Aziraphale

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Daisy
AGE: Old millennial
JOURNAL: seasided
IM / EMAIL: seasided#5378 @ discord
PLURK: seasided
RETURNING: currently playing Shaun Mason

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Aziraphale
CHARACTER AGE: Ancient. On earth 6000 or so years, and who knows how time was even measured before that.
SERIES: Good Omens (TV)
CHRONOLOGY: End of TV Mini-Series
CLASS: Hero? Hero.
HOUSING: Toss him anywhere!

BACKGROUND:
In the beginning, in the Garden, there was a wily, wily serpent, and Aziraphale was, technically, on Apple Tree duty.

Originally the Angel tasked with guarding the eastern gate of Eden, Aziraphale has lived throughout the entirety of what his universe considers human history. From the very beginning, through that whole mess with the flood and the Ark, Ancient Rome, Elizabethan London, the Reign of Terror in France (dark days for crepes... and aristocrats), through the various World Wars and finally into modern times, Aziraphale has been stationed on Earth.

As an angel, he's tasked with being a representative of Heaven on Earth. The head office sends assignments, he reports back, blessings and miracles get done. The balance of the world tips a bit more towards the path of heavenly righteousness. All that in theory anyway.

The thing is, one of the first actions that Aziraphale takes on Earth is to give away his flaming sword to Adam and Eve as they're being expelled from Eden. In his defense, it was getting cold, there were hungry large predators, and Eve was pregnant. In short, it seemed like the right thing to do, even if it may not have been something that his Heavenly bosses would have approved of. The angel has a small crisis of fretting about whether he's done the wrong thing, but thankfully he's reassured by a demon.

Right, yes. The demon. Crowley. The first time Aziraphale meets Crowley is on the ramparts of the Garden, and the two strike up an initially-awkward but ultimately interesting conversation. Unbeknownst to the angel at the time, his relationship with this particular demon will be fundamental in shaping everything that happens to him and everything he becomes. As time goes on, Crowley and Aziraphale are both stationed on Earth, and their paths keep crossing. What begins as remarkably polite conversation between opponents eventually works its way into a tentative professional Arrangement (wherein they work together rather than directly oppose one another, staying out of each other's way and occasionally covering for each other -- an odd temptation here, a minor miracle there), and then into a genuine friendship. They have their spats (often), but Crowley also manages to save Aziraphale from discorporation by guillotine and Nazi bullet as time goes on.

So six thousand years, life goes on this way. Then the Antichrist is born. Aziraphale and Crowley come up with a scheme to work together to try to sway the world away from Armageddon, by balancing the Antichrist's upbringing between Good and Evil, with the hope that they'll cancel one another out, and therefore cancel the Apocalypse. Really, it's a perfectly brilliant scheme, but they have the wrong boy.

Then it's a scramble to try to stop it. Aziraphale winds up at odds with Heaven itself, given that his side is gunning for Armageddon and the War to End All War just as hard if not harder than Hell. Both Heaven and Hell are only interested in their battle, and have no regard for what happens to humanity or the Earth. Thing is, Aziraphale is very fond of humanity and Earth. So he and Crowley try to track down the actual Antichrist, to try to prevent Armageddon despite their earlier failures. And, through a series of scrambling misadventures (that involve Aziraphale being inconveniently discorporated, possessing a local medium (and part time Jezzebelle), they manage to get themselves to the site of Armageddon just in time to lend a hand to the eleven-year old Antichrist who decides that he likes the world far too much to destroy it. Said eleven-year-old even stands up to and defies Satan. The ending world is reset and Crowley and Aziraphale are left to contend with their respective Head Offices, upstairs and down, who are, well, pissed.

With the help of a long-dead prophet's predictions, they switch places and fool Heaven and Hell into thinking they can't be destroyed through the normal means one would typically use to eliminate and angel and a demon. The two are returned to London for at least a brief reprieve, while all sides lick their wounds and catch their breath.

An angel and a demon dine at the Ritz. And a nightingale sings in Berkeley Square.


PERSONALITY:

Aziraphale isn't a very good angel. This isn't too say that he's not good, since being a good angel and being a good person are two very different things.

Over the millennia on Earth, Aziraphale has strayed a bit from the strict and frankly sterile nature of many of his kind. He's learned to enjoy life's little pleasures, to the point where he verges on being a hedonist in many ways. He's also casually acquainted with a few of the seven deadly sins: a little bit of gluttony with his love for food and drink, a smattering of pride and greed with his book collection, a dash or so of sloth given his Arrangement with the demon Crowley to cut down both their work. That's four out of seven, for anyone keeping count, and he flirts a bit with envy when he holds onto Anathema's book a bit longer than strictly necessary when he finds it left accidentally in Crowley's back seat. All these little sins, however, are born out of love. Aziraphale has fallen in love with Earth, with humanity and all the clever little things that humans have created.

This is clear in his interaction with Gabriel. The archangel questions why Aziraphale pollutes his body by deigning to eat food, and Aziraphale seems genuinely bewildered by the question. It's sushi. Sushi is delicious. This isn't the last of the conflicts that come up between Aziraphale and his fellow angels. They've been in Heaven, and he's lived among humans. He's gone and wound up more than a little humanized as a consequence. There are times when he seems genuinely uncomfortable with the actions Heaven is taking (the whole Flood incident, for starters) but tries to reassure himself that the Almighty's plan is ineffable, and that God works in mysterious ways. He talks to Crowley all about this, but it's clear the angel is trying to convince himself as much as if not more than he's trying to convince the demon. Aziraphale is kind, and he wants to be kind; it's a large amount of cognitive dissonance when the actions of Heaven or his orders from upstairs seem like they're doing more harm than good. When Armageddon is upon the world, Aziraphale is the single angel who wants to prevent it (and Crowley the single demon of the same mind) rather than excited for it happening and the war between Heaven and Hell beginning. Aziraphale understands and appreciates the cost, for the world but also for himself. He loves his life, and no one wants to listen to The Sound of Music on repeat for eternity.

Aziraphale comes across as a fairly prim (one might argue "prissy") and old fashioned person, set in his ways and quite stubborn about it. His fashion sense and his general approach to technology lags more than half a century behind the rest of the world, but he's comfortable as he is. Comfort is a big thing for the angel. Looking at the way Heaven is depicted -- pure and pristine white, sparse to the point of being empty, vast and open and featureless -- contrasted against the home that he's made for himself -- a bookshop packed to the brim with used books, a backroom with comfortable seats, cluttered but cluttered with care, all warm colors and cozy feeling. He seems content and genuinely takes joy in much of the world, in the feeling of love, in sleight of hand magic tricks, in well-kept and pristine clothes.

Despite being millennia old, the angel has definitely moments of naivete. He's exceptionally trusting and easily led, mostly because he wants to believe the best of people. This gets him into trouble on more than one occasion (though thankfully, Crowley has been there to bail him out). Aziraphale is also a terrible liar; his poker face is non-existent. He flusters easily at times, and though he is generally a fairly mild person, his emotions can get the better of him -- usually resulting with him in a huff. He can be stubborn and judgmental and has his moments of the sort of holier-than-thou sanctimony that seems to plague the Heavenly Host. He seems to be compelled to heal and to help, but sometimes he overdoes it. He is exceptionally intelligent but manages to be an idiot at the same time occasionally, which is genuinely impressive.

One of the defining things in Aziraphale's life is his relationship with the demon Crowley. Though the two start off ostensibly as enemies (though, they are remarkably cordial for direct adversaries even then), they quickly come to an understanding and not last to a friendship. The angel seems to understand, even if he has trouble admitting it, that he has a great deal more in common with Crowley than he does with anyone else, even (especially?) his fellow angels. This is difficult for Aziraphale though; he genuinely wants to do the right thing, and wants to believe that by obeying Heaven that is what he's doing. He's conflicted when Crowley talks about them being on their own side, or potentially fleeing the coming Armageddon together, because of his sense of duty to a Heaven that he increasingly feels out of alignment with. He refuses to directly disobey, though he's good at justifications why bending a bit here or there is fine, right until the end. This is one of the major sources of conflict between his demonic best friend and himself; Aziraphale is much easier to sway on a social basis, but tries to put his foot down when it comes to going directly against Heaven. The thing is though, Crowley is the one who has actually been there for him -- saving him from discorporation by beheading in Paris and saving him from a double-double cross at the hands of Nazi spies in London. He enjoys the demon's company and clearly cares about him, even if they squabble and have sometimes gone decades without speaking. One major contention was Aziraphale's refusal to provide Crowley with Holy Water; he fears the demon intends to use it as a suicide pill, since holy water can and will destroy a demon forever, not just kill their current body. Eventually, however, he cares enough about his friend to relent rather than watch him risk himself to obtain it.

In a way, he's torn between loyalties. Between his duty to Heaven and his friendship with Crowley, between his orders and the things that he truly believes are right. And he does want to do the right thing. Just before Armageddon begins, when it becomes clear that Heaven has no desire to actually save humanity or the world, Aziraphale finally makes his choice. He defies orders and works with Crowley directly to stop the oncoming end of the world. Though the angel has never killed anyone, he is at the very end willing to kill the Antichrist (who happens to be an eleven-year-old boy) in order to save the world. But he's stopped. And that's for the best. He seems to make a certain peace with himself over his break from Heaven, explaining to Adam (the Antichrist) that though he'd feared Adam would be Hell-incarnate and hoped he could be Heaven-incarnate, he realizes that the boy being Human-incarnate is actually the best thing that could have happened, that being neither good nor evil but just fundamentally human is the only thing that can possibly save the world. And it does.

Aziraphale is in many ways adjusting to this new realization. After Armageddon is canceled, Crowley invites him to stay at his place since Aziraphale's bookshop has burned down, and the angel's first protest is that "his side" wouldn't like that. Crowley reminds Aziraphale that he no longer has a side, that they are well and truly on their own side now. It's not so much that the angel is figuring out his new place in the world so much as accepting fully the place that he's been occupying for a while now.


POWER:

His canon ability:
Aziraphale is an Angel (if you'd like me to break this into multiple rather than under one overarching Angel umbrella, please let me know):
Aziraphale will have powers similar to those he has in canon: He is an angelic being in physical form. At will he can manifest his wings (and presumably fly, but it's usually simpler to take the bus).

He can also perform miracles -- conjuring items out of thin air, changing the nature of items (e.g. a mediocre wine to a very nice wine, a regular traffic cop notebook to a puff of smoke exploding in the poor man's hands), planting suggestions in the minds of mortal beings (I will set up a permission post for this), making things disappear, relocating people from one spot to another fairly instantaneously.

He also has no actual need to eat or sleep, but he enjoys the former and isn't entirely against the latter. He can also heal people and resurrect the newly dead.

His physical form is subject to damage much like any physical body. In game, while he won't age or need to rest or eat to keep his body going, if he's wounded or killed, it would be the same as if a human being were wounded or killed. No one is around to replace his body and his respawn point is far away.


〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉

COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:

[The angel is not used to mobiles. He's spent a great deal of time resisting the modern world in many ways -- though back home, in his lovely little bookshop, he does have a clever little computer that has not counted as modern for a decade or two at least -- but he's been left little choice now. It was part of his welcome packet. And these other imPorts, of which he apparently is one, are all connected this way.

That said, he's fidgeting with the phone and the image is a far-too-close-up shot of his face before he adjusts.]

Ah. There. Yes, good. Hello.

[A smile, warm and genuine if a bit frazzled at the moment. His voice is soft, accent distinctly British, distinctly proper.] Clever little devices aren't they? I expect it'll take some getting used to, but it's likely high time I surrendered and wound up with a mobile anyway. There's a bit of a learning curve, isn't there

[He's rambling and circling the point rather than making it though, and he does realize this.] Not important. Actually, what I'm hoping to find -- if anyone would be so kind as to provide the information -- is a decent sushi restaurant.

[The angel's priorities are in order.] If this is home for the time being, I may as well make the best of it.

LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

TDM threads

FINAL NOTES:
Aziraphale's current body is a borrowed form in a way. While canonly angels and demons can't be destroyed by normal means, they can be discorporated -- which means that essentially their body dies and their spirits/souls get sent back either upstairs or downstairs. I assume in-game, discorporation would be replaced with actual physical death? Since Aziraphale wouldn't exactly have a Heaven here to respawn in, so to speak.

I'll be sure to put up a permissions post for the more mind-influencing style powers, though Aziraphale seldom uses them anyway.