From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

Contents 1 Personality 1.1 Skittish 1.2 Passive/Submissive 2 Background 2.1 Stream 2.2 The Freezing 2.3 Rituals 2.4 Freedom

Personality

Skittish

Vex has been abused by mankind often in his millennia of existence, both as a water fae and as a freed being. Therefore he does not trust people easily and is rather shy around strangers.

Passive/Submissive

Male naiads are characteristically passive and submissive, serene like the waters they are linked to. Vex is no different, generally just going with the flow, doing what others do or what others in authority tell him to.

Background

Stream

Once upon a time, in the land that is now known as Russia, a small stream traveled a short distance from a forest spring to a small lake. A rare male naiad was linked to this stream. His name was Vesxim Sporlid, the meaning of which is lost to even him today.

Vesxim, like most of his kind, was shy and reclusive. He didn't inspire many stories. In fact most of the stories he did inspire came after the lake had frozen over permanently and his stream was in danger of doing the same.

The Freezing

The world around him was freezing, and Vesxim knew his stream would quickly do the same. He had, himself, become sluggish in the cold. His quickness to flee from mortal eyes was diminished. It started as glimpses of what appeared to be a freezing boy. Later it was more clear what he was.

Vesxim, however, slipped into hibernation after his stream froze up. All that was left was the bed and a few panes and shards of ice. As these remnants began to sublimate, Vexim was in danger of dying out altogether. However, a human had different ideas.

Rituals

A shaman had come to the stream bed and laid down various ritualistic paraphernalia and begun his chants. This pulled Vesxim out of hibernation and severed his link to the stream he embodied. He was rebound to a flask of enchanted ice from the stream bed.

Vesxim thus became a curiosity, like many other dying fae creatures the shaman had collected. At first Vesxim was too sluggish to care. But as he got used to his new self, he begun to resent his enslavement.

When the collector aged and died and his collection was passed down to his children and sold to pay off debts, Vesxim was passed from person to person as a trinket until he landed in the possession of a rather nasty slaver.

This slaver not only employed slaves to do his work, he bred them to sell to others as well. When the true nature of the trinket he has acquired was discovered, the man didn't hesitate to put Vesxim to work in the house as well as showing him to guests as an oddity.

Usually gentle and passive, submitting to the whims of others, Vesxim grew tired of his imprisonment. He worked with some of the human slaves, who subversively sought a ritual and materials to free Vesxim. This new ritual freed Vesxim from the imprisonment of the enchanted ice flask and rebound him to himself.

Freedom

Vesxim wasted no time in freeing the other slaves and smuggling them out of the area. Vesxim himself traveled back to his stream bed, only vaguely identifiable as such. He laid himself down and went into a state of hibernation, content to sleep for eternity.

He was roused millennia later, however, when a group of criminals were using the area where his stream once flowed as a place to hold several captives. Vesxim called upon his inner reserve and flung ice shards at his adversaries while using ice shields to block the captives from harm.

Vesxim remained awake this time, after freeing the captives from their captors, using his own freedom to spread hope and freedom to others. Traveling the now-alien world, he setlled in Paragon City, where so many from across the globe, and across the multiverse itself, had come to bring aid to the virtuous causes of the City of Heroes.