#pretender cecil

[hexfloog]

would you let him make you a deal? :)

"deal with the devil au alternate cecil" is a bit of a mouthful, so this smug mf is just going to be "pretender cecil" going forward eheh

[hexfloog]

the flesh is weak, cecil. only the soul is immortal... and yours belongs to me.

flinging this here as-is since i am unlikely to finish it. and unrelated but i still find it weirdly difficult to draw this mf smiling LOL

yapping below:

so i started thinking about that Actual Deal with the Devil scenario i want so badly to pretend happens with cecil, a deal that ends with a mouth full of sharp teeth and some otherworldly, demonic abilities that he keeps in his back pocket at all times. i love a good faustian bargain, so it sounded easy, and tbh it should be easy, but... of course... i also happen to be kind of weird about depictions of the devil. because in my mind there was no way this was happening between cecil and any run-of-the-mill demon, especially not the same league of demon we've seen in the show so far ahaaa

the tl;dr is that i deeply enjoy the idea of the devil appearing to people as anything but himself. nobody--nobody--gets to see his "true form," whatever that means. there's narrative reasons for this but i also firmly believe the "true form" of what's supposed to be The Greatest Evil is simply incomprehensible. and for cecil, i think the worst possible image he could take when dealing with him is... himself. definitely not because i think cecil's quietly haunted by civilian versions of himself that could've been, or even more monstrous versions of himself that could still be as their ever-treacherous world forces him to be the worst version of himself in the present. definitely not.

anyway so this is that, i'm a huge sucker for this type of imagery so this was technically another inevitability LMAO

i don't think the deal has to be complicated. "my soul for enough power to keep the world safe" or something. in the heat of the moment i think even cecil would be raw enough to forget specifics. additionally, i also like the idea that cecil perhaps had some kind of post-deal clarity (you know... what have i done-type existential horror) that he's actually a bit frightened of his own power--and to that end, still doesn't quite know the extent of it. the scope of his abilities are whatever the devil has decided to lend him, but... personally... because i think cecil's soul is probably quite delicious as a man who's torn himself to pieces and resigned to be the "necessary evil" in spite of his private morality... i think he'd have given him access to a lot. all the more reason to be weary of his own power, i suppose.

still haven't figured out what exactly prompted him to commit to the deal in the first place, but to me it would have happened when he was still relatively new as director. it actually seemed more plausible to me to be something he'd do out of desperation while locked up, but... i ended up deciding against it. it seems way more likely the first few weeks of director responsibilities could stress-test anyone to breaking point, and i like to think even cecil wouldn't have been hardened enough to withstand those pressures, especially since the cold, hard numbers of "saving lives" is his biggest pain point. heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that.

uhhh whoops idk how to end this but thanks for reading if you did \(o^o)/ and this has nothing to do with anything but young cecil actually makes for a great vampire + brownie points if you know where the quote is from!!

[hexfloog]

Ye progeny ov disgrace This is an ode to my falling from grace!

??? wtf do you even call cecil x cecil asdfgsdf

This was supposed to be an attempt to depict part of the ritual that Cecil uses to summon the entity. He thinks he's summoning a simple demon, of course... and I suppose he's not that far off the mark, the entity is functionally the devil.

I haven't thought too much on specifics yet—it's not terribly important, more self-indulgent than anything—but I tried to stay within the show's implied boundaries for "demon magic;" the ritual so far only involves the devil's sigil, salt circles, and a blood offering using a specific weapon tied to this exact rite (something I don't doubt the GDA would already have in their possession, probably obtained at some point in time as collateral from another mission, then subsequently forgotten in their equivalent of an evidence room).

When the entity emerges, it locks them in an in-between space with each other, suspended in time, contained within the salt circles, and invisible to anyone outside looking in until the deal is sorted. (At this point, Cecil has no choice but to follow through; backing out means death, perhaps one of the few things he really knows going into this.) This purgatory is something of a spiritual dimension, where only things like the soul can manifest—which is why Cecil isn't wearing anything here—but when all's said and done, no time will have passed in the corporeal world and Cecil won't appear any differently than the way he went in... except that he'll now bear the mark of his benefactor.

[hexfloog]

"However cleverly you sneak up on a mirror, your reflection always looks you straight in the eye…"

Companion piece to this younger Alternate Cecil I drew as a self-indulgent birthday treat.

After the Under Realm episode I kind of felt like I had to clarify that "the devil" I keep talking about in Cecil's Faustian Bargain is a completely distinct entity from what the show establishes as "Satan."

He might not be a corporeal, hulking beast, but I imagine the devil to be a monumental force nonetheless: craftily malevolent, largely omnipotent, and more akin to a jaded god, wholly interested in the corruption of men for reasons retold countless times through human tradition. Think Christianity's Lucifer or his many parallels in other mythologies, if only because I like to believe human superstitions got some things right, rather than simply being the products of some very long games of telephone as Damien claims.

yapping + bloodier alt/closeup below the break eheh :)

and okay okay maybe this was also an excuse to finally draw my take on alternate cecil - by treating him as the devil's appearance of choice when dealing with regular cecil.

as thrilled as i am that there exists an official(?) cecil doppelganger, i couldn't really get on board with him just being "cecil but evil." normally i'm a sucker for this exact thing but it... wasn't really hitting this time? imo "cecil but evil" is a herculean undertaking, you can't really do it without making him a totally different character, so... why shouldn't he be just that?

so the devil appears this way to him on the rare occasion they meet in person, adjusting his apparent age accordingly with each rendezvous purely as a way to fuck with his client, fully aware it rattles him. this is kind of dependent on my interpretation of cecil's character lol—that is, as someone perpetually haunted by alternate past and future versions of himself. his scar isn't flipped for the same reason: he's not really manifesting as a doppelganger, but rather as a reflection (with some demonic flare, of course), as one of the many hypothetical cecils that he thinks could've been or could still be, rather than a confirmed version of him that exists in tandem—and for certain—in another world. imo a true doppelganger from another dimension wouldn't particularly bother him since he'd be able to separate them enough from himself to see them as mere copies sharing his face.

they would've only met a handful of times from the day the deal is made leading up to the present/the events of the show, always following some major incident that takes a toll on cecil's conscience (just so the devil can catch him when he's a little raw). but cecil's a good talker, a good liar, so their conversations would be brief and pointed. he'd catch on to the devil's game pretty quick—which, for him specifically, is to further blur the line between good and evil in a bid to corrupt him just a little faster... always trying to sell that the distinction is a sham, especially for men like him, the type who'd seek out malevolent forces to do his bidding... that there is only his desires and what he'd do to obtain them. and it would unsettle him a bit, i think, mired as he is in grey morality walking that exact path, but he's cold and seasoned enough not to let it show... most of the time.

i know i just said that true alternate cecils wouldn't bother him, but there's an extra layer of depth here that i think would eventually crack him, given enough time. this doppelganger isn't a clone who ran away from home, it's the monster he thinks he is waiting for him to let his guard down. associating with him at all forces him to confront things he's definitely thought before but has buried deep in the back of his mind, thoughts that challenge the way he justifies his place in the world, and i like to imagine that he'd falter at least once during the course of their relationship as a result :3 maybe something to explore in another one-shot idk

tysm for reading! here's the draft for this one as a treat:

also i gotta start calling this something so i can give it a tag, deal with the devil au? demonic cecil au? both?

[hexfloog]

ABRACADABRA

Companion piece to the last Alternate Cecil I drew as a self-indulgent birthday treat :)

Bloodier alt/closeup below the break:

He'd told it he felt sorry for its dry cleaning service, and that there were a myriad of colognes it could choose from in the modern era that were more delicate than iron. (It had laughed at him then, and remarked that it was flattered by the suggestion it could pull off delicate.)

Nipping this one in the bud: the scar placement is deliberate. I know Alternate Cecil is scarred on the other side of his face, but my take on him for this AU is that he's a demonic entity taunting Regular Cecil by appearing to him less as an alternate-dimension-doppelganger and more as his reflection given life. So if it were to drop the demonic features and theatrics, they wouldn't be distinguishable from one another... if that parses.

...that, and i personally think the alt cecil fit just looks better on young cecil asdfjskd

Since the entity isn't limited to any single form, it can manifest as whatever it wants, and showing up as Cecil's double from different phases of his life—even those which haven't happened yet, or heck, never happened at all in his universe—is just a way for it to fuck with him. It's always hoping to piss him off enough to tempt him into using the abilities it's given him; its power is an aphrodisiac to mortals and tapping into it increases Cecil's chances of going off the deep end, and thus dying (which is what it wants, since the "rules" dictate it can't directly cause or influence his end itself).

That said, it's going to be trying for a long, long time since Cecil is a harder nut to crack than most >:)

LMAO okay so this one went through like... three different drafts, and the one i ended up using still ended up being a giant pain in the ass because i didn't take the time to properly clean it up, enjoy:

[hexfloog]

POV when the world's most intriguing man freely offers his soul to you on a silver platter 😈

this was meant to be a shitpost to mark the arrival of the makeship plush, but drawing it did finally force me to start thinking about the appearance of the sigil of the entity, which is supposed to be present somewhere on cecil's back (though it's rarely, if ever, seen by anyone, cecil himself included):

note: the doll imagery is incidental, i will not be implementing it in this au... iykyk

get grisped, idiot (this is not the picture of him getting grisped)

[hexfloog]

Character ask game #30

I know this question has been asked before, but I'm really curious to know more about your version of Cecil. You don't have to answer if you don’t want to, I don’t wanna be too pushy about it. So… here's the question: Since your AU contains "other evil" besides the familiar demons that live underground like Darkblood, is there some other force at work, a "light one", maybe? And if we imagine such a thing exists in your AU, when Cecil encountered person protected by these "light forces" and immune to his powers, how would he perceive them? As a threat or as a resource that could be used to save the world, since they can "do good"?

That's okay, anon! I don't draw OR write fast enough to get all my ideas on this AU down as art or fic so I'm more than happy to answer questions and elaborate here :D

You're right, if a malevolent entity like Cecil's exists it kind of begs the question as to whether there's a more benevolent counter-entity to balance it.

Normally I'd say "yes," but I feel a little strange injecting religious mythos into an Invincible AU beyond mere implication… so in this case the entity is technically neutral. There is no opposite, only competition. I can't help but think of it as the devil since it behaves villainously, but really it's just a single supernatural being in a pantheon of other, similarly-powerful "deities" that exist in the cosmos. I don't have any lore for them and the entity itself would probably only ever hint at their existence if pressed, but it's not important for a story I want to keep on a human scale. Cecil will never have a relationship with it that he and others don't understand as Faust and Mephistopheles.

Tangent: It's been interesting to contemplate what "supernatural" means in the Invincible universe. Superhero stories already operate on an extranormal baseline and their outlandish worlds always sit somewhere at the intersection of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Invincible is no exception: on earth alone there are vampires and werewolves and all manner of magic that can curse men to turn into monsters, clans of demons living deep underground, kaiju hailing from eras past that regularly menace the world, and even Cecil mentions there are villains who "only exist in dreams." (That one tickles me, since it more plainly suggests the existence of evil spirits.) So with such a varied smorgasbord of creatures and threats to choose from, does any of this still count as "supernatural?" Or is it all so normal to their world that there is no such thing, anymore?

For the sake of the question, though, let's say Cecil gets careless with his powers and attracts the attention of another supernatural force that does align more traditionally "good." Cecil himself is at odds with the demon he dealt with, his only real loyalty to it being their pact; he has no obligation to serve it otherwise. He's not secretly carrying out its agenda or paving the way for its rule or anything and so his own disposition towards "opposite" entities is neutral - that is to say, he has no reason to view them (or their agents) as immediate threats. The diplomacy with which he initially approached Nolan comes to mind.

Now he might not view them as a threat, but the reverse may not be true (competition can be cutthroat, after all). Cecil isn't above defending himself, especially knowing what happens if he dies, so...

I guess the short answer is that even less duplicitous bargainers than himself are potential allies until they aren't. Since moral alignment doesn't matter too much to him, all he'd see is another with similar abilities to himself, and since there's not really an obvious "holy burns evil" thing going on here (for now, cough) he'd chalk their resistance to his influence up to sheer strength. And the GDA could always use another superpowered someone on their payroll.

character ask game