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[wouldbeking]

Player Information
Your Nickname: Brig
OOC Journal: hane@lj
Under 18? no
Email/IM: twopoinsettias@gmail.com
Characters Played at Singularity: Erik, O'Brien

Character Information
Name: Castiel
Name of Canon: Supernatural
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: canon
Reference: http://supernatural.wikia.com/wiki/Castiel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castiel_%28Supernatural%29
http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Castiel

Canon Point:
Season 6, between 6.21 and 6.22

Setting:

On the surface, ordinary Earth in the 21st century. People go to work, kids go to school, the sun rises and sets and most humans live fairly ordinary, oblivious lives.

Underneath that surface, there are monsters. Vampires, demons, ghosts, werewolves, wendigos, shapeshifters, angels and even pagan gods. Many of them prey on ordinary people and get away with it, fitting themselves into society or hiding away and only striking at the most convenient opportunity. The general public has no knowledge of what's lurking just outside their doorsteps, or under their beds, or in their walls, aside from the generic and often faulty pop culture awareness they might have of the supernatural. Strings of mysterious murders all too often simply go unsolved, since the local authorities are unlikely to believe witness accounts about ghosts or unnatural creatures. Sometimes it's not even creatures but ordinary people coming into contact with cursed objects or places.

Some of these entities are harmless or even benevolent, but many more are definitely not, and that's where hunters come in. Hunters are usually ordinary people who dedicate themselves to, you guessed it, hunting down the nasties that go bump in the night. Some of them have been trained since childhood to hunt monsters, some come into it as adults after exposure to the supernatural (a loved one being murdered is a recurring theme). There's no strict organization to their ranks as hunters are often lone wolves, but occasionally they can and do coordinate. The current stereotype of hunters seems to be survivalists, living on the road or maintaining a base of operations, outrunning and/or manipulating the authorities, and doing what they can to hunt while being viewed by regular society as crazies or outcasts. Hunting is not a glamorous lifestyle in the slightest. For the two most visible hunters in the show, their lives are a constant stream of driving across the country from 'job' to 'job,' running credit card scams for money, staying in crappy hotels, impersonating anyone they can in order to get information on the case, getting the crap kicked out of them by various monsters and being chased by the police or FBI, and usually having the innocent civilians they're trying to save not believe them about impending danger. It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Enter Sam and Dean Winchester, two brothers from Kansas who were raised in the hunting life by their father, John Winchester, after the mysterious and traumatic death of their mother Mary in a "house fire." Which of course was really nothing of the sort. In an effort to track down their missing father and also solve their mother's murder, Dean and Sam crisscross the country in their trademark black Impala, investigating mysterious murders and disappearances, putting angry ghosts to rest, breaking curses, hunting witches and zombies and other things that kill people, and eventually working up to regularly tangling with demons. Their weapons are guns and knives and silver and salt, the occasional use of seals, exorcism, and witchcraft, and the willingness to barge into terrifying situations because, honestly, no one else is going to. As it turns out, the Winchesters are probably the most fearsome hunters in existence and everything from monsters to demons has good reason to be wary of them, but we'll get to that in a bit.

For the Winchesters an 'ordinary' job is investigating murders/disappearances/strange phenomena that make the papers or the internet, or following clues that local authorities have no reason to pick up (ex. every ten years someone goes missing in a certain area like clockwork). The usual culprits are ghosts, monsters, or curses. Ghosts and angry spirits are actually fairly run of the mill occurrences. Creatures like vampires and werewolves can be either individuals or small groups operating independently as they please, acting as your standard serial killer(s). The occasional pagan god will also make an appearance as a serial killer type, having been reduced from their former status to a standard monster by dwindling belief or dwindling sacrifices. Most of these have no particular tie to Heaven or Hell and appear as stand-alone monsters of the week. The boys ride into town, investigate, try to figure out exactly what they're up against, and usually get the crap beaten out of them anyway before finally defeating the baddie.

On the other hand, you've got angels and demons. While demons have plagued the Winchesters for years (their mother, grandfather, grandmother, and Sam's nearly fiance were all killed by demons), and hunters in general are aware of demons and demonic possessions, there is at first no real working knowledge of how demons function as an organized whole and what their motives are. Hunters rely on holy water, devil traps, and exorcism rituals to fight them, but when an average hunter goes up against a demon, the demon usually wins.

Demons appear as black smoke and have to possess humans in order to affect the physical plane. Exorcism rituals don't kill demons, only force them out of their host body, which unfortunately does not often survive after being possessed. The demon is sent back to Hell where eventually it can and usually does make a re-appearance in a new host body. There are special weapons that truly "kill" demons, but those are few and far in between. Demons can be summoned and even controlled by witchcraft or other seals/traps/rituals.

As for demonic motivation, all demons are actually human souls that have been tortured and twisted during their time in Hell until their humanity has been stripped away. Lucifer is considered by some of them to be a myth himself. The story goes that he was cast out of Heaven because he refused God's command to venerate humans, considering them imperfect beings and inferior to angels. Lucifer was imprisoned in a cage by God for the crime of creating the first demon out of a human woman's soul (Lilith), and in his absence demons proliferated, some of them worshiping him as their creator. Since few (or none) of the other demons had ever seen him or his cage, or ever encountered angels personally, not all demons even believe that Lucifer is real. Powerful demons give the orders to lower demons and the high rollers are individuals like Azazel and Lilith, who work to free Lucifer from his cage and bring about the Apocalypse without their minions being aware of what they're really doing. Some demons even have ambivalent opinions on Lucifer and the Apocalypse when they find out what's going on. Crowley, for example, maintains that he's "in sales" and has no interest in ending the world. Crowley believes that Lucifer being set free will result in all demons eventually being destroyed, as Lucifer has as little love for them as he has for anything else.

In other words, factions in Hell. Since the Winchester family turns out to be integral to the Apocalypse (much to their horror), there are demons that choose to aid them in order to screw over other demons, and demons that want to kill them for the same reason. Demons don't like each other, jockey for power, and stab each other in the backs just like any corporate organization worth its salt.

Unfortunately for everyone, Heaven is much the same way. God has been absent for a long, long time, and only the four Archangels (Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, and Lucifer, in this particular interpretation) have ever seen him in person. Some angels believe that God is dead, or that he has ceased to care what happens in Heaven or on Earth. Without God, orders come down the chain of command from Michael and Raphael (Gabriel having long since fled Heaven and vanished somewhere on Earth) and angels are expected to obey without question and have faith that their orders must be the will of God. Angelic society is structured like a military, and disobedience is strictly punished by torture or even execution.

There are very few people on Earth, hunters or otherwise, that know or believe Heaven is real. Dean is adamant that if angels actually existed, someone would have seen some proof over the centuries. Castiel states that angels have not walked the earth for thousands of years (wiki says it was forbidden for them to take vessels and do so), which might be an exaggeration. All the same, the small portion of humanity that happens to be in the know about the supernatural has all kinds of definitive proof about the existence of demons, but apparently none about the existence of angels. Angels enter the series abruptly when Dean is brought back to life (his soul rescued from Hell, no less) by an unknown power, which the boys at first believe to be an abnormally powerful demon. The lead up to the Apocalypse plot has been a slow burn since the first episode, without the boys realizing why demons had such an interest in them and their family. When angels finally enter the picture, they explain their presence as being required because the Apocalypse has begun and the Winchesters are destined to be smack dab in the middle of it.

Just like demons, angels have to manifest on the physical plane by occupying human vessels. Unlike demons, who can possess anyone they want, angels can only possess vessels from certain bloodlines. This ends up including Lucifer, and the explanation is that only these particular bloodlines can contain the raw power of the divinity inside. Less suitable vessels are slowly burned up by the power inside them, so vessels are a big deal, and they have to give their consent before an angel can possess them. This again includes Lucifer, which is a major Plot Point later.

Angels are easily capable of dispatching demons, able to perform exorcisms with a touch, but they can be killed, trapped, de-powered by certain tiers of beings (such as Eve), locked out of locations with the use of seals, and even forced to manifest by witchcraft. Angels derive their power from their connection to Heaven, and since Heaven is full of squabbling factions and even corruption, any given angel can be "unplugged" and their powers significantly reduced. A rebellious angel can have their powers reduced without actually being banned permanently from Heaven, so there are degrees of Falling. Lucifer was cast out, Anna voluntarily left Heaven and ripped out her Grace which turned her human (but she was able to become an angel again by getting her Grace back), Gabriel voluntarily left Heaven but retained all of his angelic powers, and Castiel disobeyed Heaven's orders and had his powers greatly reduced but was not actually cast out. Out of these, only Lucifer and Anna count as Fallen Angels, while Gabriel and Castiel are merely rebellious.

According to Castiel angels don't exist simply to help people but to serve God's will, and in his absence that means Michael and Raphael's will, and what Michael and Raphael (and a number of other angels) want is the Apocalypse. End of the world, Lucifer walking free and everything. They want the showdown between Michael and Lucifer, and all the disasters that lead up to it because it will mean eternal peace if Michael wins. Or eternal suffering if Lucifer does. To most of the angels, the misery of humanity caught in the crossfire is simply collateral damage. Sure, thousands of people might die when the Four Horsemen are unleashed on the world, and a whole slew of people are going to have to die in order to get Lucifer out of his cage, but that's destiny, and most angels aren't very fond of humans anyway. Michael and Raphael didn't actually agree with God's command about venerating humans above angels, but they refused to support Lucifer's argument because that was disobedience to their Father. This attitude of resentment towards humanity is apparently widespread in Heaven. Also the angels are fairly surely that they'll win (having any opinion otherwise is forbidden), so everyone will have eternal peace in the end and that's totally worth the death toll.

It's also apparently worth murdering other angels in order to allow the 66 Seals to be broken and get the Apocalypse ball rolling. Michael and Raphael didn't simply give the orders to let Lucifer rise and let the Apocalypse happen, even if they secretly wanted those things, because they are determined to follow God's will to the letter. They command their soldiers to go to war against Hell and do everything in their power to keep the Seals intact, which in some cases ends up pitting angels against angels. Some angels are alright with this. Some angels feel no compassion for humanity but balk at murdering their own kind, and some angels draw the line at all of it being corrupt and wrong.

Our heroes of course want to stop the Apocalypse at all costs, being sensibly concerned about a destined showdown between two ultimate superpowers that will probably fry half the planet. Also it turns out that they have a very personal stake in the coming duel between dutiful older brother Michael and estranged younger brother Lucifer; dutiful older brother Dean is Michael's vessel, and estranged younger brother Sam is Lucifer's. Both Heaven and Hell are determined to force the Winchesters to consent to be used as meat puppets and fight each other to the death, so when they aren't being kidnapped or tortured or threatened by demons, they're being kidnapped or tortured or threatened by angels. Which is often worse. While the various demons can be manipulated by their own senses of self-preservation, angels are hard to fight and harder to convince to back off for any reason. When they can't force Dean to agree to be Michael's vessel, they bring his half-brother Adam back from the dead and manipulate him into agreeing, even though he's a less suitable vessel and will probably die from it.

In the end, the grand duel between possessed Sam (who had said yes to Lucifer in hopes of gaining a moment of control so he could throw himself-and-Lucifer back into the original cage) and possessed Adam is interrupted by Dean being Dean, who decides that if he can't save either of his brothers then he's at least going to die with them. Sam gets his moment of control, and both he and possessed Adam are sucked down into the prison God built for Lucifer. Hypothetically forever.

Tl;dr angels are dicks.

Most of them, anyway.


History:

Castiel enters the series as a stoic and dutiful angelic soldier, loyal to his superiors and showing little outward compassion for the humans he finds himself surrounded with. Other angels note that he has always been a good soldier and willing to carry out any orders without hesitation, and Cas at first presents himself as the type that only sees black and white in a situation and ignores individual misery for the sake of the bigger picture.

Since Dean is actually the first Seal (the Righteous Man) and also Michael's true vessel and he got himself dragged down into Hell at the end of season 3, Heaven is obliged to lay siege to Hell in order to get his soul back up on Earth where it needs to be. Castiel is the angel that succeeds in rescuing him, which more or less makes Castiel his handler as the Apocalypse draws nearer. In the face of Dean's incredulity at how ruthless the angels are, Cas tells him that humanity has a skewed perspective of what angels do. They are warriors, punishers, built to have no free will or emotions of their own but to blindly follow orders and never question their superiors.

However, as evidence of Heaven's corruption begins to mount and attempts are made on Sam's life just because he has the potential to become Lucifer's vessel, Castiel is forced to acknowledge that he has doubts about his superiors and the orders they are handing down. Cas is one of the few angels who truly believes that humans can be admirable and capable of feats that angels aren't, just as God said they were. When he discovers that angels are murdering other angels in order to allow the Apocalypse he is understandably appalled, and even more so at the justification used by the higher ranks that the dead angels are only low level cannon fodder anyway. For Cas, who had wholeheartedly believed in the war against Hell and believed that all his siblings were fighting to prevent the Apocalypse and save the Earth, that it's their purpose to defend the Earth and humanity against the forces of darkness etc, it's a harsh blow to realize that he and his human wards and his other siblings are just pieces on the game board to the more powerful angels. It's an even harsher blow to discover that they are openly disdainful of God's will, preferring death and destruction of their own kind and of humans in order to win the Apocalypse, which would let Heaven rule over Earth and angels rule over humans. For them, it's not about saving lives or observing God's will in his absence, it's about winning.

Castiel's superiors are also suspicious of his increasing attachment to his human charges (protecting Dean intrinsically means protecting Sam, Lucifer vessel or not) and their influence on him, as Cas allows the Winchesters to persuade him to help just a little bit, bend his orders, overlook things. As per Heaven's disobedience policy, Cas is eventually dragged back upstairs by force and tortured in order to re-string his loyalties. For a short while he seems to revert to being completely dutiful, but Dean gets through to him in the end, and Castiel sacrifices himself in order to give the Winchesters a chance to keep Lucifer from escaping his prison and walking the Earth.

It doesn't work and Lucifer rises anyway, but the important part is that Cas had made his decision to join Team Free Will. In the beginning of season 5 he's resurrected by an unknown power and chooses to take that as proof that his defiance against Heaven is, on some level, God's true will. From that point on he is the Winchesters' self-appointed guardian angel, dividing his time between helping them and trying to find the long-vanished God so that he might actually weigh in on whether he wants the Apocalypse or not. Cas is now a fugitive from Heaven and constantly hunted by other angels, and in some cases has to kill his attackers. He justifies it by clinging to the hope that he's secretly doing God's will and that the Winchesters' morality is superior to that of Heaven, and most of all that if he can just find God, he'll be told that he'd made the correct decision and the end result will be taken out of his hands. Like any child, he desperately wants his Father to validate and rescue him from the disaster he becomes less and less capable of handling.

Cas's rebellion means he's cut off from Heaven and slowly losing his powers, day by day becoming trapped in his human vessel until he's nearly mortal by the end of the season. While any angel can choose to rip out their Grace and Fall to Earth and become mortal, Cas never had any specific desire to become a human and is in fact increasingly useless and even a liability to the Winchesters the more power he loses. To him, becoming human is more like a punishment for his decision to go off script and believe that there might be a way to save everyone. Cas deals with his new limitations as best he can, being a stoic soldier, but the possibility that all of his efforts and sacrifices might be futile is utterly terrifying and angels aren't actually emotionally equipped to handle free will easily. Doubt, fear, resentment, and even despair overtake him at times, especially after God finally makes his presence known and declares that he will not be stepping in to help. Team Free Will is on their own.

Needless to say, Cas doesn't deal well. Feeling abandoned by the Father he was desperately hoping might care enough to save him and his friends, he realizes that everything he's ever said to the Winchesters about God's true will and his belief in humans and hope is a lie. There are only enemies on all sides and no rescue coming, and Sam and Dean being backed into corners so that they'll agree to become Lucifer and Michael's vessels, and Cas no longer has the power to stop any of it. He becomes fatalistic, helping the boys grasp at straws to halt the inevitable but quietly sure that they're all going to either die or be forced back on-script. Despite that he refuses to abandon his friends, choosing to die with them if he can't save them.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The more time Cas spends around the Winchesters, especially Dean, the more habits he picks up, and self-sacrifice has always been a time-honored Winchester trademark.

In the case of the showdown between Michael and Lucifer, however, self-sacrifice successfully averts the Apocalypse. Sam-and-Lucifer and Michael-and-Adam are locked back inside Lucifer's original prison, Castiel and Bobby are both miraculously resurrected (again, in Castiel's case), with little doubt this time that it must have been God's doing, and Dean survives to fulfill a promise he made to his brother: that he would retire from hunting and go live a normal life. Castiel's powers are fully restored, as is his broken faith in God, and he vows to return to Heaven to try and halt the squabbling factions and restore peace.

Season 6 Castiel is an entirely different creature. No longer the hunted and scorned nearly mortal at the bottom of the food chain, Cas is now secure (or more secure) in the knowledge that God wants him around, doing the things he feels are right. As the only witness to the bond between two humans trumping Lucifer and Michael's ~destined battle~ and all of Heaven and Hell, Cas feels that it is his duty to advocate free will to his brethren and get them to understand that destiny doesn't have to rule every action. He also devotes himself to subduing the remaining forces of Heaven that still want the Apocalypse, led by the last archangel Raphael. Raphael still wants Michael and Lucifer free to have their duel, Castiel is determined to protect the peace that Sam bought with his sacrifice and keep Dean from getting dragged back into the conflict. Sadly, angels still aren't very good with free will and all they want is order and hierarchy, and Castiel is slowly forced to become their new battle commander, demanding loyalty as fiercely as Raphael does. Being an archangel, Raphael believes that Cas's rebellion is upsetting a natural order where lesser angels must bow to stronger angels, and accuses Cas of trying to become a second Lucifer with all his talk of free will and refusing to submit to Raphael's authority.

As the war rages on, Cas grows increasingly desperate but no less determined, locking himself into the mindset of doing whatever it might take to protect humans and Dean specifically from any further divine influence. His failures begin to rack up around him and God refuses to answer any of his pleas for guidance. He starts dealing with the new King of Hell, Crowley, tries and fails to liberate Sam from Lucifer's cage (he succeeds in rescuing Sam's physical body, but not his soul), and is also unable to prevent Dean from being dragged out of retirement. Rather than go to any of his human friends for help as the war tilts in Raphael's favor, Cas isolates himself, so determined to protect them this time that he refuses to answer them when they try and contact him. He watches over them invisibly and acts like a rabid guard dog when any angel or demon so much as mentions the Winchesters in conversation, but he holds himself apart, telling himself that he can still save them from Raphael's idea of fate if he could just win the war in Heaven.

With such tunnel-vision, it's not long before Crowley manages to tempt Cas into helping him find and unseal Purgatory, chock full of souls that, once absorbed, would give Cas enough power to flatten Raphael and his faction and take full control of Heaven. Crowley's deal is to split the souls between the two of them so they can both cement their control of their respective kingdoms, but instead Cas absorbs all the souls by himself. Drunk on power and self-righteousness, he declares himself the new God, kills Raphael and any angels that try to oppose him, scares the shit out of his humans and basically marches on his merry way to become the new series villain.

Of course an angel was never meant to have the power of that many souls, and Purgatory is the resting place of monsters and the Old Ones (the Leviathans), who promptly begin manipulating and corrupting Castiel from the inside. When he finally realizes that he's lost control and has become host to something worse than Lucifer, which are actually melting him in their attempts to get loose, Cas tries to purge the souls and trap them back in Purgatory. With partial success. The Leviathans successfully cling to their host and overwhelm an apparently dying Castiel; he's last seen walking into a lake and probably exploding (for the third time) while the Leviathans move freely through the water supply and go on to take new hosts.





Cas is, first and foremost, absolutely not human. Angelic society is all about conformity, devotion, and community. Individuals and individuality are not prized, and all angels are accustomed to thousands of years of society with each other. They call each other brother and sister, and loyalty to family is meant to be absolute. At the heart of things, the dispute between God, Lucifer, and the other archangels is a family squabble between warring brothers and their father, and by extension it's also a family matter for every single angel in existence. It's personal. Castiel's own opinions on the matter have apparently been buried for centuries, as he would not have been considered a good soldier if he'd been expressing any. It's been a burden for him, privately agreeing with God's opinion of humans while his siblings actively resent them. God's absence is also particularly hard on an angel that finds himself no longer able to believe that his older brothers, his absolute authorities, are doing the right thing. When Castiel chooses to rebel against Heaven he loses his certainty, his moral compass, and despite knowing that he's no longer doing the wrong thing, he's not sure that any of his individual actions are the right thing. It's difficult for him to trust or even understand human judgment and priorities sometimes, and aiding the Winchesters is not the same as standing shoulder to shoulder with his own siblings. Part of him will always find that unnatural, and when things get especially bad he's actually more prone to despair than the Winchesters. Living off the script is a terrifying experience for an angel who has never known anything else. He goes so far as to beg Anna, a Fallen angel, to tell him what to do, but she refuses and states that he needs to start thinking for himself.

Despite his long existence watching over humanity, Castiel is woefully out of touch with culture and behavioral norms. His stare is too direct and too empty, looking through people instead of at them, he holds himself too still and has little concept of personal space, and constantly responds to Dean's pop culture quips with the monotone/exasperated "I don't understand that reference." Technology baffles him. For the most part, Castiel doesn't give a damn about blending in, teleporting away mid-conversation and missing important social cues, like the acute distress of his human vessel's own young daughter. While he's dedicated to stopping Lucifer he's also constantly not around when the Winchesters are in danger and even more constantly not around when one or both of them could really use another friendly shoulder. Cas simply doesn't understand the instinctive emotional responses that humans have. He does make some effort to learn, mostly by emulating Dean of all people, but usually there are more pressing concerns like whatever is trying to kill them all this week. This isn't to say that the boys aren't important to him. Both of them, especially Dean, slowly become more important to Cas than anything else, including Heaven and even God, but he doesn't always know how to deal with them and it's easier for him to teleport away from uncomfortable conversations than struggle to provide the right answers or assurances. Castiel is highly uncomfortable being the authority they look to for solutions when it turns out he has none, and their disappointment scares him almost as much as mortality. When Cas finds out that God is alive somewhere on Earth but refusing to step in to stop the Apocalypse, he curses Him not just for his own sake, but because it means there is no help for the Winchesters and even Castiel, an angel of the Lord, isn't going to be of any use to them if God himself is stepping aside. Cas doesn't get the validation he so desperately wants and has no choice but to face the looming end of the world with all the terror, doubt, and despair that Sam and Dean feel.

When Cas rebelled he was "unplugged" from Heaven, cut off from the flow of energy he's normally accustomed to and forcing him to deal with some depressing realities of becoming quasi-human. For the first time he experienced despair, isolation, physical human pain, and being forced to walk everywhere when he gets too low on energy. Cas isn't emotionally equipped to deal with the normal frustrations of every day life, much less the very traumatic things that occur while he's trying to save a completely oblivious world, protect two suicidal human idiots, and stave off Heaven and Hell. Cas is really the only one who appreciates how bad things can get on that front, but as he's a dutiful, uncomplaining soldier, he chooses to cope by, well, not coping. And by drinking entire liquor stores. And sacrificing himself for the sake of the boys, twice, getting himself exploded by Raphael and then by Lucifer without hesitation. Actions come easier to him than talking, anything that can be black and white, kill this demon or even this angel because they're about to kill one of his allies and there's no other choice. The simplicity of battlefield decisions is sometimes a comfort. Even in a "bad end" future where Cas has become entirely human and lost his faith in God, in Dean, and in any remaining hope for the future, he's still willing to follow Dean into battle because that's the only thing he can do.

After the Apocalypse is averted












Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions:

Teleportation

Angelic strength/durability

Occult knowledge/Exorcism

Angel blade

Dreamwalking/telepathy/prayer

Telekinesis

Reveal


Inventory:
Appearance:
Age:

OC/AU Justification
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?

Samples
Log Sample:

Network Sample: