(By Julian Mensch)

He just wants everybody to know the truth. That's the primary thing you have to remember when dealing with Litheroy; ultimately, he's a simple being.

The world is filled with illusions, with malicious hatred covered by a thin film of innocence. Litheroy wants to take that film away, to reveal to mankind the simple lesson that he himself learned so long ago: there are no heroes. There is no such thing as goodness, just varying degrees of skill at faking it. Litheroy firmly believes that every Archangel in the heights of Heaven is a black-hearted monster, and however twisted that impulse has become in the mind of a Demon Prince, he's still acting out of what, to him, is an overriding moral imperative to expose that evil to the light of day. As the most quintessential Balseraph, Litheroy's personal reality is completely separate from the Symphony, mirroring it only in the things he personally sees and hears. Beyond the walls of the absolutely proven lies the unknown: a vast sea of malice and evil, all waiting to crash down on the Demon Prince of Accusation unless he can expose it first.

Litheroy attained his rank as a Prince of Hell for betraying Gebbeleth, the original Archangel of Trust, leading to him being slaughtered by Michael. In his mind, Gebbeleth was nothing short of a monster, a terrible deceiver who sought to build false bonds between individuals by working to conceal the inherently evil nature of all sapient beings. Alaemon thus has a tremendous vendetta toward Litheroy, but this isn't held up well on Litheroy's side: he views the new Archangel of Trust as a dupe and an ingenue, barely competent and certainly not capable of the kind of masterful deceptions of her predecessor. He has assigned Raziel, one of his senior Servitors, the Word of Mystery -- the same Word that Alaemon possessed before her ascent to Archangelic status -- and left the matter at that. Raziel is an insidious and subtle demon, and in many ways serves as the Infernal front for the conflict between Accusation and Trust. For his part, Litheroy sincerely believes he is still at war with Gebbeleth, who was surely too cunning to allow himself to be destroyed that easily. Even if he is dead (and, objectively, he quite certainly is), Litheroy will not rest until everything he represented has been scoured from the face of the Earth forever.

In outlook and personal demeanor, Litheroy vacillates between Machiavelli and Gollum, being capable of incredible cunning but having to make a constant effort to conceal his paranoid malice and psychopathic tendencies behind a sheen of casual equanimity, "just like everybody else does." Michael makes a constant effort to keep Litheroy's personal Symphony at least remotely in line with objective reality, so that his accusations remain credible and dangerous, but he has still developed a reputation as something of a crackpot, and when he's placed under stress or emotionally disturbed, he can start to believe the people around him are engaging in truly surreal atrocities. Much of his dementia would be hilarious if it weren't so macabre. Still, for all of his crazed behavior, Litheroy is Hell's primary propaganda machine, and Michael has made it clear that harming him is simply off limits. No other Prince's servants are close to as skilled at whipping the troops, suppressing any rumors of redemption and truly inspiring the Horde to hate Heaven.

Litheroy's organization is chaotic in the extreme. Unlike the fiercely regimented ranks of Condemnation, Accusation is not concerned with such things as chain of command or group initiatives. To outsiders' eyes, Litheroy largely leaves his Servitors to do their own thing with very little central authority. A lack of direction does not imply a lack of motivation, however. Litheroy's paranoia regularly drives him to cull his Servitors -- to casually soul-kill between 2% and 5% of his entire body corpus! No other Superior has this kind of friendly fire death toll going on in his ranks, and for any other Word it would be disastrous. But for Accusation it works: every Servitor is scared for his very life, with no level of Distinction placing one above the possibility of a sudden and arbitrary extinction. The only way to stave off this death sentence is to root out enough dirt on others -- humans, demons, angels, even fellow Accusers -- to keep Roy fascinated and pleased with your progress. Thus it is that a Word known for complete individualism and disorder is also intensely efficient.

Litheroy never lets a demon he created transfer to another Word, and the measures he uses to guard their Hearts range from the merely draconian to the outright lunatic. Redemption attempts are particularly common among Accusers, but successful Redemption is immensely rare -- the terrible nature of service under Litheroy means that it is nearly impossible for the desire for Redemption to be truly selfless. Litheroy loves this -- nothing makes for better propaganda then a Redemption attempt frying the candidate alive. (Of course the Archangel planned it that way all along!) Demons of Accusation don't like each other -- they're all looking to root out guilty secrets, as demons they all tend to have their own skeletons in the closet, and the Darwinism of the Word means that the only real way to ensure their own survival is to get other Accusers killed through their own sins. However, the do have a loose order among themselves, the better to facilitate their work, spread rumors and dig up dirt on whomever happens to be their current project. This network is known informally as the Grapevine, and tends to have a subculture similar to that of human conspiracy theorists, complete with newsletters, Internet sites and shadowy meetings in alleys -- indeed, the 'lone gunmen' image tends to make the Accusers seem more pleasant then they really are to those who don't know a lot about them. It's only when one begins thinking about their theories that the sheer intensity of paranoid, petty malice they bear becomes evident.

The Scary Thing The official party line on Litheroy in Heaven is that he, like all Balseraphs, is a Liar, and his accusations are a tool used to spread fear, paranoia and mistrust. This is, of course, quite accurate. None of this, however, implies that his accusations are not, sometimes, true. Litheroy would be a lot less dangerous if there wasn't some truth behind his venom. While the more idealistic Archangels simply disregard whatever he says on the principle of the matter, Heaven's more pragmatic Superiors do not have that luxury. Litheroy has exposed and destroyed more than one unclean angel, and members of a few different Heavenly Words keep their ears pressed to the grapevine. When Litheroy isn't in his gonzo conspiracy theorist mode, his words can have a great deal of rationality to them. He sincerely believes every accusation he makes -- being a Balseraph, he can hardly knowingly lie -- but he also knows what others think is reasonable, and when he's fully composed and in possession of his faculties, he'll accuse only in ways he thinks his audience will find credible. Thus, he might imply that Makatiel has a secret protocol known only to his most senior Servitors for actively foiling Baal's attempts to kill Hellsworn, but not that his true word is Blood, that he engages in ritual cannibalism with the other Archangels regularly or that he conducts secret genetic research into superviruses, which he considers to be the ultimate expression of Life.The Word of Trust is already a little too "touchy-feely" for many angels' sensibilities, and Gebbeleth has been dead for several millennia now, and is thus unable to offer any kind of defense. It's thus unsurprising (and tragic) how many of Heaven's less empathic angels can be heard repeating macabre rumors about him that find their origin with the Word of Accusation... Even in a world with as stark a moral delineation as that of the INverse, things are not always black and white. For all his terrible malice, Litheroy does operate under one overriding moral imperative: secret sins must be exposed to the light of day. He's not opposed to evil, per se, but he is fanatically opposed to it being concealed by the illusion of good. This makes him an incredibly useful figure to the angels at times -- when something subtle or secretly corruptive is happening, he can be trusted to fight with a surprising tenacity to expose it. Michael is generally fairly honest and forthright about his evil, so this doesn't bother him too much -- but there have been one or two occasions when the First Fallen has swept Litheroy away in the middle of the night, locking him in a dungeon buried deep in the fetid bowels of Damascus. Hell must have some secrets, after all. Others are not so sanguine about his methods, however. His personal crusade has made him the dire enemy of Christopher, who thrives on the appearance of innocence and on sins hidden by shadow and shame. The enmity between these two Superiors is ancient and terrible, and an active danger to anyone caught between them.

DISSONANCE

It is dissonant for a demon of Accusation to have one of his accusations proven to be false. The idea that someone could be truly innocent, devoid of guilt, is so loathsome to these demons' mindset that proof of it fractures their personal Symphonies and drives them to indescribable fury.

BAND ATTUNEMENTS

Balseraphim (Restricted)
A Balseraph of Accusation can manufacture evidence of any crime they believe to be true. This is similar to the canonical Balseraph of the Media attunement, but it affects only longterm media such as papers, fingerprints or computer files. All things that will be altered by this attunement must be in the Balseraph's vicinity when it is used -- the demon can't change computer files hosted offsite, for example. The demon must make a successful resonance roll to "lie to reality" this way, but the duration of the evidence is measured in days, not minutes. The Balseraph can increase this duration using the rules for artifice found in the Infernal Player's Guide normally.

Djinn (Restricted)
A Djinn of Accusation automatically knows the most deviant behavior their attuned has engaged in over the duration of the attunement. These demons are stalkers in the most literal sense, priding themselves in knowing all the most sordid details of their attuned's lives -- the better to torment them with, of course.

Calabim (Restricted)
If a Calabite of Accusation can bring one human to physically strike another human who is defenseless over a perceived or actual transgression the demon revealed, the Calabite may make a resonance roll and add the damage to that inflicted by the original strike (even if the original damage is nothing -- the attunement can be used on a blow as simple as a slap across the face). This one particular use of their resonance causes no disturbance in the Symphony, even if the human dies.

Habbalah
When a Habbalah meets the gaze of another person, they automatically know what single crime, deviance, normally hidden trait or action evokes the most visceral emotional resonance in that person -- the one accusation they are least capable of being objective or forgiving about.

Honorium (Restricted)
When an Honorite resonates a subject, she can choose to force him to expose the greatest sin she has discovered. This functions essentially as the canonical attunement Dark Desire, but the Honorite must first succeed in a resonance roll. The desire implanted is always to either confess the sin in question or to act on it immediately in such a blatant manner as to expose the sinner's nature for all to see (the choice of which depends on the context, at the game master's discretion). The Honorite must verbally accuse the target of the sin in question, immediately after the resonance use, to trigger this ability. (Honorium judge people by their own twisted standards, but for the purposes of this attunement they may only choose to expose things the target feels strongly shameful about. Obviously, since the Honorium resonance reveals things the target really has done, this can't be used to procure false confessions. It can be used to make the target confess to things that are not evil, however. For example, many homosexuals have been humiliatingly outed with this power, and many Seraphim feel a great shame about having to keep the War, and the existence of angels, secret from humans...)

Dark Lilim (Restricted)
If one of these Daughters can sense a Need to preserve a secret, they can claim a geas-hook from that person by telling him what they know and promising not to reveal it. When (not if, never if) they later betray this trust, the geas-hook remains intact even through they have not actually fulfilled the Need.

Shedim (Restricted)
While ridden by a Shedite of Accusation, a Host must succeed in a Contest of Wills with the demon to formulate the belief that any person is trustworthy or innocent of wrongdoing. They do not have to believe a given person is guilty of a given crime, but they know intuitively that everybody is guilty of something, and something serious enough to make them a black-hearted monster in the Host's eyes. For normally trusting people, this manifests only when they stop to think about the people around them, rather then being an abrupt 180-degree shift in worldview. (Note that this attunement is always on, which can make these Shedim suspicious in a normally trusting Host. For this reason, they usually choose Hosts that believe the worst of everyone to begin with...)

Impudites (Restricted)
These demons are Litheroy's blackmailers, gaining dominance over others through knowledge of their secrets. If they have dirt on a subject of their resonance (either aspect), they may add the level of the victim's Need to keep that information secret to all their resonance rolls.

Skulker (Restricted)
Whenever one of these demons hears a disturbance, he may roll Perception to learn if it was caused by an act that the being who caused it feels shame over. If it was, and the check digit of the Perception roll is four or higher, the Skulker also learns the identity of the being who caused the disturbance.

SERVITOR ATTUNEMENTS

Mob Justice
Using this attunement, a demon of Accusation can draw together a lynch mob on the strength of one of her accusations. The people drawn in must view the nature of the accusation as wrongful, but they don't need to be people who would usually engage in mob violence. The attunement takes about half an hour to take full effect, and has no impact on anyone who makes a conscious effort to resist it. Otherwise, given a reasonable setting and an evocative accusation, the demon can drum up five crazed subjects per Celestial Force, and another five for every point of Charisma modifier he has. Unless quickly directed towards an appropriately mobish activity, the group will disperse or choose their own target.

Light of Revelation
This uniquely horrible attunement supernaturally exposes the memories of a subject to everyone nearby. The demon spends two Essence and touches a subject for about a minute; the subject must be adequately restrained, and must fail a Will roll, though torture, degradation or various skills can grant a penalty to the roll at the game master's discretion. At this point, the demon can choose any specific incident he wishes from the subject's memories, and it will be replayed telepathically as the victim experienced it to everybody within a sixty yard radius globe. The memory plays forth in realtime, and the subject is as aware as everyone else of the exposure. If a demon can aim this violation to strike a psychological weak point, it's entirely possible to seriously damage the victim's psyche with this attunement.

Trusted Authority
With this attunement, a demon of Accusation becomes preternaturally persuasive is regard to those beneath him -- gremlins, imps, snotlings, frothlings, weaker etherials, demons who are not as Distincted as he as, and most importantly any humans whose Status is lower than the Status of the demon's Role. In regards to these people, any skill rolls needed to make a given accusation stick (Lying, Knowledges, Savior Faire, etc.) can be boosted by adding the demon's Celestial Forces to the roll. Note that this only works in regard to making accusations in a credible manner; other social activities are unaffected.

Chains of Shame
Using this attunement, a demon of Accusation can literally enslave the soul of a human. The demon must first be instrumental in that human reaching his Fate, and the Fate must be brought about by effectively destroying the target's life through shame and accusations. If these conditions are met, when the victim's soul arrives in Hell it will be bound by three Geas/6's owed to the demon.

DISTINCTIONS

Knight of Truth
The gaze of these demons can cause a target to lose her composure, stammering and stuttering; the demon's Will must exceed the target's for this to be effective. Under this effect, the subject suffers no game penalties, may defend herself as she wishes verbally and isn't otherwise affected -- but her credibility may be severely reduced in the eyes of those around her.

Captain of Justice
If the demon can manage to drive a subject to complete emotional hysteria (or quiet, but equally intense, extended shame and guilt) through the force of her accusations, she can use the ability granted by this Distinction to implant a suggestion toward escape from shame via suicide in the victim's mind. The victim is entitled to a Will roll to resist the effect, and the effect is not instant; it may take hours or even days for the victim to reach a suitable emotion state to kill themselves. If the victim has friends and they offer counsel or emotional support -- or, best of all, refuse to believe false accusations -- this can add a bonus to the roll or negate the Distinction's effect entirely. Note that the emotions that this Distinction depends upon can not merely be conjured by supernatural means such as a Song or the Habbalah resonance; they have to be the genuine result of an effective accusation.

Baron of Vindication
Litheroy's Barons have a very special privilege: access to the Prince's own Book of Sins. In this ancient artifact (which, like the Superior himself, has many manifestations, though it can not be removed from his Cathedral) is recorded, as Litheroy says, the dark and horrible deeds that every living (or otherwise sapient) being has ever committed. The truth is a little more complex: the book contains every accusation that is either true or cannot be firmly disproved. Essentially, it's an ever-bountiful source of the most credible lies possible, written by Litheroy himself and intermingled with the truth of all crimes. Like Yves' library, the sheer bulk of information makes research intimidating and lengthy. Further, the book has a deleterious effect on the psyche of those who delve too deeply into it's profane lore: long term exposure can lead to paranoia, schitzophrenia, disconnection from reality, and ultimately a direct, mind-shattering exposure to the horror that is Litheroy's personal Symphony.

BASIC RITES

-Publicly accuse someone of a serious transgression.
-Deliver evidence of a serious crime to the proper (human, infernal or even divine) authorities.

RELATIONS

Litheroy is commonly known in Hell as being Dominic's bitch. As a minor Superior, he does adopt a distinctly submissive attitude toward the Word of Condemnation, and goes out of his way to aid their endeavors. Dominic is the only other Prince in all of Hell who really Gets It, according to Litheroy's way of thinking, so his loyalty to him is strong. Dominic views Accusation is a significantly more nuanced light -- the evidence Litheroy brings forth against traitors is certainly useful, and his work on Earth certainly furthers Dominic's Word -- but he is also chaotic, unstable and demented. While Litheroy is certainly selfishly solipsistic even by Balseraph standards, there is also a vein of perverted altruism is his mission, and that displeases Dominic. Despite this, simple pragmatism does demand that the two Words work closely together, and so they do.

Because of Litheroy's close relationship with Dominic, he has become something of an intermediary between the Houses of Destruction and Defilement, serving as a medium by which other Princes can pass messages and innuendo back and forth and still, thanks to Litheroy's loose sanity, have plausible deniability. Litheroy is quite pleased with this role, as it gives him ready access to the gossip and intrigues of both of the major Houses of Hell, and lets him keep a careful watch over the Princes of Destruction -- an advantage he would not otherwise possess.

Otherwise, Litheroy's relations vary from week to week. He's more amicable toward other Princes when he's been able to root out sordid details about their affairs. As long as he knows someone's secret sins, he can deal with them equitably. It's only when he can't find any significant accusations that he can make stick that he becomes intensely hateful toward his fellows; this largely manifests in a fanatical desire to prove them guilty of something and tear down everything they do in the meantime.

Allied: Dominic
Associated: [2-3 other Princes]
Neutral: [the remaining Princes]
Hostile: [5 other Princes]
Enemy: Laurence, Christopher, [1 other Prince]

CHANCE OF INVOCATION: 2

INVOCATION MODIFIERS

+1 A tabloid paper (i.e., National Inquirer)
+2 A serious book of negative racial propaganda
+3 A family fighting with real malice
+4 The public outing of a major scandal
+5 The body of a lynching victim
+6 A piece of "smoking gun" evidence in a nation wide scandal