Well, I will assume this is where to put this..., A canon character application.

[AmberPalette]

Character Name: Xelloss Metallium.
Nicknames: I can only imagine the number of disparaging and vengeful titles flung upon Xelloss over his millennium of wicked deeds, lol. Few are actually known, although Filia Ul Copt does call him “namagomi” (raw garbage), if that counts.

Race: mazoku (“demon”/”monster”/”evil race”), high-level (as of the end of TRY, only Shabranigdo and his remaining three mazoku lord “children,” Dynast Grausherra, Lady Deep Sea Dolphin, and Greater Beast Zelas Metallium are more powerful than Xelloss).

Gender: Chooses to take male form.

Age: At least 1,012 years, but he resembles a man in his early 20’s to the outward eye.

Appearance: Xelloss is described in the Hajime Kanzaka novels as pleasantly nondescript, a deliberate choice of appearance on the purely astral being’s part to create a false sense of security in his allies and victims. However other accounts of him convey him as extremely attractive, almost dangerously so (as, again, it fools his prey). Either way, he is not ugly. He’s of moderate height and build, more a “sleek” and “slender” male than a muscle-bound one, though that too is a deceptive appearance. He wears a cream turtle-neck tunic with many gathered bags around the waist, a brown satchel bag, loose black pants that plume a bit at the ankles, brown boots whose height varies based on manga, anime, and OVA’s, gloves of an off-white or lavender color, and a long billowing black cloak with an Inverness front and a Greek meander pattern that is usually yellow and red colored (but sometimes green and red, as in scenes of TRY). He carries a gnarled wooden staff with a large glowing red orb at its tip, an object seemingly used to concentrate his considerable demonic magical powers. He has a young, almost childlike, handsome face, with a fair olive skin complexion and completely symmetrical features. His most distinguishing features are his hair and eyes. His hair is cut just below the chin, severely straight, with pageboy bangs that reach just below his eyebrows. It is alternately a deep purple or a black, based on whether you are consulting the anime or manga, and in either case extremely glossy and shiny. His eyes, large but usually closed or craftily narrowed, are long-lashed, amethyst in color, with pupils slit like a cat’s or snake’s eyes. On one or two occasions in the anime, Xelloss’s eyes have turned completely red, without pupils at all, but it is for a brief frame of the animation, and then it is gone. Their appearance is the single element of his looks that betray that he is a mazoku and not a human.

Personality: Ah, what a delight to try and answer THIS question, lol. Xelloss is absurdly polite all the time, even when he is in the middle of killing someone. Xelloss is all cerebrum, no heart: That is, his actions are dictated by thoughts, not feelings. Xelloss is the quintessential survivalist. He is ruthlessly pragmatic and even quite selfish in his day to day handlings, adopting the path of least resistance and greatest efficiency whenever he can. He sticks his neck out for virtually no one. He commits fairly heinous crimes, but only on direct orders from the Greater Beast, not out of a self-derived sadism. In fact, if he can avoid being conspicuous or making new enemies, he will. Indeed, sociopath is a better word for Xelloss than sadist. His vast intelligence and insatiable curiosity are perhaps the most endearing traits of his personality, leading him to be quite a loquacious talker (though don’t expect half of what he says to be anything more substantial than circuitous half-truths), and a spontaneous student and teacher of all things novel. He has an active (sometimes unkind, or, contrariwise, harmlessly goofy) sense of humor, a gleeful smugness about anyone who challenges him and expects to live to tell the tale, and is therefore quite arrogant (a trait of over-confidence which has gotten him injured by characters who are actually weaker than he), even though the egotism is not topically evident. The problem, though, with getting a really solid grasp of Xelloss’s personality, is the manner in which he was created necessarily gives him a split, or dual, personality. The Greater Beast invented only Xelloss to carry out the duties of TWO underlings: priest AND general. Therefore the easygoing, cordial, if eccentric side of Xelloss is just as legitimate a part of him as the cold, menacing, bloodthirsty side. And the switch from one side of his personality to the other is always shockingly abrupt. Indeed, Xelloss seems to at some level realize his own self-contradiction, and be intensely proud of it, delighting in paradoxes and in subverting people’s more rigid ideas of “moral” codes and “goodness” vs. “evil.” His title of trickster priest is well earned.

Skills: Well, we know Xelloss couldn’t cook to save his life, LOL (see a certain episode of NEXT involving Artemay Tower and a revolting vat of Mandragora Soup). I want to elaborate here but with a canon character one can only report canon observations. So I will say he is capable of doing any menial task in the Slayers world that allows him to fit in with humans. After all, Lina and company couldn’t tell he wasn’t a human until his own confession to Lina. He can even eat and drink human food even though his body is essentially spiritual and gets nourishment only from the negative feelings of humans.

Spells and Powers: Xelloss can presumably perform any black or shamanistic magical spell. However Hajime Kanzaka has noted that mazoku prefer to draw on their own black magical powers, rather than deplete energy from their mazoku lord superiors or from Lord Ruby Eyes himself (for instance, a Dynast Brass, a Gaav Flare, a Dolph Strash, or a Zelas Gort, or Lina’s Dragon Slave which calls on Shabranigdo himself). Xelloss is probably drawing on the considerable powers bestowed to him at “birth” by the Greater Beast Zelas Metallium when he executes spells of incredible potency with shockingly minimal effort—such as raising and waving a single index finger and causing a cataclysmic explosion during the Koma War which killed innumerable Golden Dragons (manga and NEXT anime). His attack spells are therefore not identifiable as they are each original and idiosyncratic to him. However he can also Teleport without limitation. He can also perform any level of black magic, such as the Blast Bomb (novels and NEXT anime) and the Demon Wind (manga). He can perform whatever magical process is needed to drain negative energies from humans and thus eat. He can perform his attacks from the astral side, jumping dimensional walls speedily and skillfully. He does not need to breathe or eat human food. He is able to produce an elaborately convincing human bodily shell/illusion, complete with inner organs and blood (though the blood is black). In rpg I give Xelloss some other powers and attack strategies, but as we are keeping strictly to canon unless otherwise approved, I will not list them here.

Weapons & Equipment: The only visible weapon Xelloss carries is his red-tipped staff. It serves as a manual weapon, much like a martial arts bo, or as a site at which he concentrates the energies of a powerful black magical spell he is about to release (such as his casting of the Blast Bomb in NEXT). However, most of the time Xelloss’s weapons come from his own body, when he shifts to his true form—a black vortex or inverted cone, which can, on the astral side, split into infinite and extremely damaging spikes which are hurled at the target. Xelloss’s attack strategy, voiced to Valgaav in TRY, is a sort of guerrilla warfare opportunism: to “inflict small wounds over a long period of time,” conversely to throwing a big and cumbersome spell at someone and never being able to actually reach the target (“it doesn’t matter WHAT you throw at me if you can’t HIT me!”).

Weaknesses: White and holy magic, too long a period depleted of the negative energies off of which all mazoku MUST feed, or an excess of positive energies delivered over a concentrated period (such as Amelia’s, Gourry’s, and Zelgadiss’s amusing assault on Xelloss near the finale of TRY). Aside these weaknesses, Xelloss is virtually indestructible, unless you want to count his single foolishness: getting a little too over-confident and careless with his enemies.

History: This is elaborate but I will try to make it short as we all are fairly aware. Kanzaka has based his mazoku history and social stratifications on a 17th century book on demonology which actually exists, called the Ars Goetia. Over 1,000 years ago, during the Koma War (aka War of the Monsters’ Fall), immobility was enforced on Shabranigdo’s five mazoku lord “children”— Hellmaster Fibrizo, Chaos Dragon Gaav, Greater Beast Zelas Metallium, Dynast Grausherra, and Deep Sea Dolphin—in order to seal off barriers of the magic of the Red Orb/World within one small peninsula of land. Without going into the Koma War in scary detail, lol, I will just discuss how Xelloss came to play in it. While the other four lords created two disciples of their own to do their wartime bidding in the human realm—a priest and a general—Zelas Metallium invested her powers in only ONE “child,” Xelloss, who became both her priest and general. It is not specified how Xelloss was “born,” (again I have theories but will keep non-canon stuff to myself), though Kazaka has implied that he was created fully grown as he appears to us today. His immediate mission was to carry out efficient and vicious military campaigns on Zelas’s behalf—such as his infamous ryuzoku genocide—and also to destroy every single extant full copy of the Claire Bible. This last mission he is still trying to carry out over a thousand years later, when he bumps into Lina and her gang in the novels and NEXT continuity. At that point in time, though Lina and gang don’t find out till much later, Xelloss has been loaned by Zelas to Fibrizo, who uses him to follow Lina around and eventually persuade her, via a confrontation with the renegade mazoku lord Gaav and with Fibrizo himself, to use the Giga Slave to return the world to its original chaotic form (allegedly the goal of L-Sama, the Lord of Nightmares and supreme creator herself). However, before Xelloss can completely fulfill his mission, Gaav grievously wounds him and he returns to the astral side to recuperate till the very end of NEXT. After Lina’s casting of an out of control Giga Slave, possession by L-Sama, and Gourry’s rescuing of her, Xelloss reappears having somehow bartered with L-Sama herself to get back Gourry’s Gorun Nova (ONCE AGAIN I HAVE THEORIES lol but won’t voice them). He then disappears. During the TRY continuity, Xelloss is back again to play double agent for the monster race, once again Zelas’s chief servant. He is to prevent the various pawns in the Darkstar Campaign from bringing the Overworld maoh Darkstar to Lina and co’s world, as well as to bring the megalomaniac ancient dragon/monster hybrid Valgaav to the monster race’s side or exterminate him, because essentially the monster race wants to destroy its OWN world. He tries to steal the final of several weapons needed to open the gateway to let Darkstar into the world of the Slayers universe, hoping to prevent the Overworld gods Almayce, Sirius, and Erologos from achieving the task of letting Darkstar loose in the dimension in which Slayers takes place. Xelloss is deeply disturbed by Valgaav’s pontifications that gods and demons fight for no logical reason and that the entire slate of creation should be wiped clean—he even terms Valgaav’s words “madness,” a slightly revealing knee-jerk response from someone who is supposed to want ONLY such madness and senseless destruction of all things. For many reasons, some inexplicable (that’ why Xelloss is so fascinating, lol), Xelloss ends up helping Lina instrumentally to defeat Darkstar. He does this by fusing the black magic of Shabranigdo with Filia’s holy magic of Ceiphied. The two of them send their opposite but harmonizing energies into Lina’s Darkstar weapon, which sends an inconceivably powerful attack at Darkstar (who is equal in power to Shabranigdo WITHOUT his being split into several shards), and kills him. After this battle, Xelloss bids his allies farewell and returns to report his antics to Zelas.

Other Notes: I do have pairing preferences but will not impose them on anyone else (and will not mention them unless asked). We will approach pairings, if they are even important to a given rpg plot, on a case by case basis, involving the needs of all the players. However, in the case of indifference, I will request that my pairing preferences be noted. In any other case, I will respect the preferences of ALL players involved.

[Shadow_otm]

Sorry for my long delay! D=

Accepted!

[AmberPalette]

HUZZAH! Thanks!!!! <3

I hope you are feeling better?

[Shadow_otm]

For the most part... still have a cough I'm trying to shake though.

[AmberPalette]

Hope it goes away fast! <3