Sigil: City of Doors

BASIC INFORMATION
NAME: Goes by Shahzada, or the alias Sayyid. His IC name will never be needed or known in the game and I have not even used Sayyid yet (maybe I never will).
Sex: Male
Race: Marid
Age: 219
Origin: Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls, Water Plane (See Narrative Bio Below)

PHYSICAL INFORMATION

He is sixteen feet tall, flesh the color of the sea at dusk, the glint in his eyes something like the glint in cats' eyes, or like a sunset seen from beneath ice, or the glow of stars piercing clouds. His sparse attire is braided from seaweed spun with platinum and gold with brocades of coral and pearl. He wears several necklaces beset with pearls and his fingers are festooned with bejeweled rings. He has the scent of salt and surf and a deep basso voice.

From time to time, especially when distracted or daydreaming, veins of ice seem to well up, a coldness that seeps out of his body. The source of coldness seems to come and go, the consequence of having been frozen completely solid recently by the Pale Prince of the Winter Court.

MENTAL INFORMATION

Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Chaotic: The Marid is full-tilt chaotic; you can read in the narrative bio below how he was willing to risk almost certain self-destruction in order to remain unfettered from his responsibilities. Although manners and decorum are important to him, he is very much a fair-weather gentleman, liable to change his temperament as quickly and without warning as the sea itself; the class and politeness are a facade for total contempt for society, authority, tradition, and their trappings. The only authority that he will ever accept is the rulership of the Padishah and his older, superior Marid relatives.

Evil: The Marid is self-absorbed and selfish and cares very little for others, unless they are really beautiful and/or have endeared themselves to him as a friend. His evil side is heavily tempered by naivety, lack of ambition, obsession with beauty, and his own narcissistic tendency to see himself as the multiverse's gift to other sentient beings. He is liable to do conceivably really good things in order to show off his opulent wealth and beneficence, like giving a lot of money to charity, or saying lots of kind words to build people up and win them over. Hey may also take up sword to fight some evil if it will make him look heroic and grand. He is a gloryhound.

Deity/Beliefs

Much like his fair weather attitude toward manners, the Marid is fair-weather pious. The Marid portion of genie culture takes its courtly terminology from Persian culture, and the Persians changed religions like we do clothes. That is to say, they changed many times. The mosques of the Citadel of Ten Thousand Pearls pay some small tribute to numerous deities, but none more so than the Padishah Empress herself. Rather than emphasize deity, this particular Marid focuses on the virtues and values of smatterings of numerous equivalent real-life eastern religions, with ideas drawn anywhere from Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and the like to the more animistic ideas of Shinto. If inclined to explain this phenomenon, the Marid might claim that all life came from water, that water was the first element, that Marids formed the first culture, and that he enjoys drawing inspiration and wisdom from the entirety of the rich bodies of culture his people spawned and inspired: Namely, anything he likes or is interested in. If inclined, if the moment is appropriate, he may pay some tribute to just about any power really, but the closest thing to a "deity" that he follows would simply be the Padishah.

Philosophy:

The Marid's philosophical orientation is rooted in his need to justify his impetuous, self-indulgent behavior and to inflate and rationalize his narcissism. He contends that there is no such thing as truth, there is only beauty. His definition of beauty is really broad, and he is always trying to find hidden, subtle beauty. Observing the wreckage of the bazaar, for instance, he remarked that he never realized there was so much beauty in dirt and wreckage. He claims that from virtue comes wealth, and from wealth enjoyment. He believes that personal growth and development of power and wealth are directly related to how much freedom, pleasure, and beauty one can experience.

PERSONALITY

Impetuous: The Marid quickly changes moods and attitudes. He can go from calm to furious in the space between heartbeats and the opposite too. If you don't like his disposition, you might wait five minutes.

Narcissistic: Ultimately, the Marid simply believes himself to be better than all other beings, even when he should know better. This is foolish, as he is sort of young and kind of an idiot, for a Marid. I have described him as the "dumb high school football jock" of Marids.

Indulgent: The Marid has vast appetite for all kinds of pleasures, and he sees no harm in overindulging in *any* of them. He is not just self-indulgent, he gets a lot of joy from encouraging hedonism in others as well and being a source of pleasure for others feeds his narcissism.

Romantic: The Marid is in love with himself and in love with the multiverse. He believes that ugliness exists to contrast and highlight beauty, and he values all creative endeavors as essentially romantic, too. He is easily distracted by any kind of beauty or anything that pulls the strings of his heart. He sees tragedy as beautiful, too, such as the tragedy of mortality. How sweetly quaint, the brief lives of mortals. What a thrill it must be to know you will die, at all, and so soon.

Weaknesses

The Marid is a show off and will waste a lot of money any time he is given an opportunity to do so. He will show support to any artist of any medium who has good manners and provides some beauty for him to enjoy. He needs beauty like mortals need to breathe. He is easily distracted by anything beautiful, opulent jewellery, lovely bodies, and the like. Because of his somewhat vapid obsession with admiring the beautiful, he frequently misses important details when he gets distracted by lovely sensations. He will ask a woman a question and then get distracted looking at her belly and miss the answer, and has been kicking himself since arriving in Sigil because he realizes now that he should have paid more attention to his tutors during his education. His naivety is another weakness, but one that will not last forever. Anything he did not experience in the water plane and has not yet encountered in Sigil or out planewalking is liable to be totally unknown and new to him.

Narrative Bio

The night I was born, my mother took me from the palace, a thousand steps down to the cliffs, and flung me from great height into the waiting sea. I knew the waves and the currents and loved to drift and spin perhaps as you loved to be cradled in your own mothers' arms.

For a century, I knew none other like myself. I spent those sweet years exploring the far reaches of the oceans of many worlds, among the sea elves and sahuagin, discovering the delightful treasures of shipwrecks and the measures of my own mettle. This lifetime seems to me now as mortals must see a season just as it has passed: fleeting and impossible to fix in one's heart.

One bittersweet evening as I watched as the sun set on a watery horizon of perfect stillness until quite suddenly my father emerged from the sea. As his head rose from beneath the still water and his eyes fixed mine, I knew instantly we were blood, and that my childhood was over.

I was brought home. Educated. Civilized. Engulfed in tedium for a slow decade. I learned of history, the planes and their peoples, all the little miserable civilizations that spring up around these mortal beings, in which they play out their little lives. The tragic beauty of their mortality captured my heart, to the chagrin of my parents, who care little for the lives, ways, and societies of those whose existences will one day be snuffed like weak flame. What interests my father is the future, our family's place in the hegemony of this empire that shall never fade.

In a thousand years' time, I am expected to take my place in it.

I was to begin my training only a few months ago...but one quiet evening, I crept past the guards and the wards and stole one of his majesty my great uncle's smallest spelljammers, and I took to the astral seas much like the oceans of the moment of my birth. I cast the maps and charts and sextants into the Styx and I took swiftly to a path of whim, lost my way as completely as I could, traveling far beyond the borders of what is knowable by the minds of the known, until I had lost all control of the vessel and been pulled by strange and foreign currents toward something utterly unknown. Just as a great emptiness began to gnaw at the edges of my vessel, just as its tendrils of star-stricken blackness kissed my perfect form and wracked me in vistas of pain beyond my ability to describe, only then did my father reveal his presence to me... and soon, we stood in this great ugly wreck of a city at the center of the multiverse, and my father said to me, "So eager to escape your destiny that you would swim into the abyss of oblivion?"

At length, I replied. "The multiverse has many vistas. I have seen but a glimpse of them."

"I see. Very well... I grant you a thousand years' time to seek pleasure and learning and the ends of the paths of your whims. Then you shall return to your family and begin tending your duties. You cannot hide, for we know your true name. We named you."

And so I am free, again, for now, if only for an elf's age. I try to look on the bright side: perhaps this is a taste of the tragic romance of mortality.