Virtue Mondegreen

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This page in some of its sections contains major spoilers for The Perpetual Oratorio of Davia Pledge. Tread carefully!


Virtue Mondegreen is a character in Sangfielle.

Appearance

Pre-Perpetual Oratorio

Virtue is a human woman with shoulder-length black hair and gray, "desaturated" skin (on account of being a vampire).

She wears a white cape blazer hanging on her shoulders, high-waisted pants, and a button-up shirt with a high collar to cover the decapitation scar on her neck. Sometimes she covers it with a necklace instead. She wears red-tinted sunglasses. She carries a parasol when she has to go out in the sunlight.

Virtue wears gloves to cover her hands, which are always stained with soil that cannot be cleaned off. She can dig through earth and mud with her bare hands as though she had a shovel.[1]

Sylvia's two touchstones for Virtue's outfits are the women's fashion in Bloodborne, and Brendan Fraser's outfit in The Mummy.[2] She dresses in an attempt to look like an adventurer, but her outfits are conspicuously clean. She doesn't carry a bag, only a belt on which she hangs her sword, notebook, and spyglass.

Post-Perpetual Oratorio

After her transformation, the vibrance of life has returned to Virtue's face, and mechanical plating from the Oratorio has covered over her death scars. Elements of webbing and bug stuff are also visible, and the dirt on her hands has flaked off. Darling has become a more powerful apparition, now visible to other people.[3]

History and Involvement

Virtue was born a couple of centuries prior to the current Sangfielle setting[4], in the Third Canton. She allegedly had a sister who died in childhood, after which she threw herself into her studies.[5] Learning about dark magic allowed her to become a vampire, and she decided to lean into the Dracula aesthetic, and joined the vampire high society of the day. It was a lovely time until, shortly after the Panic, she was slain by vampire hunter Darling Malice.[4]

After being killed, she spent centuries with her consciousness trapped in the Residuum. She managed to get out, but also lost all of her power. She then joined the Blackwick Group, hoping to use the energies of the Residuum to re-achieve immortality and find a way to establish dominion over death itself.

Darling's spirit now haunts her and supplements her vampire powers.

Return to vampirism... and beyond

In Episode 27, Virtue concludes from Davia Pledge's personal library and her own observations in dissecting Marcos Soto that it would be possible to reroute the powers of the Perpetual Oratorio through her, draining it away and also incidentally turning her into a god and the people trapped in the machine into her thralls. While Lye Lychen thinks this is too risky and opposes it, Virtue and Duvall construct a chrysalis to hook her in. Despite interference and an explosion, this succeeds, stalling the Oratorio in its destruction of the city and leaving her free to reign as vampire queen of Sapodilla.

Virtue has since built herself a terrifying mechanical castle, and discovered that she must return to the Oratorio regularly to maintain her immortality. Sylvia switched to playing Hazard.

At a later date, Agdeline cashed in a favor and was hired on, with her compatriots, as "The Knights of Virtue".[6] She also hired on Emma Serchilde, and turned her into a vampire.[7]

Trivia

  • The word "Mondegreen" is a word coined by American writer Sylvia Wright, meaning a mishearing that gives a phrase another meaning. It originally comes from a 17th century ballad where the line "They had slain the Earl of Moray, and laid him on the green" was widely misheard as "...and Lady Mondegreen."

References