Origin Stories: Succubus
We mentioned last time that it’s been almost a year since we started our Magus/Demon Queen storyline. Knowing that the anniversary of their cat fight is just around the corner on Devil’s Night, it seemed like the perfect time to focus on fiendish plots. That’s why we were so pleased with the results of this month’s Patreon poll. Asked which hero deserves a proper origin story, our Quest Givers gave a decisive victory to Succubus. Of course “hero” is stretching things a bit. Our resident bad girl has been serving the powers of darkness ever since her days in the blackest depths of the secretarial pool. One can only surmise what she might do if she ever discovered that her treacherous former coconspirator was now trapped in the body of a vulnerable catfolk.
While our characters barrel towards their inexorable date with destiny (which I should probably write at some point), what do you say we talk about the hierarchy of fiends? There’s a lot to draw on.
If you want to base your adventures in the default setting of the world’s most popular roleplaying game, the Blood War offers a lovely backdrop. That storied conflict features hordes of ravening monsters on the demons’ side, endless armies of infernal soldiers on the devils’ side, and an uneasy set of upper planes spectators hoping that neither side gains the advantage. This military conflict has the added bonus of showcasing the differences between chaotic and lawful evil outsiders, helping to distinguish them from the “generic evil” alignment.
Speaking of “generic evil,” Succubus herself offers an excellent example. When I first met the monster back in my 3.5 days, succubi were always chaotic evil demons. The 5e version has rearranged that taxonomy, designating the succubus/incubus as a neutral evil fiend. That means you’re officially free to treat them however you like. A succubus in your game can be a creature of a wild malevolence who dwells in the Abyss, a figure of patient manipulation who hails from the Hells, or a free-wheeling red girl just trying to find love in a big, uncaring multiverse. It’s all fair game.
Of course, the real trick is that you’re allowed to give this kind of treatment to any fiend, regardless of edition. The denizens of the lower planes are fun because of their diversity. Sure you risk losing a bit of flavor when you homogenize, but you gain a lot of freedom in return. That means “chaotic” demons in an office setting, “lawful” devils who moonlight as barbarians, or even iconoclast characters whose personalities explicitly break the mold. If you’ve ever met an evil angel or a succubus in paladin armor, you know what I’m talking about.
That of course leads us to our question of the day! How do you like to characterize your fiends? Do your demons skew towards a monoculture of psychopathic rage? Are all your devils mean-spirited accountants? Or do you prefer infernal critters with just as much individuality as their human counterparts? Tell us how you divide your personal Hell down in the comments!
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In my setting, ‘demons’ are a species of shapeshifting predators from the Underworld: a realm of endless darkness and void. Any matter there needs to be pulled together and formed by an act of will. The strongest lords and ladies assemble lands for their minions to live on.
Demons did not find out about things like light and eyes until they were first summoned by mortals, but they took to the mortal realms in a big way. They are predatory by nature, and the mortal realms have abundant food and energy, and do not require a demon to constantly focus on their form to keep from reverting into something hideous.
Uncivilized demons will hunt mortals for food, slaves and sport – but would do the same to their own.
Civilized demons are smarter about it. They cut deals and maintain trade enclaves in the Underworld, where brave and cunning merchants can barter with them.
While demons are not by nature concerned with mortals’ souls, they are often confused for devils – fallen angels, beings of corrupted cosmic might – and have learned to work a soul contract. On occasion, they will transform mortals they want to preserve – for whatever reason – into lesser demons.
Some demons feel they are above the whole hunting and warring, and live in austere isolation, studying the nature of their own realm. Others take their predatory nature to extremes and scheme to conquer both mortal lands and their own dark infinity. Yet others act as destructive pranksters. All demons are immortal until slain, capable of shapeshifting, and have strong instincts to hunt, breed and dominate. How they deal with these differs between various tribes, like Cornomusca, Golsse and Vadakiir, and even between individuals.
Some parts of the Underworld are a warzone. In others, dark cities drift serenely, dreaming dark dreams.
I saw some art book in Barnes and Noble back in the day. I think it was called “inferno,” and depicted demons as the native inhabitants of Hell before the fallen angels moved in.
…
Neat! Finally found it after all these years:
https://waynebarlowe.com/artwork/hell/
I really ought to pick up a copy, because it’s exactly the kind of macabre that I love.
Wow. I ran into this web page (I didn’t even get to explore the site, just the page…) years and years ago and wasn’t sure if it was real or just something out of a dream ever since.
Honestly, I forgot just how haunting and… hellish the architecture and biological designs are; I never realised that this is part of a book.
I could say more, but I’ll keep it short and say that I owe you a drink for re-introducing this to me, Ms Stricklin.
Well hey, if you happen to be in Atlanta this Friday:
https://twitter.com/HandbookHeroes/status/1579937667235868672
But yeah, I always regretted not picking up that art book. It looked like fantastic inspiration and worldbuilding.
That’s an absolutely fantastic take over the usual lore, I love it. Gives a lot more depth into their character variety!
Well, thank you very much! ^_^
I prefer looking at old folk lore from various places, mostlynleaning on the little we have about the Finnish lore that isn’t obvously corrupted by christianity. For example fiends are just spirits with bad intentions on humans. But even a good spirit will become mischievous and harmfull if badly treated, Sauna Tonttu being a prime example.
Also I prefer to have things like that not as physical chalenge but mental, using smarts and charisma to trick or talk your way out, like in many old tales.
And as world is full of intresting folk lore, some one who wants a change of the european medieval vibes most fantasy has, could use any other continent or era to fit a game in, armors can be just renamed or above certain point erased.
And as some DnD settings use the old norse gods, you don’t have to change much, for a campaing inspired by Saga of Ragnar(Vikings) or Saxon chronicles(Last kingdom). But if you do, pkease for the love of Freya do not nmae female character with last name ending in son, it’s dottir. Be smarter than the mouthbreather who wrote or cast for Vikings: Ragnarök
Of course in warhammer the lesser deamons are stuxk to a template, greater deamons can have variavle personalities as do princes, bit tend to be in a line with their deity. Khornes deamon princes will all try to kill you while singing “Gory, gory what a hell a way to die” and trying to not enjoy it too much, because that is excess and slaneesh worship.
Do you have a “bad afterlife” in your setting? I mean, if demons and devils and “mischievous fae” like tonttu are all basically the same critter, what guards the gates of the underworld?
I don’t ours had a quardian but you have to cross a rapid river with razor sharp blades flowing in it, you lived a good life you get ferried over. You lived badly you had to swim across and be cut to pieces and being eaten by swans. Also the old “gods” were more spirits with specific aspects to them. The god of death for example wasn’t one, it was a family with each theirbown specific aspect.
And one old belief was that you shouldn’t mourn the deceased as it would prevent their spirit from moving on. so people celebrated the times spent with the deceased. As one can quess the church was not a fan of this custom.
Succubus realized there and then that DQ was a rising star… and she should do her utmost best to not get in the way of whatever she wanted!
That’s the face of, “Oh shit, I’m not the Queen Bee after all.”
Individualized. Sure, it’s harder to do that with the lesser demons and devils… you can get away with giving the odd one a bit more personality, but if you do it too much they end up too relatable… more human than fiend. But whenever the big guns appear, they tend to be named and a bit more detailed.
That’s something I love with Exalted… that once you step up to the second and third circles, they’re all named individuals. There’s no generic “I summon a pit fiend” — there’s “I summon Makarios, the Sigil Dreamer”, because only his powers will serve your purpose… summoning the Living Tower wouldn’t do you any good. And if none of the published ones fits, you can always make new ones…
> too relatable… more human than fiend.
I suppose it’s the same issue as the “dwarf monoculture” or the “elf monoculture” problem. You don’t want play a human in a dragonborn suit, but by the same token you want to portray an individual. I suppose it’s useful to establish a “mainstream culture” and then orient a character towards or away from that.
What’s the problem with having a human-like antagonist?
It’s the “alien perspective” thing from Star Trek. If your nonhumans are just people with wrinkly foreheads, it feels like a failure of imagination. For example, shouldn’t a 300 year old elf somehow “feel” different than a human?
The question is how seriously you take that issue.
A very valid point. I’ve always wanted non-human races to feel definably *different* to humans in ways more signfificant than just a few cultural hats. You often see the alternative – where everyine is essentially human – and some (lookin’ at you, Mercer!) take it to extremes with human orcs… human goblins… human gnolls… human, um, elephant-people?
When I built my magnum-opus fantasy setting (something I’m sure every forever dm gets around to eventually!), one of my many missions was to create distinctly different feels to all the sentient species present. So I went “Pinian” on elves – turning them into a perpetually stone-age culture psychologically averse to long-term thinking. I turned dragonborn into actual dragons, but with a recessive chromosonal abnormality that leaves them stunted, sterile, yet with much more rapid cognitive development. And so on.
I only dare this much because I have a coterie of loyal and admiring players willing to give my whims some time, of course. But clearly the answer to the question you pose is, for me: very.
Nothing, if they’re supposed to be human — but if they’re supposed to be demons, they should have personality traits to match. And when you’ve got one demon functioning as a named NPC, that’s not too hard… you can throw in some suitable quirks.
But if you’re actually on a road trip through Hell and everyone you meet is a demon, that’s a bit harder to pull off… you need to do a lot more work if you’re not to have the PCs hanging out in a tavern in the Abyss, playing cards with fiends and listening to them grumble about how bad their boss is. Because at that point, they’re not demons… they’re just generic humans with horns, and Hell is just another big city.
And to be clear, I don’t expect aliens to be totally inhuman… if they’re created by a human GM and interacting with human players, their personalities are going to be fundamentally human. But you need flavour… something that makes them stand out a bit from normal human NPCs… something that influences their actions and behaviour in ways that a human wouldn’t.
> if they’re created by a human GM and interacting with human players, their personalities are going to be fundamentally human.
Lacking a proper alien, I wonder if AI might be able to create something that successfully fakes an alien perspective? This stuff is trained on human inputs, but there’s got to be a way to recombobulate those pieces into a different whole.
Could be a new genre of SF lit.
I’m a big fan of Neal Asher’s “Polity” novels, and a recurring theme in his work is that some of the AIs are more human than some of the humans. It’s notable in the way he writes them… his human protagonists are often very focused, while some of his AIs — especially the old war drones — have a real sense of fun. So that’s kind of the reverse of what I’d normally look to do.
Using real-world AI techniques to imitate the inhuman would be interesting. It’s not something I know much about, but I guess you’d be doing it sort of the same way as a human GM would… start with a loosely-human base, but deliberately tweak the rules, mess with the weightings, that sort of thing. In a way, you’re trying to build a human but *deliberately* inducing an uncanny-valley factor…
Insert the Office opening theme, only with demons.
And a band of demons joined in, and it sounded something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epvOsmURyTc
All else held equal, I’d generally pick a banally-evil merchant or noble as my villain before I picked some guy who’s evil because he’s made of evil. I just don’t tend to find that kind of villain interesting. So if I include fiends in my campaign, they’d need to fulfill a role that (demi)human villains can’t. With that in mind, I’d say they work better as a MacGuffin than a villain.
Now, definition time. Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin as “the thing that the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience doesn’t care.” And most characters would care quite a lot if, for instance, a portal to %lowerPlaneName opened up on the material plane.
Maybe it’ll open if you don’t destroy the evil key, or it’s the plot of some crazed cultists, or a side effect of magical rituals the banally-evil upper class is performing to get an edge over the other aristocrats. (“It’s not like emissions from my demonblood incense are meaningfully weakening the barrier between this world and the next!”)
But in any case, the fiends only matter to the players as a hypothetical bad thing that happens if they fail in their quest.
> some guy who’s evil because he’s made of evil. I just don’t tend to find that kind of villain interesting
So like… Why not change the nature of fiends in your setting?
*Nerdily adjusts non-existent glasses* I should point out that none of this is consistent with the current lore! *Hmph*
Firstly Devils don’t have sex organs. (Succubi/Incubi aren’t Devils or Demons, they’re an unaffiliated group of Fiends that will work with either. Also they’re the same thing: A Succubi can become an Incubi and vice-versa based on the needs of who you’re targeting.) You’re not schtupping your way up that hierarchy.
There are three ways to advance in the Infernal hierarchy: Getting souls (What Succubi are good at: Their modern thing is temptation/corruption rather than specifically sex, though sex can be a part of that) distinguishing yourself in the Blood War, and the people above you having unfortunate accidents.
As to that last point, those in the Infernal hierarchy are forbidden from open conflict with each other. They can use go-betweens like mortals and ~~Yugoloths~~ Daemons though.
I was under the impression that “current lore” made succubi a lineage rather than a subrace. :3
In my campaigns, when the party just needs the appropriate amount of pain to make the mission seem worthwhile, then Demons/Devils/etc. are just some HD with attack & damage values and flavor text thrown in.
When, however, something more cerebral is called for, I love nothing better than a terrifyingly OP Efreeti or Crossroads Demon who will (literally or figuratively) pop on the spectacles and the green eye-shade and show a willingness to –negotiate– the terms of the PCs’ surrender/safe passage/temporary nonaggression pact/etc. Expert ranks in Profession (Lawyer) are recommended.
Ah. So your demons signify “dangerous social encounter.” Brilliant!
What happens if the PCs goof in their negotiations? In other words, what does this evil outsider get out of screwing with them? Is it just schadenfreude, or do they have more esoteric motivations?
Mileage and motivations may vary.
Efreet and Oni are –by tradition– contrarians who follow a vague algorithm akin to reverse Benthamism: “maximum suffering to the greatest number of mortals.”
Demons and devils
-) may want to pull a single soul to Hell to make quota
-) may (like Crowley of *Good Omens* or the stranger in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”) be working to corrupt as many as possible just a *teeny* bit at a time to shift the alignment of a community or kingdom, or
-) may (like Lord Ruthven in Polidori’s “The Vampyre”) spread misery through cursed generosity (enabling addicts by giving gamblers money and a temporary luck bonus, wine to encourage alcoholism, food to encourage gluttony prior to starvation).
-) Ideally, your basic crossroads demon coerces their mark into selling their soul for an object, material wealth, or enhanced ability, then boasting of the source of their new macguffin to proselytize more potential marks into making their own infernal bargains. I mean, if the PC wasn’t *using* their soul for anything, I’m sure *somebody* out there has a plan for it. (DM shuffles his notes and pretends to not have a stack of possibilities waiting.)
Well sure, fiends in a whole truck in souls. But what does the individual demon get out of it? Are souls tasty? Can you redeem them for cash and prizes? Do you unlock new spell-like abilities when you get enough?
Just hang on a minute. That dagger looks a lot like Mr Stabby. Same black steel, very similar red glow… is the brain behind Fighter going to get an origin story at some point?
Oh wow… It must be some kind of weird coincidence.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/origin-stories-mr-stabby
>_>
Fancy that. It’s a big world: best not to ask too many questions, right?
Don’t let me discourage any wild speculation and hairbrained theorizing you might like to throw out there. 😀
Demon is a political label. Demons are but servants of the gods that don’t do what they are supposed to do and are send by the gods to hell. A demon becomes such when as a servant of a god of murder they have mercy and protect people as much as a servant of a god of charity going on a killing spree so that people dies and don’t get greedy anymore 🙂
They are send to hell where they can do whatever they want well far from their former god, Supposedly hell is a one way trip. You enter and can’t get out. It was supposed to be a garbage pit but even if things can get out of it they can still get pulled out from outside. So people summons demons and they get to cause trouble and trade for souls 🙂
True is that flaw is made by design. The gods didn’t made hell as a prison but as a bullet. The idea is to have demons do their stuff and collect souls there and get more powerful and then when the need arise use hell as a bullet of cosmic demonic power against the Void 🙂
Without they knowing it that may not work since the demons invented their Art of the Deal based on teachings of the Void and their end of the bargain may involve they don’t using their power against the Void destroying the gods single cosmic bullet 😀
Also the Apocryphals, god-tier mages, made a key to destroy the thaumaturgical barriers that make hell a one way destination which could mean the demons could get loose on the multiverse to do lots of trouble. Making the key was already like declaring war to the gods, something they didn’t wanted, so they hid the key far away of their own hands… by placing it somewhere on hell 😛
Oh no:
https://media.tenor.com/images/2712e6408fb01d56fca548fb94f6e5b2/tenor.png
I will say that this has a powerful whiff of White Wolf about it. I don’t know Mage so well though. Is this extrapolating from multiple books, or is it your own special brew?
You would need a powerful high-level Mage to reach Apocryphal levels 🙂
Kinda 🙂
Apocryphals are supposed to be mages that got way over the top, but the name comes because they may just be magic thinking they are a mage. A sort of living spell that inherited the memories of a mage rather than a mage transcending their mortality to become magic 🙂
Honestly, I prefer them with a great deal of individuality with flavorings of their respective typical backgrounds. But…
Let’s say you have a Devil. And they have levels in Barbarian. And what triggers their rage is things being disorderly.
…is this Devil chaotic as he must be to be Barbarian, or is he lawful because he violently imposes order on the disorderly?
And that’s why I dislike the Law/Chaos axis.
Depending on your edition, homeslice literally can’t be a barabarian if he’s not chaotic. Alignment requirements have serious cosmological implications when taken seriously.
Depends how seriously you take that whole bit. You technically can’t have a chaotic devil because reasons.
I find a lot of the alignment restrictions a bit ridiculous.
Still ironing out details for some of the cosmology in my setting – but basic idea is that celestials / fiends are separate factions from the gods, who both seek to draw souls out of the mortal plane and towards their respective planes (primarily differentiated by very different ideas on how best to treat those souls).
All of the various types of fiends would originate from the same plane, though different subsets (demon, devil, etc.) typically prefer to associate with their own and dominate different regions within the plane. While it isn’t impossible for one to associate with a different group, they’d generally be seen as eccentric and/or an outcast for doing so.
For Demons in particular – they primarily report to one of the “Ten Thousand Minor Lords.” Leaning into the CE alignment, the exact composition of minor Demon Lords changes so often that no one bothers to catalog all of their names, as both literal and metaphorical backstabbing occur so frequently you’d have to remake the list every time you finished it. [Major Demons Lords being those who have survived countless backstab attempts for so long that others don’t reasonable expect them to go away anytime soon.]
—
As a result of this, I actually have an eccentric succubus NPC that I’m still waiting to inflict on my PCs. Unlike many demons, she doesn’t particularly care about the mortal plane and finds it bothersome to interact with mortal races. Instead, she is generally focused on thwarting the BBEG Demon’s plans (whether they’re a rival of her current boss or her current backstabbing target) in hopes that engineering their failure will help further her advancement in the abyssal hierarchy. To that end, she’d end up being a helpful NPC since her goals align with the PCs and she isn’t above asking mortals for help.
As for some of her other quicks. She is terrible at using her innate change shape ability (poor acting ability), and becomes surprisingly upfront about her evil intentions when discovered. (“Sure I’m evil & will probably betray you if convenient, but we both want to stop [BBEG], so why not work together for now and we can go back to killing each other afterward?”) Also really hates bards who would consider her an easy conquest – ranting that the sin of lust is about more than just lewd acts, and requires lewd desires overwhelming reason in some sort of harmful (preferably self-destructive) fashion.
> lso really hates bards who would consider her an easy conquest – ranting that the sin of lust is about more than just lewd acts, and requires lewd desires overwhelming reason in some sort of harmful (preferably self-destructive) fashion.
Have Bard and Succubus ever had a comic together? I feel like they’d have a lot to talk about.
The whole “how do you handle demons” question is why I like the Demons vs Devils thing. You get to have both hordes of (mostly) unthinking destructive murder monsters and civilizations of evil based people.
But there’s all sorts of ways to handle it, so I mostly go with whatever makes sense for the setting/whatever I was inspired to do.
Still, there’s certainly a fondness for this kind of “have your cake and eat it too” approach.
Devil if you need Faust, demon if you need a monster? Sounds reasonable.
Do you have a favorite setting / treatment that handles this distinction?
I like to give major fiend characters as much individuality as other characters. When they’re the main villains, it makes them a lot more fun and memorable when they have their own unique quirks, and I also like to explore them in less villainous roles (I feel the “Always Chaotic Evil” trope has problematic implications, and anyway, subverting expectations is fun). I often play up the non-evil parts of their alignment to help contrast them, emphasising the wild, carefree aspects of demons, the organised, methodical nature of devils, and the flexibility and opportunism of those in between. Sometimes I throw in quirks tied to their particular species too. I’d say my favourite was Darzioka, an arcanaloth who was a serious literature nerd as well as a spell-hoarding schemer – her first line of dialogue was complaining that the fiction novels in the sacred library she’d just conquered weren’t up to her standards.
Agreed. But you’ll sometimes see exceptions carved out for demons and devils in this debates.
I think the only time I’ve written about it is back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mean-girls-part-3-3
Probably my most interesting fiendish interpretation is an NPC who is the daughter of Encardros, the Infernal Duke of exploitative capitalism. (The other capitalism gods include a Neutral deity of creative destruction and a Chaotic Good god of free-market innovation.) She is the product of the Encardros-worshipping cult that runs a city’s merchant guild, and she has extraordinary talent at summoning and binding devils. She uses this talent not for any grand Infernal plan but purely for profit, selling devilish servants and services to any faction that wants some minions or dark magic. She positions herself as completely neutral in the various faction conflicts throughout the city and will sell to anyone, including their enemies. She’s not entirely heartless, though. She once resurrected a poor man’s wife in exchange for him spying for her (though the wife became a tiefling, which they passed down to their son) and developed a soft spot for the PCs. She rarely even backstabs her clients or twists their wishes, because she doesn’t need to – she’s just an arms dealer, and as long as people are fighting, business will stay good. (She WILL occasionally sell to a client and then approach that client’s enemies to sell to them as well. Can’t have one side winning for good, after all!)
I did recently have a campaign (the Pathfinder module “The Moonscar”) where near the end a PC decided to bind a marilith demon to help them fight the powerful demonic villains. They knew that one of the bosses they had recently slain was a servant of the Demon Lord Zura before switching to the villains’ patron Nocticula, so they specifically summoned a marilith servant of Zura and offered it the head of that slain boss (as well as the swords they had taken from killing a Nocticulan marilith) if it would help them kill the demon who convinced that slain boss to defect. They rolled well on the checks (the marilith was also partial to the summoning PC on account of the PC being a tiefling with an Oracle curse that caused her to eat demonic flesh, which roughly fit Zura’s portfolio as Demon Lord of vampires) and got a CR 18 ally who didn’t even particularly try to betray them at the end – after all, the marilith got the heads of two of Zura’s great enemies to submit for a promotion for a pretty small amount of work. Evil can be managed as long as you have the proper incentive structures.
In general, “evil vs evil” is a fun way to deal with fiends. In my current campaign, a balor demon is about to escape unless the PCs stop it, and a squad of devils is trying to stop the crisis as well, but will probably get in a fight with the PCs because the devil plan involves murdering a bunch of people to reseal the balor. But these are PCs, so maybe they’ll agree to help with that too.
> Evil can be managed as long as you have the proper incentive structures.
Well said. And not a bad model for “evil PC in a mixed party” characters.
> But these are PCs, so maybe they’ll agree to help with that too.
“So… Which people are we murdering? I don’t care who does the sacrificing, so long as I get to do the nominating.”
–Boss Tweed, probably
Is it just me or does the dead demon look like the boss from Ugly Americans?
Oh dang… I haven’t seen that show in ages!
Loved the aesthetic, but the comedy gave me the same issues as Rick and Morty. Pitch black is fun for a few eps, but it becomes actually-depressing over multiple seasons.
Is this an origin of villainy or adventuring? It seems like there’s a lot of ground not covered between birth (creation? Genesis?) and this promotion for Succubus. Or is this more DQ’s backstory?
Seems like a pretty strait line between “lousy work environment” and “seeking new career” with Witch:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/powers-of-persuasion
What were DQ’s and Succubus’s titles before this corporate coup?
https://cdn.britannica.com/82/191982-131-D3194343/ball.jpg
You’d think the first thing a high ranking demon/devil would make foolproof is the stab-ability of their back. Grow some natural armor back there!
What makes you think he didn’t? That dagger looks pretty gnarly!
Given the length of their horns, we can now assume Succubus and DQ are Cougars/Hags in the present, age-wise.
You can theoretically count the rings in their horns to see how old they are. You can also theoretically not get stabbed to day with a pitchfork.
I WISH TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT THIS HAPPENED.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/championship-round
Vulnerable catfolk, yes, but said catfolk has had prior (positive!) interactions with Succubus! The real question is, how is she going when she finds out exactly WHICH catfolk is inhabiting the body of her longtime colleague/boss, and whose body said colleague/boss is left inside…
We should not forget this!
Glad I’m not the only one paying attention to the storyline. 🙂
I’ve said it before, but it’s a tightrope balancing the pleasing-to-longtime-fans story arcs with the accessible-to-newcomers gags that are Handbook’s bread and butter.