Lemure

Lemures were among the weakest devils. Lemures were the shock troops and laborers of the devils. The most selfish, cruel, and evil mortals that died and came to Hell become lemures. Only the nupperibos were lower in the infernal hierarchy than the lemures.

Description
A lemure was a hideous creature, appearing as nothing more than a man-sized blob of molten stinking flesh with a permanent expression of anguish. It oozed across the ground as it moved. They stood about 5 feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds. They lacked a true name.

Birth
One way for lemures to be born was to create them from souls that came to Baator on death. When a soul arrived on Baator, they were shipped to torture stations. There, they were tortured and wrung out of energy. On being completely drained of energy, the souls were underwent the process of being turned into lemures.

Another way to create a lemure was from a larva. Out of about a hundred thousand larvae, only about a dozen were turned by the devils into lemures. Once becoming a lemure, the baatezu acknowledged the creature as part of their race and not as a petitioner.

The process of lemure creation was concluded with dropping the soul to be turned into a lemure into the Maggot Pit in Avernus. There, the soul was reborn into a lemure.

A lemure had no sex organs. Lemures were low-ranking baatezu and needed more frequent but short rests as such. They took whatever rest they could to satisfy their necessary five minute rest, which they needed.

Behavior
A lemure was almost completely mindless, they were effectively incapable of making decisions, even those that concerned themselves. It was presumed that this was by design. The idea being that the baatezu wanted the low caste to be easy to influence, so they would choose the path of evil. With this mindlessness came also a lack of "lesson" that the lemure needed to learn if it wanted a promotion.

No matter from what kind of soul a given lemure was created, they retained literally nothing of their old personality or memory. However, despite their mindlessness, they were capable of one thought. The desire for promotion and the knowledge that this happened to those who managed to somehow prove themselves.

History
After a mortal soul had been thoroughly tortured for an untold time, its soul was wracked with pain and infused with hatred. It was at this time that the devils then transformed the soul into one of their own. The mortal soul was corrupted with infernal power and turned into the least powerful of the devils: a lemure.

Combat
These mindless fiends made up the rank-and-file of the infernal legions. They shambled forward at the command of their masters' telepathy, thoughtlessly slaughtering everything in their path and stopping only at the telepathic commands of their superiors. When not engaged in battle, lemures were left in the fiery spawning pits of Hell to torture any mortal souls that they found swimming amid the hellfire.

Lemures usually attacked their prey by clawing them apart. They were individually weak and their tactics, or what passed as such, consisted of swarming their enemies relying on their numbers. Said numbers could reach more than thousand under a single devil commander. This tactic did not rely utterly on the numbers. As dumb lemures were, they were capable of marching in a special wedge formation that allowed them to hit more accurately. These claws were aligned with the philosophy of law and evil allowing the lemures to ignore the resistance against physical damage.

Lemures were hard to kill. They had an inherent regeneration ability. This ability was not the fastest regeneration ability, but it was very tenuous. Even when somebody managed to turn a lemure into ash, over time, they fully regenerated. One way to permanently kill them was to use holy things like holy weapon or holy water to kill them. Another method was to eat them. Out of all methods, the last was the most secure and also the one commonly used by demons.

A lemure's mindlessness conferred a complete immunity against any effects that tampered their minds.

Society
Lemures were the lowest of the devils. They existed en masse in infernal armies that were thrown into the Blood War.

As low a lemure's position was, they had a shot at high positions in the infernal hierarchy. Every lemure was at least theoretically capable of rising through the ranks up to pit fiend rank and from there to higher to nobility. For example, when a lemure had to chance to be promoted to a spinagon, it had to fight against other lemures and after it won, its skin was taken away. Underneath the skin, the winning lemure had become a spinagon. When a lemure did not manage to get a promotion, something that was effectively a matter of chance at their low station, it was over time absorbed into Baator like the petitioners, they actually were. The promotion at such a low level was something that could be done by a mere greater devil and was done when there was some demand for specialized skill.

Conversely, it was entirely possible for a higher-ranking baatezu to commit such a severe crime that it was demoted to lemure-status. When this happened, the devil in question lost all memories.

Appearances

 * Adventures
 * Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus
 * Novels:
 * Sword Play