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Character Information
General
Canon Source: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Canon Format: Book
Character's Name: Anthony J. Crowley
Character's Age: 6000+ give or take
What form will your character's NV take? Smart phone on which all audio files eventually turn to Best of Queen.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Crowley’s a demon. He has a fair bit of temporal power, but has to keep it fairly quiet in his own world. He can change form into just about anything, he generally chooses the shape of an attractive human man (although he wears sunglasses to cover the fact that his eyes are yellow with vertical slitted pupils). He used to be a snake, and some of the snake-y attributes have just stuck. He can also turn into things straight out of people's nightmares.
As evidenced by his need to put some annoying policemen far behind him, he can transmute one thing into another. In this case, a police vehicle’s engine into… something.
It’s not a power, exactly, but every tape in his car turns into The Best of Queen.
Many of his powers are used very casually – unlocking his Bentley’s doors with a wave of his hand. Running the same car on no gasoline for three decades.
Table reservations are things that happen to other people.
He can get drunk. He can just as easily get un-drunk. It’s all a matter of mind over matter. Or demon over alcohol as you prefer.
He is fireproof and immortal even if his physical form is destroyed. He can even turn into pure energy and travel through phone lines.
He has wings (angel wings, not bat wings) and can fly, but his wings are usually nowhere to be seen.
He has kept his hand in on the whole miracles and divine inspiration thing as part of his Arrangement with the angel, Aziraphale. It indicates that healing, blessings, and even minor resurrections (animals, not people) aren't out of the realm of his abilities. Good Omens takes pains to note that demons were once angels and haven't lost most of the oomph that made them what they were before they became what they are.
He is weak against the things that demons are weak against - holy water, holy ground, etc., although there's no GO canon about salt. ;)
Weapons: None but his tongue.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: This is a copy/pasta from Wikipedia, links [here and here]
Point in Canon: At the end of the book, before his Bentley is restored.
Character Personality: Crowley isn’t evil per se. Or at least not really, really, evil. As fallen angels go, canon has it that he didn't so much fall as vaguely saunter, and he remains certain that it was all about the company he was keeping.
He figures humans do a much better job of creative evil than those Downstairs can really pull off. He doesn’t want the world to end, and he doesn’t want things to get as bad as they were during, say, the Inquisition. Which he refuses to take theblame credit for, by the way.
Crowley believes in creativity in his evil. Small work for big returns. It’s a waste of time to spend most of a human lifetime corrupting one soul when he can spend a few years making a thousand or a hundred thousand souls a little bleaker, a little colder, a little harsher.
Just as Crowley sauntered down, as it were, he tends to lead the human race in a sauntering path away from Upstairs.
For example: “I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime.”
It’s not guaranteeing a single soul to go Downstairs, no, but to his much more Machiavellian temperament, it’s well worth it. His reasoning goes as follows:
Clever bastard. He’s a craftsman.
Not to say that he won’t do a good thing now and then, but he’s not doing it for himself. Rather, he’s doing it to keep the balance. Maybe Aziraphale, his angelic counterpart, is busy, so he’ll take over a couple of minor blessings until Aziraphale’s back online. In return, the angel may take on a couple of minor ills here and there.
It’s part of the Plan. You can’t argue ineffability, even when you’re a fallen angel. But just because you’re a demon and aren’t supposed to have free will, doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a few tricks after hanging around six thousand or so years with humans.
Crowley likes modern gadgets. He rather likes humans, actually. He likes classical music, creature comforts, his car, and sleeping. He's sarcastic, occasionally acerbic, and rather self-involved. He is not particularly interested in sex or emotional entanglements. Per his canon, while he is capable of manifesting the sexual attributes of a man (or woman) ["sexless unless they really want to make an effort"], it requires actual effort to do so, and he simply doesn't see any reason to bother most of the time.
He does not like Down Below and wants to do everything he can to stay up on Earth doing his thing and not having to hang out in a place that doesn’t even allow smoking.
Character Plans: He's quite certain he's due a break after helping to fend off the Apocalypse, so he'll settle in, get to know people, find out how best to make himself very comfortable, and run with it. Probably with AGI, since vice is just easy money.
Appearance/PB: I'll be using Carlos Dengler for his PB.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
Text
Oh right, this is perfect. Thumped down in a baseball field? Obviously we aren't bothering with a civilized place to either punish or reward me for singlehandedly staving off the end of the world. Look, if we aren't going to get to the screaming and/or repenting part of the programme, I'll take a cigarette and a latte.
Third Person Sample Ignominious drops onto his rump in the middle of a dusty baseball field notwithstanding, Crowley thought that he had landed on his feet in Siren's Port. He had been forced to set sloth aside in favor of avarice for a little while in order to get himself set up in the manner to which he was accustomed, but he found that the island had all the opportunities he would need to see that done with only a minimum of effort. After that, he would be able to put his feet up and coast on through a well-earned vacation. It just stood to reason, if the souls here were mostly going to stay here or return to worlds completely unrelated to his own world, why did he have to bother tarnish, tainting, or otherwise vexing them for any reasons other than habit and keeping a hand in for the inevitable time when he would return to his own world?
He dropped his snakeskin shoes off of his desk and waved the next stripper in to cash in the night's wages. He liked the club well enough; it was easy work, low pressure, and rife with opportunity. The fact that he had absolutely no physical interest in the workers - either male or female - just served as his value add to his employers.
That he had seen, enacted, and in some cases invented almost every scam known to man in the past 6000 years made him invaluable. He liked being invaluable, and he had promised Management a 70% drop in skimming off the top by the end of the fiscal year.
One budgetary quarter into that promise, skimming was already down by 60%. It had only taken one tete a tete with a greedy little headliner to do the trick. She might never sleep without a night light again, and he'd had to pay a little extra into her insurance for the therapy bills, but there was nothing to get the staff on the straight and narrow like a first-hand testimonial about what Mr. Crowley looked like under the human mask. No one needed to know that the maggots were just stage dressing after all....
He buffed his nails and watched the stripper count out his tips for the night. As long as he didn't have to touch sweaty bills straight out of a man or woman's bikini, he rather liked Siren's Port.
General
Canon Source: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Canon Format: Book
Character's Name: Anthony J. Crowley
Character's Age: 6000+ give or take
What form will your character's NV take? Smart phone on which all audio files eventually turn to Best of Queen.
Abilities
Character's Canon Abilities: Crowley’s a demon. He has a fair bit of temporal power, but has to keep it fairly quiet in his own world. He can change form into just about anything, he generally chooses the shape of an attractive human man (although he wears sunglasses to cover the fact that his eyes are yellow with vertical slitted pupils). He used to be a snake, and some of the snake-y attributes have just stuck. He can also turn into things straight out of people's nightmares.
As evidenced by his need to put some annoying policemen far behind him, he can transmute one thing into another. In this case, a police vehicle’s engine into… something.
It’s not a power, exactly, but every tape in his car turns into The Best of Queen.
Many of his powers are used very casually – unlocking his Bentley’s doors with a wave of his hand. Running the same car on no gasoline for three decades.
Table reservations are things that happen to other people.
He can get drunk. He can just as easily get un-drunk. It’s all a matter of mind over matter. Or demon over alcohol as you prefer.
He is fireproof and immortal even if his physical form is destroyed. He can even turn into pure energy and travel through phone lines.
He has wings (angel wings, not bat wings) and can fly, but his wings are usually nowhere to be seen.
He has kept his hand in on the whole miracles and divine inspiration thing as part of his Arrangement with the angel, Aziraphale. It indicates that healing, blessings, and even minor resurrections (animals, not people) aren't out of the realm of his abilities. Good Omens takes pains to note that demons were once angels and haven't lost most of the oomph that made them what they were before they became what they are.
He is weak against the things that demons are weak against - holy water, holy ground, etc., although there's no GO canon about salt. ;)
Weapons: None but his tongue.
History/Personality/Plans/etc.
Character History: This is a copy/pasta from Wikipedia, links [here and here]
Originally named Crawly, he was the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve with the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. He soon tired of the name, stemming from the fact that "it just wasn't 'Him'".
After changing his name to Crowley, he went on to become one of Hell's agents on Earth, under the guise of a stereotyped yuppie. He is fascinated by humanity's ability to do worse things to each other than the legions of Hell could imagine (largely because the legions of Hell have no imagination). The personal achievements he himself is most satisfied with include Welsh Language Television, game shows, value-added tax, Manchester and the M25 London Orbital Motorway.
He regularly pulls pranks and causes small annoyances to people, on the belief that they will become angry and cause small annoyances of their own choosing, in a domino effect-- thus he won't have to work so hard. "Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger." He wipes a girl's contact list on her cellphone, at one point, and in another case, causes a city-wide ties up "every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime."
Crowley is unusual among demons in that he, as he puts it, "hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people." He disapproves of many things about Heaven, but isn't very enthusiastic about Hell either; ultimately he prefers Earth to either one. In the book's list of dramatis personae, he is called "An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards."
Although he is responsible for transporting the infant Antichrist to the hospital where he will be switched with another infant, precipitating the Apocalypse, Crowley decides he would rather have humanity continue than see either Heaven or Hell win. When it transpires the Antichrist was a different boy all along, he worries that his superiors would do all of the things he described in his reports on the Spanish Inquisition, first individually and then all at once. His eventual attempt to thwart the Apocalypse puts him in Hell's bad books ("not that Hell has any other kind").
As the end of the world approaches, Crowley finds himself on the run from fellow demons, as well as Dukes of Hell, Hastur and Ligur. He dispatches Ligur with an emergency supply of holy water (which he treats with the same care as a human might treat an armed bomb), and manages to get Hastur temporarily trapped in his ansaphone. (Form is immaterial to demons; in this case, Crowley leads Hastur on a chase through his telephone line.)
Point in Canon: At the end of the book, before his Bentley is restored.
Character Personality: Crowley isn’t evil per se. Or at least not really, really, evil. As fallen angels go, canon has it that he didn't so much fall as vaguely saunter, and he remains certain that it was all about the company he was keeping.
He figures humans do a much better job of creative evil than those Downstairs can really pull off. He doesn’t want the world to end, and he doesn’t want things to get as bad as they were during, say, the Inquisition. Which he refuses to take the
Crowley believes in creativity in his evil. Small work for big returns. It’s a waste of time to spend most of a human lifetime corrupting one soul when he can spend a few years making a thousand or a hundred thousand souls a little bleaker, a little colder, a little harsher.
Just as Crowley sauntered down, as it were, he tends to lead the human race in a sauntering path away from Upstairs.
For example: “I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime.”
It’s not guaranteeing a single soul to go Downstairs, no, but to his much more Machiavellian temperament, it’s well worth it. His reasoning goes as follows:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
Clever bastard. He’s a craftsman.
Not to say that he won’t do a good thing now and then, but he’s not doing it for himself. Rather, he’s doing it to keep the balance. Maybe Aziraphale, his angelic counterpart, is busy, so he’ll take over a couple of minor blessings until Aziraphale’s back online. In return, the angel may take on a couple of minor ills here and there.
It’s part of the Plan. You can’t argue ineffability, even when you’re a fallen angel. But just because you’re a demon and aren’t supposed to have free will, doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a few tricks after hanging around six thousand or so years with humans.
Crowley likes modern gadgets. He rather likes humans, actually. He likes classical music, creature comforts, his car, and sleeping. He's sarcastic, occasionally acerbic, and rather self-involved. He is not particularly interested in sex or emotional entanglements. Per his canon, while he is capable of manifesting the sexual attributes of a man (or woman) ["sexless unless they really want to make an effort"], it requires actual effort to do so, and he simply doesn't see any reason to bother most of the time.
He does not like Down Below and wants to do everything he can to stay up on Earth doing his thing and not having to hang out in a place that doesn’t even allow smoking.
Character Plans: He's quite certain he's due a break after helping to fend off the Apocalypse, so he'll settle in, get to know people, find out how best to make himself very comfortable, and run with it. Probably with AGI, since vice is just easy money.
Appearance/PB: I'll be using Carlos Dengler for his PB.
Writing Samples
First Person Sample
Text
Oh right, this is perfect. Thumped down in a baseball field? Obviously we aren't bothering with a civilized place to either punish or reward me for singlehandedly staving off the end of the world. Look, if we aren't going to get to the screaming and/or repenting part of the programme, I'll take a cigarette and a latte.
Third Person Sample Ignominious drops onto his rump in the middle of a dusty baseball field notwithstanding, Crowley thought that he had landed on his feet in Siren's Port. He had been forced to set sloth aside in favor of avarice for a little while in order to get himself set up in the manner to which he was accustomed, but he found that the island had all the opportunities he would need to see that done with only a minimum of effort. After that, he would be able to put his feet up and coast on through a well-earned vacation. It just stood to reason, if the souls here were mostly going to stay here or return to worlds completely unrelated to his own world, why did he have to bother tarnish, tainting, or otherwise vexing them for any reasons other than habit and keeping a hand in for the inevitable time when he would return to his own world?
He dropped his snakeskin shoes off of his desk and waved the next stripper in to cash in the night's wages. He liked the club well enough; it was easy work, low pressure, and rife with opportunity. The fact that he had absolutely no physical interest in the workers - either male or female - just served as his value add to his employers.
That he had seen, enacted, and in some cases invented almost every scam known to man in the past 6000 years made him invaluable. He liked being invaluable, and he had promised Management a 70% drop in skimming off the top by the end of the fiscal year.
One budgetary quarter into that promise, skimming was already down by 60%. It had only taken one tete a tete with a greedy little headliner to do the trick. She might never sleep without a night light again, and he'd had to pay a little extra into her insurance for the therapy bills, but there was nothing to get the staff on the straight and narrow like a first-hand testimonial about what Mr. Crowley looked like under the human mask. No one needed to know that the maggots were just stage dressing after all....
He buffed his nails and watched the stripper count out his tips for the night. As long as he didn't have to touch sweaty bills straight out of a man or woman's bikini, he rather liked Siren's Port.