Name: Leviathan, The Hierophant, Herald of a Drowned Heaven, King of the Final Continent
Origin:
In the beginning, nothing moved within nothing.
In December of 1991 Dr. Noah Lasker, a brilliant young engineer and theoretical physicist, is dismissed in disgrace from his position at the University of California, Berkley. Disciplinary proceedings are handled internally to avoid the spectacle of criminal prosecution. His experiments are destroyed and his work buried. The graduate students serving as lab assistants settle their civil suits with the University for undisclosed sums. A decade and a global revelation later and he will be understood as one of the world's first "Minor Powers", struggling to make sense of his abilities within a mathematical, rigorous paradigm. Turning increasingly to synthetic pharmacology and occultism as his models of the world failed to cohere.
In the beginning, God brooded over the black waters.
By November of 1992 Dr. Noah Lasker is a person of interest to the FBI as they conduct ongoing investigations into the decade's burgeoning militia, cultist, and white nationalist movements. Trying, and comprehensively failing, to contain the proliferation of both conspiracists and conspirators. Cut free of any semblance of a structured, settled life, Dr. Lasker is believed to have become fully immersed in these fringe movements, particularly those that claimed descent from magical or arcane philosophies or touted proprietary knowledge of extraterrestrial life. Moving freely in this shadowy world, winding his way through the American interior and Pacific backcountry, he leverages his expertise in a most mercenary fashion, accruing funds and equipment for an unknown purpose.
In the beginning, before there was light, there was a shape in the depths. A coiling form in the dark.
In July of 1994 Dr. Noah Lasker, sheltered by the secessionist People's Church of the New Millennium in their compound on the Olympic Peninsula, restarts his experiments. Finding, at last, what eluded him during those first, fumbling attempts at Berkley: a crack in the walls of this reality. The first feathering of a breach between this world and another. In late August of 1994 he succeeds and becomes potentially the first human in the modern to lay eyes on another plane of existence. To make contact with an alien realm and beckon forth the thing that dwelled (captive?) within.
There are few survivors of what ensued. Of the freak storm that enveloped over a hundred square miles of Northwest Oregon and razed the People's Church settlement down to nearly the foundations.
In the beginning, there were teeth.
Appearance:
Leviathan is not, he gamely insists, Dr. Noah Lasker for which everyone should be quite grateful. He only ate the man after all, shredded him between an infinity of fractals and slipped into the fresh-shucked skin. Tailoring for his own use. The resemblance to a younger Dr. Lasker remains striking even so: a deep tan, dark hair that falls in loose ringlets, and shadowed circles under the eyes. An athletic build slightly neglected, broad shoulders set in a perpetual slouch. Strong features framed around a broad, toothy smile that seems to stretch ear to ear.
Not quite conventionally handsome, Leviathan still somehow manages to read as disarmingly wholesome. Less an nth dimensional sea-monster and and more California beach boy that went on to do a postdoctoral program. He adores dressing up, and primping, decorating his corporeal form with all the attentive care and meticulous action of a child with a treasured doll.
It is, of course, all imperfect: green-black scaled flesh and horned hide pokes through the inevitable rents in his corpus. His pupils are slit, his irises the yellow-orange of rusting metal. Sometimes serpents squirm beneath his skin, poking out from the ends of sleeves or curling out beneath the hem of his coat, peeking out from his collar. His smile is sincere but his teeth are disconcertingly sharp. And there seems to be rather too many to properly fit in that mouth.
Personality:
He strives to be pleasant. He aches to be sincere. Mankind, in the full sweep of its experience, history, and culture delights him and he ardently hopes he can experience a little more of it before the end. Preserve as much of it as possible against the ravages of his fellows and the fallout from their wars. Leviathan particularly cherishes the humans who have flocked to his banner seeing it as a sign of hope for the future. He spoils his devoted in the not-quite-a-church of the Second Flood, lavishing them with time and attention and scheming how to draw ever greater numbers into the organization. Sometimes to achieve strategic ends. Sometimes, it seems, simply for the sake of it.
There are of course mismatches in expectations and effects, despite his mild reproaches, his friendly-but-firm reminders, it's easy to forget that he isn't human himself. That the viewpoint he uses to interact on something like an appropriate scale had to be constructed. He still ultimately lacks much of the urgency that mortals, with their finite lives, feel. Patient by nature he is sure that given enough time he can get everything he wants with a minimum of collateral.
Agenda:
14 - Immanentize the Eschaton
12 - Survive
10 - Preserve and Propagate the Second Flood
8 - I am the Lynchpin of American Control over the West Coast and Pacific Northwest
6 - Some Form of Stable International Order is Essential to Long Term Success
4 - Uphold America's Strategic Interests
2 - Global Tourist
Superpower:
The Coiling
Leviathan's powers are eclectic and esoteric, derived from mediating reactions between Earth and his native plane (which may, in fact, be the superstructure of his greater self). He's been recorded as manifesting abnormal weather events, projecting disorientating psionic effects, manipulating bodies of water, ice, and water vapor, and summoning creatures from his home reality. While it is clear that he has a personal spatial manipulation ability of some kind it has been proposed (and not conclusively refuted) that rather than teleportation, he may just be exiting conventional reality altogether, reappearing some time later at a convenient intersection of the two at another location.
His two abilities of most significant import both hinge on the recurring pattern, the twisting spiral, associated with his "true" self. Introduced, imprinted, into a localized environment and it induces a kind of xenoforming, widespread self-perpetuating mutations and deviations in the region's flora, fauna, and climate. Introduced into a person it causes radical physiological alterations, kindles Minor Powers, and elevates extant Minor Powers to new heights. Both facets of which are of great potential interest to the world's governments.
Second Strike:
The Inundation
Leviathan's long term strategy revolves around the idea that he can, with time and care, acquire control over a region of sufficient size and a population of sufficient scope, that he can ensure mankind's survival on his terms. That the better future is his to fumble and the petty striving of many of his "peers" is...exactly that. Petty and suited only for those who lack vision. If stripped of these comforting illusions and facing true and total annihilation, Leviathan elects to accelerate his timetable. Removing all restrain in the hopes of ensuring that some part of his great project, some part of his vision of humanity, survives him. Heaven can still be a place on Earth.
The Inundation represents a deeply alien and partially inimical reality colliding with Earth at multiple points. Propagating seismic shifts in its ecology, biosphere, geography, and atmosphere. Storms will wrack continents, waves will march against the shore, the natural world will twist and the flesh will change.
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