Editing Demon: The Descent (section)

===That's great, but how do I get one?===
Obviously, the simplest way to improve your Cover is to live in it and do things your Cover would be expected to do. The longer it stays a part of the world, the more it'll be accepted by the world. 

But sometimes that's too slow. That's where pacts come in. Put simply, a demon can make a pact with a human to give them something they want, and in return the human gives up a little bit of their life: a former roommate, an unsatisfying job, and so on. That connection with the world then gets transferred to the demon's cover, making it that much more "real". Only the demon and the pactbound remember the original relationship; everyone else assumes the demon was always in the place of the pactbound (though even then sometimes evidence of the original relationship can emerge, which can be troublesome if it falls into the wrong hands). Initially all these disparate pieces grafted on cause some inconsistencies within the Cover, but with enough "patch jobs" such a Cover can become nearly impenetrable.

And if they're desperate enough, a human can be convinced into selling away their soul. It doesn't damn them in the conventional sense of the word, but when a demon calls it in, the pactbound individual will be effectively erased from existence- which the demon steps into, effectively converting the pactbound's entire life into a Cover without any of the usual weirdness associated with the workings of the God-Machine. The catch? It doesn't transfer any of the pactbound's memories or personality to the demon, so they had better know the pactbound's life like the back of their hands before making it their own. Otherwise, the resulting compromises will make that cover all but worthless. Oh, and burning them in order to go loud creates an Echo- a ghost that can use Embeds against you and will do all it can to make you miserable. Turns out that most people don't like having their existences stolen and then used up for a brief power boost. 

In theory, you can make pacts with the other spooks that inhabit the Chronicles of Darkness. In practice, this is a bad idea for two reasons. 
* You can only get aspects of their mundane lives. No trying to dip into anyone else's powers, and you can't take away their weaknesses either. 
* If you're stupid enough to make a soul pact with one and call it in, you take aggravated damage based on their supernatural tolerance stat due to the incompatibility of your respective supernatural natures. (An analogy for this would be trying to run a program meant for Windows on an Apple II; the hardware was never meant to work with that kind of software, so to speak.) Even if you survive, all the caveats to normal soul pacts apply. Given how convoluted the societies of other supernaturals are and the inability to replicate their powers, that's a recipe for disaster.

Some Demons choose to create Façades, very basic covers that use the absolute minimum of detail needed to maintain themselves (and so can fall apart even from sufficiently intense questioning). Pacts which create Façades use only trivial aspects of a mortal's life and last for a limited span of time (e.g. a demon gains access to a person's summer home for a month, and uses that to make a Façade in the form of "the house sitter"), but doing so spares more important Covers from scrutiny.