Thus Spake Zaraholden/InfernalsEvilorNot
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Infernals and their Yozi
The problem with the Yozis is that even after the Primordial War, they still don't get it. Their thought processes are simply not wired to understand that these creations of theirs have arrived in a place where they don't care about the Yozis or what they want. Yozi thought processes stem from the basic assumption that what they want is the only thing that matters. They understand that the Exalted have the power to hurt them, because they did that once upon a time. But they think they can control this batch of Exalted by alternately laying into them with a whip and giving them mountains of blow and hookers in Hell. This is, to put it bluntly, crude.
I mean, recall that Malfeas's original plan was to control the GSPs by just screaming at them and beating the shit out of them constantly, because, hey, it works with his demons, and the Ebon Dragon (who understands guile, treachery, and betrayal better than the rest of them) had to talk him around to understanding that this might maybe backfire.
They have drafted human beings to carry out a fundamentally inhuman and anti-human agenda. An Infernal's overlords are alien. Although they've been humbled enough (once) to conceptualize appealing to him in his moment of weakness, they don't really understand what weakness is because they've never lived it. At their worst, darkest hour, they were still cosmic beings. With a bit more luck, they could have had things turn out their way, like they usually did.
The Yozis think that if they judiciously apply the carrot and the stick, their Infernals will obey, because barring unnatural weirdness like the Primordial War, they think obeying is the natural state of beings that aren't Yozis. Infernals do not share this preconception, especially not once they really get a taste of the raw power of a stolen Solar Exaltation. Frankly, they have a lot more to gain by telling the Yozis to go screw than by continuing to carry out the Reclamation, whether they fetch kittens out of trees in the process or not.
Do Yozis Choose Evil GSPs?
Mm.
Keep in mind, also, that the Yozis don't go up and say "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, find me the cruelest serial rapist of them all." Their Infernal Exaltation's guidance system is... a Solar Exaltation. They get to evaluate people who could have been Solars. Sometimes they get lucky, and it's Havesh the Vanisher. But sometimes it's Dace, only he decides he can't win tomorrow's battle and slinks off in the night rather than standing to die with his men.
If they can't get cackling, fucking-a-dead-baby crazy evil, they'll settle for gullible. People with a grudge against Heaven or the current establishment of Creation. Folks like Blood on the Horn—not evil by any stretch of the imagination, just wronged and foolish and willing to sign a bad deal to get her pound of flesh.
They're counting on the uglier parts of human nature to carry the day for them, but the fact of the matter is, right now, the Reclamation is mostly running on inertia. It's one reason they're in such a damn hurry to break out of Hell now. Unlike the Neverborn, they haven't set up a truly sustainable control mechanism, and their Green Sun Princes are a lot more powerful than they expected.
Of course, there are still some sticks and carrots and other surprises waiting in the wings—the line has not had its final say on the Infernal Exalted yet. If the Reclamation fails, or fails to work quickly, the Yozis and their new Exalted are going to be in for... interesting times.
How the Yozis Think
Let's take this back to basics.
The Yozis are beings of profound hatred and malice.
Even the nicest ones—Adorjan, SWL and Cecelyne—are still absolutely furious about getting rolled for lunch money and shoved down Malfeas's throat. And they still don't fit any recognizable human value of 'nice.' Adorjan is homicidally insane (it just isn't personal), SWL wants to obviate free will, and Cecelyne simply wants a method to the madness of your torment. She wants to abuse and punish you, just, you know, systematically, rather than at random like the ED and Malfeas. Except that the system will itself be inherently capricious and random, so this isn't really much of a step up.
Given their druthers, the Green Sun Princes would just be akuma with superchargers in place of caste marks. Given their druthers, the Infernal Exalted would have their brains scooped out and replaced with silver sand, able to do nothing but act as perfect vessels of Primordial vengeance. Ideally, their Princes would retain only enough self-awareness to fall down in terrified awe before the Yozis, worship them with every last terrified shred of their hearts, and then go forth to topple the nations of men, gift the Exalted with blindness and weeping sores and laugh as their blood boils them from the inside out, and then eat the gods one mote at a time.
This is how most of the Yozis believe the universe inherently works. The fact that they don't get everything they want, as soon as they want it, is some kind of terrible, ongoing mistake that they're attempting to correct without really understanding that this is the outcome of the cosmos they designed, when viewed through a perspective other than their own.
The Yozis are insane, but not fishmalks.
The Yozis are mad by human standards, generally manifesting an enormous, divine version of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They're broken and lessened by their imprisonment, yes, but the fact of the matter is that their madness generally does not emerge from their imprisonment.
Consider Autochthon and the Mountain Folk. It took the dumb bastard three tries to produce a functioning race. He made the First, and was like "cool" and wandered off. And then much much much later he ran into the First again, who was sitting there despondent without a purpose, and Autochthon was like "uhhh... make more dudes." Because, hey, it made him happy. So the First made more dudes, and then they all sat around kind of despondent not knowing what to do. And they finally got ahold of Autochthon again, and what was his suggestion for their Grand Purpose? Why had they been brought into existence? "Uhh... make stuff." Hey, it worked for him. He was God to these people, but he had no interest in purpose. He just liked making stuff. His bliss was in the building. He liked humans because they used his three favorite inventions (faith, dogma, tools). He didn't even care what they did with them, he just liked that they used them.
And he's probably the most functional of the bunch.
Before Malfeas was the Demon City, he was the Holy Tyrant. Look at his Charms. They're mostly not being tongue-in-cheek—he has to have a damned psychic fracture to even conceive of anyone else's opinion mattering. The Ebon Dragon is actually incapable of understanding heroism except through opposition to it. That urge to reach down deep, and to rise above? He can't fathom it. He doesn't even really believe in it. It's a glitch in the pattern of how he believes the universe works.
Yozis embody what they are and they are what they embody. Their multitude of souls are less tightly constrained, helping to facilitate their interaction with a universe that is not made up of the complete mental absolutes that Yozis deal in, but still...
As an example—we (the crunch guys of the line) are pretty sure at this point that Yozis can't actually practice martial arts. At all. Their entire Essence structure is dedicated to hard-core embodiment of the titan's integral concepts. They can't make it imitate a tiger or the prismatic arrangement of Creation. (The Ebon Dragon, of course, has kind of a loophole here, but even then, he's just acting in his function as the Shadow of All Things. He can only mock other peoples' enlightenment, he has none of his own.) Their souls can learn martial arts, and to some degree emulate things other than what they are, and this helps them stretch beyond their own mental boundaries a bit. But Yozis themselves remain cosmic absolutes.
The point I'm getting at here is, they're really smart, but part of their inherent nature also makes them really stupid at times. Up until the Exalted came along, they were powerful enough that nothing could really make them face the consequences of those stupid moments.
The Infernal Exalted were designed by committee.
The Neverborn, to put it very bluntly, have better Exalted for their purposes. They have all the time in the world. The Abyssals are inexorable world-killing weapons. They've got a nice control mechanism, but it really doesn't even matter if it works—the Neverborn think their Abyssals will kill the world even if they're trying not to. They were designed with a unified goal (kill everything), and it's a very simple goal (kill everything) that can be accomplished in an almost infinite variety of ways. It really doesn't matter how they do it. Just wind them up and turn them loose.
That's not the Infernals. The Infernals were designed by five bickering titans whose insanity works at semi-cross-purposes. She Who Lives In Her Name wanted, basically, super-akuma. This would have presented the same problems that already plague the akuma they have. She didn't care. She cannot care about anything more than a place for every thing and every thing in its place. She had to be ordered to stand down from the idea by Malfeas, and that only worked because her place is to do what he says. Malfeas, in turn, wanted to just scream and yell and beat the shit out of the Princes to motivate them, because that's how he motivates everything. He can't, on his own, conceive that them not liking that sort of treatment would matter. The Ebon Dragon, ultimate embodiment of backstabbing fuckery that he is, had to clue the Demon City in on the likely consequences there.
The Infernals are not an ideal design. And they're carrying out a decidedly non-simple goal. And they're not all that elegantly matched to the goal. Instead, they have carrots, and sticks, and these are applied crudely at various intervals.
People in Creation are pretty much like people in the real world—and the Exalted are pretty much just people.
With 'heroism' in Exalted's milieu pretty much just meaning 'wow,' what's the biggest criteria you generally see Solar shards choosing for? Strong moral standings (of some sort) and ambition seem to be the big two. This is the guidance system for the Infernal Exaltation.
So the Yozis are picking out of a pool of candidates who are mostly men of powerful conviction (which faltered in the crucible), or great ambition (which blew up in their face). The Yozis say, "The gods gave you a shot, and you were judged unworthy. The world is cruel and it cares nothing about you. But Hell sees that you have worth. It wants to give you another chance. It wants to give you the power to change everything. Are the Yozis not merciful?"
People will usually jump at that.
But that isn't quite the bargain they get. They have the stolen power of a Solar Exaltation, and they have their Motivation, but the Yozis don't care what it is. You still want to become the world's greatest thief / seduce the most beautiful woman in the world / punish those who prey on the innocent? That's nice. Your Urge is to murder Lytek. Sure, you've never heard of Lytek, and you don't care about him, but that's what we want for the Reclamation, and we're going to Torment you if you don't go fucking kill Lytek.
But it's cool. You get demon hookers and demon crack and a townhouse in Hell. Monsters sing your praises. The booze is without compare. And here's a shiny blade of infinite blasphemies, and a cult that worships you as the terrible bringer of all their darkest dreams. You have magic that makes you mightier than a hundred men and as terrible as the wrath of any mere god. So, this is a pretty good deal!
No, you don't get to use it to be the world's greatest thief / womanizer / vigilante. GO KILL LYTEK. Do it or the worms in your brain start to sizzle and the red haze comes down and you'll wake up to find yourself covered in the gore and intestines of your concubines, in the smashed shell of your townhouse.
But it's okay. We still forgive you. You had to learn. Now go kill him. We'll fix you up with a new townhouse, and more whores. And when you're done with Lytek? We've got more goals.
They understand venality but they don't understand self-determination, because they don't think humans should have any, even though the Ebon Dragon insisted that they need to keep it. They still don't understand that the Exalted fought for themselves. They think it was all those fucking treacherous gods. The Exalted were their instruments. They can conceive of the gods as things-that-matter.
The Primordial War went down for human reasons. Why did humans accept the Exaltation? Because it gave them the power to chase their dreams. Why did they go to war for the Incarnae? Because their promise was that, if the Exalted won, people would not have to live in filth and fear, as the playthings of mad titans and the slaves of the mighty.
The promise of the Yozis is, "when I rise up to blot out the sun and turn Creation into an endless abbatoir of vengeful atrocities, I'll spare you. You can still have blow and hookers, rather than agony and death."
This becomes a less and less appealing proposition as a given Green Sun Prince's power approaches the point where he can march up and slap the taste out of Malfeas's mouth. This is one of the reasons the Yozis want the Reclamation to happen, like, yesterday, rather than letting it take its sweet ass time the way they Neverborn are with their agenda.
Exalted and Consequences
Exalted, as a game, isn't designed to emulate Ancient World traditional mythic stories. It's designed to subvert them by injecting modern rational analysis and consequences. To say that Exaltation makes one immune to consequences is to completely and totally miss the point of the game. This is why there is no resurrection magic in Exalted, even if you sell your soul to the Yozis and sacrifice a five-dot artifact. You can't build a N/A artifact to do it. You can't invent an Essence 10 Charm. You can't give up everything you have and are. You can't have take-backsies. The things you do have consequences and you have to live with and deal with them.
And I imagine the Exalted care about death exactly as much as the average heroic person does, which is to say, they're absolutely terrified of the whole notion, but maybe they have something they value enough to put it above their own life. They're certainly not blasé about the thought of dying.
Infernals and Leashes
Specifically because they're "not that terrible," as you put it. A Green Sun Prince can save the world (or, hell, forge new worlds) as he is. An Abyssal can't. He can't truly, effectively oppose the Neverborn the way a Solar can. Not as an Abyssal. The only way to realize the heroic potential some Abyssals strive for is to quit being Abyssals.
Infernals are not in that position. They have a leash, but they can jerk it out of the hands of their masters eventually. They have more freedom than Abyssals, and more self-determination. They don't need redemption into a different kind of Exalt to change the course they're on.
