Corporeal Forces: 1 Strength: 1 Agility: 3

Ethereal Forces: 4 Intelligence: 7 Precision: 9

Celestial Forces: 4 Will: 10 Perception: 6

Vessel/1, +1 Charisma

Skills: Dodge/2, Emote/3, Fighting/1, Languages (Cantonese/3, Mandarin/3, Japanese/3), Lying/2, Savoir-Faire/1

Songs: Charm (Ethereal/3), Dreams (All/2), Form (Celestial/3), Healing (Corporeal/2), Motion (Ethereal/3, Celestial/6), Shields (All/1), Tongues (Ethereal/3)

It's entities like this that give ethereals a bad name among the Host.

Granted, it's not as bad as some of the monsters that you'll find in the Aztec pantheon, or among the Unseelie, but Venerable Ancestor exists solely to feed off of humanity's fears and needs. The fact that it's the ethereal version of a confidence man, rather than a violent predator, is completely beside the point.

Venerable Ancestor's modus operandi is fairly simple: it cruises a selected area until it finds a family that's lost a loved one, spends a brief time watching them, then manifests, masquerading as the ghost of the dead person. A few parlor tricks later, the grieving family is ready to believe. That's where things can get obnoxious.

Venerable Ancestor would have made a wonderful Impudite: it sees nothing wrong with sucking a particular group of humans dry of Essence (via specialized worship Rites), and it enjoys having the adulation of its victims in the process. Usually, it pretends that it is in danger of being cast into whatever Bad Place exists in the local theology (or needs help getting into the Good Place): properly done, this can assure a steady supply of devotion (and Essence) until the ethereal is ready to move on. Lots of experience has taught it to move around a lot. Whether or not its food source is in good shape when it leaves is a matter of indifference to it - plenty more out there where they came from.

The ethereal is one of those annoying hard-to-kill ones (in fact, some members of the Host suspect that there's more than one): it's been around for a while, and there are a lot of copycats, of various power levels. The real (beneficial) spirits of ancestors past, both ghost and ethereal, happen to loathe this ethereal with a passion, and have no problem at all with calling in either side to stamp on it (Venerable Ancestor refuses to serve Hell, but only because it would rather be a free agent). Certain Malakim of Dreams have made some interesting mental adjustments to avoid Smiting later ethereals that call in an air strike against Venerable Ancestor...