diadem app

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Player Information

Player: dmitri
Contact: chayot@plurk or hayyot@discord
Invitation OR characters played: TDM Invite
Are you over 18?: yes


Character Information

Character: Castiel
Canon: Supernatural [Season 11, Post-The Devil in the Details (Episode 10)]
Age: P: 30s-40s, M: Several millennia up to several billion years
History: Link
Possessions: A wallet and a (now broken) early 2010s era smart phone
Weapon: N/A. While Castiel usually has his Angel Blade, I think his ability to smite would usurp this.

Powers/Abilities: A list.

Castiel's super strength and immortality will be unaffected. He still will not need to eat, sleep, or drink to survive.

Any abilities Castiel has that have the potential to cause physical damage (such as smiting, pyrokinesis, electromagnetic interference) will work mostly as usual, though Smiting will no longer be a 1-hit kill for most people/creatures (unless it's approved prior).

Castiel's telekinesis/minor reality warping ability won't be nerfed, as it usually only applies on the small scale (such as cleaning dirty clothes, repairing ripped clothes, rearranging the pieces on a game board, appearing a glass in his hand from across a room, etc.)

Abilities that require input from other players (such as telepathy, mind control, mental manipulation, memory manipulation, mental projection, lie detection, and dream walking) will simply fail to work at all on most occasions, unless a discussion has happened beforehand. Castiel doesn't use these abilities all that often anymore by the time I've taken him from (probably because the writers didn't want to write around it) but these powers are so god-moddy that they're more of a hassle than fun most of the time in a game setting.

Castiel's Astral Perception/Senses will be selectively nerfed. His heightened sense of sight (ability to see very far, ability to see in the dark, ability to see ghosts, reapers, and other astral creatures), taste/smell (ability to taste/smell molecules), and hearing (ability to hear very far or soft sounds) will not be affected, but his ability to know most information about a person by looking at them will no longer be reliable (as I believe this is based off of his telepathy anyway). Castiel will sometimes be able to gain more information about a person by touching them (such as their health), but this will be applied on a case by case basis only after asking permission, and will otherwise fail.

In fact, Castiel's ability to precept, identify, and find people at any distance, and his ability to identify supernatural creatures on sight, seems to no longer be working reliably by Season 12 (In S12EP09 he attempts to take on a hunt and can't locate a nest of vampires, which should have been very easy for him). This failure of his abilities is never elaborated on in canon. By Season 15 he claims that his powers are failing, though this plot-line is never resolved either.

Castiel's ability to knock a person out with a touch will also be selectively nerfed. Occasionally, when it fails, it will just make the subject sleepy.

In the finale of Season 8, Castiel, along with most of the other angels, loses his wings. From then on, he can no longer teleport.




Application Questions

Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?
It's no exaggeration to say that Dean Winchester is the reason that Castiel became the person he now is.

Despite being a main player in the apocalypse (Sam and Dean's births were orchestrated for this very reason), Dean rejects the very concept of destiny, something that is at this point simply fact to Castiel. He insists to Castiel that it's "just a way to keep [us] in line" and, at the end of S4 when Castiel hesitates to help, tells Castiel that he is "already dead" for his cowardice. This shakes Castiel, and shortly after their confrontation he returns to help Dean escape, despite having stressed to Dean that they'll be hunted for their rebellion, and despite knowing that this isn't how things are supposed to go. When confronted in confusion by Chuck ("You aren't supposed to be here.") Castiel answers: "Well, we're making it up as we go."

Though he's later bitter about being cast from Heaven (and, at first, directly blames both Sam and Dean for his status as a fallen angel), Sam and Dean do eventually succeed. Sam sacrifices himself, and Dean lets his brother be sacrificed, in order to save the world.

This moves Castiel. He goes on from here to espouse free will to the angels, and tries to restore Heaven from it's corrupt position. It ends badly, but he truly only wanted what was best for his home, and he does prevent another apocalypse despite the mistakes he makes. From here, it becomes his life's purpose to make penance, and to better the world in whatever way he can, inspired by Dean's empathy and kindness.

If he had never met Dean, it's most likely Castiel would have proceeded as he had before and simply followed Heaven's orders to the end, even if it meant the eradication of humanity. In fact, we see this ourselves. In EP22S13, in an alternate universe where Sam and Dean were never born, we meet a version of Castiel who still fights on the side of the angels (against humanity, which they're locked in guerrilla warfare with) and is a human-hating sadist under Michael's watch. Likewise, there's yet another alternate universe that's shown to us in S14EP13, where Dean and Castiel never meet, and this Castiel is still under Zachariah's command, working as a dog of Heaven.

That's not to say Castiel had no regard for humanity prior. But Castiel's regard, before meeting Dean, is distant and impersonal, and clearly capable of being warped. He "loves" humanity because they're his Father's beautiful creations. But he does not love them up close until he meets Dean and he's swept up in Dean's passion and sense of justice.

Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?
Castiel would give almost anything to rewrite his terrible coup in Heaven. In his attempt to stand against Raphael and restore Heaven to its former glory, Castiel chose to work with the demon Crowley rather than enlist Dean's help (because he felt Dean had already given enough of his life). While his intentions were noble, his choice to lie to his friends, and the fallout resulting from this choice, spiraled into destruction.

Previously, God had brought him back to life at the end of S5. Because of this, Castiel believed that he had been chosen to lead Heaven into a new era, and his self-pride is key to what destroyed him. Even though his intentions were pure, this, alongside the pressure of fighting a war, pushed him to make more and more extreme choices, until his friends' discovery of his secret and questioning of his actions caused him to decide they had betrayed him. When they attempt to stop his dangerous plan (Castiel intended to absorb all the souls from Purgatory in order to amass the power to face Raphael) he lashes out and hurts them, mentally crippling Sam in order to keep them from being able to successfully mount a counter. He then takes all the Purgatory souls for himself (he had agreed to split them with Crowley), kills Raphael, and massacres the angels who had opposed him before moving on to Earth. When he snaps further (pushed by the Purgatory souls inhabiting his body) and kills a building full of innocents, he's forced to face the fact that he's gone too far.

In the aftermath, he returns to Sam and Dean for their help. He lets the Purgatory souls go, and vows to redeem himself to Dean.

Obviously— This is not how he meant for things to go. In fact, this is pretty much the worst way it could have gone, unless Raphael had won. Although he prevented the Apocalypse 2.0, he wasn't able to repair the corruption in Heaven. If anything, he made it worse: By killing all the angels that opposed him, who were adherents to order, he assured that the only remaining angels would be those who had their own ideas about how to do things. And this is what happens. The in-fighting in Heaven doesn't stop until there are almost no angels left in Heaven, late in the series, completely obliterating his dearest wish.

If he could do it all over again, he would do absolutely anything and everything differently. It's difficult to overstate what he wouldn't try to avoid the terrible consequences of his actions. Refusing to work with Crowley, attempting to come to peaceful terms with Raphael, even making the terrible sacrifice of asking Dean for help— As Castiel admits, he needed Dean to tell him a better way ("Where were you when I needed to hear it?") and Dean is dragged into the fighting regardless. If only they could have come together as a family, perhaps even Heaven could have been united.

Instead, Castiel only teaches them conflict.

But you can't say he doesn't learn his lesson.

His self-hatred becomes so great after these events that he never recovers. And, despite how self-destructive it is, it absolutely keeps him in check. He still makes mistakes, but never on so grand a scale, and never for the same reasons (he has a tendency to trust the wrong people, despite his best intentions).

What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting?
Assimilation, to put it shortly.

Castiel's lack of social skills have always made it difficult for him to live among humankind. It will be no different in Diadem, even with the incredible variety of peoples it offers. Likewise, such a lack of direction he often seems to find overwhelming. Castiel always has a mission, and while the debt will suffice, it's not something he cares about. Even his empathy toward living things can't make him feel personally attached to a world that's not his own in the same way as the one he feels he's responsible for, so he'll not be driven as he was on Earth. Being without Dean's strong moral compass to give guidance will also make it difficult for him to reassess this position. Dean has always had a way of reminding Castiel that sometimes the simple things are most important. Castiel tends to think on a larger scale, by nature of what he is, and occasionally needs to be grounded in his thinking.

Worst of all, Castiel has given up. When he let Lucifer take his body, he willingly ceded control, and being thrust back into the forefront hasn't changed his mindset much. He's always had difficulty acclimating, but as of now he's unlikely to even so much as try. This will inevitably cause conflict when his actions and beliefs clash with others who find his behavior off-putting or want him to be more proactive.

Though when it comes down to it, perhaps I should say that the greatest challenge Castiel faces is himself. It's his own lack of self-esteem that's hamstrung him, the inconvenience of being tossed into another world is simply making an already bad problem worse. Castiel will have to fight himself every step of the way now that he's been isolated from those he loves.

What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?
Castiel is a bit of a cheat when it comes to survival scenarios, since he doesn't have to eat, drink, or sleep. But ever since losing his wings, he's also become adept at cross-country travel. At some (undisclosed) point during Season 9, he learned how to drive, and it's become his main mode of transportation across the continental US. The general setting will be easy for him to inhabit, and despite his isolation, he'll find it easy to live in the city.

Likewise, Castiel's life is all about strange phenomena. The cosmic influences of the storms and diffusion zones will strike him as a curiosity, one which he (believes) he has the knowledge to understand (though time will only tell if this is true).


Samples

Sample: Link