Background: Where to begin?

Nephthys and Noxis are a pair of lower-ranked succubi from Nocticula’s realm in the Abyss, always dreaming of a way to advance their station while ensuring they aren’t backstabbed by everything else in the infinite layers. Circumstances threw the pair together and mutual survivability prevented them being driven apart, and as a result they have a bond that has lasted a thousand years and more...unfortunately.

In the century or so leading up to Deskari exploding and Hell directly invading the Abyss and all the current “fun,” the pair had tried to increase their station. Noxis led an effort to infiltrate and disrupt a rapidly industrializing kingdom on a prime material plane somewhere, and things were going well (for a change)! Usurpations, assassinations, even direct involvement; she used every trick in her book to change the course of the nation’s development, and the crowning moment came when she...and Nephthys...were installed as co-rulers, and dubbed as “goddesses,” for both their power and their great beauty.

And then a neighboring country drove the pair out, with the invading armies led by a pair of angels who’d taken a similar tack to become leaders, just with better funding.

Returning to the Abyss with their plan only partially successful--after all, their country HAD ceased advancing its technological base. Just now the conquering country brought theirs in, instead--Noxis was sent to the never-ending, never-changing fields of the Blood War, where Nephthys shone as a leader...until proper planning was required, of course. Noxis routinely took over, doing all the planning in meticulous and excruciating detail--and then giving up in frustration when the tiniest little setback or unaccounted-for detail would throw a proverbial wrench in the works. Her frustration with Nephthys manifested in frequent bouts of yelling that the thick-headed other succubus routinely ignored, then retaliated with something inane like a hug, which shorted out every ounce of rage and shut Noxis up for a while.

Later, and after both of them had died a score of times, Noxis was sent back to a different Prime, where she decided to take things a little less directly this time. Instead she sought to become the muse of an already-famous artist, inspiring him to greater and more profane and provocative works...until she found out something else was also grabbing his attention. Finally, when the artist had retreated deep into the woods to settle his conflicting emotions and produce his greatest masterpiece yet, her nemesis was revealed: it was Nephthys, and the pair argued for so long and so vehemently that they attracted the attention of a set of bandits who had no eye for the fine arts, and who murdered the artist and took the few gold pieces he’d had with him for his sabbatical.

Their next trip to a prime saw them actually succeed, installing a demon cultist to the throne of a princedom before returning to the Abyss. Flush with pleasure at the success, Noxis paraded her self-importance around like a medal dangling from her neck--which is how she ran into the group of adventurers who’d come from still another Prime in an attempt to demolish Nocticula’s realm. She would have none of that, and seduced, scared off, or slew the entire party. As far as she knows, two of those fallen mortals were remade in her image but far, far down the hierarchy.

Her final adventure saw her and Nephthys disguised and fooling a different set of adventurers into doing her dirty work; the mortals were escorting a dread artifact of great destruction to a major holy temple, though the succubi had convinced the adventurers that the artifact was, in fact, an extremely powerful holy relic that would end the seed of corruption spreading across the land. All went according to plan, though what neither of them knew was that the holy temple had already been infiltrated and desecrated by a different demon’s cult, and was now a seat of power for him on the plane. The pair arrived with their explosive and their heroes just as the cultists were performing a ritual to summon their lord to the plane.

The temple was blown sky high, every mortal in it destroyed, and the ritual forever lost...severing the balor’s ties to the plane and the souls sustaining his presence there. The heroes and all the good people of the world celebrated Noxis and Nephthys as heroes of light...and, rather than return to the Abyss right away and face the wrath of the balor they’d foiled, they opted to remain on that plane for several years in mortal guise and continue the charade of “heroes” of “good.”

All “good” things, of course, come to an end, and after a decade or so the pair returned to the Abyss. Within a week, though, Deskari exploded; Noxis, ever the one with an ear for gossip, heard of the succubus-captain Gya-lia and her need for a crew aboard her Ark, and signed her and Nephthys on without hesitation--especially after yet another group of highly powerful mortals followed the dead Deskari and began killing *everything* in the Abyss. Permanently.