[center][img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1006944408438059143/1007740282005102662/CHUD.png[/img][/center]

There once was a city ruled by a tyrant. This man was not especially cruel for his era; his measures were harsh, but necessary. Under his rule the thieves were hanged, the beggars were lashed across the back and driven away, deserting soldiers and disloyal nobles were beheaded, the greedy merchants were cast out into exile (their possessions were naturally forfeit, seized by the tyrant to fund his army), adulterous wives had their ears severed, the wicked and impious were burnt at the stake in gruesome displays, and the grisliest punishments of all befell the runaway or rebellious slaves. All of these punishments were carried out by the tyrant’s men in a public square for all to see, before a great monument hewn from gray granite. This ostentatious monument had been raised by some long-gone lord that few remembered, and whatever its original purpose, by virtue of its place in that square the people came to connote it with their tyrant’s justice.

The monolithic structure was then something of a shrine to the civic rule of law, to punishment, to order, to the structure and hierarchy that had restored the failing city from the brink of ruin at the hands of its many rivals. Life was good for the average man of the city in those days, even if they lived through almost perpetual war! Indeed, by having driven out the filth and created discipline, the tyrant had single-handedly staved off a long decline and cultural decay, his soldiers even making some gains and reclaiming long-lost lands from neighboring city-states. But he was only a man, and so the tyrant passed as all mortals do, and the city was not long to outlast him. A soft man succeeded that tyrant as lord of the city, and his reign ended a decade later when another lord’s soldiers broke down the gates. The streets were choked with blood, the men massacred while the women and children were dragged off in chains, the temples and the tyrant’s palace ransacked, the houses set aflame, the tomb of their hated enemy the late tyrant was leveled and his many statues cast down, and finally, a once-great monument to justice was defaced.

The collective consciousness of the people – their unwitting reverence and mild idolatry – had made the monument into something more than mere stone. Though they did not know it, they had given the thing an essence and life; however, when nought remained but bones and ruin, the spirit that had been born within the monument eventually moved on. It might have exacted retribution in the ways that it knew against those who had destroyed its first home, but it possessed no such power; it was condemned to be a silent witness to the world, not a shaper of it. 


The spirit was immortal, but it knew only justice and law and punishment and order, so it meandered across the land and observed the executioners with an interminable, puerile fascination. Nothing else held its interest, and in truth it was barely even sentient. Eventually the world itself came to die, that first city having been just a microcosm of a greater decay. Still, the spirit persisted. Weary and sad, it drifted away. It slept and was lost to time, until eventually, something roused it.

It sensed somewhere new, just barely flourishing: yonder there was an infant world, not a fading one like it had once known. Justice could be observed once more! It raced forward, rocketing through the cosmos; it must have been asleep for countless aeons, for it tore through the void with power and swiftness that it had never known before, and it realized then that it was an infant no longer.

During its approach, it realized that it no longer had a shell to dwell within like that granite monument. It had accreted… [i]something[/i] of a body, but that form did not please it. So its will seized the void and rent order and substance out of chaos and nothingness, and so a great mass of metal congealed in a familiar dull gray hue. The spirit’s unbreaking will wrought the gigantic asteroid into an impossibly dense, divinely-imbued suit of armor. No eyes or senses, be they divine or mortal, would be able to penetrate through the plates or visor and see what dwelled beneath; he had privacy again. Likewise, the armor could defy magic and steel with ease; [i]this[/i] would not become some cairn heap of stone pieces. The spirit reckoned that by virtue of this, it could be both invisible and safe during its observations.  Now, it – no, [i][b]he[/b][/i] – was ready.

[hr]

When he finally drew near to the nascent world, its atmosphere clawed at him. It couldn’t do the faintest bit of harm through his armor, but the sense of it pushing and dragging his mass during the fall was a novel experience. It was a strange feeling, to [i]feel[/i]. The friction quickly grew great enough for a majestic cloak of fire to wreathe him for his descent. Fond memories returned: great heaps of wood, majestic blazes, screaming witches and warlocks.

Ecstasy filled his being when the spirit realized that now, [i]he[/i] could bring about justice himself! Perhaps he needn’t merely observe passively from afar! But then he was filled with an inscrutable turmoil that coursed through his every fiber of being – was it justice if [i]he[/i] did it? Was it legal? He contemplated that for the rest of the way down, and even once he landed gently.

Absent-mindedly, he looked around to see the depression in the sand that he’d disturbed, and also the listless motes of dust thrown up by his arrival. It was [i]certainly[/i] not his prerogative to go about defacing the landscape another had wrought. But perhaps it was his right, or perhaps even his [b]duty[/b], to bring justice to this world? As he delicately put the coarse earth back into place, he reflected upon his qualifications for the role. He had spent thousands of years bearing witness to justice at the ends of justice, and then for an eternity thereafter he had meditated upon all that he had seen in empty darkness and in silence. That settled it – he realized that none were likely to ever be so learned or worthy to carry out Justice as he!


He paced for a moment, weighing these revelations. There was suddenly a great pride that lifted his heels, a heavy burden upon his shoulders, an eagerness swelling up somewhere beneath his breastplate. As if to denote the great significance of that moment, the ground itself trembled from some distant perturbation.

[hider=He Stood]
[center][img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1006946263599677521/1010357920464117842/ChudArrival.PNG[/img]
[i]An armored giant, a spirit, a god, a vessel of justice![/i]
[/center][/hider]


Then with the lifeless wastes as his witness, the god made a solemn vow:

[color=SlateGray]"I will be True, and hold all else to the same precept."[/color]

Tiny flakes of dirt and regolith drifted through the air, cast up by his landing. The motes of dust were silent, and they seemed to meet his words with equal resolve. He looked around, restless. 

To be true to himself, he could never rest, would never tire, until all things were exactly as they should be, guided by the tenets and laws of those whose will shaped the world; but not by his, certainly. He did not presume to determine what was lawful or orderly, though he knew that he would be able to innately sense anything that rebelled against its lot. By that feeling if nothing else, he would find the faults in the universe and right them.

He felt it right then, even in that earliest of days. The towering metal giant spun around suddenly and fell onto his knees, brushing the ground with his hands to fill in the tiny depression left by his landing and ever so carefully restore it to exactly what it had been a few moments before. His passion compelled him!

Of course, his work was undone soon thereafter when huge clouds of dust and toxic metals, hurled from beyond the horizon, came to rain down on him. His first instinct was fury – he considered hunting down the perpetrator of this calamitous destruction, the one who had undone his very careful restoration of the ground over the last few moments and punishing the criminal severely. He stormed forward as a colossus with massive strides, effortlessly fighting against the flying clouds and rivers of earth, the metal of his armor groaning as it warped to match his growing size. Yet then he peered through the sandstorm, his divine gaze reaching out the horizon, and he beheld the perpetrator and sighed in disappointment. 

Yonder there was no criminal, just some spirit like him – no, nothing like him. She had no armor like his to hide her spirit, so he could perceive her easily enough, and he recognized her as a goddess of earth. [color=SlateGray][i]Such a dreadful, useless aspect,[/i][/color] he found himself suddenly thinking, but then he fondly recalled memories of gray granite, and judged her much more fondly for it. In moving that earth, careless and bothersome as it might have been, she had been fulfilling her role and prerogative. She’d therefore committed no great crime that he could discern, and so he could take no action… alas! He deflated and shrank a bit, then began to wander the world. He sought out an opportunity to witness justice, or better yet, deliver it himself – the time would surely come soon, and he’d waited so long.

[hider=Summary]
Turns out that the chud might canonically be Squidward, because he used to live inside of a monument.

He spent a whopping 5MP to make some pretty mighty armor. It’s made of gray metal and is very tough. For some reason he seems to think that it makes him invisible, but he’s stupid and it definitely doesn’t – maybe it just masks whatever his aspect is to others.

After the events that took place in the myth on his CS (which coincided with when Lektoria was resculpting the planet) it began to hilariously rain toxic dirt and metal all over his parade, and he was both really mad and really excited about having an excuse to beat the crap out of somebody in the name of JUSTICE! But he realized that it was just the earth goddess, and couldn’t justify attacking an earth goddess for throwing some dirt all over the place.
[/hider][hider=MP Usage]
5MP out of the initial 5MP spent on Justice’s Armor – count this towards a Smithing aspect maybe.
All 5 initial AP remain.[/hider]