Ultimate Bio: Koten

Name: Koten

Titles and Aliases: The Murk, Chaos, Ol' Daddy Random, Entropy, The Crooked Alley, The Grinning Derelict, etc.

Goals: His methods are not a means to an end. The means is the end as far as he is concerned. Fishwaffle.

Associated Colors: Purple, Black.

Associated Elements: Water, Darkness, Earth.

Positive Attributes: Completely non-judgmental, never holding a grudge or expecting his orders to be followed, instead encouraging anyone he meets to do whatever they want. Values freedom. Can sometimes be pretty funny.

Flaws: Extremely capricious and unstable, just as likely to kill you as he is to grant you immortality. Rejects structure and order, which will often cause reality to glitch out around him whenever he appears. Can sometimes be downright childish.

Common/Preferred Forms: A black, feculent sludge that is hot and sticky to the touch (like molten tar) and leaves behind a cold and slippery trail wherever it slithers, a black-haired homeless male of indeterminate ethnicity and shifting age who wears dark clothing and goes barefoot, a skyscraper-sized humanoid figure wearing a purple hooded robe that obscures his features (save for glowing purple eyes and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth exposed in a perpetual grin) sitting upon a gigantic throne, and a hellish dimension of constantly-shifting properties and landscape which is inhabited by multiple deceased souls (as well as a few other things that are far older) and can only be accessed from the mortal plane via a randomly-appearing alley that always looks crooked, dark, and ominously out of place in a way that can't be properly explained. In this latter form, Koten might appear within the dimension in another of his forms, acting as a sort of overseer or spectator.

History: Koten is Chaos. Period. He and his brother Oballa were the first minds to exist, forming naturally in the pre-universal abyss from which all time began. After gaining sentience, the two brothers created a universe together. Liking it, they decided to create more and more, eventually creating a multiverse that is now called the Ago, held together by the first universe they built which served as a keystone or linchpin. In the Ago, Koten and Oballa were well-known by the denizens of the multiverse, who worshiped the brothers and revered them as Gods. They created a pantheon of smaller Gods, called the Sovereign, to interact directly with their worshipers and perform "minor" tasks such as making the sun rise and inducing creatures to evolve in various universes. Eventually something went wrong in the keystone universe. It was destroyed, and soon the Ago fell apart with it. The brothers created a second multiverse some time after, but this time pulled back the Sovereign and kept their existence a secret out of guilt for screwing up the first time, and instead gave the sentient life in these universes the capacity to create their own Gods via faith and empower them with worship. The two brothers found this satisfactory, and agreed to maintain that system while they continued to create and play in secret.

Unfortunately, that was about the only thing that they agreed on. Koten, having a predilection for unrestricted freedom and random disorder, often did things that irked his brother Oballa, who valued rigid control and ordered designs. Their squabbles often resulted in billions of universes being torn apart. Eventually, after their fighting got bad enough (to the point that the second keystone universe was almost destroyed), the two agreed to create a mediator. After many failures, they finally created a little sister who was equivalent to them in power but didn't want to supplant them: Ragh-Ne-Rok, who serves as a diplomatic mediator between her brothers due to her ability to see both the positive and negative sides of their plans. Of course, she is often ignored anyway as the brothers are hard-headed.

While initially appearing as a being of evil to most people, Koten's morality is actually more complex and alien than what most humans and subsentients can understand. He values freedom above all else, and considers disorder to be a virtue. His terrifyingly-random behavior, coupled with his dark appearance and snarky sense of humor, will often come across as villainous when viewed through the lens of conventional morality. However, he has also been seen engaging in behaviors that most would consider benevolent, such as creating and preserving free will, shrugging it off (or even approving) when his servants and children disobey him or make a mistake, and blessing those who stand against tyranny and follow their own hearts. When a toddler accidentally slips and falls down the stairs, breaking every bone in his body, that is Koten. When a crack appears in the sidewalk and a seed falls off of a person's shirt and into the crack, sprouting into a beautiful flower, that is also Koten. Good and evil are meaningless concepts to him. If the psychopath who murders people and the doctor who saves lives are both doing what they truly want to do, then both are doing the right thing as far as he is concerned.

In the few universes where the Ultimates are known about and worshiped (either due to residual memories of the Ago or the universes advancing enough that their existence is discovered), Koten is revered as the patron God of chaos, anarchy, freedom, defiance, life, luck, revelry, insanity, darkness, water, earth, oil, will, Substance, and tenacity. He accepts offerings of whatever one has on their person at the time or whatever they can gather without thinking about it. Summoning him is random and different for every person every time, and he can sometimes be summoned by accident. He enjoys games of chance such as dice or roulette, and his favor can sometimes be bought by gambling with him. Winning or losing appears to be entirely irrelevant.