Daughter Superior Virginia is the Priestess of my nascent Cawdor gang, the Daughters of the Damned. She’s based on a Sister Novitiate figure with the Redemptionist Brazier added to her head (it’s a perfect fit for the Novitiates, and thankfully saved me from trying to figure out how to fit one of the actual pyromantic mantles to her). The chain axe head was added to one of the novitiate melee weapons and the autopistol arm is magnetised so I can upgrade her weapons mid-campaign if I get the creds. (Although, realistically, by the time I’ve forked out for a brace of cherubs and the pyromantic mantle – which is just for show in my 1000 cred starting list – there probably won’t be much campaign time left.)
Daughter Superior VirginiaHer parents had always known Virginia had an addictive personality, really,
really embracing whatever the current focus of her attention was, but invariably latching on to something else in due course. However, in her young teens, her addiction to the pict-cast series “Seraphim Squad Sanctus” endured far longer than anything before it. Her incessant demands for the latest toys, the perpetual insistence of pretending to be one of her heroines, acting out her favourite adventures, and the tantrums that ensued whenever they tried to watch a different pict-cast as a family taxed her parents’ patience to breaking point.
In the end, in a bid to break her out of her addiction to the series, they enlisted the help of their local Ministorum preacher. They reasoned that Virginia was fixated on the glamour of the Adepta Sororitas, but overlooking the austere life of penitence and prayer that occupied them when not protecting us all from heretics, mutants and xenos. At the preacher’s suggestion, they sent Virginia on a Schola Progenium junior camp to give her a flavour of the austere life of service to the Ecclesiarchy, assuming her materialism and love of comfort would shake her out of her current addiction.
This intervention was successful, in that after she returned from the camp, she never watched an episode of “Seraphim Squad Sanctus” again. However, in place of her addiction to a pict-cast, Virginia turned her intense focus to studying the Imperial Creed and applying its tenets to her life. In hindsight, the way she gathered up her “Seraphim Squad Sanctus” toys and burnt them in a pyre in their mansion’s grounds should have been a warning sign that her embrace of the Imperial Creed was not going to involve any half measures. At first, her adoption of a more ascetic life simply meant she abstained from some of the more material luxuries the rest of the family enjoyed and attended church more frequently.
However, after attending a sermon by a visiting House Ko’iron Prima Materis, Virginia became more fundamentalist and began proselytising her faith. This got tiresome. Very quickly. Virginia’s parents were part of a wealthy merchant family in the upper reaches of mid-hive (they lived below The Wall, but had contacts above it and occasionally had permission to travel up to the Spire for social and business functions). They attended church every week, donated to the Ecclesiarchy and believed in the God Emperor of mankind, but weren’t going to sacrifice their lifestyle or adopt the more austere interpretations their daughter was now espousing.
Virginia’s new, more fundamentalist approach to her faith was further fed by her attendance of Ecclesiarchy study sessions at their church. These were led by a visiting preacher who’d spent time as a missionary in the Underhive, and was sponsored by House Ko’iron to hold weekly sessions at the churches in that sector of the hive.
Things reached a head when Virginia flew into a righteous rage at a party her parents were hosting for some business contacts, including a Spire Noble. Denouncing the materialistic display of wealth as an affront to the Emperor, she accused all present of being little better than heretics, paying lip service to the Imperial Creed whilst looking only to their own comfort. Virginia’s outburst ended up costing her family several contracts, millions of creds and considerable social standing.
As a consequence of Virginia’s actions, her parents confined her to her rooms and banned her from going to church, or attending the study sessions. Despite the strength of her faith, and her ascetic interpretation of its requirements, she had hitherto shied away from the more militant exhortations of the Ko’iron missionary. Therefore, whilst Virginia initially raged against her confinement, she eventually sought solace in quiet prayer and contemplation. Eventually, she was given free rein of the house, but still bared from leaving (and locked back in her rooms whenever guests called). As Virginia’s confinement stretched into months, she eventually began to hear the Emperor answering her prayers and offering her guidance. Whether this truly was the God Emperor himself choosing to speak to one of his most loyal followers, or Virginia’s fragile mind beginning to crack will never be known.
Be they were divine words whispered into her ear, or the imagined voices of a mad woman, after months of acquiescence, Virginia was driven to act. Convinced that her parents’ actions were a betrayal of the Emperor, she saw no choice but to do what she must to save their souls from the fires of eternal damnation. Thus, one night, when the household was fast asleep, she took a can of promethium from the garage and snuck into her parents’ room. Her parents awoke as she doused their bed in promethium – the shock of the cold liquid seeping through the bedding and the acrid smell rousing them from their slumber. The last thing either of them ever heard (other than their own screams) was their daughter condemning them:
“You have shied from the Emperor’s light, and tried to draw me into your heresy. By your actions have you damned your souls for eternity; only the cleansing purity of holy flames can rid your souls of the taint of sin. I hereby grant you the Emperor’s peace!”
With that, she flicked a lho-stick lighter onto the bed and the room went up in flames.
The sound of her parents’ screams echoing in her ears, Virginia fled the house and made for the only sanctuary she knew. On any other night of the week, Virginia would have found the parish preacher at the church. Whilst he admired her faith, he was wary of the more fundamentalist interpretations of it, would absolutely have condemned Virginia’s actions and called the Enforcers. That night though, the Emperor smiled upon his daughter, and she encountered the Ko’iron missionary first. Unbeknownst to the parish preacher, the missionary had Redemptionist sympathies (developed during his time in the Underhive). Knowing the fate that awaited Virginia if the authorities found her, and being not entirely unsympathetic to the burning of the faithless, he arranged to have her smuggled down-hive into the care of House Cawdor.
As a novitiate in a Cawdor gang, the Sisters of Mercy, Virginia finally found her spiritual home. Despite her sheltered upbringing, her burning faith granted her the strength to prosper amidst the violence of the Underhive and she soon rose to the status of Cawdor Sistren. Over the years, she became battle-hardened and her faith was honed into a burning fury; it was inevitable that she would eventually don the (pyromantic) mantle of the Redemption.
Eventually branching out on her own, she drew kindred spirits to her banner and established her own gang, the Daughters of the Damned – women united by having fled parents who strayed from the Imperial Creed and are thus irrevocably damned. In a slight break from traditional Cawdor/Redemptionist delineation, Daughter Superior Virginia only grants the red of the Redemption to those Daughters who have purged their parents’ damned souls by granting them the Emperor’s peace. The Daughters of the Damned now control their own little corner of the Underhive, bringing the Emperor’s cleansing flames to the heretic, the mutant and the insufficiently pious alike. LET IT ALL BURN!
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April 27, 2024, 12:23:14 PM
August 10, 2011, 08:16:24 AM
