Question: When Kettila was still mortal, was she ever hunted by authorities as a serial killer?
Oh, heavens, yes - she is a serial killer. While her murders in Sweden were believed to have been perpetrated by other criminals, her large-scale massacre of an entire Girl Scout camp in the States was inescapable. She went missing immediately after the incident, so authorities weren't sure if she was another victim whose body they hadn't found or the murderer herself, but as soon as there had been sightings of her in the country, she pretty much became suspect number one. She was never caught or tried because of the convenient onset of Fimbulwinter and the subsequent breakdown of a lot of national authority, but she was definitely wanted and narrowly escaped being discovered a few times before then.
Alas, now that the World is in terrible shape and it's hard to keep a centralized authority going, her later murders (gas station attendants, hapless hotel travelers, whatever) have gone pretty unnoticed in the general sea of horribleness (though Vivian, Aurora and Woody generally tried to keep a restraining hand on her). Now that she's a goddess in her own right, it's doubtful that anyone's ever going to take her to task for them, especially not her Aztlanti fellows, though a god with Justice could bust her if they were aware of the situation and so chose (that's happened to Sangria, actually).
Luckily for Kettila, there are bigger things afoot than a few murdered mortals. Poor mortals.
despite her childishness and immaturity Ketillia is also rather brilliant right? her mortal stories say she graduated university with high marks.
ReplyDeleteShe's certainly no slouch. :) Her university career was probably helped along by the fact that her father was in the government, but over the course of her development she went from only a dot or two of Epic Int to a whole bucketful. She's one of the smarter characters out there now, though of course she's still quite childish (I doubt that'll ever change!).
Deletea sociopathic eternal eight year old that is almost as smart as Sophia who herself is a divine genius. what exactly does she bend that brain power toward?
ReplyDeleteShe uses that big, beautiful brain primarily for synthesizing new kinds of plants (often weird plant-animal or plant-people hybrids, which inevitably causes friction with poor Vivian and her Harmony Virtue) and for medical purposes, as she's a fairly mighty healer now. She's also recently been studying very hard in an attempt to learn all of the ancient Aztec laws, since upon reaching apotheosis and arriving in Acopa she discovered that she was doing pretty much everything wrong.
DeleteIt's pretty fun to watch; most of the time she's her normal, childishly naivete self, but every once in a while Sverrir will say something and she'll correct him with all her genius and leave him blinking and confused that the smackdown didn't come from Aurora or Vivian.
I don't think that Kettila is a sociopath--she very clearly cares for other people and expresses empathy. I think that in Kettila's case its just that she has a world view that differs from most.
ReplyDeleteThats difficult ground to walk on. Dont all sociopaths just have a world view that is different from others? It takes a very special kind of brain to murder innocent children without a second thought as they cry and beg for mercy.
DeleteMy quick-and-dirty understanding of psychology has always been that psychopaths don't understand that killing people is wrong (either because they have no understanding of morals or because they don't understand that other people are, well, people), while sociopaths understand that it's wrong but do it anyway. It's a difference between being mentally disconnected from the rest of the world, and understanding societal rules but choosing to discard them.
DeleteBut in Kettila's case, I'm pretty sure killing people has always seemed like a good thing to her, not a bad thing she'd be worried about. She tends to murder to "help" the people she's killing or, later to help the gods; among the Aztecs, murder for ritual purposes isn't socially unacceptable the way it is in modern Europe, so she's not doing anything wrong as far as they're concerned. I wouldn't call her either a true psychopath or a true sociopath; she's in a weird no-man's-land that someone with more knowledge of psychology than I have would have to diagnose.
I do think she's messed up in the head about nine ways, but considering that there are people like Marcus, who will murder you for bringing him the wrong sandwich, or Sangria, who can't tell the difference between a human child and a bug, or Seamus, who just really likes the feeling of peoples' organs in his hands, she's not one of the worst murder offenders in our games. If anything, her big mental problem is that crazy Peter Pan complex thing she's got going on - somehow her player manages to make that far creepier than any of the bloodletting heart-stabbing shenanigans going on.
Kettila definitely has strong emotional attachments to others and frequently tries to put their good before her own, so she's definitely not close to being a vicious killing maniac.
Man, your PC's are WAAAY more psychotic than mine. I only have one that murders people on a regular basis (Russian Murder-Batman) and he's only after criminals.
ReplyDeleteOf course, he IS hunted by the FBI, Homeland Security and pretty much every cop in the US, Mexico, Canada and Russia. Also Interpol. Chernobog has been spreading rumors that he's a serial killer. Which he KINDA is.
Yeah, I don't know why, really. It's not like we went around advertising "Hey! This is a game in which we will allow you to rampantly kill people!" It's all different players taking different approaches, too.
DeleteThis question probably would have been better if asked about Sangria - she spent her Hero career assassinating anyone her father told her to and was wanted as an international terrorist by the time she met the rest of her band. Several times they all had to flee across the countryside because, no joke, there was an entire army chasing them.
Then there was that time in Australia where Sophia and Sangria had to use Deus so they weren't blown up by nukes, and ended up being horribly cursed in the process.
Deletemost of your heroes are more anti-hero than anything. they would make great antagonists for a band of altruistic justice league wana-bes. Hell, even gods like Thor and Hercules must be pissed by some of the crap they've pulled.
DeleteThey're a good mix - capital-H Heroes like Geoff are certainly around, but so are bumbling heroes-by-accident like Goze and antagonistic anti-heroes like Sangria.
DeleteOh, yeah, plenty of gods are annoyed with them. Anybody with Valor gets pissy when humans are getting killed, even if (as the Aztecs continue to insist) it's for a good cause. Conversely, those with different systems of morals are just as mad - an Aztec with Duty and Conviction is just as offended when you refuse to kill someone and therefore deprive the universe of the essential energy it needs to work. Tyr once Banished Sangria from Europe for murdering people there; Tezcatlipoca once flayed Goze alive for letting some of his sacrifice damage be magically healed. It often just depends on the values of the person in question.
These poor kids, nobody likes half of them. Heh.
which means if there was a band of scions who were pure heroes dedicated to protecting humanity and living by human morals (ala keepers of the world only better) there would be alot of opportunity for making divine enemies from all sides. I'm surprised there isn't a band like that who has decided to say enough and stand up to both the gods and titans.
ReplyDeleteThere are always opportunities for making enemies; nobody's point of view is necessarily "right" and everybody disagrees on something. Our PCs generally don't get along too well with other Scions no matter what their views, though they have made friends with a few.
DeleteI'm not sure a "band like that" is the sort of thing that can really exist without destroying itself. Scions are people with all the shades of moral grey people have, after all; sometimes they do bad things for emotional reasons or they make poor choices without realizing it. Those aren't bad-guy morals; they're human morals, too. Nobody gets to live in a world of pure black-and-white morality - and if they do, they're often just as bad as the bad guys they're fighting again. It's the age-old problem of the paladin: if you always follow the rules and do what's morally "right", you hurt people that maybe you shouldn't, but if you start breaking rules, you can't be sure you're better than the bad guys. Oppose the Titans, great; oppose the gods who are being douchebags, great, too; but life's never that simple and sooner or later they're going to have to make horrible choices in which there is no good outcome. Life (and myth!) is like that.
As Vala is fond of saying, it's not about where you end up, it's all about the choices you make along the way. (As she is also fond of saying, there is always some god with Ultimate Manipulation directing where you go anyway, so it's not like you've got anything to lose.)
Which is not to say that people like Sophia are operating on normal morals; she is a sociopath and not to be emulated. But often folks like Aurora or Goze or Geoff may end up doing bad things but for a good reason as they see it, which is the best you can often ask of them.
Deletethen it would be a great plot. A band of Scions deciding to act like modern day superheroes and seeing how far they get before they have to start breaking there moral codes or if they are able to persevere while keeping there "souls".
ReplyDeleteso are the souls of the entire girl scout troop in tlalacon even though none of them are of the aztec heritage.
ReplyDeleteProbably not, actually. None of the Girl Scouts (or very few) were likely to have any Aztec blood and they were killed far from Aztec territory, so there's no reason for them to go to any of the Aztec afterlives. They'd probably go to the Underworld of whatever pantheon had the strongest claim on them, or with whatever psychopomp happened across them first. It's not like Tlaloc needs them for anything. There's no reason to tell Kettila that, though; I mean, she's not wrong when she thinks that codices are suggesting that. They are. Those kids were Aztecs, is all, and the difference hasn't occurred to her.
DeleteAt this point, actually, any of them that had gone to Tlalocan or Mictlan would be in Nonantztochan, Eztli's afterlife for dead children, anyway. I doubt very many of them made it there, though.
poor ketilla. She thought she was ending there suffering and taking them to paradise. Instead they could be anyplace from Irkallu to Mag Mell. I wonder what she would do (if anything) if she found out she was wrong.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Kettila's bandmates learned long ago that it's sometimes best not to mess with her vision of reality. Feeling better about teaching her something is almost never worth the emotional fallout.
DeleteI'm not sure what she'd do; she might try to go to those other Underworlds and rescue them, possibly to move them to Nonantztochan or Tlalocan manually. It sounds like the sort of thing she'd do, though I haven't asked her player.