Baalphegor's powers largely operate in an ascending skill tree of capacity, with several core abilities acting as the roots to be mixed together and evolved into further branches over time.

Socialite: Baal is familiar with the workings of high society, and playing the modern day "Game of Thrones" comes naturally to her. Her words flow like silk, and her canny gaze dissects the nuances in body language from everyone around her.
Performance: Covering a perhaps surprising spectrum, Baal can sing like a siren, play both the violin and piano, and she is such an able dancer that she sometimes goes as far as to literally style on her opponents in fights, dodging blows with the likes of anti-gravity leans or moonwalking in retreat.
Will of the Unbowed: Boasts a high mental resilience and pain tolerance.
Money: Truly, the ultimate superpower. As an avid stock trader and millionaire, Baal lives the life of the upper 10%, and her liquid resources are substantial enough to comfortably finance a PMC on foreign soil.
Polylingual: Speaks English, Russian, Japanese and Chinese in that order of familiarity.
Swordsmanship/CQC: Baal has been trained in the art of wielding light, agile blades such as rapiers and daggers in an entirely serious, self-defense capacity. Being also trained in Muay Thai, she is quite comfortable in CQC despite her NA's powers suggesting a ranged preference.
Firearms: Despite her Noble Arm's power being far more potent in most cases, Baal bears no disdain for the usefulness of firearms, appreciating the beautiful simplicity in just aiming and squeezing a trigger. She is respectably competent, though not prodigal, in their use.
Occult Programming Language V1: As a result of her past associations with Qingshe, Baalphegor is familiar with some of the mysterious occult practices involved in the art responsible for the advent of Noble Arms. She is not a master, but she is capable of advancing, analyzing and contributing to the construction of "magitech".

"Affably evil" is perhaps how most would describe Baal upon first meeting her. Projecting a shameless corporate self-interest, she is the sort of necessary evil brought about by the age of capitalism, regarding herself as one of the many pillars supporting the debt-ridden global market and staving off its collapse. She is a study in contrasts who offers dubious bargains while seemingly openly warning against accepting them. Utterly ruthless on the corporate battlefield and dispassionately apathetic towards the tribulations of strangers, she is conversely an often warm and accommodating sort with "friends" and collaborators, despite making some effort to disguise her penchant for fondness. Similarly, despite being a highly demanding and occasionally perfectionist taskmaster in regard to her subordinates, she maintains an attentive and genuine care for their well-being, being quite generous with "bonuses for exceptional performance", mindful of work-life balance where affordable and supportive of personal improvement endeavors and efforts to thrive. If confronted, she would declare that it is because she demands exceptionalism that she is so favorable to reward genuine hard work and loyalty.

This is not to say that she cannot be cruel, however. She has little regard for the impudently disobedient and will not hesitate to harshly punish those that test or defy her out of some naive misconception that they can "prove" something or preserve some "useless sense of pride", especially if it is underscored by any element of betrayal or deception. She expects Hellbound to serve her loyally, to appreciate the sheer value of being effectively immortal so long as they do, and she has no issue callously "firing" them if they prove recalcitrant to her demands. She has no patience for entertaining lurking knives at her back, no matter how insignificant. Her cruelty can be seen especially in how she conducts "deals" with enemies, finding no issue in deceiving them of the particulars from the start and taking complete advantage of them once they fall into her web. She even quite enjoys making them suffer, delighting in tearing them down, taking everything she can and discarding them when she can take no more. She has been known to reserve a similar level of sadistic -even spiteful- dominance for those that steal from her or attempt to establish control over her, occasionally going out of her way to over-retaliate solely to set an example to anyone else that might consider offending her similarly.

Regardless, she maintains something in the way of moral standards despite her outward facade, and she has rejected attempts to be pulled into the Downward Descent's circle of influence in the past, seeing them both as a disgusting cancer on the world... and competition for her growing appetite for dominance. In the face of the whispers of chaos and the siren call to depravity, Baal remains steadfast as a champion of Law and Order... no matter how subjective her interpretation might be. As far as the rest of the Big Three go, she considers the Paragons of Science to be meddlesome competitors and the Seven Virtues to be delusional zealots. Of all the Big Three, Baal only finds the Paragons to be vaguely tolerable, if only because they can be useful for the right price.

Likes: Gaining power, expanding her "collections", a good cigarette, spicy food, defeating and humiliating a powerful foe, projecting dominance, undermining any authority over herself, "presentation", living in the lap of luxury, loyal and competent subordinates, extracting a "mutually beneficial" deal, extracting an individually beneficial deal, overcoming a competent "competitor", making a profit.

Dislikes: Being disrespected (without her permissiveness), loss of control, attempts to establish agency over her, invading her personal space, incompetent allies, personal stagnation, waste (time, resources, etc), slimy food (the idea of eating things like snails, slugs or raw eggs revolts her), being scammed, having her schemes undermined by foolishness and irrationality, an investment turning out a loss, threats to the "Free Market", The Big Three.

Fears: Losing everything she has built. Threats to her selfhood.

The Devil of the Free Market, known only as Baalphegor (or "Baal" for short), is the enigmatic and charismatic CEO of Infernus Interests, a multi-branched company with an intimidating number of fingers in global pies. They style themselves as a form of "Investment Firm" and loan agency, conducting grand scale stock investment and seemingly "philanthropic" donations to worthy causes, particularly in the industrial and scientific sectors. On the sly, they also maintain a "Mystic" branch, which focuses on studying the magic of Noble Arms and Occult Programming Language.

Baalphegor herself almost seems untouchable in this arena. Monetarily and legally, she appears to have connivingly ingratiated herself amongst the wealthy elite and takes calculating advantage of her ability to bribe just about any legal outcome into being. Despite clearly being an open Arms Master of power suspected to be quite substantial, Baalphegor has successfully rebuffed all attempts to investigate her true nature, to coerce her into military conscription or to otherwise meaningfully curtail her growing business empire. At least part of this being her willingness to "invest" in the USA's military industrial complex as a "loyal" US citizen, thereby bribing her way into being left alone from serious pursuit.

By the present day, thanks to her initially isolated upbringing and growing network of influence, Baalphegor has effectively managed to eliminate all trace of her birth name from documented records outside her private ones, leaving only her claimed alias to stand out in black and white in the present day.

Baal was raised in a fairly wealthy family, and she received rather "heiress-like" training in the vein of potentially inheriting some sizable assets. At some point, she was subjected to a hostage situation at a young age, but the little negotiator was bold enough to try and make a "deal" to be let go, offering to perform with her hard-learned skillset. This started her Noble Arm's awakening. What really set it off, however, was when she was humored, only to find out after that her captors were obviously lying and reneging on their side of the agreed-upon bargain. Enraged with the kind of uncontrollable, morality-free fury only a child can bring forth, her Noble Arm manifested and gave her "Hellfire" as her first power. Cremations ensued, and Baal -perhaps concerningly- never lost a wink of sleep over it.

Instead, this event's psychological impact was that Baal became very driven by the pursuit of personal strength, deciding that any other form of power or influence was ultimately useless if you didn't have the force of arms to uphold your terms against those that ignored them. She was young, of course, so it took a while for this ideal to be fully realized, but in time, such was inevitable.

So, she worked harder, learned to grasp control with words and to enforce it with her Noble Arm's growing abilities. Through meticulous experimentation, she figured out how to draw more Potential out of her Noble Arm than she would have otherwise come by naturally in any swift amount of time. It was around this period that she began to go by the alias of "Baalphegor" herself and started creating a legal mire to cloud her dealings, and by the present day, most people either simply call her "Baal" out of familiarity or are entirely unaware of her birth name at all. At some point, her network of control would intersect with other "equals" in the field, among which numbered a fellow "devil" bearing the moniker Mephistopheles and -much more recently- the recently promoted Snake of the Zodiac Qingshe, who she'd come to feel fond wariness for.

While building up her own place among corporate empires, Baal and her family went to great pains to hoard and exploit her powers for themselves, keeping her off government radars and rejecting probes by any means necessary, even assassinating at least one spy and inserting their own to fabricate any records detailing her abilities in a compromising way. Baal, of course, had no intention of allowing her pursuit of power to be curtailed by laws or "suppressors" designed to drag her down to the realm of "equality", and the only reason she didn't try to hide that she had a Noble Arm at all was the impracticalities brought about by the sprouting of her inhuman features early on in her development.

When the war overseas broke out, Baal's only concern was initially how it would affect her bottom line. Though, from a certain self-serving rational perspective, she felt it was obvious that China and their allies should not be allowed to win, given their atrocious comportment. However, Baal elected to support ASEAN only indirectly, manipulating stocks where she could, making "charitable donations" to the war funding programs for Task Force Obsidian, and even hiring mercenary forces and information brokers to harass the enemy and give her sensitive information that she could feed their enemies as "anonymous tips".

She would only deign to actually enter the field personally shortly after receiving a message from Qingshe that felt rather like a final parting. Of course, the Snake couldn't help but be transparently "sus" even in a situation like her end, and so Baal was more amused by the frank manipulation than anything else, baiting her to personally take to a field where there were ample powerful Arms Masters to exploit. And so... somewhat reassured by the Snake's now absence from the situation, Baal decided it was time that the TFO finally met one of their longest running "investors" in person.

Power: A-
Speed: B+
Range: A-
Persistence: A (?)
Precision: B
Potential: G

Noble Arm Type, Element, and Range: DPS/Tank Hybrid | American Superiority | Variable Range

Noble Arm Abilities:

Air Force One: Everett’s attack speed and agility scales proportionally to his enemies’ as long as he is actively focusing on them. His max travel speed hasn’t been properly measured, but is estimated to be massively hypersonic at its peak, although his Noble Arm artificially decelerates him to a top speed of 60 mph in active conflict zones if he isn’t locked onto anyone. Lastly, he can alter his own momentum, making him able to achieve and brake from incredible speeds on a dime.

America’s Constitution: Everett’s body is much tougher than most other Arms Masters’. He can lift a Ford-class carrier overhead, survive nuclear bombardment, and hold his breath for a day while also requiring elephantine amounts of highly potent drugs to knock out. Furthermore, his senses are sharp enough to filter individual persons, sounds, or smells up to 20 kilometers away, with x-ray vision that can see through anything that isn’t lead-lined. However, his senses are so fine-tuned that it is fairly easy to overwhelm them with sufficiently advanced crowd control weapons like sonic devices or high-powered strobes, as they cause him enough pain to render him unconscious within 3 turns of exposure.

Freedom’s Beacons: Everett has heat vision that is effective up to his visual range limit of 20 kilometers. It is laser-accurate and can cut through almost anything, but can only be fired for 3 turns before requiring a 5-turn cooldown. He can alternatively recover a charge of heat vision in exchange for 1 full turn of non-use in order to avoid the lengthiness of a full recharge.

Everett’s life was fairly normal until around 16 years ago. After graduating valedictorian from his high school and receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, he made the choice to try out for the U.S. Army Special Forces by way of an 18X contract at 22, allowing him to simply drop into their highly-selective pipeline. He passed all required courses with flying colors, emerging from the grueling trials with the right to call himself a Green Beret. However, despite the harsh and lengthy process that proving himself turned out to be, the worst would prove to be far from behind him. His first couple of deployments were nothing special; he dismantled paramilitary cells, executed terror group leaders, and trained his detachment in the use of various foreign and domestic weapons platforms. But these organizations, however dangerous, were all led and staffed by mundane humans; a fact that made each mission painfully boring to him since all he had to do was calibrate a given weapon, aim it, and push a button once his squadmates gave the okay. All in all, he considered it a very uninvolved and slightly cowardly affair.

This would change once he was authorized to join deployments that involved (and targeted) Arms Masters directly. Suddenly, he was given systems enhanced by the OPL– tech so hot off the presses at DARPA that the rest of the world took another decade to catch up with the formation of the Paragons. During this time, he’d also find out about the existence of numerous Arms Master-led organizations and receive debriefs on their at-the-time most dangerous group, the Hammer of Masters. Said experiences planted a small fear of Arms Masters in his mind, which translated into an extremely cutthroat attitude when performing his duties in the field; to him, enemy Arms Masters were walking, unregulated time bombs, whereas allied ones were always potential enemies that needed to be closely monitored. This was exacerbated when he was assigned to one of the first OPL-enhanced mech squadrons ever fielded– a decision that cost the Americans a very sizable chunk of intel due to his tendency to outright kill enemy Arms Masters unless specifically instructed otherwise.

Unfortunately, his very palpable prejudice against Arms Masters alienated him from some of the most influential members of his detachment because they considered him rash and overly paranoid, which resulted in his squad leader requesting his reassignment in late 2015. However, they wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing his career crumble alone, as come 2016, the new President had every military asset abroad pulled from their posts and reassigned to domestic affairs. Troops moved back home, military bases were closed down, and the nation that had once been the World Police unexpectedly began looking inward. Normally, this would’ve been a career-ender, with Everett stuck in reserves writing books about his experiences. But someone– or rather, a group of people, watched him carefully during his deployments as part of something far greater than a single SF detachment.

The data they collected made him stick out to exactly the right people in his local chain of command, and so, he was chosen to be a test subject for DARPA’s Project Hoplite only a few years after the US’s new isolationist policy began. Hoplite was an experimental Noble Arm-related black project that finished field testing in late 2018 after a 30-year development period, and was based on experimental OPL-enhanced alloy technology that managed to produce an amorphous, ‘blank’ proto-NA made of ‘living’ metal. The core mechanic of Hoplite was that the blank NA would tap into a prospective wielder’s soul through its OPL-enhanced matrix to force a manifestation event that would identify the proto-NA as the its willpower conduit, causing the ‘template’ to assume the shape and abilities desired by it. Once completed, the project was to be used to create 4 artificially-made Arms Masters in total as part of an experimental super-soldier program that would slot them into different detachments across all SF branches in order to further bolster American military dominance.

What made Everett different from the other candidates was the unique power suite his soul manifested. Even though Hoplite had no rank-dampening flaws, his abilities were measured as having the highest potential out of all the other subjects by a long shot, effectively shifting the project's focus away from the 3 other subjects and onto him specifically. He was initially extremely resistant to the idea of being labeled an Arms Master, but after the government promised him a sorely-needed increase in pay that'd lift him out of "struggling" and into "well off" territory, he acquiesced. What followed was four years of image-building through a carefully-curated debut that included a flawless first save, an impeccable speech after the fact, and continued top-tier performance where the margin of error was razor-thin and lives were at stake in the hundreds or thousands.

As a result, he became a top-tier domestic asset that was eventually called upon to serve overseas when the President realized America was getting way too much negative PR; largely because Everett was essentially a walking solution to the dilemma of sending his own countrymen to die for foreign interests. After all, someone as powerful and trained as him would only be able to fall due to extraordinary carelessness. He was thus ordered to tend to the ASEAN War; specifically to help the coalition while they were busy recovering after a notable victory against the Chinese. Everett has since been transferred to Task Force Obsidian to aid in this endeavor due to their high concentration of powerful Arms Masters, making it even more likely in the American President’s eyes that he’ll help them recover their long-lost image as the world’s premier military and industrial powerhouse.