#agati heshatani

[lightdancer1]

The second major family is the Heshatanis:

The most 'heroic' of these two are Vishori and Agati, a super-soldier made to destroy planets and the setting's equivalent of Frankenstein's monster as an artificial lifeform (and green, to boot!) and the equivalent of the head of the KGB or director of the FBI. That tells you something about the rest.

The first of them to really be focused on the story at any chronological level is Darshandrin Heshatani, a master of the electromagnetic force and one of the Four Lords of the Architects of Fear. Also the master of the Four Lords of his time. Darshandrin is an oversized Roes'in for his species who has a stout frame that even without the rest of his powers would qualify him as an extremely dangerous individual and with them means that he's got raw physical abilities and the power to command the electromagnetic spectrum (meaning among other things he can hijack communications and unleash gamma ray bursts). Darshandrin was dedicated to a classical Lovecraft villain's goal of encountering the eldritch powers that sustained the universe, and did exactly what he wanted and he and his wife are now ever-living and ever-tormented inhabitants of the empire-entity of Azarath.

They have three children, the eldest of whom is Shandrin Heshatani, the master of the Weak Nuclear Force. He happens to in other words be a very literal walking atom bomb and a WMD analogy, which is why his own sons have this same quality as well in different fashions. Shandrin is the Imperial greater-scope villain of the story, who made a bargain with a terrible Daemon and willingly allowed it into the Empire and the consequences of this are what set off the setting proper. He's a dour murderous fanatic deeply beholden to the Architects' own codes, one of the most powerful metahumans to ever exist, and fully aware of it.

He has two sons, one is Yrvin Heshatani, who is a telepath and telekinetic to Dark Phoenix proportions (who is the Lex Luthor to Xaderavcal's Superman, he, not she, would have been the greatest power if she didn't exist and the same petty envies that drive Luthor drive him). He's also a brutish thug who uses portal tech to cross dimensions and indulge in a lengthy and protracted rape and murder spree whenever it suits him. He is one of the most morally repugnant characters I've written and his main flaw, like that of the character that inspired him, is a monstrous arrogance leavened by complacency.

His brother Landro wields plasma, and is in relative terms the weakest of the family in metanormal terms if one of the most dangerous in other ways. He's essentially the Architects' equivalent of Internal Affairs, the Watcher of the Watchmen and accordingly an inventor and a master of super-tech that makes him feared even by entities who are much mightier than he. And relative to Yrvin he's the Mycroft to Yrvin's Sherlock, Yrvin is more social and more open with his loutish thuggery but Landro is much more sinister and takes even greater joy in what he does.

His younger sister Keshri commands the strong nuclear force and is called the Star-Kindler, as she can literally....kindle stars. Complete with the gravitational distortions as well as heat. Even with the Architects the legacy of the Age of Legends means identifying with a body of starlight is the equivalent of Xipe Totec cults or the generic Hollywood Satanist. She also has ASPD, or its equivalent in an alien species and it's very much not a superpower but she's so absurdly powerful that the Architects are caught in a trap of their own making with no way to get out of it.

She has three children in turn, two daughters and a son. The two daughters are Etashri and Kaartshahin, and both of them inherited their mother's powers and are in a perpetual spiral of competition. The son, Arzhandzhir, is a reality-warper who's the least sadistic of that branch of the family but is perfectly callous and monstrous in his own way, as the power behind the throne manipulating his sisters and his mother with his own powers making him one of the few who'd dare.

And then there's the youngest, Agati Heshatani, who's got his own powers that have a WMD analogue. When he gets angry he gains four feet and a thousand pounds in mass, becoming a colossal muscled force where the madder he gets, the stronger he gets. He transforms in a flash of light and due to mastering the idea of a tranquil rather than a berserker rage (though at times this can slip and when it does it's very much AGATI SMASH PUNY EMPIRE) and is fond of using his transformed state to 'interrogate' people with the idea of facing a colossus who's an unstoppable force and an immovable object all in one.

He's the equivalent of the head of the KGB, his rival Azazteti Kavtrulin is the equivalent of the head of the GRU.

His daughter is Vishori Heshatani, the aforementioned Frankenstein's Monster equivalent and a femme lesbian. Who happens to have her own shadowy secrets and among all of them is that she, Xaderavcar, an agent and relatively normal fellow of her father's named Vuhl H'ven Dugara who didn't sign up for this shit and is stuck in it anyway, and a seer who's a hybrid of the Khair and Trarh-Khanir, Meremi, are all tied to the God on the Gilded Throne as her Oversoul. Occasionally someone too clever by half tries to take one of them as a hostage to bargain with the Urhalzantrani walking virus.

It goes messily if she's deranged and it goes much more horrifically if she's lucid.

The Heshatanis are in their own way a dynasty and a mirror of the Empire and of its imperialism, the raw architects that helped to create it and those who took that technology and pioneering spirit down its darkest and most unhallowed corners.

[lightdancer1]

The House of Heshatani:

Is one of the major families of my stories, and the one that has a good look at the Motif of the Four Sages.

In this sense there are Darshandrin, his sons Agati and Shandrin, and his daughter Keshri.

Agati Heshatani, whose power is to transform into a larger self capable of immense strength and whose power grows with his anger in a perpetual upward spiral, is the head of the Directorate of Unified Intelligence Consortia. In short, for a pop culture analogue, the head of the Space Okhrana/KGB is the Hulk. He also has a few elements of Michael Moran in his understanding of his power, and like the Hulk has elements and models of the power of the atom bomb. However he has less of this than his brother and sister. He, in terms of the Motif of the Four Sages, enters the garden in peace and he departs in peace.

Darshandrin is the one who looks upon the garden and dies. In his own lifetime he was Lord of the Strong Nuclear Force, a Star-Kindler like his daughter Keshri. He was monstrously arrogant, devised the idea of the Omega Program to make Gods with the capital G and the power to match. He never resolves any of the theoretical difficulties, though he lays the groundwork for them, and it is his hubris that ensnares his family in the eyes of the God on the Gilded Throne, with whom he has a very gruesome set of encounters that give his family a bad reputation for spending the lives of their people like coins. The only reason the Architects keep having things to do with them is that they are undeniably brilliant and take them down paths they could never have imagined and the results of Heshatani successes outweigh the oceans of blood to get there.

Shandrin Heshatani is the one who looks upon it and becomes the heretic, willing to make a terrible Faustian bargain. He is the archetypal Architect of Fear. He possesses the power of the Weak Nuclear Force, aka nuclear fission. In short he doesn't merely have symbolism of nuclear explosions, he can and does create them. He is his own atomic bomb and the power over atomic structures permits him an immensely powerful invulnerability and low-tier immortality much like it does with his sister (and Agati's own Hulk-like transformations likewise keep him perpetually young as he regenerates his body down to the sub-atomic structure with each shift, meaning wounds taken in one shape are healed in another).

Keshri is the one who looks upon the Garden and goes mad, though her madness is pure unfiltered sociopathy. She cares for no-one but herself, follows her own moral code, and as mistress of the Strong Nuclear Force she kindles and can create *starlight* and embodies the same kind of resolute horror and arrogance that this means for her father.

She is among the most powerful metanormals in her entire setting and one of the only non-Omega Program wielders who can and will face the Omegas on an equal footing because igniting a star inside someone's body will not make them a happy camper even if they have Omega Program tier healing. The Urhalzantrani would also struggle against it, save the Lightdancer, who is completely invincible and cannot be harmed by anything or anyone.

Keshri and the Azar are the only cases of the 'insane woman with phenomenal cosmic power' trope and for one the insanity is actually her restraint, because her insanity makes her a violent virus storming around the Omniverse picking fights without real rhyme or reason...and for the other it is the simple consequence of inheriting the same mentally defective brain structure as her father and it makes them simultaneously so brilliant they cannot be done without, and so untrustworthy and dangerous that even the amoral and merciless Architects of Fear see them as monsters.

Darshandrin's wife, Ekandri, was consumed by giving birth to no less than three such powerful metanormals, which sapped her own strength and led her to die from overdrawing what her body could reasonably support. Had she lived longer she would have been every bit as unpleasant as her daughter and her elder son.

[lightdancer1]

The Omega Program wielders like Xaderavcal the Unifier and her cross-time counterparts:

Are among the most powerful individuals in the setting and just beneath the Urhalzantrani, to whom they are essentially pale copies and true things that should not be. Mortals ascended to elements of a power far greater than their own and yet able to survive wielding it with a foot in the realm of the Outer Gods. Xaderavcal the Unifier can mind-control entire galaxies without breaking a sweat and literally turn stars into white dwarfs with telekinetic force and reality-warping power amplifying it.

She can shapeshift gender, size, and mass without any of the effects in say, the transformations of Agati Heshatani. She can fly faster than light and fly through the core of stars without ill effects with complete immunity to radiation. She is capable of throwing stars like softballs and teleporting instantaneously across entire galactic superclusters. She also can fly, has eyebeams in all her forms, and with her telepathic speech can be understood by any species in any context.

In short, she's invincible to any physical threat save those of Urhalzantrani, who have the same powers she does but in the full sense and not the copy rendered badly sense. Naturally she's put into scenarios and puts herself into scenarios where the ability to snuff out a star with a thought does not in fact solve all problems, and the very presence of such entities produces its own arms races and fears.

In most superhero settings she'd be the cause of a Crisis even on the side of the heroes by being too powerful for an average setting. She's not a superhero, nor does she have the desire to be one.

So if she shows up as the protagonist that's one thing but as the antagonist she'd be a completely invincible shapeshifting entity that can appear in any form, has telepathy powerful enough that its constructs are indistinguishable from flesh and blood life for extra paranoia, and who cannot be harmed by mere weapons of fleshbound life and quite a few even of life that is more than that.

In short, all the paranoia of the various giants and the like of lore that fight deities and the Terminator and Superman in moderrn concepts but still moreso.

And in the setting of the Tales as mighty as they are, there are plenty of things mightier still and there are always Titans that seek to steal back the thunder that Zeus stole unthinkingly from Cronus...

[lightdancer1]

In my Haruka as Princess Serenity AU:

I’m setting up the awakening of the last of the Inner Senshi, though they’re not the last of the Senshi to be introduced. Chibi Moon, Saturn, and Pluto all make their debuts in the next arc. This means that I get to introduce Aino Minako and have her and Sailor Neptune/Kaioh Michiru as active at the same time (which in my view they were and Neptune canonically helped keep the Dark Kingdom weak in the same elements as Aino did and her avoiding the Arctic is one of her quiet bits of guilt).

Aino Minako/Sailor V in my takes has her own complexities. Aino is a fun malaproper with a bit of a ditzy element to her who makes a new kind of personality to do justice to. Sailor V is a distant and fairly cruel no nonsense guardian of the Princess and general of the Senshi who retains her Imperial Japanese Army style approach (as in beatings will continue until morale improves, and that means with the flat and pommel of the blade) and when facing a threat doesn’t waste time on speeches, she literally goes for the throat or tries to.

She’s set up here as a foil to Sailor Moon, who represents the more idealistic side of the Senshi, in that both are loyal to the Princess and to the Kingdom, where Neptune, as per the canon is loyal only to Haruka. And thinks she’s serving her own visions and not those of the Moon (which just...LOL. in this alternate universe).

She’s the most like the Outer Senshi of the Inner Senshi and has the most direct divergence of Senshi and human personas, to a point that she’s more like a self-controlled benevolent Incredible Hulk of sorts, like my OC Agati Heshatani. When she transforms she’s one of the most powerful of all the Senshi, a cold-blooded strategist, but Aino Minako is haunted and guilty at several levels for how V handles her battles, haunted more deeply by the death of Ace, and buries all this beneath a sunny facade.

Which of course leads to the Haruka-Minako BroTP as Aino GETS it, which none of the other Senshi do. Even Michiru.

[lightdancer1]

Then there’s the Architects of Fear themselves:

Who are basically the super-science version of the Bene Gesserit but very explicitly malevolent. A scheming cabal of super-scientists who seek to create new superpowered individuals, succeed, and in the process unleashed a Metanormal Revolution that profoundly and utterly altered the Bizjarran Empire in unpredictable ways. They become God-Makers, ruled by a cabal of four Lords, of the Electromagnetic, Gravitational, and Strong and Weak Nuclear Forces respectively, and almost invariably the most powerful wielders of the Fundamental Forces in their given eras.

The Strong Nuclear Force and the Weak Nuclear Force are the provinces, respectively, of Keshri Heshatani and Shandrin Heshatani.

Their younger brother Agati is the most benevolent of the bunch and where the family’s oldest brother and the middle child go into the family business (their father Darshandrin Heshatani was Gravitation Lord in his own lifetime), the youngest son happens to be the Hulk with elements of the Miracleman family, as he transforms into a second body that has perpetual strength reliant on his anger and that the madder he gets, the stronger he gets to a point he can literally be the only being in the universe capable given sufficient time, of facing the Unmaker on truly equal terms.

And this Hulk-expy happens to be the head of the Space Okhrana because the Bizjarran Empire is Space China with Space Russia’s dynastic infrastructure and Austria-Hungary bureaucratic sclerosis. So the ‘benevolent’ Heshatani is the head of the Space Secret Police, the malevolent ones are outright ‘A God am I’ super-tyrant aspirants in their own right.

The Architects are also the most Sufficiently Advanced Aliens in the series, with technology that more than crosses a line between magic and science, and vast mountain-ships and casual interdimensional travel. In most sci-fi settings up to the Halo and Warhammer 40K tier, a single Architects of Fear ship in a full galactic setting is a threat on par with the Neverborn and the Culture.

In the DC and Marvel settings they blend elements of the Celestials, the Dominators, and Apokolips, down to elements of Aztec mythology in wearing armor patterned like flayed hides...except the people of Keshri Heshatani’s Strong Nuclear Force faction, who wear armor patterned like the stars. In a setting where Strohm Atromo is the archetypal starlight-bodied entity and basically Satan in a can with a genocidal bodycount in the hundreds of quadrillions.

And the person who wears that starlight armor commands the strong nuclear force, aka Fusion, meaning she casually *makes stars as easily as a person crosses streets, meaning she’s hilariously overpowered and has the full weight of arrogance to go with that.