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[inchesofevil]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: The Guindo
AGE: 29
JOURNAL: theguindo
IM / EMAIL: AIM: PianistOfRaielin
PLURK: ninjarobotclone
RETURNING: Returning player, new character

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Duncan Heimdall Jackson
CHARACTER AGE: 26
CANON ORIGIN: Strictly original
CHRONOLOGY: A few days after killing Darius, but before deciding to resurrect Xumurdad.
CLASS: Well-Intentioned Anti-Villain
HOUSING: Randomized housing in Heropa please! All I ask is that wherever he goes, Nova winds up in the same house whenever he apps in. I will give my firstborn for this.

BACKGROUND:

SETTING:

Duncan's end of things is the not-so-distant future of an Earth very similar to our own. The short version is that the US economy collapsed in the twenty-teens due to a combination of the Great Recession and the Citizens United decision, and WalMart basically bought out the government and created an even worse corporate dystopia. That time period became known as "The WalMart Era" and it ended in 2020 with a group of moles taking the corporation down from the inside; the two survivors of that group went on to become the first presidents in the wake of the WalMart Era and proceeded to institute a host of new rules and regulations intended to prevent the same thing from happening again.

So Duncan, born in 2024, grew up in an America that was less imperialist, less exceptionalist, and a lot less corporate dystopian. Tech levels there progressed as you might imagine modern tech would. No flying cars, but computers kept getting smaller and more powerful, the internet is a public utility on the same level as electricity and water, people finally started realizing QWERTY is garbage and Dvorak has become equally popular, etc etc. Nothing too fancy.

Really though, this side of things isn't the interesting stuff. The interesting stuff lies in Legacy of Zenderael, a very popular fantasy MMO that went live in 2043 and of which Duncan has been an avid player for its entire 7-year lifetime. Spoilers: Zenderael is not an MMO world created out of whole cloth, but an actual, extant alternate universe. Hijinks ensue.

Zenderael and Earth's respective universes were on a collision course, fated to merge into a single universe. This is a thing that just happens sometimes, like asteroids hitting planets. And, like asteroids hitting planets, these universal merges frequently result in extinction-event level disasters that cause massive changes to the course of history. You know the K-T event that led to the rise of mammals? Or how every culture in the world has a myth about a great flood? Merges.

Before Zenderael's last merge, it was an Earth where the Ottoman Empire became just as massive and widespread as the British empire in ours, thus leading to the Ottomans claiming and colonizing Australia instead of Britain. Then it merged with a universe that was just lousy with magic, bringing along with it a god called Xumurdad. Xumurdad was unable to stop the merge, but It was able to protect a fragment of the world from the merge's more devastating effects. It chose to insulate the Australian continent from the devastation and sunk the rest of the world. That all happened so long ago that written records from that time period are almost impossible to find. As far as anybody in Zenderael knows, history doesn't go any farther back than Xumurdad, and Its sinking of the world is remembered as "a terrible act of mercy" that happened because humans could not comprehend the reality of the complete world.

Xumurdad was a being of contradictions and opposites - male and female, kind and cruel, benevolently tyrannical. Two-thousand years ago, a group of ten heroes came together to free Zenderael from Xumurdad's oppressive rule. They defeated the god, but found Its claim to immortality held true. Unable to kill It, each of the heroes took and consumed one of the god's organs, gaining a portion of Its power and preventing It from rising again. Xumurdad would remain dormant for as long as It remained unwhole, adding "living and dead" to its list.

Those ten heroes became the first ten guild leaders, demi-gods with the ability to lend others access to Xumurdad's powers. They established the ten guilds: Clerics, Mages, Paladins, Assassins, Berserkers, Spellswords, Alchemists, and Rogues. Yup, they're pretty much MMO class leaders. God-organs add 100 years to a person's lifespan, at which point a successor will eat the god-organ and take over as guild leader and claim the title that comes along with it. Of course, each guild has their own traditions for determining successors. Not that tradition would matter much once the merge rolled around.

One more very important note on Zenderael: its afterlife. Clerics come with the ability to resurrect people, which means diving into the afterlife, finding their soul, and binding it back into their body. The afterlife in this case is a place called the Dark, cold and dark and oppressively quiet, filled with demons that feed on fear and a deity known only as the Denizen who is respected as the god of fear. The Denizen is basically an eldritch abomination and It is very good at what It does.

CHARACTER:

Duncan grew up on a ranch in Texas with five younger sisters and one younger brother, but not even, like, a cool cowboy ranch or anything, it was literally an emu ranch. Did you know they raise emu on ranches? Fun fact!

He completed a Genetics B.S. with a Biology minor at UT Austin and chose to get as far from emu as he could by going to grad school halfway across the country in future-fictional-Portland: Fall City, Oregon. Also because he's a huge nerd and a lot of his MMO friends happened to live there. The eldest of his younger sisters--Melissa Eir Jackson, better known as Missie--followed him out there by taking a job in Fall City with her newly earned nursing degree. Supposedly it was because Mama Jackson asked her to keep an eye on Duncan, but really it was because being separated from your closest sibling for the first time in your life is really lonely.

Duncan played three alts in Legacy of Zenderael: Marlene, a spellsword; Ravindra, a paladin; and Artemis, an alchemist. He convinced Missie to start playing the game soon after her arrival in Fall City by having her pick up Ravindra's younger sister.

Around this time--2050, the start of spring semester at Fall City University--strange events began surrounding the game and its developers, X-DAV. A local politician who'd been very vocal about trying to get the game banned had his wife go missing only for her to be found gruesomely murdered a week later. People would log in to find their alts suddenly deleted and the data unrecoverable, or find themselves logged in at very different locations than they'd logged out. A couple of paladin alts showed up in the game having been graphically murdered with evidence pointing to berserkers, and later a berserker alt was killed by paladin NPCs without having drawn their aggro by gameplay means. Some people began to notice strange, unnamed NPCs in grey cloaks following them around in-game.

When the politician whose wife had been murdered resigned from his position, student protests broke out against his replacement, leading to increased violence in the city and eventually rioting. An X-DAV sponsored event was interrupted by a blackout and accompanying riot, and Duncan LIKE AN IDIOT tried to stop someone from sneaking away from the safety of the event by SNEAKING OUT WITH HER. They ran into a gang of looters and had the dubious privilege of being rescued by a single X-DAV security guard with inhuman strength who took out five men by himself, which was Duncan's introduction to the fact that X-DAV and their game might not be quite what they seemed.

A couple weeks later, another riot interrupted a wifi cafe meet being held in the honour of one of Duncan's league-mates, Rachel, who was visiting from out of town. One of Duncan's friends tried to escort her to safety only to have her mysteriously vanish on him and then find himself stumbling across an answer that only raised more questions: the Ahura, guild leader of the berserkers, bleeding to death in an alley. He seemed to have some idea of what was happening, but no time to explain any of it; he ripped out his stomach and shoved it at Duncan's friend.

Well, anybody who'd played the game knows the lore. The Ahura's god-organ was Xumurdad's stomach, and he knew exactly what to do with it.

The next day, the violence in the city took a sharp decline and a plethora of new plant and insect species began appearing in and around Fall City. Local scientists, including the university labs Duncan was doing his grad work for, started falling all over themselves to study and classify them. As time went on, bigger and badder things started appearing, namely monsters from Zenderael, and monster attacks in the city became a regular occurrence.

Meanwhile, in Zenderael, with the growing hostilities between the berserkers and paladins, the berserkers blamed the paladins for the Ahura's sudden disappearance. They laid siege to Bastan--faux-fantasy Vatican City and headquarters of the paladins and clerics. Unbeknownst to most, those mysterious folks in the grey cloaks, who'd come to be known simply as "Greycloaks", were responsible for both of the paladin murders and the Ahura's disappearance, and this conflict between the guilds was their intended result.

Duncan was stuck in midterms hell around this time and oblivious to most of what was going on, aside from occasionally logging onto his spellsword and finding her in weird places. Then his friends started talking to him about scenes they'd done with her that he didn't remember and couldn't have been logged in for...

The next time Duncan logged on, he found a notebook in her inventory with a message in it for him: "Who are you?" He answered and logged off, logging back in a few minutes later to see her reply, and spent the rest of the evening nervously pacing his dorm room waiting for her replies to his attempts to explain to his now-self-aware RP character why he'd made her. Talk about a fuckin' guilt trip, man. Ultimately, though, Marlene understood that she'd been created to make an interesting character in a story, to be someone whose head Duncan wanted to spend time in, and once she laid out some ground rules with him (like, never log in to control me ever again you asshole), they got along just fine.

Not all characters took their awakenings quite as well as Marlene did. Duncan, unfortunately, ended up accidentally earning the ire of several self-aware alts, but the most notable one was Nova, his alchemist's best friend. Nova awoke and discovered that, not only were his friends being puppeted by mysterious faceless entities, but his entire backstory was bullshit and his memories were a muddled contradictory mess. He decided that he had to know whether or not Artemis was being controlled by a player, and tricked Duncan into revealing himself.

Being the first player Nova managed to speak to directly, Duncan became the face of players for him, the target for all of his anger and bitterness for everything every player had ever done to wrong an alt. Part of Artemis's backstory involved trying to find an alchemy-based way to resurrect a dead fiancee, and Nova decided that if Duncan wanted to see how it felt to have a dead loved one, then Nova might as well show him what it was like for real.

Duncan, being a MOTHERFUCKING GENIUS, decided to handle Nova's threats by being condescending and trying to intimidate him out of trying anything. This worked out about as well as you can imagine, especially once Nova realized that another of his friends was being played by Duncan's sister, giving him the perfect target to make good on his threat.

In the meantime, more crazy merge stuff was going on, including a lich-dragon raid boss crashing a public event and the paladin guild leader showing up dead in the same building at the feet of a takeout delivery boy. The new paladin and berserker guild leaders disappeared into Zenderael that night, immediately calling for a stop to the berserkers' siege of Bastan and trying to make peace between the two guilds. The next day, the entire southeast section of Bastan showed up in the southeast section of Fall City. An official state of emergency was declared, but the federal government and local government couldn't come to a consensus on whose problem it was to handle and they just slapped a military cordon around the city and closed down all the schools and called it a day.

Also, Marlene showed up in Duncan's dorm room. Did you know it is super exciting to meet your RP character in real life??? And it is even more exciting to be able to show her all kinds of cool Earth stuff like motorcycles and Starbucks???! And to go out monster hunting with her and have her elemental-enchant your rifle bullets for you and - actually that one is terrifying, not exciting, never mind.

In less cool news, not only were alts appearing outside of the game, but people were also showing up inside the game. Rachel, for example, was discovered to be living as a cleric in Bastan after her mysterious disappearance, and when Duncan's best friend's six year old son also mysteriously vanished, he too was found inside Zenderael. Said friend stormed into X-DAV's headquarters demanding answers, and she and Duncan managed to get a list of numbers from an X-DAV executive that turned out to be years.

Duncan investigated the list, but with the school closed he no longer had access to the academic journals through the library system and google was not quite thorough enough for him to figure out what it was supposed to mean. So, I mean, obviously he broke into the library with his librarian girlfriend to find the information and got arrested. But he also got his info, along with bail posted by the X-DAV exec who'd given him the list, and managed to put together the fact that those dates were the dates of previous merges Earth had experienced, and they were all huge disasters. His girlfriend asked her alt, also a librarian, to see if she could find any evidence in Zenderael's World Library. She eventually came back with a journal written in ancient Persian, detailing places and animals that existed in Earth but not Zenderael, leading to the conclusion that Zenderael also had experienced other merges in its past.

After another two merge-events which put chunks of Bastan in Fall City, along with several other cities across the world winding up in Zenderael wholesale, the federal government shut down X-DAV, took their executives into custody, and confiscated their servers. The game shut down and all the remaining alts who hadn't yet woken up became self-aware. The US government held a press release to make public the information they'd gained from X-DAV: that the worlds were merging and this was a natural disaster that could not be stopped, they'd only been trying to mitigate the damage by introducing the two worlds in a more controlled way. They also sent the X-DAV execs to the UN as a show of good will (when all of Paris and Giza go missing and show up in a video game, it's kind of a Big Deal in the worldwide community). But hey, remember those weird Greycloak NPCs? They had operatives on Earth who murdered the shit out of the X-DAV execs before they got a chance to get questioned by the UN. They also wound up being the ones behind killing guild leaders and putting them on Earth in positions for Earth-natives to take their god-organs, because as it turns out, an Earther taking a god-organ is the way to force a merge event to happen smoothly as opposed to destructively.

At this point, the merge had been in progress long enough for summer session to start, and Duncan started taking swordsmanship and archery classes to prepare for eventually living in Zenderael. He was so excited to get to be a spellsword, you guys. So excited.

But alas, it was not to be. A plague-bearing necroticorn showed up in Fall City, spreading an epidemic of various magical illnesses through the population. And Duncan, a very promising swordfighter but a very bad sparring partner, managed to catch a blood-borne illness from a classmate who was not very happy about getting injured during class. Known as the Red Death in Zenderael and named panorrhagia by Earth scientists, it's a disease that causes bleeding of the mucus membranes/internal organs/etc that just keeps getting worse and worse until you eventually die. Incurable, except by a cleric with the ability to cure diseases, and they were all tapped out trying to handle the epidemic. It was a death sentence. He was going to die before he ever got to become a spellsword.

Around this time, Nova finally wound up in Fall City. And, as you might imagine, he made good on his threat: he found Missie and killed her. He then called Duncan to let him know she was dead, and called him out for a fight.

Welp. YOLO. He swordfought the shit out of Nova and then put a bullet through his brain.

Of course, his sister was still dead. Enter a mage named Irena, the frIEND WHOSE APARTMENT NOVA DID ALL THIS IN. DID YOU REALLY MURDER A GIRL AND CHALLENGE HER BROTHER TO A DEATHMATCH IN UR FRIEND'S LIVING ROOM NOVA, REALLY???

Somehow Duncan managed to talk Irena into not burning him into ashes where he stood and instead running out to find a cleric who could resurrect his sister. And Nova too, I guess. By impressive coincidence, the cleric that Irena returned with happened to be not just any cleric, but the cleric: the Vahishta, the guild leader.

This was fortuitous on two levels: Duncan had been unable to find a single cleric in the city with the mana available to heal him, and resurrection was the signature ability of the Vahishta. The first problem was solved by the Vahishta making Duncan a cleric and teaching him how to cure diseases and having him heal himself.

Unfortunately, the second problem he refused to address. He would not resurrect Missie, and instead told Duncan about how Xumurdad's heart had made him eternally unaging but not immortal and gave him a speech about not knowing Xumurdad's will which was just enough to make Duncan think that maybe?? the Vahishta?? was ASKING to be murdered and cannibalized????

There was so much room for doubt you could fit a raid boss through it, but Duncan was just desperate enough to convince himself. He grabbed a knife and carved the Vahishta's heart out of his chest and ate it over Irena's sink.

Xumurdad's heart came with an instinctive, intuitive understanding of resurrection. Duncan dove into the Dark after his sister without hesitation. He found himself surrounded by a darkness so deep it couldn't possibly be the simple absence of light. The Dark was a cold black void, and all he had to guide him was the link between his sister's body and soul.

In the process of trying to find Missie, he stumbled across the Denizen. Their meeting is an experience Duncan would never forget. No matter how badly he wishes he could.

After escaping the Denizen, Duncan found Missie's soul and pulled her back into her body, bringing them both out of the Dark and into the world of the living. Unfortunately, she came back blind. His guild would later tell him that it wasn't his fault, that people just lost things in the Dark sometimes and no one knows why, but he never stopped blaming himself for it.

He also knew one thing for certain: he absolutely could not allow Xumurdad's church the option of reinstating their old Vahishta. He was not going to end up stuck in the Dark with the Denizen for all eternity. Never.

He held Nova's resurrection over Irena to coerce her into burning the old Vahishta's body; you can't resurrect ashes. After that, he forced her to help him drag Nova's body to the place that Xumurdad's Earthbound clerics were using as their base of operations, and resurrected Nova in front of the auxiliary bishop in charge to prove that he was now the Vahishta. After putting the fear of god into Nova--specifically the Denizen--he was able to rest assured that Nova was not going to try to fuck with him or his ever again.

There was still the matter of the citywide epidemic, though, and as the demi-god of clerics, Duncan now had the ability to do something about it. He spent the night going through the hospitals and curing as many of the more serious illnesses as he could. The next morning, all of Bastan had merged with all of Fall City, and both were now in Bastan's proper place in Zenderael, and the Zenderael continent itself was now out in the middle of Earth's pacific ocean. With Bastan's church and all of its clerics now at his disposal, it was easy enough to mop up the rest of the epidemic.

However, Duncan's encounter with the Denizen had left him badly traumatized. So badly that he came to the conclusion that no one ever deserves to stay dead, and he undid millennia of tradition by completely changing the church's policy on resurrections. Instead of turning away anyone who couldn't pay the steep price tag for the components necessary to perform a resurrection, Duncan accepted all requests. The Vahishta didn't need those expensive components; they were only necessary for normal clerics who could not understand resurrection as instinctively as he did. He could perform resurrections at no cost and he did, subjecting himself to the Dark again and again, as many times as necessary to rescue others from it.

Remember Rachel, the girl who disappeared and ended up in Bastan? She'd been killed by rogues somewhere between here and then, and Darius, their old league-leader, found her body and brought her to Duncan for a resurrection. She came back without her sense of touch, which was greatly upsetting for her, and Darius blamed himself just as Duncan blamed himself for Missie's blindness. Darius mercy-killed her, sending her to the Dark for a second time.

And Duncan FLIPPED. OUT. He resurrected her immediately, found out Darius had done it, and confronted him. Duncan told him what the Dark was like, what he'd sent Rachel back to, and Darius begged Duncan to let him make up for it somehow. And so Duncan convinced Darius to let Duncan kill and resurrect him, because if he wanted to help then he needed to know what he was fighting, and Darius agreed.

Cue Duncan's slow descent into villainy. He murdered Darius and resurrected him, and then he dug up Xumurdad's body from where the church had been secretly keeping it and fed Darius Xumurdad's skin. He had reason to believe it carried power over death, and he was correct--Darius became the guild leader of the necromancers.

Duncan had begun to realize that resurrection was not a solution to the problem of keeping people out of the Dark. It was a stopgap at best, you couldn't resurrect someone indefinitely and they would inevitably come back missing too many things if you tried. The necromancers would serve as a temporary solution while he figured out a way to permanently end death.

Resurrecting Xumurdad was the solution. The Dark hadn't existed before Its defeat, and logically would cease to exist after Its resurrection. The Greycloaks had been made up of clerics and assassins, and Duncan inherited the cleric branch from the old Vahishta; he used them to murder his friends, his fellow Earth-native guild leaders, to steal back their god-organs. He was planning to resurrect them all afterward, of course! But long story short, this did not work out for him and they stopped him by sending him back to the Dark permanently.

PERSONALITY:

Alright so picture a high-strung angry chihuahua. One that's still friendly and likes being around people, but which will take offense at the tiniest perceived slight and bark and growl until it wears itself out and finally just goes along with whatever while half-heartedly growling the whole way.

Bam. Duncan.

Don't let that give you the wrong impression, though. He's actually very sociable and easy to have a conversation with (partly because he can carry one all by himself). He likes people and he likes being around people but he's perfectly content to enjoy the company of others in silence or to just quietly sit amongst a group of loud friends and feel included. Even so, he can only take socializing in reasonably sized doses; the longer he's out, the more actively he's expected to contribute, the more people involved - the faster his social energy drains, and when it's running low he gets headaches and turns irritable and will start looking for the quickest way to politely excuse himself.

None of that is to say he's any good at socializing, though. He is in fact incredibly awkward and extremely good at sticking his foot in his mouth, because that little voice that most people have that tells them 'hey you probably shouldn't say that thing that just popped into your head' likes to sleep on duty. However, he is perfectly aware of his own awkwardness and is not self-conscious about it, and has learned to defuse it by pressing on without giving it a chance to settle in. Which, surprisingly, makes it very easy to strike up conversations with perfect strangers! Despite being an introvert, he's also Southern--not saying hello and striking up conversations with perfect strangers is super rude, what are you, Californian??

If you get to know him, though, you will quickly discover that his baseline is a tightly wound spring. The term 'high-strung' was invented to describe Duncan. He's constantly full of nervous energy looking for any outlet it can find, and ready to snap at the slightest provocation. That hair-trigger gets worse the more stressed he is, but since Duncan is a workaholic who frequently takes on more than he can comfortably handle, he's pretty much always some degree of stressed. Even if he doesn't have anything to do, he'll stress himself out about having nothing to do. Honestly there's no winning with this boy.

When he does explode, he'll rant until his anger is exhausted and eventually relent to either apologize or go sulk and nurse a grudge. Because his fuse is unpredictably short and the most inconsequential things can get him ranting for hours, it can be difficult for others to separate his serious anger from his minor frustration. This has led to friends either getting upset over harmless frustration or pushing jokes too far because they didn't realize when his outbursts crossed the line into genuine offense. Life's rough when you seem to get equally angry over spilled coffee and spending a night in jail.

All that is how he acts. As for the personality guiding those actions, the most important thing about Duncan is that he is a scientist through and through. He wants to know things. He asks questions and seeks out answers; he's the kind of person who'll get asked something as a joke and then spend four hours on google finding a legitimate answer just because he's curious. This also gives rise to a pragmatic streak a mile wide and he's much more concerned with logic and logistics than ethics. He recognizes how readily he's willing to shove ethics aside for concerns of practicality and finds it worrying--because what does that say about him as a person?--but not enough to try to change it. Just enough to feel bad about it and to know he shouldn't be too open about it with other people.

That doesn't mean he doesn't have any morals, though. He's a very loyal friend who is constantly going out of his way to help others. This stems from the fact that he does not actually like himself very much, which makes it easy to put the needs of others above his own, and also gives him an appreciation for the people who do like him that makes him want to make sure they stick around. Also a huge chunk of it is because he has six younger siblings so he's just used to taking care of people and looking out for them; he very easily falls into a big-brother role with people.

He might be logical and pragmatic to a fault but he is also not the least bit level-headed. He acts rashly out of fear or anger and subconsciously holds self-preservation as his top priority. He is that specific breed of pessimist known as a complainer, not happy unless he's miserable about something. In a crisis situation, he can be extremely useful if he has a clear course of action readily available to distract himself from being a panicky mess of nerves; otherwise he's that completely useless "we're all going to die" asshole in the group. Either way he still tends to be pretty defeatist about things, but at least having a plan makes him feel like there's a chance.

There is an exception to the panicky-mess-in-a-crisis Duncan and it stems from his stubborn loyalty. If you put his friends or family in danger, all his panic gets redirected into protectiveness and he will turn calm, collected, and ruthless as fuck. Just ask Nova, he learned that one the hard way.

On some deeply buried subconscious level, his quest to end death stems from selfish cowardice and self-loathing. He never wants to end up in the Dark permanently, and he's not worthy of being an exception, so nobody should end up in the Dark permanently. He also does not care enough about himself to try to be a good person, so even though he knows that the things he's doing are awful, and the fact that he is able to go through with them disturbs him, he also feels like he can't stop because what he's doing is necessary and he does not deserve to be a hero.

One last thing: his encounter with the Denizen legitimately fucked him up and gave him a serious case of PTSD. He keeps trying to pretend it didn't affect him as badly as it did, but the signs are there and they are not well hidden. He has nightmares, he sleeps with the lights on, he's extra jumpy in dark or dim places, he can't stand any degree of cold to the point of being physically incapable of ever feeling too warm, overpowering smells - especially spoiled milk and mold - will give him panic attacks, and so will anything that sounds like carnage (good-bye his stomach for graphic horror movies). Less obvious effects include his sense of fear being, just, completely jacked up; he has a very cavalier attitude about risk because it is difficult to find mundane things scary after you meet an eldritch abomination that radiates fear like bodies radiate heat.

POWER: Okay so first off he is losing the ability to make other people into clerics. Also all of his powers stem from having the Heart of Xumurdad, ie his heart is LITERALLY Xumurdad's heart, so if he ever lost it he would be back to being a normal dude. (Not that I plan on ever having him get his heart ripped out but, you know. It bears mention.)

Otherwise, as long as he's got Xumurdad's heart, he's got the following abilities:

Healing Factor: As a cleric, his main ability was healing magic. That's gone. Instead of being able to actively heal others, he passively heals himself. Minor injuries will heal naturally in a matter of minutes, major injuries in a matter of hours. He can reattach limbs (but not regrow them), regrow organs (except for his heart, since his powers are gone without it), metabolizes toxic substances and fights off infections extremely fast, and doesn't age. He's functionally immortal unless you manage to decapitate him or completely tear out his heart.

The downside of his healing factor is that it still runs off of his mana, so he can theoretically run out and stop self-healing. The good news is he's basically a demi-god so he has quite a lot of mana to work with, and it is naturally restored by all the same things that restore normal human energy levels (ie rest and sustenance). He can't slow down his base healing rate, but he can spend mana to speed it up; that's exponentially more draining than letting it happen at its base rate, though.

Offensive Holy Magic: His healing and support spells are gone, but he can still throw attack magic around. It's basically just kinetic force with a holy element to it, no matter what form he's giving it. He can also enchant items with holy magic, but all that does is: enable them to hit incorporeal entities, deflect or resist incorporeal/magical attacks, or affect any creatures that are affected by holy items. Without the necessary components from Zenderael he can't do any perma-enchantments, so a holy enchant will only last a day or two max.

Keeper of The Dark:
Every piece of Xumurdad's body carries a fragment of Its essence, which is the source of both the god-organs' powers and of the Denizen, which is built out of those fragments. The Denizen is Xumurdad's soul, and the Dark exists to house It. When Duncan came through the Porter, the fragment of Xumurdad's essence in his heart gave rise to a new version of the Denizen and a new copy of the Dark to go along with It. Since this is just one god-organ versus the ten + dormant body over in Zenderael, this copy of the Dark is much smaller and more limited in scope, and this version of the Denizen much weaker--which is the only reason Duncan is able to have any measure of control over It at all.

The Dark that Duncan has access to is a pocket dimension unique to MoM's universe and contained wholly within it. The demons populating it came into being along with it, born out of the fears of the people here, and the Denizen ruling it is not the Denizen, but a Denizen, though they are equivalent for our purposes. Essentially, this Dark is a self-contained hammerspace full of unknowable horrors which might also suck in souls of the dying occasionally.

But what sorts of things can he pull out of it? I'm glad you asked, that's the fun part:

- SOULS: By way of good ol' familiar resurrection. Since the Dark here is localized to Duncan, this possibility is limited to those who die in his nearby vicinity. Anybody dying within that radius of influence might have their soul snatched up by his Dark (ie if the player OOCly wants it to happen), and if so then he will be able to resurrect them. He can't pull out any souls unless he has physical access to the body they're linked to, though, so resurrection is the only way he can pull souls out of the Dark. [Note: 1 hour resurrection window]

- DARKNESS: That's with a capital D. The Dark is not simply dark. It's not the absence of light, it's anti-light. It chases away light and radiates cold. Basically Duncan can turn a room pitch black and frigid for however long a duration he's willing to channel that through himself. (Hint: not very)

- DEMONS: demons are sightless, intelligent, malicious, and distressingly alien creatures that feed on fear, rarely any bigger in size than a large dog, and about as dangerous as any other wild predator. Duncan will be able to pull them out of the Dark and shove them back in, but will have zero control over them otherwise. That makes this ability unpredictable and dangerous and not something he is ever going to want to use if he can help it. [Note: limited to 10 demons]

- THE DENIZEN: If he ever does pull the Denizen out of the Dark, he's going to find himself having a hard time shoving It back in. Plus that thing promised to eat his heart some day?? So he's not particularly keen on ever meeting It again! The truth is that I only want him to have the ability to summon the Denizen on paper because of how deeply terrifying the mere possibility will be for him. If I ever did decide to cash it in, it would be as a player plot w/express mod approval beforehand. Otherwise, just knowing he could if he wanted to is all I really want.

Resurrection is the only one he could do before coming here, everything else is new. Resurrection he is willing to do indiscriminately but everything else would be extremely limited in use by the fact that IT'S ALL COMPLETELY FUCKING TERRIFYING AND HE NEVER WANTS TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE DARK EVER. I'm just here for the psychological trauma of giving him powers he hates and fears too much to utilize, you know how it is.