Actuary Winternight
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Actuary Winternight is a demon of Lilitu's brood, acquired through a "strongly encouraged transfer of resources" by the fledging Primal Earth branch of UniStyxHellCorp, Inc.
Contents |
Background
In dire circumstances, an archdemon can spawn a brood of thirteen, endowing each with a measure of their own strength, knowledge and cunning. The brood can be focused on a particular area of magic depending on the archdemon's wishes, and there are specific names for each of them. The newly created demons usually fight among themselves until the weakest are culled, providing a small group of strong and unfailingly loyal defenders for the original archdemon. There is usually one strongest and quite cunning demon in a brood, which becomes the alpha, and one most cunning and not as strong, which becomes the second-in-command. The demons usually do not have individual names, instead being referred to as "The first of the brood", "The second of the brood" and so on, with the qualifying name of the brood if applicable.
When she was threatened by Sublime Razor of UniStyxHellCorp, Lilitu chose to make her brood focused on the magic of cold and death, spawning thirteen Winternight demons.
As in all cases when a parent's strong qualities are distributed randomly between several offspring, sometimes exceptional coincidences will occur. The most cunning of this Winternight brood was also the weakest. With the knowledge she possessed, her self-preservation instinct overrode her loyalty to her brood-mother. Instead of fighting for dominance with her brood-siblings, she feigned death. Instead of fighting for the strongest souls with the most delicious sins, she contented herself with the ones none of the others wanted - accountants and paper-pushers, guilty of white-collar crime: embezzlement, fraud, and the occasional payment for assassination.
Combined with her cunning and the knowledge she had gathered, this made the last of the Winternight brood - the last *surviving* of the brood, after Razor was finished - a unique thing among Primal Earth demons, a cold and calculating thing who could give exact estimates of expected return on soul-buying offers.