Vanessa De Vore is a Paragon City resident and American Art History Student who was unwittingly transformed into a supervillain by a powerful mystical artifact. Several years ago, De Vore was in Venice when she “came across an exquisitely engraved Carnivale Mask in a remote store one day while shopping.” She immediately purchased the mask, but once she returned home and donned the artifact, “the mystic mask forever adhered to her face.

“What Vanessa could not have known, was that the mask was the sole surviving possession of the 17th century Venetian Sorceress Giovanna Scaldi. Slain by the inquisition for ‘perverting the souls of Venice’s youth,’ Scaldi had in her heyday, commanded quite a following of Venetian women. Her cult transcended social and economic boundaries and centered on a heretical concept of cleansing one’s soul of all sin by actually committing and then ritually rejecting the sins themselves. This inventive theology didn’t go over very well with Rome, and Scaldi and her followers were hunted down and killed for their heresy.”

Whether the mask was enchanted by Scaldi or actually contains part of her spirit is unknown, but since returning to Paragon City, Vanessa has fallen under its spell. She immediately “set about recruiting followers in much the same way Giovanna Scaldi had centuries before. For the first few years Vanessa managed to quell the more destructive impulses that the Mask was sending her brain, but after the Rikti invasion (which Vanessa’s multiple personality-stricken brain decided was actually an attempt by Hell to take over the Earth), she and her followers decided that the Rikti had polluted the entire citizenry with their hell-borne sin. Here the Giovanna Scaldi part of her psyche reared its head and the next step was obvious: forceful scavenging of souls from each and every living being.

Under the De Vore’s leadership, “the Soul Scavengers prowl the city looking for particularly egregious sinners and proceed to magically and physically rip their souls from them. Whatever it is they take, it still leaves the victims dead or brain dead, and Vanessa and her followers seem capable of using these scavenged souls for their own magical rituals. The now deadly cult has become a real danger and the Midnight Squad has taken a close interest in their activities. But with so many other threats besieging the city, the Soul Scavengers are able to keep their bases of operation hidden and continue to wreak havoc in the city’s streets.”