Livia is sly, secretive and far too fond of taking risks. She's clever, but nearly sociopathic when it comes to achieving her goals with a single-mindedness that can be easily mistaken for obsession. She's not obsessed though, she'd tell you, just driven. If the difference is debatable, that's fine, but she's not interested in having the debate. She's got better things to do.

Livia divides her time between wandering around kingdoms, experimenting with the plants she's managed to collect and running the casino that is her kingdom. All Stygians are welcome in the casino and she'll accept plants or secrets as a trade-in for the tokens that are used in the casino. She's willing to hire other Stygians to work there. She is very into collecting favors and making people indebted to her. She prefers favors to anything else she can win off people and writes it down in her book, then makes them sign it.

In her free time, she tries to sort out the information in her book. it's a massive book and written in code. She tries to keep it as up-to-date as possible and has special notations for when she's used someone's secret or called in a favor that they owe her.

On the other side of the book, when it's flipped over and looked at upside down, she writes down the information on the various plants and their properties, as well as where she obtained them from. She can't exactly kidnap Stygians to be her test subjects (though she would if she could) so instead, she agrees to let losers in the casino off the hook IF they drink her concoctions for her. Nobody has died yet but she remains hopeful! A lot of Stygians have certainly gotten sick, so now she makes them drink it in a special area that's easy to clean up.

If her book is in order (she is meticulous about that, information is no good unless properly filed and accessible), then she can wander out into other kingdoms for plant-harvesting and 'come into my lair' time aka inviting them to go gamble at her casino and offering to spot them a few tokens to start out. First hit's always free.

She derives from nightmares of losing. She comes from so many dreams of losing- the wrong hand, the wrong numbers, the wrong roll of the dice. Humankind has been gambling since before anyone could write it down, so she's actually fairly old., at least older than five thousand years. Every time someone has a nightmare about losing everything on the wrong card, it layers over her.

She induces nightmares of what happens after you lose everything on a bad draw or guess. Family leaving, gambling sharks  breaking your bones if you can't pay up, bankruptcy, etc. People who bet more than they can afford to pay rarely end up well and she likes to give them a dream of winning first, of good hands and good cards, then let them lose everything on one big bet. Greed will get you every time.

Is that cruel? Maybe. But she's a nightmare. Nobody should expect her to be nice when it's so much more fun to flip the scenario.