Gilles de Rais [Approved, 0-5+;0-3+]

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I am one of those people for whom everything related to death and suffering holds a sweet and mysterious attraction, a terrible force that pulls you down. If I could describe or express it, I would probably never have sinned. I did what other men dream of. I am your nightmare.
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» Name: Gilles de Montmorency-Laval
» Titles: Baron de Rais;
» Age: 1008
» Gender: Male
» Affiliation/Rank: Shadow Fall Infante

» True Appearance Picture:







» Personality: Gilles de Rais is a man who has fallen from his previous grace. Once a noble knight fighting alongside the great Jeanne d'Arc, Gilles de Rais can not be considered the same man. Gilles does not have that same noble side that he used to have. He does not have the "arrogance" he once did, but instead worships everything about his saviour, Jeanne. Gilles does not care who, what, or where he destroys just to see his beautiful Holy Virgin again.
Gilles does carry three things from his nobility: his appreciation of art, his appreciation of new things, and his religious views. Gilles loves artwork. As long as someone put effort into it, Gilles loves it. He can find intrigue in every style of art in every form of it. Even art made of humans, Gilles can love it. In fact, Gilles has a double appreciation for that art. The first appreciation comes from his love of art obviously, but he never saw the use of humans as art in his time, so it is new to him.
Gilles's religious views are complicated. He feels as if he has wronged God by doing what he did to call for Jeanne to return to him. He feels as if God has wronged him by taking Jeanne away from him and not allowing him to see her. He says "God never punishes humans, he only toys with them." He watched and watched as he comitted great attrocities, but no matter how much he murdered and defiled, no divine punishment came. Thus, Gilles de Rais is closer to an Agnostic-Catholic mix than any other religious views.

» Likes: Little Children; Torturing Little Children; Murdering Little Children; COOL Things; Art; Art by Little Children; Art of Little Children; Art made out of Little Children; Jeanne d'Arc; Janne da Arc;

» Dislikes: Dwarves; midgets; short people; Chris Hanson; NBC Universal; the stake;
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» History: Gilles de Rais was born in late 1404 to Guy II de Montmorency-Laval and Marie de Craon in the family castle at Machecoul, or, according to other sources, at Champtocé-sur-Loire, 60 kilometres (37 mi) east of Nantes. He was an intelligent child, speaking fluent Latin, illuminating manuscripts, and dividing his education between military discipline and moral and intellectual development. Following the deaths of his father and mother in 1415, Gilles and his younger brother René de La Suze were placed under the tutelage of Jean de Craon, their maternal grandfather. Jean de Craon was a schemer who attempted to arrange a marriage for twelve-year-old Gilles with four-year-old Jeanne Paynel, one of the richest heiresses in Normandy, and, when the plan failed, attempted unsuccessfully to unite the boy with Béatrice de Rohan, the niece to the Duke of Brittany. On 30 November 1420, however, Craon substantially increased his grandson's fortune by marrying him to Catherine de Thouars of Brittany, heiress of La Vendée and Poitou. Their only child Marie was born in 1429.
In the years following the Breton War of Succession, sixteen-year-old Gilles took the side of the Dukes of Brittany of the House of Montfort against a rival house led by Olivier de Blois, Count of Penthièvre. The Blois faction, who still refused to relinquish their rule over Brittany, had taken Duke John V prisoner. Rais was able to secure the Duke's release, and was rewarded with generous land grants which were converted to monetary gifts.
In 1425, Rais was introduced to the court of the Charles VII at Saumur and learned courtly manners by studying the Dauphin. In combat at Saint-Lô and Le Mans between 1427 and 1429, Gilles was allowed to indulge his taste for violence and carnage. At the battle for the Château of Lude, he climbed the assault ladder and slew the English captain Blackburn. He was young, handsome and rich with companions-in-arms of his own stripe about him.
From 1427 to 1435, Rais served as a commander in the Royal Army, distinguishing himself by displaying reckless bravery on the battlefield during the renewal of the Hundred Years War. In 1429, he fought along with Joan of Arc in some of the campaigns waged against the English and their Burgundian allies. He was present with Joan when the Siege of Orléans ended.
On Sunday 17 July 1429, Gilles was chosen as one of four lords for the honor of bringing the Holy Ampulla from the Abbey of Saint-Remy to Notre-Dame de Reims for the consecration of Charles VII as King of France. On the same day, he was officially created a Marshal of France.
Following the Siege of Orleans, Rais was granted the right to add the royal arms, the fleur-de-lys on an azure ground, to his own. The letters patent authorizing the display cited Gilles’ "high and commendable services", the "great perils and dangers" he had confronted, and "many other brave feats."
In May 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake; Gilles was not present. His grandfather died 15 November 1432, and, in a public gesture to mark his displeasure with Gilles' reckless spending of a carefully amassed fortune, left his sword and his breastplate to Gilles' younger brother René de La Suze.
In 1434/5, Rais gradually withdrew from military and public life in order to pursue his own interests: the construction of a splendid Chapel of the Holy Innocents (where he officiated in robes of his own design), and the production of a theatrical spectacle called Le Mistère du Siège d'Orléans. The play consisted of more than 20,000 lines of verse, 140 speaking parts, and 500 extras. Gilles was almost bankrupt at the time of the production and began selling property as early as 1432 to support his extravagant lifestyle. By March 1433, he had sold all his estates in Poitou (except those of his wife) and all his property in Maine. Only two castles in Anjou, Champtocé-sur-Loire and Ingrandes, remained in his possession. Half of the total sales and mortgages were spent on the production of his play. The spectacle was first performed in Orléans on 8 May 1435. Six hundred costumes were constructed, worn once, discarded, and constructed afresh for subsequent performances. Unlimited supplies of food and drink were made available to spectators at Gilles' expense.
In June 1435, family members gathered to put a curb on Gilles. They appealed to Pope Eugene IV to disavow the Chapel of the Holy Innocents (which he refused to do) and carried their concerns to the king. On 2 July 1435, a royal edict was proclaimed in Orléans, Tours, Angers, Pouzauges, and Champtocé-sur-Loire denouncing Gilles as a spendthrift and forbidding him from selling any further property. No subject of Charles VII was allowed to enter into any contract with him, and those in command of his castles were forbidden to dispose of them. Gilles' credit fell immediately and his creditors pressed upon him. He borrowed heavily, using his objets d'art, manuscripts, books and clothing as security. When he left Orléans in late August or early September 1435, the town was littered with precious objects he was forced to leave behind. The edict did not apply to Brittany and the family was unable to persuade the Duke of Brittany to enforce it.
In 1438, according to testimony at his trial from the priest Eustache Blanchet and the cleric François Prelati, de Rais sent out Blanchet to seek individuals who knew alchemy and demon summoning. Blanchet contacted Prelati in Florence and convinced him to take service with his master. Having reviewed the magical books of Prelati and a traveling Breton, de Rais chose to initiate experiments, the first being in the lower hall of his castle at Tiffauges, to summon a demon named Barron. De Rais provided a contract with the demon for riches that Prelati was to give to the demon at a later time.
As no demon manifested after three tries, the Marshal grew frustrated with the lack of results. Prelati responded the demon summoned, named Barron, was angry and required the offering of parts of a child. De Rais provided these remnants in a glass vessel at a future invocation. All of this was to no avail, and the occult experiments left him bitter and with his wealth severely depleted.
In his confession, Gilles maintained the first assaults on children occurred between spring 1432 and spring 1433. The first murders occurred at Champtocé-sur-Loire; however, no account of these murders survives. Shortly after, Gilles moved to Machecoul where, as the record of his confession states, he killed, or ordered to be killed, a great but uncertain number of children after he sodomized them. Forty bodies were discovered in Machecoul in 1437.
The first documented case of child-snatching and murder concerns a boy of 12 called Jeudon, an apprentice to the furrier Guillaume Hilairet. Gilles de Rais' cousins, Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville, asked the furrier to lend them the boy to take a message to Machecoul, and, when Jeudon did not return, the two noblemen told the inquiring furrier that they were ignorant of the boy's whereabouts and suggested he had been carried off by thieves at Tiffauges to be made into a page. In Gilles de Rais' trial, the events were testified to by Hillairet and his wife, Jean Jeudon and his wife, and five others from Machecoul.
Gilles' bodyservant Étienne Corrillaut, known as Poitou, was an accomplice in many of the crimes and testified that his master hung his victims with ropes from a hook to prevent the child from crying out, then masturbated upon the child's belly or thighs. Taking the victim down, Rais comforted the child and assured him he only wanted to play with him. Gilles then either killed the child himself or had the child killed by his cousin Gilles de Sillé, Poitou or another bodyservant called Henriet. The victims were killed by decapitation, cutting of their throats, dismemberment, or breaking of their necks with a stick. A short, thick, double-edged sword called a braquemard was kept at hand for the murders. Poitou further testified that Rais sometimes abused the victims (whether boys or girls) before wounding them and at other times after the victim had been slashed in the throat or decapitated. According to Poitou, Rais disdained the victim's sexual organs, and took "infinitely more pleasure in debauching himself in this manner ... than in using their natural orifice, in the normal manner."
In his own confession, Gilles testified that “when the said children were dead, he kissed them and those who had the most handsome limbs and heads he held up to admire them, and had their bodies cruelly cut open and took delight at the sight of their inner organs; and very often when the children were dying he sat on their stomachs and took pleasure in seeing them die and laughed.”
Poitou testified that he and Henriet burned the bodies in the fireplace in Gilles' room. The clothes of the victim were placed into the fire piece by piece so they burned slowly and the smell was minimized. The ashes were then thrown into the cesspit, the moat, or other hiding places. The last recorded murder was of the son of Éonnet de Villeblanche and his wife Macée. Poitou paid 20 sous to have a page's doublet made for the victim, who was then assaulted, murdered, and incinerated in August 1440.
On 15 May 1440, Rais kidnapped a cleric during a dispute at the Church of Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte. The act prompted an investigation by the Bishop of Nantes, during which evidence of Gilles' crimes was uncovered. On July 29, the Bishop released his findings, and subsequently obtained the prosecutorial cooperation of Rais's former protector, Jean V, the Duke of Brittany. Rais and his bodyservants Poitou and Henriet were arrested on 15 September 1440, following a secular investigation which paralleled the findings of the investigation from the Bishop of Nantes. Rais's prosecution would likewise be conducted by both secular and ecclesiastical courts, on charges which included murder, sodomy, and heresy.
The extensive witness testimony convinced the judges that there were adequate grounds for establishing the guilt of the accused. After Rais admitted to the charges on 21 October, the court canceled a plan to torture him into confessing. Peasants of the neighboring villages had earlier begun to offer up accusations that since their children had entered Gilles' castle begging for food they had never been seen again. The transcript, which included testimony from the parents of many of these missing children as well as graphic descriptions of the murders provided by Gilles' accomplices, was said to be so lurid that the judges ordered the worst portions to be stricken from the record.
The precise number of Gilles' victims is not known, as most of the bodies were burned or buried. The number of murders is generally placed between 80 and 200; a few have conjectured numbers upwards of 600. The victims ranged in age from six to eighteen and included both sexes.
On 23 October 1440, the secular court heard the confessions of Poitou and Henriet and condemned them both to death, followed by Gilles' death sentence on 25 October. Gilles was allowed to make confession, and his request to be buried in the church of the monastery of Notre-Dame des Carmes in Nantes was granted.
Execution by hanging and burning was set for Wednesday 26 October. At nine o‘clock, Gilles and his two accomplices made their way in procession to the place of execution on the Ile de Biesse. There, Gilles addressed the throng of onlookers with contrite piety, and exhorted Henriet and Poitou to die bravely and think only of salvation. Gilles' request to be the first to die had been granted the day before. At eleven o'clock the brush at the platform was set afire and Rais was hanged. His body was cut down before being consumed by the flames and claimed by “four ladies of high rank” for burial. Henriet and Poitou were executed in similar fashion; their bodies however were reduced to ashes in the flames and then scattered.





» Natural Abilities:
Enhanced Strength: Gilles's strength is higher than a normal human. He can crush a skull with ease, and break concrete in high-level punches.
» Unique Abilities:
Za Koa: This is put into unique because Gilles does not have any sort of DNA of Touketsu within him. This is simply because Gilles is a strong summoner and thus can access a good bit of Za Koa.
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» Prelati's Spellbook•Text of the Sunken Spiraled City: (螺湮城教本; Rain-jou Kyouhon)

» Abilities: Prelati's Spellbook: Text of the Sunken Spiraled City ( 螺湮城教本プレラーティーズ・スペルブック , ?) is a demonic guidebook and summoning grimoire with a cover made of glistening and wet human skin. It allows the summoning of an army of Horrors (怪魔, Kaima?), water demons from the depth of the seas of another dimension.. Rather than simply functioning as tome of spells and curses, the book itself is a "monster" that functions as the core possessing its own enormous "R'lyeh energy" furnaces completely independent of its wielder. It can either be read from as regular tome for minor spells, such as summoning a single demon with "Cthulhu fhtagn", or it can be completely commanded by the user, causing the pages to rapidly flip by themselves, as the tome provides the necessary incantations and its own independent power to conduct the summoning spells.
Depending on the verses used, this allows for the usage of a class of ritual magecraft that tens of magi couldn't accomplish together. The Spellbook itself is constantly giving off reiatsu, and if it is cut, rather than showing pages, it shows a glowing, unearthly substance. It is capable of regenerating damage caused to it under its own power, and the "wound" closes much like it would on a living creature. It is also known as the R'lyeh Text. It is the original book in the sunken spiraled city, translated from the R'lyeh language into Chinese during the Xia Dynasty, and later translated into Italian by François Prélati, one of Gilles de Rais' comrades known for being an adept of black magic. R'lyeh energy is a form of energy from the sunken spiraled city which powers the book. It is a spiritual energy that is only used to power the book and its summons. Only usable via a furnace.


The water demons, without a discernible torso nor appendages, are best described as masses of tentacles with circular mouth-like openings marked with shark-like blades. Their innards spew a mist-like gas that would cause lung corrosion in a normal human. They are of 5-4 tier in overall power, but they be revived by Gilles focusing the book to heal them. They are summoned by using the blood and flesh of creatures, living or deceased, as a sacrifice, and they must constantly receive energy from the Spellbook. They can be guided, but the tome doesn't allow for direct control over the creatures. It is only able to call them, revive them, and send them at any enemies as its wielder commands it. They will stay summoned as long as they receive energy, allowing Gilles to leave them as guards to his workshop while he is away. No matter how many are destroyed in close combat, their numbers will never decrease, as the flesh of the defeated demons will instantly spawn new ones to take their place. If the connection is severed for even a moment, they will all instantly dissipate into the blood of the original sacrifices. If Gilles is in need of an escape route, he can surge prana from the Spellbook into the blood that is still receiving its energy due to the summoning ritual in order to cause it to boil and evaporate into a bloody mist.

EVENT-ONLY
Gilles also has the ability to become absorbed with the Spellbook into a mass of demons. Upon preparing for a long period of time and speaking the chant "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh wgah'nagl fhtagn", they slowly fuse together into a massive extradimensional evil god, of which all of the summoned familiars had been bits and pieces, the size of a building. With a similar structure to an amoeba, it has no bones or organs and it feels no pain, even with a third of its body blown away. It continuously regenerates, no matter how much exterior damage is done (a drawback is described later on). It has tentacles capable of swatting an F15 fighter jet out of the sky with ease, and after it crashes into the demon's body, the F15 is swallowed by it without leaving a trace. In order for it to be destroyed, an Anti-Fortress attack, such as Excalibur, must be used in order to eradicate the entirety of its flesh and kill Gilles deep inside the heart of the creature. The creature is not powered by the spellbook, but rather its own energy source. However, it must feed to continue to be sustained. Thus, using it in a non-populated area is a bad idea. If it withers away and dies because it has not been fed, it can not be used for the duration of the Event series. Gilles can only use this once per thread and in Main Events only.
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Racial Skills

• Za Koa Skill: Advanced
  
• Demon Magic: Master
  
• Shadow Movement: Advanced
  
• Akuma Kyōdo: Advanced
  

General Skills

• Durability: Master
  
• General Speed: Adept
  
• Strength: Advanced
  
• Weapon Skill: Adept

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