Diaz
Lion/snake hybrid golem character description
TRIGGER WARNING for supernatural self-harm.
Diaz is the self-appointed security guard of a museum he's built in which to hold his own artwork. He would never think it fit to expose his art to any other eyes than his own, and would feel too guilty to make anyone else pay to hold exhibits of it or to look at it. He's a marble golem with the upper body of a lion and the lower body of a snake, and he hates himself. Diaz suffers for his art, and is a full subject of the tyranny of appearances whose critical sense of aesthetics has been pushed to an extreme to become inversely proportional to how hideous he's always felt he looked. He has the mother of all body image issues, and feels that he's responsible for bringing as much beauty into the world as he can to compensate for the ugliness that his own existence has inflicted on it, because of all the occasions on which his artistic talent has not prevented onlookers from being horrified by his own appearance.
Marble lions have long served as the proud guardians of museums and official building everywhere, but although nagas also have a long history of serving as the noble-hearted guardians of temples and other official buildings as well, snakes are rarely if ever looked upon with the same reverence as lions are. Those who stumble into his museum sometimes assume that since he's part snake, they must be at risk of having him turn them to stone with a mere glance, even though he possesses no such ability, simply because the medusa did. There are oil paintings on the walls and wax statues on pedestals all over the room, paintings and statues of humanoid rats, otters, foxes, snakes, rabbits, lions, dragons, wolves and bats in various poses, denoting a high level of attention to detail and a precise, patient stroke of the brush and chisel. If the paintings or statues are in any way damaged or destroyed, the oil or wax that they're made from is animated so that it will gather back to its point of origin to reassemble into its original form.
The paintings and statue pedestals are all framed by 2 and 4 marble columns respectively, there are vases on top of small tables in the 4 corners, buckets of oil paint and wax under those same tables with brushes next to them, blue curtains over the walls, a yellow ceiling, and thick red carpeting on the floor. The sound of a gramophone playing an opera echoes through the room coming from speakers in the 4 corners of the walls near the ceiling, giving the museum a quaint, mournful atmosphere. Mirrors hang from the walls between paintings so that visitors can compare themselves to the paintings and statues and determine the extent to which the representations of them resemble their real selves or not, and so that corrections can be made to them in case they don't.
"If you're making a sculpture of an elephant, what you do is first you take a block of marble, and then you chip off everything that doesn't look like an elephant." He really took those words to heart, and they're rarely far from his mind. He only makes art in the hopes that people will find it after he'll have long since died and disappeared himself, so when people stumble into his museum while he's still in it to lay eyes on him, Diaz panics. And you really don't want to be around when Diaz panics.
He becomes so afraid that people will look at him and that he'll have to see the look of horror on their faces that he starts running around trying to hide wherever he can before they can find him, but he's never together enough as it's happening to do it in a very well organized way. He starts slithering up and down all the columns, alternating between holding them with his lion arms or snake tail to move headfirst or tail first, speed crawls under the thick red carpet or behind the blue curtains accidentally knocking people over as he scrambles to get away from them. He can shoot lasers from his eyes, which he usually only uses to make minor corrections to paintings or sculptures from up close, but when people are in the room and he begins to interpret their reactions to his artwork as negative, Diaz - who really needs to learn how to handle criticism a lot better - begins to try to make corrections to them so that they'll look better as fast as possible from wherever he is, not always stopping to think of whether there's someone in the way of the lasers or not, which would get even trickier for him to do when they start bouncing on the mirrors on the walls.
But the most disturbing thing he does is that, when people do see him and he sees that look of horror on their face, even though he feels pain from it the same as someone would if it were their own flesh, Diaz takes his hammer and chisel to himself. He roars deafening lion roars from the pain as he does it, and the chunks of marble that fly off from his body from the columns near the ceiling rain down upon visitors, along with the wax and oil that bleed out from his wounds, risking landing in people's eyes as it falls or having people slip on them and fall after it does. He especially takes out his anger on his snake tail, chipping away at it hoping to split it into the two legs he wishes he'd been born with instead, or at least to make it come all the way off, but he's cursed with the same regeneration spell as the paintings and sculptures in the room are, and the pieces of him that come off always end up coming back to him to bring him back to his original hated shape.
The only way to get him to stop panicking is to offer to pose for him for a statue or a painting. When he stops being focused on himself, and can turn his attention completely to another person and to the execution of his artwork, his mind becomes too preoccupied for there to be enough of it left to worry about his own flaws, and he gives himself over to the creative process instead, losing himself in it and forgetting that he's even there. Those are the only times in his life during which Diaz can remember having really been happy, for a change.
"It's really the flaws on a sculpture or on a painting that make it look realistic, neither of them will look real if it's more perfect than the person that it represents would be. And it's really the flaws on a person's personality that make that person real, which is why the blocks that people themselves consist of are sometimes best left uncarved."