Notes from Diane: Andy first sent me this character concept in November, 1998. Unfortunately, it has a few flaws. First, Shedim cannot possess animals. Second, Manasseh would probably have had difficulties traveling so quickly around the globe. Third, the character points used far exceeded the 36 I was allotting to new players, not even counting that Manasseh had a Word. Andy decided to start over, but I liked the back story enough that I think other people should get to read it. And who knows, perhaps a slightly-changed Manasseh, which means "forgetfulness" or "he that is forgotten", may eventually make an appearance.
"How was your day, dear?" Mei Ling asked vacantly.
"Fine. And yours?" I answered, barely catching myself before answering truthfully.
Truth was, it had been a terrible day. One of those days where everything is scheduled at the same time. First a lunch meeting at Harvard to vote against offering any courses in ancient languages during the next academic year. Skipped out of that early to hit the 9 AM at Stanford and make the impassioned speech to abolish the historical linguistics department. Then without a break, over to the University of Oxford for their cocktail party, and some preemptive schmoozing to make sure a couple of key grant proposals get rejected. My midnight trip to Cairo was almost a relief.
Cairo's fun, because I get to use one of my favorite tricks. I possess one of the stray animals near the camp and sneak into the good doctor's tent. I jump up on him to wake him up, transfer over to him, scare away the stray and spend an hour reviewing his notes. Usually there's nothing to worry about, but I change a few things just to be sure. No new developments, fortunately.
I did have a few hours respite, then, before things started up in the Far East. I hate meetings in Japan. If I wanted to toe the line and follow arbitrary rules for every little thing I could have stayed in Heaven. "It might be difficult to find funding for even such an honorable project." Makes me sick. And after hours and hours of doing everything just so, they decide they need another meeting next week before they finalize anything.
To make a long story short, the day continued in a similar fashion; but now, I'm back "home" in middle-of-nowhere Oregon, and Mei Ling will have dinner on the table shortly. I'm no glutton, but I do love to eat. Especially when the food is way too spicy the way Mei Ling makes it. After dinner, I surf the net to see if anything needs attention, and add a flourish or two to one of my faux-cuneiform sites. Once Mei Ling is upstairs for the evening, I build up the fire, throw a book on it for old time's sake and sit really close in the easy chair to feel the heat. I transfer some of myself into the fire, and watch the flames as I play within them. As I watch, my mind wanders, and I dream of the way things used to be...
Heaven. Creation. Things were certainly simpler back then, if somewhat dull. OK, really quite dull, as well as mind-numbingly conformist. The only Celestials that seemed to have any real motivation were those charged with making sure none of the rest of us accidentally had an original thought, or did something different. To make a long story short, when Lucifer offered an alternative, I took it.
Those were the days. I wasn't a Demon Prince, but I was right up there. And when humans learned to write, I became Manasseh, Demon of Illiteracy, reporting directly to Gebbeleth. I made sure that writing systems were hugely complex, and continuously changing. I encouraged people to believe that oral traditions were the only ones that were worthwhile or dependable. I even got some do-gooders to travel the land teaching enough literacy to make people feel that they were missing something, but not enough to actually be of any use. I had more Forces, Attunements and Distinctions than you could shake an ass's jawbone at.
This was in the old days, when Shedim were real Shedim: subtle, classy and effective. None of this silly business of corrupting individuals one at a time by overpowering their will. First off, it doesn't do any good unless it's their own free will, and second, changing individuals is almost completely useless in The War. One must change ideas, trends, cultures, beliefs; these are the things that need corrupting. You subtly insinuate yourself into a host, drop a comment or two, vote the other way, destroy a harmful idea while it's still small. A gentle nudge today can make a difference next year, and a whole different world next century. I don't know what's gotten into the new Shedim. Just lazy and short sighted, I suppose. I'm not above destroying an individual that way, but only when their destruction serves a greater purpose, or when it's fun. (Did you ever possess someone, walk them into a fire, and then leave? A cheap shot, but always good for a laugh.)
There was this one time, just a few centuries into my Word, that I found myself in Babel. All I did was destroy the architects' guild, and convince the king that he didn't need no stinking plans; he could just keep building. Having finished there, I went on with my work and thought little more about it. A few years later, right in the middle of a papyrus burning party, out of the red comes Lucifer (THE Lucifer) who grabs me by my Celestial wrist, says, "You've Gotta See This", yanks me out of my host and next thing I know, he and I are looking down on the Tower of Babel, which had really grown since I had last seen it. Suddenly Yves, or one of that crowd, explodes down out of the sky in an obscene show of Heavenly power, says something like "Lest You Become The Equals Of God, We Shall Confound Your Languages". Suddenly they're all speaking different languages, and they're all running off in different directions. Lucifer is laughing so hard he couldn't even speak, and I join him. Yves's action plays a bad chord in the Symphony that could be heard throughout Creation, and he seems to be working for our side! We (the infernal we) would have loved to do something like that, but could never bring ourselves to be so crass about it. Lucifer manages to squeak out a "The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways" before being overcome with mirth again. When he regains his composure, he tells me "Good Work, Manasseh", gives me a high five (or the Celestial equivalent, which is somewhat more complex), and goes elsewhere.
I didn't see that I had much to do with it, but who am I to argue with The Lightbringer?
As it turns out, that was also the beginning of the end for me. There's irony there, if you like that sort of thing.
What I didn't realize for several centuries, was that this made my job much more difficult. Not only were there a thousand more languages ripe for writing, but when trying to communicate with someone who doesn't speak your language, a picture is worth a thousand words.
I was working harder and being more productive than ever, and was feeling quite proud about the whole thing. I didn't notice that I was falling farther and farther behind, and that my Word was suffering. Perhaps if Gebbeleth had been around, he could have warned me, but he was missing by that time.
Disaster stuck around 3000 PL (Post Liberation, around 1000 BC in current reckoning). The Phoenicians developed a simple, powerful phonetic (for lack of a better term) alphabet, and by the time I realized what had happened, it was too wide spread to be completely destroyed. To add insult to injury, Alaemon, my new boss, was just made Prince a few centuries earlier, and had a reputation for being something of a softy. When he saw what I had done, and realized the repercussions, he was going to use me as an example to others, destroy me utterly and cast my forces to the infernal winds.
I tried every low-down dirty trick I could come up with to frame someone else or get another Prince to disagree, but to no avail. Alaemon wanted to make a big show of it, and in the end I decided to die with dignity, primarily because I'd tried everything else already anyway. Alaemon began stripping my forces away, one by one, which is more painful than you can possibly imagine, unless it's happened to you. To make a long story short, Lucifer intervened after a time and declared that he would spare me, for my exemplary service in the past. Alaemon was a little put out, but since he had proved himself no softy, and since I would be taken out of his sight and out of his service, he didn't make a fuss (plus, making a fuss to Lucifer is seldom productive).
Lucifer's only words to me were "Sorry Kid, But It Beats The Final Death."
As it turns out, I was stripped of almost everything. I now served Belial and report to Clobotch, the Demon of Kilns. I was to be Manasseh, Demon of Half Baked Communications. It was not unlike my original Word of Illiteracy, except that it only pertained to languages that were carved (e.g. into clay) and then baked; with an emphasis on disrupting the actual carving or baking process. Belial gave me immunity to heat, which sure helps when you're crawling around inside an active Kiln, and I got to keep a few of my most useful, albeit pedestrian, songs. No one ever mentioned this part, but I have since learned that if I leave most of my forces in my host, I can simultaneously possess a fire with the rest of me. Useful primarily in two cases: when I need to do physical work in the middle of a fire that I also need to control, or when I'm relaxing, watching a fire, and want to make it dance. Also, no one mentioned the cold. I'm always cold. At anything below about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, it's always uncomfortably cold.
I tried to put the unfairness of my demotion behind me, and get on with my work. I became something of a loner, at least as far as other Celestials are concerned, but I held as tightly to my new Word as I did to the old. There were fun times, even as a nobody. A few times I managed to stumble upon a witch burning about to happen. I possess the so-called witch, protect her (or him) from the flames, while making the fire burn as fiercely and completely as possible. The flames drop from extreme to nothing rather suddenly once everything is consumed, and what do the onlookers see? The wood is gone, her bonds are gone, even the stake she was tied to is gone, and she's dressed in nothing but soot. She/I walk away with a disdainful air, leaving the mob crazy with fear. The witch then becomes a Soldier (it's worked that way every time so far) and the mob (and thereby their whole town) is very easily led wherever I need them.
As pen and ink technology flourished, carve-and-bake languages went into a rather serious decline of their own. I figured my Word applied to those languages even when written on paper, so I still had a little to do.
Somewhere around 5000 PL, Clobotch died the real death in Celestial combat. I waited for someone to contact me about my new Superior. I'm still waiting.
During the dark ages, while my Word was pretty much taking care of itself, I stumbled upon a stunningly simple idea. To keep carve-and-bake literacy at the lowest possible level, what I needed to do was invent more. From each carve-and-bake language, I derived a dozen others; each with the same general first-glance flavor, but completely different in all other respects. I made each of them rich and complex, yet sufficiently incomplete that they could never really be used to communicate much of anything. Thus I could not only suppress the original languages but replace each with a plethora of non-languages.
The Archaeology boom in the 19th Century kept me hopping. And to make matters worse, some of the most active, a couple named Emerson, were so strong willed as to be almost impossible to possess or control. I tried to destroy them directly, through use of the old "master criminal" trick, but that fell through. Eventually I destroyed their reputations, to the extent that today they are thought by most to have been fictional.
Nowadays, life has become somewhat routine, if a trifle hectic. I generally spend the day zapping between Universities, and other research institutions, confusing lectures, destroying original sources, and occasionally publishing books and Web sites promoting my false versions of the languages. I have a few "homes" where I like to spend the night. They've all got really big fire places, and a house pet that gets to sleep in front of the fire, and a spouse who makes really spicy food, but otherwise ignores me.
When I hear Mei Ling settle down for the night, I move the fireplace screen out just a bit and inhabit the cat. Once William recovers himself and goes upstairs, I walk into the fireplace and curl up in the hottest part of the fire.
Next morning I'm off to continue my routine, but I can almost hear the scene I left behind.
"William, you left the fireplace screen ajar again."
"Now Fluffy, how many times must we tell you not to sleep in the cold ashes? There might be a hot coal in there and you could get hurt! Bad kitty! You mustn't do that!"