app for babylonwood
The Player
User Name/Nick: Amy
User LJ: ladyvoldything
AIM/IM: socksaresocky
E-mail: ipokebadgerswithsticks@yahoo.com
The Character
Character Name: Chuck Shurley (not ever known as but still nonetheless God)
Character Journal: paterelohim
Canon: Supernatural
Age: Older than the universe, but appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties.
From When?: 4.22, before Castiel and Dean go to see him.
Abilities/Powers: Omniscience, omnipotence, prophetic visions, and the awesome might of never getting an STD from Mistress Magda. Hoo boy.
Omniscience:
This one is pretty easy, on the surface.
Except it’s not that simple, not by a long shot. Chuck keeps His divine nature and abilities stuffed behind a locked, chained, deadbolted door in the back of His mind, and almost never accesses it for fear of unleashing an avalanche that would unravel the carefully constructed mortality and limited scope He’s set up for himself. Chuck has no desire to undam that river, so He shuts his omniscience off 99.9% of the time. The first time he got a vision was a genuine surprise to him- he was pretty sure “Chuck Shurley” was one of the prophets supposed to foresee the Winchesters, but didn’t know when the first one would happen.
His reasons for shutting it off are manifold, though- it’s not just a self-serving matter of status quo: it’s a matter of principle and belief, too. How can there be any true free will if some higher power knows all the outcomes and has everything predestined? No. Never. He’s lived for billions of years with the passionate belief in free will and the power of human choices, and he isn’t about to go fucking that up now. So strong is his will on this point that His omniscience is actually sometimes limited- by his own design. There are many instance where even if He used his omniscience to its full extent He wouldn’t know the outcome of a certain event- if and only if the outcome is dependent on human choices. If it’s determined by luck of the draw, that’s something Chuck could know. If it depends on what someone will say when asked to make a hard decision, then there’s a good chance He won’t know until they make their choice.
There are some things that filter through regardless of what He does about it- passive senses, for instance. He can tell when someone isn’t human, and can sometimes tell exactly what they are. It’s a lot easier when the someone is from Supernatural (i.e. from His universe and one of His creations). But by and large, most of what he knows that he shouldn’t comes from his visions.
Omnipotence:
He can do anything. Literally. He can do anything. You name it, He can do it. Reverse death, create pocket realms, unravel the fabric of reality, turn this Universe around and make a new one, turn you gay, turn your mom gay, bone your mom. Well, not that last one. Well, he could. But He’s kind of a spazzcase with sex. That’s not the point here. Chuck is capable of literally anything in all of Creation, and has the Universe to prove it. He can elevate angels to higher rungs of power, restore them from the dead, erase addictions, create new planes of existence, and do absolutely anything. He is God. The end.
Except. Remember that door? Chuck is capable of anything, but that doesn’t mean that he will. On any given day, He only allows enough power to filter through to refill his flask with his mind. Even parlor tricks like Gabriel was shown doing, like magicking up food and bitchez, aren’t up his alley. He likes living in the gritty, crappy parts of life, as long as he always has booze.
At this point, he’s gone so long believing that he shouldn’t do anything and gotten so out of touch with omnipotence that he’s essentially psyched himself into believing that there are some things he actually can’t do- but don’t worry. He can.
STD Resistance and Visions (yes, this gets its own heading):
Prophetic visions are the tools that Chuck uses to navigate the Supernatural universe with any kind of agency over the events around him. They’re how He influences outcomes, because that’s okay: it’s not divine intervention, it’s a Prophet doing what they do and trying to help people in their own small way.
He gets visions of future events a few times a week that come in the form of excruciating headaches that lead him to drink until he passes out, then when he wakes up he writes like a man possessed until it’s all out. Usually his visions outpace events by a few days, but sometimes when it pertains to big, important things he can have visions months in advance.
Power Limitations:
With the limitations imposed by the Wood, much of Chuck’s full power potential will be cramped. As God, He is omnipotent and omniscient, although the extent to which he uses those parts of himself are always self-limited. The Wood, as a place not part of Chuck’s native dimension, is outside of his divine jurisdiction- as a result, most of His power will be closed off to Him while He’s in Babylon Wood. He will retain all of the knowledge that He had before arriving, but will only have limited extrasensory powers in terms of being able to know things about people he’s talking to- and, at any rate, he won’t use those unless pretty much forced. He’ll be more naturally in tune with those abilities around people from his own reality (meaning from Supernatural). In terms of power, most of his raw powers and abilities will be nearly closed off to him unless dealing directly with someone from his own canon- so, he wouldn’t be able to do anything without huge strain if Harry Potter died in front of him, but he would be able to resurrect a Castiel. Probably. He’d break into one hell of a sweat, and be nursing that headache for at least a week.
He’ll have limited reality-bending abilities, but mostly stupid stuff- making sure his flask is never emptied, and that sort of thing, or making very very paper-thin illusions that will resemble a bad hologram- worse than anything an archangel could do, since his full powers won’t work on a large scale without causing him some degree of pain. But much easier for him would be omniscience: he would be able to share knowledge with people- such as putting a finger to a character’s head and sharing with them something He knows, or making them see some memory of his. Futzing with people’s heads will be easier than futzing with reality on anything larger than a stupid parlor trick.
Using his powers for anything bigger than the small tricks will require actual effort for him, which will be extremely new, as He has obviously in the past created galaxies at the slightest whim without breaking a sweat. The bigger the task he’s trying to accomplish, the more effort it’ll take, and the strain will have an effect on his body similar to physical exertion, including pain if he tries to overwork himself.
Inventory
A half-drunk beer and a cell phone. Clothing: a green button-down shirt, black patterned t-shirt, jeans, socks, Spongebob boxers, watch, and a cheap belt. In his pockets: a hip flask full of vodka, some candy wrappers, half a cigarette, a cheap lighter.
Personality:
Chuck is a bit of a nervous guy- it comes from having spontaneous prophetic headaches and a life as filled with nonsense as his is. An insane fan base, characters who routinely knock angrily on his door demanding spoilers, and a vastly inadequate supply of beer and clean underwear plague his life like so many white-trash locusts. When confronted with these and other such insurmountable obstacles as dropping his toothbrush or answering the door twice in one hour, Chuck's usual response is to blink a few times and stare in frustration. But please don't be fooled by his veneer of flailing incompetence; he's actually very smart in certain ways, and that intellect shines through in his rare moments of mental clarity between drunk spells or crippling frustration with the stupidity around him. When he isn't watching Maury or abusing his brain with whiskey, Chuck has a perverse, witty, often self-deprecating sense of humor. He knows when he's messed up and isn't afraid to call himself on it- to a point.
Not to say that he's a complete genius. Some would call him a creative genius, surely, but Chuck at times has a startling lack of common sense and a tendency to jump to conclusions. The pizza guy's late? Oh god, he probably ran his truck off the road. He won't worry too much about those terrible doomsday conclusions, of course, just call up Domino's instead of Pizza Hut; what's certain death (or certain inconvenience) when there's laziness to be had? Anything you or I could do, Chuck can do slower, later, and in his boxers.
He’s not constantly a falling-apart mess, though- when put into high-stress or high-stakes situations, he can snap into competence he didn’t know he had and short-lived leadership skills that last for all of five minutes. Inevitably he has to hand over the reins or take a powder so he can put his head between his knees and breathe. Life is stressful, bro. But he gets by, and when he’s not being massively selfish he does his best to help other people get by, too, because he cares about them.
All of them. That’s the biggest secret, the deepest layer to his onion- how much he cares. Because he isn’t just him, he’s Him. And He cares about every single one of His creations. Castiel once called them all works of art- God sees them as perfection incarnate, every last of them. Not that it stops Him from having His share of criticisms, of course- on a fundamentally deep level He knows that His plan is just, and that comfortable confidence used to give Him the emotional freedom to criticize and alter over the course of history- just look at the ancient Israelites.
Lately He doesn’t meddle, at all, and He’s pretty okay with that. There are times, of course- underneath the alcoholic prophet and the basket case is a deadbeat father who’s haunted by deep-seated guilt about his abandonment of the angels, even though He knows with even more certainty that it was the right decision. He disengaged because He had to- and in the process, that’s meant disengaging from most of his power- He doesn’t use his power but rarely, and has narrowed his already limited so-called “omniscience” so as to know try to preclude the existence of free will. It’s reflective of a very strange quality for the Almighty to have- humility. His ego quieted after Jesus.
Then there’s the constant riot of prayers and deaths parading through his head, that he’s managed to lock away in a corner of the unimaginable vastness that is his mind. Some he can’t lock out- the visions come by (contrived) order of the angels, and sometimes he manages to hear snippets of angel radio in His mind. But He always knew most of what was going on, and- and fuck, it broke His heart. God plays favorites, and blatantly. Nothing hurts him more than the suffering of certain of the angels- on the whole, he sees them as falling far short of expectations, but some... the four archangels and Castiel, largely, can motivate Him to rare action, and it’s during those moments that one can find more raw love in Him than a human mind is capable of comprehending. Nothing horrifies him more than the thought of one of His children needing him, and being genuinely unable to help. Of course, His definition of “needing” is different than anybody else’s, and usually requires that things be far more dire than the others involved would prefer. Chuck is happy to help people out in human ways, but He still believes firmly in the power of human choices.
History:
In the beginning He created the Heavens and the Earth and it was good, blah blah blah, see Genesis for details. There’s a lot of hubbub over the “seven days” nonsense, even though in Chuck’s humble opinion any feces-flinging monkey can see that it’s a metaphor for longer spans of time. Each one of those days represents untold aeons stretching through infinity, and there was an entirely metaphorical week or two before the heaven and Earth bit that involved other planets, older galaxies, and a Bang of considerable size.
We all know the story of Michael and Lucifer- Luci refused to bow down to the new-minted humans, freaked out, rebelled, invented demons as a fuck you, created Hell, then was kicked down into a Cage by his own brother just for his troubles. It was written that in the end of days, Michael and Lucifer would fight- and Michael would win. At some point in those early days, He vanished. Vamoosed. Only the Four archangels, the ones who had seen God’s face and known him well enough to have real relationships with him, knew it. At some point Gabriel fucked off to join the pagans, and God was out of the picture for a few aeons, popping by to nudge Gabe in the direction of Galilee and have some fireside chats with Yeshua the Nazarene.
By and large, though, the world ticked by merrily on its own, paving the way for a new chapter in His life to start: life as a human. Or, you know, a human-shaped thinger. The Ineffable Plan was unfolding merrily (something about free will and self-direction, we think), so the Almighty put on an Edgar suit and walked among us for the first time. Naturally, being a bit of an alpha dog, he started out as a mighty emperor with an ego bigger than the cosmos, but over the many years He tried out lives like new shoes: king, general, shaman, hero, holy man, ascetic. Eventually a certain comfort in his skins settled in, and He started to branch out, really feeling out every single aspect of the human existence. He was a slave, a criminal, the girl begging on the streets and sleeping in gutters. The prostitute, the john, the slaveowner and the politician. Over time it became more than easy to live out a life from birth to death, acting every bit the human He wasn’t, with every life becoming less a bug in an Edgar suit and more an actual person- identifying strongly as the name he called himself, his transient identity as ironclad a part of His self-image as any human’s. He gradually distanced more and more from the tiny padlocked door in the back of His mind that held the entire Universe. It was doing just fine without an Almighty, and Heaven hadn’t caved in just yet.
Then the 20th century dawned, and with it the rise of a bloodline that lurked at the edge of his consciousness: the Campbell-Winchesters. Not yet united, they coalesced separately and with them came the slow drag of impending destiny. The Alpha-Omega knew that the game was getting very close now, and that the time was drawing night when He might have to compromise an aeons-long policy of absolute non-involvement. His next move might surprise you: being reborn once more, this time into the arms of a nondescript couple from Delaware with a drunk mother and a father who tried too hard at everything but taking his damn insulin.
And so Chuck Shurley, alcoholic prophet was born. Chuck was a new life for him- an exercise in flaws and vulnerability; He was a nervous man with vodka in his veins and a penchant for prostitutes. How he got that way in adulthood was the product of a childhood, same as every other person’s sad and boring story, and it was all fairly boring until the writer got exactly what He’d been hoping would happen (for He couldn’t remember if Chuck Shurley or Chuck Stratton was the told-of prophet, in all honesty, and this was a crapshoot in motion): he had a crippling headache that gave him visions of Sam and Dean. The first one was something of a celebration for Him, as he knew it was all going in motion, and then Chuck promptly shut off his omniscience. He didn’t want to know what was going on or anything outside of his visions: the war had to come to him.
He was just a writer from Maryland.
So, as these things go, the war did come to him. The underground cult series Supernatural took off in its small way before going bankrupt, and a year later two brothers knocked on Chuck’s door, ushering in God’s first involvement in the Plan since He had a chat in a garden in Gethsemane.
Chuck helped the brothers escape Lilith, and side-eyed Sam Winchester fairly hard for his blood habit- but any further assistance was out of the picture when the angel Zachariah threatened him harshly if he tried to warn the brothers about the horrors to come. Of course Chuck theoretically could have done something to overstep the angel, but He had a mantra of strict non-involvement, said every moment of every day of every year for a dozen thousand years.
Have faith. The Plan is Just.
So the day came that the horrors were due, and Chuck found himself in his bathrobe on the phone with a call girl company, utterly unaware that Castiel and Dean Winchester were about to start rewriting the story. Unaware that his rule against divine intervention was about to be tested for the first time since handing Mary a wine cooler and telling her it’s okay, Joseph will totally understand.
Just on the moment before that turning point, the walls melted around him and gave way to trees.
The Wood had Him.
First Person Sample:
[The video starts with a jumble of confused clicking sounds to greet Chuck’s face, dirt-smeared and more than a little confused, staring down the lens.]
Uh, hi. Um. Can I just ask what the hell for a second? Seriously, I was just minding my own business and then the world kind of melted and I woke up here. Something tells me that I won’t find Mistress Magda’s call service here. [He fiddles with the “camera” until it stills, rested now on some flat and stable surface, allowing Chuck the freedom to scootch back, ass to the dirt, and sit Indian-style while staring at the communicator.] It took me like a freaking hour to figure out how to use this stupid thing.
Can I just skip ahead to the part where I ask if I’m stuck in one of the Trickster’s illusions? Because, you know what? That’s totally the kind of messed up thing that would happen to me. I knew I should’ve been an accounting major instead of a writer.
Prose Sample:
Thread context. This is action sample:
[Chuck doesn't get angry very often. Annoyed, maybe. Exasperated- sure. But anger, rage, and white-hot fury are the provinces of greater men, of hot-blooded men, of gods. Something distant and acutely painful snaps in the back of Chuck's mind and as he stands there, rooted to the spot and taking in the scene before him, every pitiful movement and slurred sound from Cas usher in a new wave of sickening shock until He can hear nothing but the roaring in His ears and see nothing but Castiel's blood on Dean's hand. Cas, Cas, Castiel- the baby angel, the one who gave everything, the willing sacrificial lamb on Dean's altar, His littlest and best son strung up now and making those horrible, awful noises that should never, ever, ever come from the mouth of an Angel.
He doesn't even realize that he's moving until he's already there. Not until his fists are balled in Dean's jacket does he realize that he crossed the room at all, in a torrent of wide-eyed shock and quick fury, and it's all instinct that leads Him to pull Dean away from Castiel and punch him full in the face with all the force of a very literal angry god.
Fuck, it's so satisfying to hear the bones crack. His fist connects with Dean's face with inhuman strength, splintering a cheekbone, breaking his nose, and caving in his eye socket until Dean's eye burst in his head, and for a split second Chuck's fist in inside his face and Dean is on the edge of a messy, disgusting death. By the time Dean reels back from the blow, he just looks like he was punched by someone really intent on making his nose bleed, all excess damage healed.
He grabs Dean by the jacket again and shoves him hard, almost throwing him away from Cas but just barely remembering to control Himself this time rather than throw him through the wall.]
Thread context. This is my secondary sample, to showcase my writing style.
With a snap and a twist, a Coyote falls dead. Anansi, the Raven, that old fool genius. The wingéd thing beyond time.
Death, it is said, is the only being older than the ever-powerful Almighty Himself. He and Death have sat down before, for the omnipotent immortal version of shooting the shit over beers, and after so much time the Horseman-who-is-so-much-more can't be said to remember whether he or the Alpha-Omega is older. There have been so many planets-galaxies-universes that the æons run together somewhat, and the original kernel of existence is but a mote in the unrelenting endlessness of time. If the Creator-that-may-not-be knows differently or can clearly recall who it was who first emerged to greet his other and equal, to begin that first of partnerships, He is not saying. Since beginningless time death has thrived in the voids and the darkness and the space between vibrant, thriving life, and God has long since forgotten how not to depend on that force which He considers to be His other half and perfect equal. By His own reckoning, He created Death, and Death will reap Him. So: nothing to remark upon. The trillions upon trillions upon countless, endless, nigh-meaningless deaths of His own worshipers and haters and the countless who never knew a kind of god have blurred into a dull throb that long since quieted to a constant, simmering, easily ignored presence. One more death, anywhere, of anything (no matter how large) is as a drop of water in the ocean.
Somewhere, Gabriel falls dead, and God takes notice.
There's a pause, a gasp, a record-scratch of time punctuated by a glass slipping from lax fingers and falling falling crash in a gorgeous Little Bang of shining glass and clear-as-crystal vodka. As a little bearded man drops His glass with a wholly ignored shatter a sheaf of papers falls from his hand, dropping neglected to the vodka spill and even a minute later, after clear alcohol has seeped into the pages and run the black ink beyond recognition He does nothing.
There's a sense of time to be understood here; a certain change of perspective part and parcel with omniscience. Time is a toy to be played with, a path to walk and cheat on and loop around, and sometimes to stop and sit in the dirt and play cards on. He is standing at a railing on the roof of a tower in a shining silver-steel-crystal city spun out into the sky where the atmosphere opens to the heaven, and Earth itself in this age is as limited as phones and radio and smoke signals once were in those sad little dark ages. It is the twilight of World War Ten and He is in the most beautiful city in the world since Pompeii; it's twenty minutes before the bars close on the eve of an election on a rainy autumn night in Bethlehem, and a baby is crying. At any moment there is Every moment, and is it a wonder that God stands to the side unmoving? To change one tiniest spark of action or thread of reality would cause a cataclysm of parental hovering and catastrophic I told you so and He can't. He was conscientiously objecting before the Quakers ever made it cool.
But in this moment a writer in Maryland stops and stares into cool nothingness, and feels a bright light go out like a physical pain that hits Him hard. Have you ever had an asthma attack? Have you ever been deprived of breath? Not just in the breathless, nervous-or-about-to-be-kissed sense; in the real, existentially terrifying sense of not knowing whether the next breath you take will be enough to keep you alive. It robs one of their feet, stability, their faith in their own body and their place in this universe, and this writer in Maryland feels that through to His bones and a deeper place that would drive most of us mad from the revelation.
Somewhere, Gabriel has died, and He has felt it. Once now He has felt and acted upon the death of an angelic child, but never- never did it feel like this, like the icy hand of death closing around his own lungs. Sometimes, interference is the only option.
He finds a thick, tangled, sticky rope of unreality and pulls.
Special Notes: Nobody knows that he’s God. Nobody in the entire show (except Joshua, who we meet once and never leaves Heaven) is even remotely aware that Chuck Shurley is anything but a drunk, generally pantsless prophet who gets limited visions and nothing else. Everybody in the show thinks that God is dead or left the building, and in Chuck’s canon point He hasn’t given anybody reason to think otherwise.
This really can’t be emphasized enough. God’s entire modus operandi and a good portion of the show is built around God being MIA. In the show, he pings no radars except extremely human but with some divine visions. So generally he won’t ping any extrasensory radars- no weird tinglies, nothing- except that he sees the future. That’s all anybody would see about him. Ever.
The fae are obvious exceptions to this at mod discretion, of course, but as far as player characters go, it’s pretty much a secret.
User Name/Nick: Amy
User LJ: ladyvoldything
AIM/IM: socksaresocky
E-mail: ipokebadgerswithsticks@yahoo.com
The Character
Character Name: Chuck Shurley (not ever known as but still nonetheless God)
Character Journal: paterelohim
Canon: Supernatural
Age: Older than the universe, but appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties.
From When?: 4.22, before Castiel and Dean go to see him.
Abilities/Powers: Omniscience, omnipotence, prophetic visions, and the awesome might of never getting an STD from Mistress Magda. Hoo boy.
Omniscience:
This one is pretty easy, on the surface.
Except it’s not that simple, not by a long shot. Chuck keeps His divine nature and abilities stuffed behind a locked, chained, deadbolted door in the back of His mind, and almost never accesses it for fear of unleashing an avalanche that would unravel the carefully constructed mortality and limited scope He’s set up for himself. Chuck has no desire to undam that river, so He shuts his omniscience off 99.9% of the time. The first time he got a vision was a genuine surprise to him- he was pretty sure “Chuck Shurley” was one of the prophets supposed to foresee the Winchesters, but didn’t know when the first one would happen.
His reasons for shutting it off are manifold, though- it’s not just a self-serving matter of status quo: it’s a matter of principle and belief, too. How can there be any true free will if some higher power knows all the outcomes and has everything predestined? No. Never. He’s lived for billions of years with the passionate belief in free will and the power of human choices, and he isn’t about to go fucking that up now. So strong is his will on this point that His omniscience is actually sometimes limited- by his own design. There are many instance where even if He used his omniscience to its full extent He wouldn’t know the outcome of a certain event- if and only if the outcome is dependent on human choices. If it’s determined by luck of the draw, that’s something Chuck could know. If it depends on what someone will say when asked to make a hard decision, then there’s a good chance He won’t know until they make their choice.
There are some things that filter through regardless of what He does about it- passive senses, for instance. He can tell when someone isn’t human, and can sometimes tell exactly what they are. It’s a lot easier when the someone is from Supernatural (i.e. from His universe and one of His creations). But by and large, most of what he knows that he shouldn’t comes from his visions.
Omnipotence:
He can do anything. Literally. He can do anything. You name it, He can do it. Reverse death, create pocket realms, unravel the fabric of reality, turn this Universe around and make a new one, turn you gay, turn your mom gay, bone your mom. Well, not that last one. Well, he could. But He’s kind of a spazzcase with sex. That’s not the point here. Chuck is capable of literally anything in all of Creation, and has the Universe to prove it. He can elevate angels to higher rungs of power, restore them from the dead, erase addictions, create new planes of existence, and do absolutely anything. He is God. The end.
Except. Remember that door? Chuck is capable of anything, but that doesn’t mean that he will. On any given day, He only allows enough power to filter through to refill his flask with his mind. Even parlor tricks like Gabriel was shown doing, like magicking up food and bitchez, aren’t up his alley. He likes living in the gritty, crappy parts of life, as long as he always has booze.
At this point, he’s gone so long believing that he shouldn’t do anything and gotten so out of touch with omnipotence that he’s essentially psyched himself into believing that there are some things he actually can’t do- but don’t worry. He can.
STD Resistance and Visions (yes, this gets its own heading):
Prophetic visions are the tools that Chuck uses to navigate the Supernatural universe with any kind of agency over the events around him. They’re how He influences outcomes, because that’s okay: it’s not divine intervention, it’s a Prophet doing what they do and trying to help people in their own small way.
He gets visions of future events a few times a week that come in the form of excruciating headaches that lead him to drink until he passes out, then when he wakes up he writes like a man possessed until it’s all out. Usually his visions outpace events by a few days, but sometimes when it pertains to big, important things he can have visions months in advance.
Power Limitations:
With the limitations imposed by the Wood, much of Chuck’s full power potential will be cramped. As God, He is omnipotent and omniscient, although the extent to which he uses those parts of himself are always self-limited. The Wood, as a place not part of Chuck’s native dimension, is outside of his divine jurisdiction- as a result, most of His power will be closed off to Him while He’s in Babylon Wood. He will retain all of the knowledge that He had before arriving, but will only have limited extrasensory powers in terms of being able to know things about people he’s talking to- and, at any rate, he won’t use those unless pretty much forced. He’ll be more naturally in tune with those abilities around people from his own reality (meaning from Supernatural). In terms of power, most of his raw powers and abilities will be nearly closed off to him unless dealing directly with someone from his own canon- so, he wouldn’t be able to do anything without huge strain if Harry Potter died in front of him, but he would be able to resurrect a Castiel. Probably. He’d break into one hell of a sweat, and be nursing that headache for at least a week.
He’ll have limited reality-bending abilities, but mostly stupid stuff- making sure his flask is never emptied, and that sort of thing, or making very very paper-thin illusions that will resemble a bad hologram- worse than anything an archangel could do, since his full powers won’t work on a large scale without causing him some degree of pain. But much easier for him would be omniscience: he would be able to share knowledge with people- such as putting a finger to a character’s head and sharing with them something He knows, or making them see some memory of his. Futzing with people’s heads will be easier than futzing with reality on anything larger than a stupid parlor trick.
Using his powers for anything bigger than the small tricks will require actual effort for him, which will be extremely new, as He has obviously in the past created galaxies at the slightest whim without breaking a sweat. The bigger the task he’s trying to accomplish, the more effort it’ll take, and the strain will have an effect on his body similar to physical exertion, including pain if he tries to overwork himself.
Inventory
A half-drunk beer and a cell phone. Clothing: a green button-down shirt, black patterned t-shirt, jeans, socks, Spongebob boxers, watch, and a cheap belt. In his pockets: a hip flask full of vodka, some candy wrappers, half a cigarette, a cheap lighter.
Personality:
Chuck is a bit of a nervous guy- it comes from having spontaneous prophetic headaches and a life as filled with nonsense as his is. An insane fan base, characters who routinely knock angrily on his door demanding spoilers, and a vastly inadequate supply of beer and clean underwear plague his life like so many white-trash locusts. When confronted with these and other such insurmountable obstacles as dropping his toothbrush or answering the door twice in one hour, Chuck's usual response is to blink a few times and stare in frustration. But please don't be fooled by his veneer of flailing incompetence; he's actually very smart in certain ways, and that intellect shines through in his rare moments of mental clarity between drunk spells or crippling frustration with the stupidity around him. When he isn't watching Maury or abusing his brain with whiskey, Chuck has a perverse, witty, often self-deprecating sense of humor. He knows when he's messed up and isn't afraid to call himself on it- to a point.
Not to say that he's a complete genius. Some would call him a creative genius, surely, but Chuck at times has a startling lack of common sense and a tendency to jump to conclusions. The pizza guy's late? Oh god, he probably ran his truck off the road. He won't worry too much about those terrible doomsday conclusions, of course, just call up Domino's instead of Pizza Hut; what's certain death (or certain inconvenience) when there's laziness to be had? Anything you or I could do, Chuck can do slower, later, and in his boxers.
He’s not constantly a falling-apart mess, though- when put into high-stress or high-stakes situations, he can snap into competence he didn’t know he had and short-lived leadership skills that last for all of five minutes. Inevitably he has to hand over the reins or take a powder so he can put his head between his knees and breathe. Life is stressful, bro. But he gets by, and when he’s not being massively selfish he does his best to help other people get by, too, because he cares about them.
All of them. That’s the biggest secret, the deepest layer to his onion- how much he cares. Because he isn’t just him, he’s Him. And He cares about every single one of His creations. Castiel once called them all works of art- God sees them as perfection incarnate, every last of them. Not that it stops Him from having His share of criticisms, of course- on a fundamentally deep level He knows that His plan is just, and that comfortable confidence used to give Him the emotional freedom to criticize and alter over the course of history- just look at the ancient Israelites.
Lately He doesn’t meddle, at all, and He’s pretty okay with that. There are times, of course- underneath the alcoholic prophet and the basket case is a deadbeat father who’s haunted by deep-seated guilt about his abandonment of the angels, even though He knows with even more certainty that it was the right decision. He disengaged because He had to- and in the process, that’s meant disengaging from most of his power- He doesn’t use his power but rarely, and has narrowed his already limited so-called “omniscience” so as to know try to preclude the existence of free will. It’s reflective of a very strange quality for the Almighty to have- humility. His ego quieted after Jesus.
Then there’s the constant riot of prayers and deaths parading through his head, that he’s managed to lock away in a corner of the unimaginable vastness that is his mind. Some he can’t lock out- the visions come by (contrived) order of the angels, and sometimes he manages to hear snippets of angel radio in His mind. But He always knew most of what was going on, and- and fuck, it broke His heart. God plays favorites, and blatantly. Nothing hurts him more than the suffering of certain of the angels- on the whole, he sees them as falling far short of expectations, but some... the four archangels and Castiel, largely, can motivate Him to rare action, and it’s during those moments that one can find more raw love in Him than a human mind is capable of comprehending. Nothing horrifies him more than the thought of one of His children needing him, and being genuinely unable to help. Of course, His definition of “needing” is different than anybody else’s, and usually requires that things be far more dire than the others involved would prefer. Chuck is happy to help people out in human ways, but He still believes firmly in the power of human choices.
History:
In the beginning He created the Heavens and the Earth and it was good, blah blah blah, see Genesis for details. There’s a lot of hubbub over the “seven days” nonsense, even though in Chuck’s humble opinion any feces-flinging monkey can see that it’s a metaphor for longer spans of time. Each one of those days represents untold aeons stretching through infinity, and there was an entirely metaphorical week or two before the heaven and Earth bit that involved other planets, older galaxies, and a Bang of considerable size.
We all know the story of Michael and Lucifer- Luci refused to bow down to the new-minted humans, freaked out, rebelled, invented demons as a fuck you, created Hell, then was kicked down into a Cage by his own brother just for his troubles. It was written that in the end of days, Michael and Lucifer would fight- and Michael would win. At some point in those early days, He vanished. Vamoosed. Only the Four archangels, the ones who had seen God’s face and known him well enough to have real relationships with him, knew it. At some point Gabriel fucked off to join the pagans, and God was out of the picture for a few aeons, popping by to nudge Gabe in the direction of Galilee and have some fireside chats with Yeshua the Nazarene.
By and large, though, the world ticked by merrily on its own, paving the way for a new chapter in His life to start: life as a human. Or, you know, a human-shaped thinger. The Ineffable Plan was unfolding merrily (something about free will and self-direction, we think), so the Almighty put on an Edgar suit and walked among us for the first time. Naturally, being a bit of an alpha dog, he started out as a mighty emperor with an ego bigger than the cosmos, but over the many years He tried out lives like new shoes: king, general, shaman, hero, holy man, ascetic. Eventually a certain comfort in his skins settled in, and He started to branch out, really feeling out every single aspect of the human existence. He was a slave, a criminal, the girl begging on the streets and sleeping in gutters. The prostitute, the john, the slaveowner and the politician. Over time it became more than easy to live out a life from birth to death, acting every bit the human He wasn’t, with every life becoming less a bug in an Edgar suit and more an actual person- identifying strongly as the name he called himself, his transient identity as ironclad a part of His self-image as any human’s. He gradually distanced more and more from the tiny padlocked door in the back of His mind that held the entire Universe. It was doing just fine without an Almighty, and Heaven hadn’t caved in just yet.
Then the 20th century dawned, and with it the rise of a bloodline that lurked at the edge of his consciousness: the Campbell-Winchesters. Not yet united, they coalesced separately and with them came the slow drag of impending destiny. The Alpha-Omega knew that the game was getting very close now, and that the time was drawing night when He might have to compromise an aeons-long policy of absolute non-involvement. His next move might surprise you: being reborn once more, this time into the arms of a nondescript couple from Delaware with a drunk mother and a father who tried too hard at everything but taking his damn insulin.
And so Chuck Shurley, alcoholic prophet was born. Chuck was a new life for him- an exercise in flaws and vulnerability; He was a nervous man with vodka in his veins and a penchant for prostitutes. How he got that way in adulthood was the product of a childhood, same as every other person’s sad and boring story, and it was all fairly boring until the writer got exactly what He’d been hoping would happen (for He couldn’t remember if Chuck Shurley or Chuck Stratton was the told-of prophet, in all honesty, and this was a crapshoot in motion): he had a crippling headache that gave him visions of Sam and Dean. The first one was something of a celebration for Him, as he knew it was all going in motion, and then Chuck promptly shut off his omniscience. He didn’t want to know what was going on or anything outside of his visions: the war had to come to him.
He was just a writer from Maryland.
So, as these things go, the war did come to him. The underground cult series Supernatural took off in its small way before going bankrupt, and a year later two brothers knocked on Chuck’s door, ushering in God’s first involvement in the Plan since He had a chat in a garden in Gethsemane.
Chuck helped the brothers escape Lilith, and side-eyed Sam Winchester fairly hard for his blood habit- but any further assistance was out of the picture when the angel Zachariah threatened him harshly if he tried to warn the brothers about the horrors to come. Of course Chuck theoretically could have done something to overstep the angel, but He had a mantra of strict non-involvement, said every moment of every day of every year for a dozen thousand years.
Have faith. The Plan is Just.
So the day came that the horrors were due, and Chuck found himself in his bathrobe on the phone with a call girl company, utterly unaware that Castiel and Dean Winchester were about to start rewriting the story. Unaware that his rule against divine intervention was about to be tested for the first time since handing Mary a wine cooler and telling her it’s okay, Joseph will totally understand.
Just on the moment before that turning point, the walls melted around him and gave way to trees.
The Wood had Him.
First Person Sample:
[The video starts with a jumble of confused clicking sounds to greet Chuck’s face, dirt-smeared and more than a little confused, staring down the lens.]
Uh, hi. Um. Can I just ask what the hell for a second? Seriously, I was just minding my own business and then the world kind of melted and I woke up here. Something tells me that I won’t find Mistress Magda’s call service here. [He fiddles with the “camera” until it stills, rested now on some flat and stable surface, allowing Chuck the freedom to scootch back, ass to the dirt, and sit Indian-style while staring at the communicator.] It took me like a freaking hour to figure out how to use this stupid thing.
Can I just skip ahead to the part where I ask if I’m stuck in one of the Trickster’s illusions? Because, you know what? That’s totally the kind of messed up thing that would happen to me. I knew I should’ve been an accounting major instead of a writer.
Prose Sample:
Thread context. This is action sample:
[Chuck doesn't get angry very often. Annoyed, maybe. Exasperated- sure. But anger, rage, and white-hot fury are the provinces of greater men, of hot-blooded men, of gods. Something distant and acutely painful snaps in the back of Chuck's mind and as he stands there, rooted to the spot and taking in the scene before him, every pitiful movement and slurred sound from Cas usher in a new wave of sickening shock until He can hear nothing but the roaring in His ears and see nothing but Castiel's blood on Dean's hand. Cas, Cas, Castiel- the baby angel, the one who gave everything, the willing sacrificial lamb on Dean's altar, His littlest and best son strung up now and making those horrible, awful noises that should never, ever, ever come from the mouth of an Angel.
He doesn't even realize that he's moving until he's already there. Not until his fists are balled in Dean's jacket does he realize that he crossed the room at all, in a torrent of wide-eyed shock and quick fury, and it's all instinct that leads Him to pull Dean away from Castiel and punch him full in the face with all the force of a very literal angry god.
Fuck, it's so satisfying to hear the bones crack. His fist connects with Dean's face with inhuman strength, splintering a cheekbone, breaking his nose, and caving in his eye socket until Dean's eye burst in his head, and for a split second Chuck's fist in inside his face and Dean is on the edge of a messy, disgusting death. By the time Dean reels back from the blow, he just looks like he was punched by someone really intent on making his nose bleed, all excess damage healed.
He grabs Dean by the jacket again and shoves him hard, almost throwing him away from Cas but just barely remembering to control Himself this time rather than throw him through the wall.]
Thread context. This is my secondary sample, to showcase my writing style.
With a snap and a twist, a Coyote falls dead. Anansi, the Raven, that old fool genius. The wingéd thing beyond time.
Death, it is said, is the only being older than the ever-powerful Almighty Himself. He and Death have sat down before, for the omnipotent immortal version of shooting the shit over beers, and after so much time the Horseman-who-is-so-much-more can't be said to remember whether he or the Alpha-Omega is older. There have been so many planets-galaxies-universes that the æons run together somewhat, and the original kernel of existence is but a mote in the unrelenting endlessness of time. If the Creator-that-may-not-be knows differently or can clearly recall who it was who first emerged to greet his other and equal, to begin that first of partnerships, He is not saying. Since beginningless time death has thrived in the voids and the darkness and the space between vibrant, thriving life, and God has long since forgotten how not to depend on that force which He considers to be His other half and perfect equal. By His own reckoning, He created Death, and Death will reap Him. So: nothing to remark upon. The trillions upon trillions upon countless, endless, nigh-meaningless deaths of His own worshipers and haters and the countless who never knew a kind of god have blurred into a dull throb that long since quieted to a constant, simmering, easily ignored presence. One more death, anywhere, of anything (no matter how large) is as a drop of water in the ocean.
Somewhere, Gabriel falls dead, and God takes notice.
There's a pause, a gasp, a record-scratch of time punctuated by a glass slipping from lax fingers and falling falling crash in a gorgeous Little Bang of shining glass and clear-as-crystal vodka. As a little bearded man drops His glass with a wholly ignored shatter a sheaf of papers falls from his hand, dropping neglected to the vodka spill and even a minute later, after clear alcohol has seeped into the pages and run the black ink beyond recognition He does nothing.
There's a sense of time to be understood here; a certain change of perspective part and parcel with omniscience. Time is a toy to be played with, a path to walk and cheat on and loop around, and sometimes to stop and sit in the dirt and play cards on. He is standing at a railing on the roof of a tower in a shining silver-steel-crystal city spun out into the sky where the atmosphere opens to the heaven, and Earth itself in this age is as limited as phones and radio and smoke signals once were in those sad little dark ages. It is the twilight of World War Ten and He is in the most beautiful city in the world since Pompeii; it's twenty minutes before the bars close on the eve of an election on a rainy autumn night in Bethlehem, and a baby is crying. At any moment there is Every moment, and is it a wonder that God stands to the side unmoving? To change one tiniest spark of action or thread of reality would cause a cataclysm of parental hovering and catastrophic I told you so and He can't. He was conscientiously objecting before the Quakers ever made it cool.
But in this moment a writer in Maryland stops and stares into cool nothingness, and feels a bright light go out like a physical pain that hits Him hard. Have you ever had an asthma attack? Have you ever been deprived of breath? Not just in the breathless, nervous-or-about-to-be-kissed sense; in the real, existentially terrifying sense of not knowing whether the next breath you take will be enough to keep you alive. It robs one of their feet, stability, their faith in their own body and their place in this universe, and this writer in Maryland feels that through to His bones and a deeper place that would drive most of us mad from the revelation.
Somewhere, Gabriel has died, and He has felt it. Once now He has felt and acted upon the death of an angelic child, but never- never did it feel like this, like the icy hand of death closing around his own lungs. Sometimes, interference is the only option.
He finds a thick, tangled, sticky rope of unreality and pulls.
Special Notes: Nobody knows that he’s God. Nobody in the entire show (except Joshua, who we meet once and never leaves Heaven) is even remotely aware that Chuck Shurley is anything but a drunk, generally pantsless prophet who gets limited visions and nothing else. Everybody in the show thinks that God is dead or left the building, and in Chuck’s canon point He hasn’t given anybody reason to think otherwise.
This really can’t be emphasized enough. God’s entire modus operandi and a good portion of the show is built around God being MIA. In the show, he pings no radars except extremely human but with some divine visions. So generally he won’t ping any extrasensory radars- no weird tinglies, nothing- except that he sees the future. That’s all anybody would see about him. Ever.
The fae are obvious exceptions to this at mod discretion, of course, but as far as player characters go, it’s pretty much a secret.