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Name: Dr. Gail Erling
Nicknames: none
CIA code name: Lilith
Gender: female
Age: 41
Nationality: U.S.A.
Ancestry: Swiss
Languages: English/ Spanish/ Italian/ French/ Latin/ ancient Greek/ Aramaic/ Hebrew/ Mandarin Chinese/ Cantonese/ old Norse/ Finnish/ Norwegian/ Swiss/ Dutch/ Danish/ Greenlandic
Birth Place: Washington, D.C.
Current Home City: Washington, D.C.
Job: Independent researcher and consultant, frequently utilized by government agencies
Hobbies: Reading, painting, studying, collecting fine art and fine wine and rare books, taxidermy, board games
Life Goal: Penetrate the systems represented by human psychology, history, and movements, and learn if possible to predict them. Gail is fundamentally an analyst more than a meddler, but does not object to action in the presence of educational company (i.e., anybody she can watch like a bug under a microscope).

Appearance:
–Height: 5'11“
–Weight: 140lb
–Hair: White, nearly iridescent blonde
–Eyes: Ice blue
–Skin: pale white
–Build: slender

Gail Erling is the proverbial “ice queen”, tall, blonde, beautiful, severe and untouchable. She is marked by her habitual stillness and the fixed focus of her pale blue eyes, which can make the observed target more than slightly uncomfortable. She dresses modestly, often in black or other dark colors, and frequently wears dark glasses to cover her eyes and prevent bystanders to see just how closely she is examining them and noting their habits. She can and will dress up, and knows all that is required to present her face and body at their most flattering aspect, but doesn't bother unless it's provably necessary.

She is calm, cool, and collected at all times, difficult to startle and nearly impossible to frighten. This is partially due to her companion, a hazy apparition who rarely leaves her side and often presents to mortals as a feeling of deep and cold disquiet. When she refers to him in the presence of other scions, she calls him “Svorghild”.

Gail loves her work as a government researcher – it provides a sense of utility and order to the habits she would engage in naturally; delving into information, sifting and sorting it, and presenting it to those in power. She is at heart a teacher and sharer of information, but even in teaching she is always learning: it is of interest to her to observe the ways in which changes in disseminated data affect those who have hired her to find them out. Politics and the cultures of the world whirl around discrete threads of information. Gail tracks these without ceasing, as though the world were her own personal game of chess.

Dr. Erling is perseverence personified. She is not easily angered, but once angry, she is implacable as a glacier and will not cease until her target is nullified – rendered absolutely unable to harm or thwart her again, whether that entails death or some other measure. She is not so much vicious as simply pitiless. Gail doesn't much care for violence, but she will not be controlled. When pressed, she can endure nearly anything for almost any length of time, and her determination grows the harder the force pressing against it. She is largely indifferent to death, except to dislike the idea of having her research interrupted.

She lives a quiet life in a mansion in D.C. that is strangely absent security measures (when one has a ghost bodyguard, security cameras and dogs seem superfluous), and fills her days among her collection of rare books or improving search algorithms.

How did your divine ancestry get revealed to you? For as long as Gail can recall, her ghost haunted her bedside at night. To others he may be invisible to a faint haze of spiritual plasma, but to her, he is a bearded, scarred, horrifyingly massive warrior in furs and beaten iron armor. Even as a small child, she knew the fact that she didn't find him terrifying was strange. It set her apart from the other children. Her mother began to visit her in early puberty, and Gail, per her typical self, found it very interesting and not terribly shocking to learn her origins. Hel is not easy to question or analyze, and so Gail is endlessly fascinated by her, as she would be by anything that resists her attempts to pin it down into data points.

You're rich/well-off… how did you make your money? Gail is a consultant and researcher to several United States federal agencies, among them the CIA and the NSA, and a member of several think tanks. She is published in a few dozen academic journals and is highly sought by many large corporations given her knack for refining data analysis processes. For all of these services, she is paid according to her clout with the agency in question – and her clout tends to be considerable. She also makes a fine profit on her side business: buying and selling, assessing, and restoring fine paintings.

What is one thing your colleagues know about you? Gail knows a lot of stuff.

What is one secret your colleagues don't know about you? Gail has a very dark, very ugly, very angry side. She actually doesn't know much about it herself. But she is bred true to her mother, Hel, who is unbearably lovely on one side and hideously repellent on the other.

Do you still keep in touch with your non-divine parent? Gail visits her father dutifully in St. Damian's Hospital, once a week when she's in town, infrequently when she is traveling.

What are your hobbies? Reading, painting, studying, collecting fine art and fine wine and rare books, dabbling a little in taxidermy, board games. Gail is excellent at chess and go. She also restores art. She experiments with chemistry, enjoying the refinement of poisons especially, and never ceases to study, read, and learn. She rarely engages in a social life beyond interaction with colleagues, and regards dating as a highly fascinating aspect of human psychology without quite being affected by it emotionally. Gail can use her beauty, but she does not inhabit her own body on a particularly personal level.