Ra's al-Ghul

Ra's al-Ghul (Scenesys ID: 299)
Quote
"A system, in order to survive, must periodically alter its equilibrium in order to reach a higher adaptability. This is the purpose of all human endeavor."
Profile
Full Name:	The Demon's Head
Gender:	Male
Species:	Human
Theme:	DC (VFC)
Occupation:	The Shears of Time
Citizenship:	Saudi Arabia
Residence:	Himalayan Mountains
Education:	Timeless Student of Mankind
Status:	Dropped
Groups:	Batman Family, Hench, Gotham-OOC
Other Information
Apparent Age:	{{{PAge}}}	Actual Age:	767
Date of Birth	12 January 1260	Actor:	Oded Fehr
Height:	195 cm	Weight:	81 kg
Hair Color:	Black	Eye Color:	Brown
Theme Song:	"Shepherd of Fire" by Avenged Sevenfold

Profile

Born out of tragedy, surviving bloodshed, and becoming more than a man, Ra's al-Ghul was once a Chinese doctor in Rafha, in modern day Saudi Arabia. His study of the mystical and the material led him to discover the Lazarus Pit, a powerful alchemist's boon meant to help humans reach their peak potential. Although the origins of these strange spectral magicks have eluded him over the course of his centuries upon this planet, their meaning to him is simple; there are signs, patterns, within human existence, that can be studied and duplicated, to bring a higher order to human affairs. And within this higher order, Ra's al-Ghul finds himself to be a champion of it, sacrificing the lives of many for the betterment of larger systems, seeing himself as the same humble doctor he found himself as at the beginning of his strange, fated journey. A fire blooming a new forest, a chance mutation from a dying species, or an entire set of species destroyed for the evolution of a new form of life, these are the things he sees in nature. And he finds himself now an agent of nature, wielding his immensely intelligent mind to aid this nature as a newly evolved life form, a demon sought in the terrors of priests, and the rising tide forcing humanity towards a new form of sapience. For a docile man is livestock, and a hungry man is a predator, but a man without a soul? He is a sculptor.

Sheet

Description

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A man of Chinese-Mongol descent, his head held high and haught, with black hair swept backwards and carved with white through the sideburns, a pair of whiskers carefully cultivated on either side of a pair of noble lips sitting above a black pointed goatee, this is the legendary figure, Ra's al-Ghul. His face is a dour one, if one is lucky, pleasured in the sight of something he wants or savagely happy in the heat of combat, with maddening hatred at the sign of final victory. The desert is on this one's face, the sand swept yehindis of Rafha that he maneuvered as a child having carved its peace through his clay colored flesh. He's tall, very tall, six foot five, a Mongol warrior blended with the narrow confines of a Chinese Shaolin monk, his body tightly wound with slim, muscled limbs and a proudly taut chest with lean, iron pectorals and a snake's abdomen beneath it. This body is gilded in a white shirt, woven together from the base of the sternum and arrayed with a green cloak hanging about the shoulders. Brown britches are worn on his nimble legs, an Arab corsair's cutlass at his hip, held within a faithful brown sheath. On his feet are a pair of black riding boots, selected for their soft leather composition and their old fashioned reliable soles.

History

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The pace of Earth's potential has increased in more and more rapid terms. For each setback, new adaptations appear and overcome these difficulties. But there have always been irregularities. When a function becomes morose, it fails and is overtaken by the more cunning device. This is the pattern as it should be, and when a strange occurrence occurs, that trick of the light that sets aside the rules of a system in interests of a disaster, agents are placed into play to reset this balance that will eventually breed the lost potential back into play. But there is sacrifice involved in both the loss of something to antiquity, and to the upraised fist of God. The downfall of the Golden Age of Islam because of the Mongol Horde's success against the internally divided Chinese Empire, is the example that created the Demon's Head, Ra's al-Ghul.

As the Mongol Horde journeyed west, taking over society after society and reducing them to ashes from such potentialities, their legend and expertise grew to the point that the Library of Baghdad, the finest collection of intellect in all of the Old World, with knowledge from the deepest heart of Africa during the Empire of Nimrod, to the secrets of Alexander's battle tactics and the Roman histories and the medicines of the Arab states, was thrown into the Euphrates. As they say, the Euphrates turned black with the ink blood of civilization. That was 1258, AD, that Baghdad fell, and this disaster happened. And a small group of Mongols and Chinese, agents of the Horde, were so horrified that they rebelled against the perceived power of might instead of righteous wisdom, and they fled along a Bedouin track south, into the Arab Peninsula, to Rafha.

These destitute of the Mongol Horde, rich in appreciation for the culture of the Arabs, were taken in by the tribes, and one of them was born in 1260 AD, at an oasis along the sands of the tribal mercantile ways, on Chinese New Year. His name has been lost to history. He grew up raised in the tradition of the Arab fatalists, the Caliphate of Muhammad swept aside and separated into smaller groups, Turks isolated in Anatolia and Amazigh in North Africa, Umayyads in Spain and Mughals in India. The Persians, the core of the Caliphate in Mesopotamia, and the noble cities of Afghanistan, all lost and destroyed and torn asunder. But this man wanted to rediscover these secrets, and with the blessing of his father, journeyed to the city of Rafha, to study medicine, and illuminate the light of civilization once more, to redeem his blood for its crime.

The lost son of Mongolia was easily granted the privilege to study under a doctor despite his rival bloodline, thanks to the approval of the nomadic tribes, the highest caste of society, making him an honorable student to a city dweller, the lowest caste of Arab society. And here, he married a wife named Sora, became the personal advisor to the Sultan, and even discovered an ancient oddity beneath the city. The Lazarus Pit. Through studying the arcane symbolism of the carvings and ancient symbols of the pit, he came to understand that this churning pool of green apothecary was an ancient gateway to another world, that could make a man live a new life, and relieve him of any burden of the flesh. He was loath to try it, for his lessons as a doctor were not yet complete. But when the Sultan's son, the Crown Prince, came down with a fatal ailment, it was time for the doctor to attempt to earn his wings as a practitioner of science and medicine. He would have to risk a life in order to save it. And then, he lowered the prince into the pit, hoping for the best, with the aid of his wife and colleagues.

The prince, already sadistic to begin with, went mad inside the pit, and crawled out as if a man possessed, with incredible strength and insanity that the doctor found terrifying. His wife was murdered, and then the Sultan, to save his son the shame of a murder, framed the doctor, unable to make the painful decision to either kill his son for murder, or change the ways of his religion with an exceptional rule for the Lazarus Pit. The doctor, already broken by the experience, was locked in a cage with his dead wife, in public, to starve. And this is where the fatalist would've ended, had he not seen the pattern of a creator none could understand in any religious text, but was hinted at in those symbols about that sunken edifice of sorcerer's alchemy.

A man came along the cage, and the doctor recognized him as the son of a blind woman whose suffering he had eased in her last days. The man freed the doctor, and he returned to his tribe. He mourned as in the ways of the desert, fasting and praying, but also in the ways of the ancient Shaolin, meditating for weeks on end, pondering the meaning of what he'd seen. And it was in this combination that he discovered the tapestry of creation that had led these events into play. And he realized what he was. His heart heavy forever, and his soul now replaced with a ghost's touch, he sent a gift of fabrics to the prince that were contaminated with disease. When the Sultan asked a second time for the doctor's help, his tribe ambushed the Sultan and Prince, killing them both, then razing Rafha as revenge for opposing the Bedouin's ways of flexibility, in lieu of the law of a city to function. The logical proof is simple: the city live by laws that kill rather than allow exceptions, and the Bedouin demand flexibility. The paradox was Ra's al-Ghul's first revelation as a philosopher, of the true design of nature. Rafha would grow again one day, stronger than ever. And the doctor was now a devil like no other. He took a new name.

Ra's al-Ghul. The Demon's Head.

Personality

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Ra's al-Ghul is a man that has overcome stunning adversity, a product of tumultuous times that seeks to help the world become remade in the image of himself, but not in the traditional world conqueror's sense. Instead of making the world as if they were just like him, he seeks to make himself unnecessary. He has long ago noticed the patterns of the world to grow into more complex, more articulate functions, and the tendency of traditional modes of thinking to stand in the way of these developments. He appreciates culture, art, sophistication, antiquity, but feels these are pleasures to be enjoyed and studied, not emulated and repeated. To him, a blueprint is not made to recreate past achievements, but to lead to new ones. And to do this, one must be prepared to sacrifice in the name of an elegant system that few can understand unless they're a product of it.

A cataclysm can disrupt an entire ecosystem, whether it be a financial market or an entire era of life, thousands of years of potential wasted or eons of evolution erased. It can create an incredible advance forward, but at what cost? The hands of a surgeon are required, not the hands of an impartial universe...But what if, these things are the same? And what if this surgeon can have agents in mortal flesh? Ra's al-Ghul feels he is an agent of this order, this benevolent doctor of the universe. Perhaps not an intelligent force in the way humans can understand it, but sapience certainly understands it more than its predecessors, the more that sapient life develops. And hasn't Ra's al-Ghul become a more sapient life form, from the egg of knowledge that is the Lazarus Pit, allowing him to survive so long to do the will that he discovered in the Pit? Or perhaps, the Pit discovered him, calling the speck of stardust that would later grow into him, to the Lazarus Pit, this implement of whatever ancient wizard or creator or entity placed them beneath the soil in the caverns in the first place.

Fate, to Ra's al-Ghul, is proof that God is Nature.

Ra's al-Ghul is capable of heartless acts, throwing aside things he no longer requires as if they are cast off possessions, even if they are a minion, a family member, or a pupil. Life is the arena of a scientist, and if life no longer serves a purpose, it is doomed for the edges of his table, to be fed to a dog. But it is with solemn pain that he performs this act, this sacrifice taking a part of him that hurts every time, taking a part of him that makes him that much wearier. Whether one of his assassins dies, one of his pupils is found wanting, or even his own child rebels against his designs, he must cut the infection away from himself, his organization, from this mortal coil, at the risk of making himself that much wearier. Ra's al-Ghul lives a lonely life, and his truest pleasure is the material metaphysical. Art. Nothing can betray you if you understand it, and he understands the pain of the artist most.

Ra's al-Ghul knows that one day he must hang up his old life, and he is growing cold in a way he cannot describe, but others can see. The evil acts he has wrought in the pursuit of cleansing the universe of driftwood have placed a deep sadness in him. He was selected by fate, in his mind, to be a tyrant of human misery, and he is bitter. He wanted to be a scientist, a doctor, a man of letters. And now he is a Beast, an Antichrist, a Destroyer. This saddens him, and he seeks a successor. And not in the way one would imagine, to follow in his exact footsteps. He has found his flaw. His flaw is that he cannot save a system from dying, only destroy it. A doctor saves life, as if a human was a museum, a testament to beauty. So he has selected the new breed of life, the one he feels he has created, the superhero, to test. To force them into a saber duel, one which he will not succumb to intentionally, to fight with all the nihilistic drive of a dead hero that has become a villain in his own eyes, forcing his rival to strike him down. And whomever is successful at defeating him, will usher in a new world.

Of this, he is sure.

Abilities

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CENTURIES OF WISDOM

Ra's al-Ghul has had centuries to develop his own mindset, wisdom, skills, fighting ability, and philosophy, and has done it with the Lazarus Pit occasionally resetting the neural detriment to living so long, that being that quickening passage of time's perception.

Skills

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ASYMMETRIC WARFARE
Ra's al-Ghul is from a nation apart from others in their methods of war. The Arab Peninsula features neither woodlands for hidden defenses nor fields for open engagements, nor mountains for protection from raiders nor rivers to separate fields of tactics. Merely rolling dunes, oases, and ports leading to multiple trade winds. His warfare is based on clever strategy, unique tools to fit each task, and a level of self-sacrifice performed with the intention of one's sacrifice echoing for millennia in the hearts of one's children. Some prefer to call this type of warrior an animal, but isn't it the hunter that outwits the animal prey? Symmetrical warfare is defined as warfare between matching forces. Asymmetric warfare, therefore, is taking a force that lacks something compared to another force, and instead of attempting to compensate or negotiate, using an unusual strategy. Espionage, sabotage, partisans, guerillas, academics, agitation and propaganda, trade deals, even outright use of fear and shock. It can be a simple as assassinating a leader, or as complex as waging a long war inside one's own territory without any sort of network, merely individuals motivated into resistance with the eventual goal of coalescing into a renewed form.

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
Ra's al-Ghul knows how to form, run, lead, and manage what would traditionally be called a 'business', although the term has varied over the centuries. From his start among the merchants of Arabia, to his dealings inside bazaars of rare medicine, to manipulation of merchant guilds and seamen, up until the rise of the industrial house, the corporate effigy, and into the new age of mercenary business associations fostered by the information era, Ra's knows the fundaments of leadership.

MARTIAL ARTS
Ra's al-Ghul is a champion level martial artist, with skill in hand-to-hand combat forged over the centuries from multiple combat arts from around the world, and has conditioned his motor reflexes for use with his own personal system, combining sword movements, staff fighting, and dagger grappling with his hand-to-hand system suited to his tall, lithe form. He prefers to fight with the sword, but can use a staff for a non-lethal match, or a dagger (in tandem with a sword as well) for work that demands a small armament. He can fight bare handed, however, his sword movements useful for lunges and locks, his staff fighting lending itself to strikes and evasions, and his dagger grappling useful for reversals and pressure throws.

MYSTIC LORE
Over the centuries, and even in his early life in Rafha, Ra's al-Ghul has accumulated a great deal of mystic lore, regarding magic, spirits, artifice, supernatural events, preternatural beings, and even the nature of life and death, from his use of the Lazarus Pit. Although he does not practice magic, with neither blood nor willingness for a pact (and the oaths such things bring), he is very knowledgeable about this topic.

PHILOSOPHY

Ra's al-Ghul is highly astute with rare philosophy, having even shaped some of mankind's greatest philosophical thoughts since his crusade began. He knows the importance of existence's relationship to one's community, in the Confucian code, the balance and acceptance of fate to understand the Dao, the riddle tests of Buddha, the modification of situation interpretation of Ninpo, the brutality of Robespierre both in deed and in analysis of history, the philosophies of the pre-colonial American empires as they relate to government and religion, and of course, the 19th century German intellectual movement, within which his entire belief system is vindicated. At his heart is the warrior code of the Hanif, the fundamental core of Islam, the belief in one's self as an instrument of fate, defined by one's fate in one's task.

Resources

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LAZARUS PITS
Ra's al-Ghul knows the location of many Lazarus Pits, that he uses periodically to reclaim his youth, or alternately to heal himself (and rarely a trusted minion, pupil, or child) from a fatal wound or ailment. These Lazarus Pits have limited uses per site, making his youth finite, however broad in the expanse of human affairs. They temporarily induce super strength and insanity (perhaps raging clarity about mortality) when used.

THE LEAGUE OF ASSASSINS
Ra's al-Ghul's organization is named the League of Assassins, also known as The Demon, a clandestine order of martial artists, hitmen, mercenaries, and scientists devoted to perfecting their skills in the sole name of becoming superhuman. They are a league of professionals that would otherwise be completely for profit, that Ra's has brought together with the promise of lifting their individual exploits to the heights of legend in their field.

TREASURES

Ra's al-Ghul has numerous caches of treasures from around the world, in the form of liquid assets in bank accounts, corporate fronts, philanthropic organizations, shell companies, technological firms, artistic treasures, links to world governments, influence within social movements, even access to major universities. None of this wealth can be measured in terms of pure mathematics, but instead in terms of potential for service to Ra's al-Ghul's goals.

Weaknesses

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INNER DARKNESS
Ra's al-Ghul has cast off more and more of his humanity over his life, and he continues to grow wearier with every possession he must cast off. His worst realization, over the course of his life, is that he never preserves anything, only destroys things, and his inclination as a doctor, his philosophy as an agent of Nature, and his predilection towards science, demands that he also saves life. It is why he is beginning to search for successors, having slowly created a world where a new breed of being exists, the superhero.

LAZARUS LIMITATIONS
There are only so many Lazarus Pits, and Ra's al-Ghul will run out eventually, making them all the more precious, sought after, and in need of protection.

MONSTROUS REPUTATION
Ra's al-Ghul has been involved in many horrible atrocities, giving him the reputation of the blackest fiend known to man, even if he personally considers himself heroic. It has not earned him friends, and in fact, he is surrounded by enemies at all times, albeit ones that fear and admire and even adore him.

NIHILISTIC DRIVE
Ra's al-Ghul fights for the sake of fighting, not for the sake of survival. It has given him a tremendous willpower, but it has also given him an internal sickness. He can never rest his bones, or retire, the only option for the end to his quest being his own death. He occasionally retires into seclusion to meditate or plan or recover, and sometimes he can find joy in training another, raising a child, or discussing philosophy with someone he thinks he could come to admire with his help, but he can never stop moving towards an unspecified direction that his subconscious drives him towards, that he perceives as fate. It is really grief.

OBSESSION
Ra's al-Ghul is obsessed with his concept of himself as an agent of Fate, Nature, and God. His religious fervor is none that exists in any faith practiced by a large number of people, simply because most people would find it unhealthy. He surrounds himself with the dangerous, the fearsome, and the scoundrel, all his likeminded birds of a feather, united in their mutual obsessions towards entropy. Ra's al-Ghul believes that his lesser entropy will lead towards greater order, and all of his minions have other obsessions related to themselves, but the clashing manias often cause friction, deadly friction, within the ranks of Ra's al-Ghul's various clandestine orders.

OZYMANDIAS

Ra's al-Ghul is an Ozymandias-like figure, in terms of the poem by Shelly. He is worried about his legacy to the point that he often presents himself as cruel and terrible, with an empire that will fade away one day, the only memory of him being the name 'Ra's al-Ghul'. It is the legacy of most to eventually be forgotten, and he hopes the world will persist with his work having guided it, but he wishes greatly for a successor.

Logs

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Title	Date	Scene Summary
Nanda Parbat: Demon and Bat	August 3rd, 2019	Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul flash back to their past in Nanda Parbat. A hatred that turned into something else.
The League of Assassins	March 30th, 2019	Black Adam meets the new (to him) Head of The Demon
A Meeting of Two Shadows	August 9th, 2018	Summary needed
Missing Pieces	June 8th, 2017	Summary needed
On the Trail of a Devil	June 4th, 2017	Summary needed
The Conversation	May 27th, 2017	Summary needed
Assault on Gotham Central	May 21st, 2017	Summary needed
Demon's Offer	May 20th, 2017	Summary needed
Commissioner Joker's Number One Supporter	May 16th, 2017	Summary needed
The Darkness In Men's Hearts	May 14th, 2017	Ra's al-Ghul, the Demon, makes a call to the lair of wanted bio-terrorist, Albert Wesker, for a clandestine proposition.
A Question Within Creation's Pattern	May 13th, 2017	Ra's al-Ghul tracks down Edward Nygma, and chances upon a serpentine mystery woman. A grand experiment first requires the basic materials.
The Wolf Bows to the Head of the Demon	May 12th, 2017	Summary needed

Cutscenes

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Title	Date	Scene Summary
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Gallery

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