Aesir Angrboda

Angrboda is a giantess and seeress of great power. She is the queen of the jarnvidjur, the troll-witches of the Iron Wood, and the mother of Lokis blighted offspring Jrmungandr, Fenris and Hel. Angrboda does more than spawn monsters, though. Like Loki, she rests within the center of the conflict between the Titans and the Aesir, and her true allegiances remain obscure. Indubitably, a Titan spawned her, and she bore two of the Aesirs greatest foes. Yet the Aesir now count her daughter Hel among their number (if reluctantly). The Aesir sometimes, hesitantly, permit her to visit the halls of Asgard, for she can claim kinright and Odin owes her favors for secrets she has shared.

Her murky motivations and shifting allegiances, combined with her titanspawn lineage, permit Angrboda to wander the Nine Worlds freely and accumulate vast stores of knowledge. As the mother of Hel, she walks the frozen wastes of Niflheim and put her ears to the whispering lips of the dead in Eliudnir. As the concubine of Loki, she eavesdrops on the counsels of the Aesir and riddles with Odin himself. As a giantess, she strides through the mighty fortresses of Jotunheim and shares mead with Utgard-Loki. Only Fate and Angrboda herself know where else she has gone, and from whom she has learned.

Angrboda also visits Midgard. As the consort of geniuses, generals and World leaders, she occasionally amasses temporal power for its own sake. She soon wearies of that game, however, and inevitably turns back to her main love: the creation of monsters. Disguised as many thingsa midwife, a doctor, a genetic scientistshe has sought to unravel the secrets of ichor and giant-blood and impart it to mortals for her own purposes. During the Second World War, she assisted the doctors of the Nazi regime and Japans Unit 731 in horrific experimentation, disappearing as those organizations were dismantled and their scientists imprisoned or co-opted by other governments.

Angrbodas other strength, in addition to her peerless knowledge of breeding and heredity, is her insight into Fate. She spent long hours staring into the Well of Urd before she ever lay with Loki. In the days after Odin hung from Yggdrasil, he consulted her wisdom tirelessly, until the Vanir returned (some of) Mimir to him. Her knowledge and place in the skein of Fate guaranteed that her children with Loki would find some important destiny. Many suspect that the God of Mischief chose her as a bedmate for that very reason. They might have received more than either expected. Since the birth of her three infamous offspring, she has avoided the gaze of Fate and the attention of the Norns and Mimir, hoping to escape Ragnark.

When she adopts mortal guise, Angrboda appears as a tall and haughty woman of imperial demeanor, who nevertheless possesses a strangely maternal aura. Men want to sire children on her or obey her instinctively, while women often find themselves seething with hate or trusting her as they do their own motherssometimes both at once. As a giantess, Angrbodas height ranges up to 80 feet tall, but always with full and ripe hips and a matronly bosom. Yet even with those curves, Angrboda is unmistakably a warrior of the Titan races, with whipcord muscles playing beneath her ivory skin.

When not wandering the Nine Worlds, Angrboda resides in a massive, moss-covered hall in the Iron Wood, among but always apart from the troll-wives and their witcheries. The troll-wives rarely bother her. They fear entanglement in her schemes even more than her wrath, and shun her monstrous offspring that are always far more powerful than their own. She set up laboratories in Midgard where she seeks to use mortal sciences such as cloning and gene-splicing to create races of monsters loyal only to her but who do not quicken in her womb and require her oversight as they grow to maturity. More recently, Angrboda brought generators and scientific equipment from Midgard to her hall in Jarnvid, and now the rooms hiss with electrical power and the screams of her experiments.

As the Twilight of the Gods approaches, Angrbodas main desire is to find some way to navigate the swelling tides of war and save herself from death. If she can manage that, she hopes to propagate a new line of Gods and monsters from her loins or her mind. She accepts that most of her current children will perish in the coming battle along with her onetime lover Loki. Utgard-Lokis plans to betray the Titans interest her,

but she fears that Surtr might discover his treachery and destroy the conspirators out of hand.

Associated powers: Epic Intelligence, Epic Manipulation, Epic Stamina, Epic Wits, Earth, Fertility, Jotunblut, Health, Psychopomp

Associated skills: Academics, Awareness, Brawl, Craft, Medicine, Occult