][ ☩ ][ teleios application

[trumpeted]

Player Info

Name: Alms

Characters Already in Teleios: Daryl Dixon || The Walking Dead || worn_wings
Reserve: voila

Character Basics:

Character Name: Gabriel
Journal: trumpeted
Age: Older than time itself. (If pressed for an answer, he will say 39, but that’s bullshit.)
Fandom: The Prophecy series of films
Canon Point: Toward the end of The Prophecy 3: The Ascent, when he’s on his way to Gila Flats, after leaving the restaurant.
Debt:

Class A: 60,000,000,000 years -- as the angel of Death Gabriel is arguably responsible for literally every death ever; plus a lot of killing other angels; plus insanely numerous counts of treason/betrayal, against his fellow angels, against God, later against the rest of the rebellious angels… you get the idea… plus espionage on a cosmic scale.
Class B: 600 years -- Gabriel made a habit of kidnapping and using suicides in limbo as pawns to get stuff done in the mortal plane (especially to drive him around); lots of assault (I’m probably lowballing it, let’s be real, he’s old and has been pretty damn war-like in his days)
Class C: 6 years -- various counts of reckless endangerment, war mongering, torture, and bunches of others. Again, old and not a very good person for most of his life. Also includes many counts of:

engaging the services of prostitutes

GRAND TOTAL: 60,000,000,606 years*

*NB. This is based on an estimate I saw that 57,000,000,000 humans have lived, less a few for how old the movie is, plus a few more for loads of betrayal and putting angels on pikes, but mostly I’m a smartass and I liked the aesthetics of three sixes (and a lot of zeroes) for a religious horror trilogy. I am happy to amend this but would love it to remain pointlessly astronomical for my own amusement.

Canon Character Section:

History:

WIKI LINKS: first film ☩ second film ☩ third film

But, because these movies are gloriously terrible and because the wikis are a little nonsensical, here is a quick (ish) Gabriel-centric summary:

Okay, so. Once upon a time there was God, and there were angels, and everything was hunky dory. They had to deal with the first war, casting Lucifer out, blah blah blah all that. Gabriel was one of the big heroes in that war and as far as he was concerned, stuff was pretty perfect then. But then, humans came along, and that was just Not Okay in his opinion. Free will and souls and heavenly grace and all that? Angels were supposed to be the top of the spiritual food chain! Most beloved and revered! And God was not really available for comment.

So Gabriel started a war. A war to overthrow the loyal angels, to destroy them and destroy humanity too, a war that blocked all human souls from entering paradise. A war which, unfortunately, he really couldn’t win, which stayed at a stalemate for centuries. So then he got this awesome idea: they were going to steal a really bad soul, a really, really mean dude, a crazy psychotic war criminal cannibalistic general who had just died, and get him to lead their army to victory, and then whee! Everything would be back to the way it was before the monkeys, and Gabe would be happy again.

Unfortunately, another angel got to the soul first and hid it in a little girl. Gabriel did his best to rip it out of said little girl, with all sorts of collateral damage, but unfortunately he was defeated by a whiny school teacher and a failed priest-turned-detective and the power of their faith. Oh, and Satan. Satan helped a lot. There was a lot of Satan licking Gabriel’s face and eating his heart and being campy and weird, and then Gabriel went to Hell. (End of disc one.) It sucked.

Some years later, though, Satan decided that Gabriel was seriously too annoying to keep around, so he sent him back to Earth. Meanwhile, another angel, Danyael, showed up to seduce a pretty young nurse named Valerie Rosales. He accomplished this by falling on her car and ending up in the hospital and making her feel really guilty about it, and then following walking her home so they could have crazy stranger sex. Why? So he could knock her up, leaving her not just pregnant but super-pregnant. Like second-trimester-the-next-day pregnant.

The child of an angel and a human is a nephilim, which is important because according to divine prophecy (SEE LOOK IT’S THE NAME OF THE MOVIE!) he was the only one who could defeat the eventual big bad of the series, and save Earth and Heaven and all that jazz. Obviously Gabriel really did not dig that, so he recruited a recent suicide to drive him around so he could try to murder the heck out of Valerie and her unborn superfoetus. It proved to be more difficult than expected, and in the end he had to chase them to Eden-- which is now a shitty industrial wasteland, by the way-- for the ~final confrontation.~

Which he lost.

Valerie told him that the reason he couldn’t hear God was not that God wasn’t talking, but that Gabriel wasn’t listening, and that she could hear Him perfectly well. And He was saying jump, which she did, pulling Gabriel with her, which left him impaled on a fence (she was fine, thanks for asking). Michael, who headed up the loyal angelic faction, at last delivered Gabriel’s long-overdue punishment: he cursed Gabriel to become that which he hated most.

You know, one of the monkeys.

So, after being turned into a human, Gabriel pretty quickly gave up the crazy crusade against humanity. Because, you know, kind of hypocritical there. He instead spent a while totally destitute and miserable, busking with his trumpet to survive. Eventually he began to explore the various facets of humanity: he ate junk food and learned to drive and had sex and totally stayed out of all divine wars. JUST KIDDING! (Only about the staying-out-of-wars part, the rest’s true.) With his powers gone but his faith restored, Gabriel found himself on the other side of the conflict, pro-humanity and pro-divine plan, which was now being threatened by a slightly different group of rebel angels, led by Pyriel, the angel of genocide, who pretty much wanted to start over with a clean slate and put himself in charge as a new God.

The key to their defeat was some punk heretic kid named Danyael Rosales whose name may be familiar from the above paragraphs because he’s the kid the lady found herself super-pregnant with. So he kind of quietly kept an eye on the kid, saved his life when angels incited a mob to burn his house down, and then again later when Zophael tried to off him, and generally provided moral and theological support and guidance towards his epic battle with Pyriel in the desert.

In about 20 minutes from his canon point, said epic battle will be over and Gabriel the weird old dude will go back to being Gabriel the beloved archangel, but right now he’s just a weird old dude cruising down the road and playing the trumpet.

Personality:

As an angel, Gabriel was proud, vain, and vicious; he headed up a faction in Heaven that sought to restore angels to their ‘rightful’ place as the most important and most beloved facet of creation, resentful of the creation of humanity and the grace granted to them. Initially, Gabriel’s derision for humankind made him extraordinarily cruel in his dealings with the “monkeys;” he performed his duties as the angel of death with no regret, and in fact took a perverse sort of pleasure in tormenting people. He kept the souls of suicides as pets and helpers when he needed to get stuff done in the mortal realm (it seems to be a universal that angels have trouble with cars, someone had to drive,) and spent most of his time taunting them, joking about the slow decay of their effectively dead forms, and refusing to give them any of the peace they craved. He boasts of slaughtering babies in front of their mothers and turning cities to salt, and delights in spending all day every day killing anyone he pleases. Bad fuckin news, in other words.

This resentment and jealousy of the human race was the root cause of the “Second War” written about in the twenty-third chapter of Revelation-- an angelic civil war, which aside from leading to tons of death and devastation both human and angelic, kept the gates of Heaven closed to all good souls, until Gabriel's defeat at the hands of a scrappy bunch of humans and their friendly helper, Lucifer.

His fundamental flaw back then, however, was faithlessness. A large part of Gabriel’s arrogance and hatred stemmed from the fact that he no longer trusted in God’s plan for creation, because God had ceased speaking to him. As such, this initial defeat does little to reform him, and he continues to be an absolute monster throughout the second film, in spite of Satan eating his heart and imprisoning him in hell for a while.

Ultimately, his big moral turnaround is not entirely due to his spate of living as a human, but also to the renewal of his faith in God. Which seems pretty weird for an angel, but there you go. The divine interference in his downfall in the second film, the fact that even he-- one of the most powerful angels there was-- could not circumvent God’s will, brought him back into the fold mentally even as he was expelled from Heaven and stripped of his rank and power. Proof that God was still paying attention and still had a plan for things. Ultimately, Gabriel is significantly happier as a human with faith than he was as an archangel without. Failing miserably was pretty much the best thing that could happen to him.

Nowadays, Gabriel generally comes off as a crazy old man. Potentially, a crazy old man who is very scary to talk to, particularly if you know anything about theology, but there you go. He doesn’t make much of an effort to avoid talking about cosmic matters (like knowing people before they were born), so between that and his shabby appearance, it’d be easy to write him off as a slightly unhinged homeless guy (as, in fact, some people explicitly do): a friendly enough fellow, down on his luck, with a tenuous grasp on reality, but all in all harmless.

That last bit, of course, is not strictly true; when the situation calls for it Gabriel can be deadly serious, and though he’s human he’s knowledgeable enough about heavenly affairs to present a danger. He is exactly as bold, as flippant, and as fearless as ever; he’s just as likely to taunt people, even people who can squash him like a bug. (He’s human, he figures squashing him like a bug isn’t all that difficult anyway, no reason to get excited about it.) What’s missing is that sadistic edge; he’s not nonviolent (he hits Zophael with a car to keep him off Danyael), but he’s not out there fighting and killing for the joy of it anymore.

Regarding his past actions, Gabriel is not overtly remorseful; he recognizes his mistakes and accepts the consequences of his actions, but speaks of the things he has done in a matter-of-fact fashion. Things have worked out, more or less, the way they had to work out. His rediscovered faith makes him more focused on the future than the past. He’s doing his part as he figures it out, serving the divine plan, and actually, Gabriel is pretty excited about that. (“No angel, however powerful, can be anything but the messenger. Danyael, you're a message, and now... for the first time in a gazillion years, I get to know what it is! I get to know, what that message is.”) While it doesn’t justify his past actions, being mired in regret would be useless, so he doesn’t bother.

He’s hoping for redemption, but he doesn’t expect it; really, he doesn’t have any option other than serving the divine plan, anyway. Besides, humans are kind of interesting, mortality is not as shitty as he first thought, and if you listen... well, you get the idea.

Left to his own devices-- without any particular Word to follow-- he will just stick his nose in other people’s business, because it’s interesting and because who knows, maybe there’s something he’s supposed to accomplish in Teleios.

Powers/Abilities:

As of right now, Gabriel is human. He knows a lot of stuff most humans don’t and he might be a bit more perceptive than your average Joe, but the nifty cool angel tricks? Gone, baby, gone.

In canon, the only parlor trick we see him pull post-humanization is calling a stranger by his childhood nickname to freak him out a little. It’s kind of a Thing he does throughout, habitually, and it’s kind of unclear whether this is an active ability or a byproduct of angelic near-omniscience. (Circumstance kind of suggests the latter, so he wouldn’t be able to pull it off in Teleios anyway since no one is from the reality he remembers.)

He can drive and play the trumpet at the same time though, which is pretty impressive. He’s also still pretty good at perching on stuff.

ON THE OTHER HAND, if he were ever to regain his proper status (through a canon bump, tho I am not planning one in the foreseeable future, or some other kind of shenanigans) then it’s a whole different story. You could expect a slew of standard angel stuff, and Gabriel was among the most powerful of his bros. Some specific abilities he has demonstrated are:

❧ control over death: most of his pawns earlier on are suicides that Gabriel keeps around, forcing them to continue living even as their body starts to break down. When he regains his power, he saves the life of a mortally wounded girl. (Possibly he actually resurrects her, it's a little unclear). Anyway, he can pretty much do what he wants with people at that liminal state between this world and the next. Plus, you know, angel of death, it’s kinda in the name. That’s his jam.
❧ randomly exploding stuff: Gabriel breaks some windows to make kids giggle. (It’s not as cute as it sounds. He’s trying to figure out which of them he has to kill.) He also sets people on fire a whole bunch. And he also puts people to sleep. That’s not really in the same category, I guess. Sometimes he killed them too. You can’t always tell the difference.
❧ creepy angel senses: all the angels have creepy super-senses of smell and taste, and do gross stuff like lick corpses’ eyes to see what their last sight was, or smell out other angels or particular mortals. Gabriel boasts that he can always sniff out a graveyard, and he can also smell when someone is about to die.
❧ dramatic entrances: the special effects budget was too cheap for everyone to get wings on camera but it’s definitely implied the angels can manifest wings and fly around if they want to. Also one time he explodes in a shower of sparkly doves because of course.
❧ bodily weirdness: when they manifest in semi-mortal form on the human plain, angels in this canon have bones without growth rings, the “blood chemistry of an aborted foetus”, and hermaphroditic genetalia. Biologically, their bodies have no eyes-- when the angel takes up residence the eyes show up, but if it is killed, it’s empty sockets again. Speaking of which, in this form they can be killed-- and can only be killed-- by removal of the heart.
❧ also, angels’ glyphs show up on the side of their neck like a scar. Gabriel’s looks kind of like a backwards E with four bars. As a human, it is absent.

Appearance:

PB’d by my spirit animal Christopher Walken, lookin a bit grungy:
[01] ☩ [02] ☩ [03] ☩ [04] ☩ [05]

Samples:

Actionspam Sample:

here are some spam threads!

Prose Sample:

He says he’s let himself go, but it isn’t that simple.

It isn’t untrue, either; he really had, at first, too stunned by the shock of his sudden humanity to do much to keep up the condition of this mortal shell. It’s not so bad. It does what it needs to, and he doesn’t have enough vanity left to worry about keeping himself in shape, when there’s so much else to be done. Humans have an easy time learning to live; they have years and years of guidance and support, older ones showing them what to do and catching them when they screw it up. It’s not a perfect system but he’s learned to see past the fact of the flaws and appreciate how often it does work out. Even some of the failures have a hint of divine grace about them; the strange bittersweet glory of tragedy averted. He’d never noticed those-- the tiny moments, flashes in the pan. Beneath him, once; but down here they make all the difference.

Picking up a life in the middle, though, that takes more work, but he’d like to think he’s done okay. He’s kept himself alive, no small feat when you’re unaccustomed to the necessities of physicality. He’s kept been there for the nephilim, when necessary; kept him hidden, when a mob thirsted for his blood, kept the blind assassin from taking his heart. He even learned to drive, and hasn’t that come in handy. He’s enjoyed the peculiar, consuming pleasures that have no meaning without flesh and come to understand why men will sacrifice their God for a woman, and what it means when men forsake women to show their love for God. It doesn’t matter, he thinks, that his hair is unkempt and his clothes secondhand at best, that he’s soft in the middle.

Either way, it doesn’t matter; he could look like an underwear model and Zophael would still look on him with disgust. It isn’t the shape, but the substance. Human. Mortal. Monkey. Fallen.

Gabriel doesn’t think of himself as fallen, now; even what came before, his descent into a realm even lower than this one, does not seem like a fall. Certainly, in the literal sense Zophael is right; but when he thinks of falling he thinks of a fall from grace rather than from Heaven; he thinks of an impossibly distant moment, of a time when he ceased to trust God, venerating only his own arrogance. He thinks of the height of his power, the depths of his despair.

“You must be scared,” he says. “What if you lose? You must be scared you might become like me, right?”

“Yes,” says Zophael, and in his eyes Gabriel sees that peculiar shade of arrogance some angels mistake for pity, before he turns to leave, to fight his fool’s war. And Gabriel smiles.

And there but for the grace of God go I…