Dionus
- You may be looking for the series starring Dionus.
Dionusavarnapexiandal, known for short as Dionus, (PROSE: Love & War [+]Loading...["Love & War (short story)"]) was a House Military soldier during the War in Heaven who defected following the Battle of Golgalith and founded a clinic for the study of temporal diseases on Gulliver's Rest. As a Homeworlder, he had a level of innate skill at telepathy.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early life[[edit] | [edit source]]
Dionus was "churned out" by a breeding engine of the Great Houses. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape [+]Loading...["Eternal Escape (audio story)"]) He recalled being familiar with the original identity of "Nari" when they both lived on the Homeworld. (AUDIO: Me & My Ghost [+]Loading...["Me & My Ghost (audio story)"])
As a guard[[edit] | [edit source]]
to be added
In the House Military[[edit] | [edit source]]
After War broke out, he spent some time as a mindless drone of the House Military, (AUDIO: Eternal Escape [+]Loading...["Eternal Escape (audio story)"]) working as an Interrogator. He committed a number of atrocities against prisoners on the order of his superior, not even considering the question of whether they were innocent. The victims of his interrogations included a number of Homeworld deserters who had been tracked down by agents of the Houses and returned to the Homeworld for trial. (AUDIO: Call Me Ishmael [+]Loading...["Call Me Ishmael (audio story)"]) Dionus also tortured Thula Kra for days, an ambassador of the Splin'Trex whom the Houses accused of being an agent of the Enemy and an assassin sent to kill the War Council, eventually obtaining a false confession of what Dionus wanted to hear. This resulted in the Splin'Trex being almost entirely destroyed. Dionus's methods, even by the Houses' standards, were extreme. (AUDIO: The Healer's Sin [+]Loading...["The Healer's Sin (audio story)"])
However, he was traumatised by General Sandus's lack of concern about the natives during the Battle of Golgalith. He developed a conscience and ran away in a stolen timeship with his wife and children. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape [+]Loading...["Eternal Escape (audio story)"]) Dionus scavenged from War-time powers a biodata extractor amongst other artifacts, which he stored in his safe within his clinic, as a precaution against agents of the Houses. He was also haunted by his victims' cries, mangled bodies and shattered psyches for every day of the rest of his life. (AUDIO: The Healer's Sin [+]Loading...["The Healer's Sin (audio story)"])
The physician of Gulliver's Rest[[edit] | [edit source]]
They settled on the planet Gulliver's Rest where Dionus began to run a clinic for those affected by temporal diseases as a result of the War in Heaven. He was visited by a Mother and Father of Faction Paradox who offered to help run his clinic in exchange for sole ownership of a "temporal anomaly" which they had predicted would materialise on Gulliver's Rest someday. He refused them, and in retaliation they erased his wife from history; Dionus carried on with his life believing himself a single father of two. A member of the Friend later arrived on Gulliver's Rest and offered to help run the clinic, something he accepted. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape)
Dionus was once unexpectedly visited by a man calling himself Ishmael who travelled in a strange egg-shaped ship. Ishmael was a member of the Order of Tarth'Rioshim who had been having strange dreams of the life of a noble "doomed lover" straight out of a fairy tale, Dra'Heem. Delving into buried memories inside Ishmael's mind, Dionus revealed to him that his memories were simply of his original life, while, as a result of the War's impact on Urok'Sharn's timeline, in the current version of history Dra'Heem had been abandoned as an infant and raised by the Order of Tarth'Rioshim as Ishmael. As a result of this revelation, Ishmael broke off from the Order and swore to protect beings from parallel timelines, instead of hunting them down as was the Order's practice. (AUDIO: Call Me Ishmael)
Dionus accepted Maroth Rak’Nah into his clinic, the survivor of a race of empaths Rav’Shee from the planet Spydrex after it was erased. He was concerned she'd never be able to lesve the clinic but she made a recovery, connecting with the patients and desiring to become a doctor of psychology; Dionus employed her, and she worked as a councillor. She began to run group therapy sessions, which, while weren't mandatory, often had most of Dionus's patients attend.
One morning, after attending to Juno and Juno, a long-term patient who had become akin to conjoined twins after the version of Juno sixty years in her personal future became merged into her twenty year old self, Dionus was invited to one of the group therapy sessions. Although he had his fears that the new patient that had been admitted that day was an agent of the Great Houses and had forced Maroth to do their bidding, he attended nonetheless. He watched some temporal refugees, Raggeron G’Rim and Julia Smith give their stories, before a third and very familiar refugee slithered onto the stage.
Dionus was now having to face his past, something he knew he would have to do eventually. The refugee was Thula Kra, once an ambassador of the Spin'Trex, a species that could've rivalled the Great Houses' superiority; Dionus had been the one responsible for torturing Thula while his species was destroyed. Dionus rushed to his office and spent hours in turmoil, the guilt of his actions weighing heavily on him. Maroth came to reason with him to talk to Thula. He agreed, but snuck a scalpel for security. Upon engaging Thula, Dionus began to repeat his apology and Maroth calmed him. While Dionus wanted forgiveness, he knew he didn't deserve it from him. Dionus didn't hide that he had cowardly been following orders, but had no justification for what he did. Maroth tried asserting that Dionus had been trying to atone and Dionus told them both he never could. Despite his anger, Thula knew that killing him would be pointless and exposing him would deprive those who needee help.
Thula went to leave but Dionus stopped him, asking if there were enough survivors of the Splin'Trex to rebuild. Thula admitted there weren't, despite their efforts to obtain a breeding engine finding that it lacked a biodata extractor. Dionus, by chance, had one in his possession as a safeguard against the agents of the Great Houses; he offered it to Thula, who declined, neither wanting to be in Dionus's debt or wanted to be risk being tricked. Dionus furiously refused the notion of the debt and handed him the scalpel, telling him to slit his throat if he tried any trickery, but Thula discarded it and placed his hand on the extractor, allowing it to reprogram itself to Splin'Trex DNA. Dionus and Thula met one last time, the latter still not forgiving him yet not forgetting what he has done for his species.
Dionus and Maroth met in his office. He hid his joy of saving the Splin'Trex under a veil of calmness, thanking her for the meeting and learning that while he could never overcome his psst he could make a better future. (AUDIO: The Healer's Sin [+]Loading...["The Healer's Sin (audio story)"])
Once, after having cured and discharged all of the patients who had been in his care, he tried to take the opportunity to settle in and finally write a detailed record of his past actions as an Interrogator. However, he was interrupted by the arrival of Nari, a mysterious woman whom he seemed to remember from a previous lifetime. It soon became clear that she was a Homeworlder herself and suffering from some kind of amnesia. He became infatuated with her, not realising why. Shortly after more patients arrived, Nari blacked out in the night and brutally murdered one of them, only to wake up with no memory of this.
Locking her up in her room, Dionus hacked his way into the Great Houses' mainframe and realised Nari was an infamous wanted fugitive, with whom he had been familiar while he was living on the Homeworld, and that she had tricked him into liking her using artificial love pheromones. After confronting her in her room and then using a mind probe of her, however, he realised the innocent Nari persona was not an act, but a real artificial personality the Renegade had buried herself within. Though she was aware of her true identity, whenever she tried to access the memories of her criminal past, Nari passed out — though she sometimes experienced bursts of violence as her concentrated "evil side" briefly returned to the front. Having done her job too well, Nari was unable to free her real personality, as much as she wanted to.
As Nari still had access to her original self's knowledge of advanced biochemistry, Dionus offered to work on curing her of her self-imposed personality disorder, in exchange for her agreeing to stay locked in her room for the safety of the other patients, and putting her knowledge of chemistry to use helping Dionus prepare various medicines for his other patients. They settled into this routine, with Dionus coming to genuinely enjoy Nari's company with no need for brain-addling chemicals, to the point that he ultimately trusted her to cook a meal for the two of them. This proved a mistake as Nari drugged the meal and escaped from Gulliver's Rest. Dionus held no grudge, however, and was somehow happy to know that Nari was once more out there in the universe, not expecting to ever meet her again. (AUDIO: Me & My Ghost [+]Loading...["Me & My Ghost (audio story)"])
Flight from Gulliver's Rest[[edit] | [edit source]]
Eventually, however, General Sandus's Fifth Time Fleet arrived on Golgalith, followed in short order by Enemy timeships and the Faction's ritual barges. Running out of the clinic with Meren and Egar, Dionus tried to make his way to the warded bunker where he had hidden his timeship. They encountered the Faction Paradox Mother whom Dionus had met earlier. Erasing Egar from time with one blow of her shadow-weapon, she taunted him with the idea that it could all have been avoided if he'd agreed to the Faction's earlier offer, but, having forgotten Egar, he dismissed her retort as meaningless lies.
By the time he made his way to the timeship, his one surviving child Meren had briefly been replaced by one called Tara before disappearing from his mind completely. He departed in the timeship unable to remember anything but the Battle of Golgalith he believed he had just run away from — poised to start all over again by settling "somewhere nice", "out of harm's way, where the War can't find me" and building a family there, which he would believe to be his first. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape [+]Loading...["Eternal Escape (audio story)"])
Return to Gulliver's Rest[[edit] | [edit source]]
During V-Time, however, Chris Cwej was able to visit a "medical centre" on Gulliver's Rest which "specialised in afflictions of a temporal nature" after he sorted out the shifting timelines in the planet Golgalith. The staff of the clinic agreed to help the people of Golgalith finish healing from the aftereffects of the timeline shifts. (PROSE: Crushing Reality [+]Loading...["Crushing Reality (short story)"])
Dionus was one of the individuals Chris Cwej and one incarnation of Lady Aesculapius enlisted to assist with the reboot of Professor X in the Warsong, written by Auteur to help restore Grant Markham, who had been forgotten by history and taken by the Letharchy. In the show, he portrayed Hamish Forester, a reader of stories and holder of the Green Glow, whom a fictionalised version of Professor Meistras attempted to destroy. His role was in episode three of the reboot, Tales from the Green Glow. He, along with everybody else who participated in the reboot, was taken out of reality by the Letharchy when it transpired Auteur had been lying to them. When the Memory Containment Area on the Letharchy's ship, the Point of Know Return, was smashed, he regained his stolen memories, and remembered the sunrise over Gulliver's Rest, though he "conveniently" forgot his encounter with the "knockoff amnesiac botanist". (PROSE: And Today, You [+]Loading...["And Today, You (novel)"])
He found Miara on the planet Veraxis, an individual with a condition that made her body change form, and brought her back to Gulliver's Rest. By this point, he was searching for Urizen's Absence, to "recover what he had lost", and had taken a step back from the clinic, overseeing things from above, and letting others heal the patients. He took a break in his quest for Urizen's Absence to find Miara, but even when she was found he was not satisfied, for she seemed to not be recovering, and was withdrawn from the other patients and staff. After a discussion with Ayla, one of his species and his second-in-command, he resolved to help the girl. He decided that what he must do was remind her of her home, and set up a Christmas party. She was very awed at having all this done for her, and resolved to stay on Gulliver's Rest and assist Dionus in helping others. (PROSE: Trauma and Tinsel [+]Loading...["Trauma and Tinsel (short story)"])
Legacy[[edit] | [edit source]]
The Bookwyrm knew Dionus as a "repentant deserter", and knew of his efforts to help those affected by the War using his powers as a Time Elemental. (PROSE: Previously On... The Multiverse [+]Loading...["Previously On... The Multiverse (short story)"])
The first story in an anthology magazine that would later be present at the Plume Coteries' Library was called Trauma and Tinsel - A Dionus story. When Maritsa, Callum, Claret Doe, Vomm She'hayle, and a mysterious man in black were trapped in a room of the library by the Snowstorm, it was one of the books they consulted to attempt to find their way out. (PROSE: "Scene 11" [+]Part of The Book of the Snowstorm, Loading...{"page":"351","namedep":"Scene 11","1":"The Book of the Snowstorm (short story)"}) It was by James Hornby, and documented Dionus's attempts to help Miara. (PROSE: Trauma and Tinsel [+]Loading...["Trauma and Tinsel (short story)"])
Personality[[edit] | [edit source]]
John Lennon's song Happy Xmas (War is Over) was a "particular favourite" of his. (PROSE: Trauma and Tinsel [+]Loading...{"page":"363","1":"Trauma and Tinsel (short story)"})
Appearance[[edit] | [edit source]]
When he participated in the reboot of Professor X, he appeared as "a Caucasian man in a fine vest, pants, tie, and dress shirt. (PROSE: And Today, You [+]Loading...{"chaptname":"Filming","page":"67","chaptnum":"6","1":"And Today, You (novel)"})
