Leonard Ephesian

Jerks, demons, megalomaniacs, psychopaths, self-interested jackasses and other general varieties of gits, welcome. Leave your ego at the door and don't murder your kindred during your stay.
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IamLEAM1983
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Leonard Ephesian

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Name: Leonard Ephesian
Age: vessel is 68, demon is immesurable
Gender: male
Species: anthro goat, demon

Strengths: like all Fallen, Leonard is skilled at plying Hellfire to suit his needs. An extremely mutable substance, Hellfire can be used to enhance mortal objects, curse them, to curse other individuals or to exert a supernatural level of influence over them. Otherwise, owing to the fact that the body known as Leonard Ephesian is clinically dead, he is able to withstand levels of injury that would kill most of everyone else. His bones would still break or his muscles still be torn apart, but he would show no palpable discomfort. This is somewhat useful in the case of easily concealable lethal injuries or structural traumas, but would cause problems if he ever finds himself in a position where he, as a mortal man, would be very much expected to be either in terrible agony or flat-out dead.

Otherwise, Leonard has his waking life's entire array of court cases, personal experiences, successes, failures, setbacks and accomplishments to draw from. This Infernal Dominion has access to a shrewd orator's skills, satisfied former clients across the nation, an obviously efficient grasp of mortal law – specifically of the American kind – and to all the tricks and tips necessary to the successful acquittal of organizations or persons who may or may not deserve to be absolved of all charges...

Couple that with just a smidgen of Southern charm and hospitality, oodles of effortless charisma, along with an iron-clad reputation in Hope, and you've got a premium vessel for any Dominion who might be desirous of a means to better Hell's standing on the mortal plane. Then comes the old family wealth, the name and the still building, if generally prestigious heritage.

If you told anyone that Ephesian Legal Counsel's leader and founder was strangled in the courtyard bathroom by a demon who spent a few minutes licking its nightmarish and caprine chops at the sight of this Grade-A and utterly oblivious slab of sinful meat, they wouldn't believe you.

As, after all, nobody believes in the Devil. As far as anyone knows, Leonard is congenial, spirited, witty, distinguished without being foppish or snobbish, and possessed of this kind of gracefully aged sense of decayed wealth – as if going back a few centuries and moving down south would show you more white-clad and white-haired ungulates leading the relatively easy life of plantation masters. Times and ethics have changed, the family's adapted despite its own personal ruin and there he is, a well-dressed gentleman who always has a smile and a wink to spare.

Who would honestly believe this is a demon in disguise?
Weaknesses: the demon Leonard picked a fairly aged shell for itself and as such, he has to keep playing the part or risk attracting unwanted levels of attention. The frail old goat who managed to look straight and regal despite his osteoporosis isn't exactly supposed to be able to manage marathons. He isn't exactly supposed to shrug off busted hips, and he certainly isn't supposed to go about shrugging off bullets or tugging his neck back into shape after an atrociously bad fall. All these things naturally tend to send physicians and healers into fits of sheer terror – and he also can't just kill all witnesses, either. There's being a demon and then there's being recklessly stupid.

Unfortunately, while he can coax his dead flesh into maintaining a heartbeat and brain activity easily enough, forcing complex injuries to heal is another matter. The body being dead, tricking groups of neither active, neither necrotic cells into springing into action to repair damaged nerves or broken segments of bone takes a lot of time and energy. If he can't abandon his body, he'll have to very patiently wait things out. If he can risk leaving the goat to return to its status of dead husk and claim another body on the short term, he has that option. However, as Leonard Ephesian has a history in town and a family that cares for him, it'd be fairly difficult for the demon to shrug off those admittedly handsome features for new ones without attracting attention.

That's the problem with picking a body that's been tailored to receive unscrupulous spirits : people tend to know these bodies and to go looking for them once you've shucked them off like last decade's bad fashions...

Then there's Hellfire. Leonard can burn angels with it, contaminate mortal hearts and minds, bolster the output of mundane weaponry and use it as a replacement for via when operating a spell in a particularly sterile environment – but every serious use of it burns his shell out a little more each time. At first, the effects are nearly nonexistent : looks might become undefinably different, something in the person's poise might have changed without anyone being able to pinpoint it. Eventually, the shell's physical integrity begins to be attacked. One or both eyes might turn blind, teeth might fall off the fur or horns might show signs of decay – and none of these changes can be reversed. Give it time and severe makeup becomes needed to look even remotely mundane, if veiling spells can't be applied. Before long, the physical shell becomes warped beyond all pretense of stability, which renders it unusable for the expected purposes of the Fallen.

Leonard, being a high-ranking demon in the ranks of the Pit, has a deeper level of control over his favored shell. It might be some time before his uses of Hellfire begin to leave identifiable marks behind. If that doesn't, however, then his vessel's newly acquired immortality will eventually and inevitably cause questions to be asked. A man known to have been a mundane and a non-practitioner from Day One can't possibly go past his eightieth birthday and still be in tip-top shape. If the body goes past a hundred and still looks the way it did in its sixty-eighth year, interrogations will become inevitable.

Appearance: at a hundred and eighty-two pounds and six feet four, Leonard is a fairly lanky fellow who displays the expected delicate features of certain strands of caprine anthros. With his projected muzzle, obvious goatee and his gently curving horns, he fits the expected image of an old billy goat to a tee. Add to that fur that's whiter and much softer than standard goat hair thanks to careful grooming by sapient hands, and you're left with a distinguished exterior.

A combination of excellent breeding, the hardships of his earlier years as a lawyer and of clean living paired with a few vices have left him with venerable wrinkles that lend further expressiveness to an already crystal-clear face. Emotions tend to flow across it gracefully, in a manner that certainly is controlled but never seems quite like it. Looking at him, you realize you're not just looking at a skilled liar – you're looking at a man who's mastered the art of bending truth in new ways by using nothing else but logic, persuasion, the legal system's own offered technical details and a fairly deep and instinctive knowledge of human psychology.

That old Southern wealth isn't something that readily shows, but Louisiana's renowned hospitality is something he wields expertly. At best, you could accuse him of unconsciously subscribing to the stereotype of the white suit – but you really couldn't. The pristine pants, shirt and jacket he wears always seem to fit him like a glove, complimented with very sedate dashes of colour. Delicate cuff links you'll miss if you aren't looking for them, expertly shined black leather shoes, and a delicate yellow necktie all attract attention only long enough for you to notice them, and then fade away into the general picture of professionalism he projects. His horns are buffed and polished on a weekly basis, carefully blunted to avoid doing damage to low ceilings and shined to perfection, to the point where you'd wonder if there's some sort of pool cue-inspired body mod for goat anthros that's just been released. In a nice touch, his cane fits his horns' patina exactly, to the point where you'd wonder if they weren't made from the same length of keratin.

Generally speaking, Ephesian seems to be a man who's internalized the notion of maintaining some sort of poise to the point where it's become unconscious. Suit-cut khakis almost identical to his suit pants are put on for the weekends, more supple loafers discreetly replace his shoes, and he simply loses his tie and cuff links. At all times, even in the most casual of circumstances, you get the sense that appearance matters to this man. He's not wrong – you don't get to be one of the most sought-after corporate defense attorneys if you can't project your success and self-assurance forward in a matter that's not too restrained and not too showy either.
Behaviour: gallant, chivalrous, never too deeply invested or distracted, always right there and always seemingly pleased as punch of being so – these characteristics represent Leonard's approach to legal counsel and indeed, much of everyday life as well. The man he used to be was never bothered, always available, always pleasant. If and when he suffered, he did so nobly, still with the kind of Southern poise and the barely audible twang that's just short of feeling stereotypically British. Even in the grip of arthritis and osteoporosis, Leonard seemed to make it a priority to have it seem like piffle. Distant as a father and yet ever-present as a support and authority figure, he was an ideal lover but the kind of father who would try and minimize admittedly trivial childhood issues for his then-young son, who couldn't quite rationalize his kid's troubles away in one fell swoop. He wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination – especially emotionally – but what he did do, he did remarkably well. His son Thomas, with his own career and successes, stands as proof of that.

That is what Master Leonard, Chief inspector for all realms of black magic – Lord of All Sabbaths and superhumanly vain Fiend that he is – has to fake. This is what is his to maintain, or simply cast to the winds to be left free to ply Ephesian's resources in new and unsuspected means. The demon is Vanity boiled down to its purest extract, a rather devout school of Lucifer's school of unrestrained self-adoration. Considering, small things that weren't there before are giving that old, gently weathered and normally personable face slightly troubling new curves. He spends a little more time in the mirror than before, each morning, and has started courting the shoe-shiners near the court, which he used to have enough dignity to ignore. The little things in haberdashery aren't as breezy as before, with his tie's knot suddenly mattering, the exact sheen of his fur, the hydration levels of his lips... Leonard is a demon who's always been known to deploy a fastidious amount of care for his vessels of choice, who plys Hellfire with a metaphorical dropper and in small, excessively contained ways.

From the simple application of cologne and the two-day shampoo routine, what Thomas ignores is that his father's morning routine has utterly exploded in terms of complexity. Under new management, the goat's body undergoes daily maintenance regimens that would make Patrick Bateman's own rigmarole feel sedate. Moisturizers, deluxe fur revitalizers, lanolin oil for his horns, a meticulously constructed diet intended to repel the limits of these aged muscles' limitations, stem cell injections and discrete body augmentations... All this is joined by a new interest in fitness, as well as for pursuits of the fairly carnal variety.

Vanity including the pleasure of seeing others being wantonly seduced by your charms, Ephesian is now deploying a treasure trove of alibis and coincidences to hide his newest interest in philandering. Thomas' father was known for his quiet and noble dedication to his wife Estèle, and everyone assumed that her death would have transformed him into the kind of gentle, kindly and always respectfully closed-off widower who would choose celibacy over the threat of dishonouring the loved one's memory. The demon has no interest in these maudlin mortal notions, perceiving sex as something significant, a fairly physical representation of his own forceful acquisition of this old body. There's a power in being in control of nubile young things, of knowing that you're able to make dead flesh seem alive and to have flaccid organs rediscover their youth's potency. That power strokes the Lord of All Sabbaths' ego rather nicely, and has motivated his shifting the figure of the irreproachable family patriarch into that of an unrepentant Lothario.

The body being dead, nothing is of any real importance to Leonard. Preservatives spoil the fun and dull the senses – and any woman who has the gall to find ways to suggest that his laying in bed with them is not a tremendous honour is deserving of being dealt with.

That's usually where Hellfire goes. Hurt Ephesian's inhuman ego in any shape or form, and he'll find subtle, if painful ways to make you regret it. Dash his plans, and he'll do far more than simply make you regret doing so. As he sees all of Humanity as being lambs being driven to the slaughter, he has no compunctions with finding external means to supplement this frail old shell's physical strength. He'll tear you limb from limb with power tools if he has to – or momentarily leave the goat's body to force you to take your own life, for having dared to insult him.

Goals: hidden underneath a myriad of conflicting agendas deliberately left hanging to waylay arcane and mundane investigators, you'll find a very simple goal at the heart of all his machinations.

He intends to survive.

Something is coming, the Planes of Bliss and Pain have already felt its knell, and Leonard isn't beating around the bush, waiting for Them to come barging through the mortal plane's back door. He intends to spread his forces, little by little and bit by bit. First will come the Vices, who will claim the wealthy and powerful of this world. Then, rung by rung, the Pit will claim all the oblivious meat sacks for itself, so that it might stand at the front lines, once They finally do break through. Once the Darkhallow is emptied and even the watery abominations They created are done with, however?

Then, Hell will have two fronts on which to operate, and only one enemy remaining. All things considered, he assumes, Heaven should fall easily enough. As for the mortals...

What about the mortals? They'll all be dead, anyway!

History: the body's history begins in 1957, right outside Shreveport, Louisiana. The ancestral house was decayed and mostly closed off, the end of the slave trade having long since brought an end to the enviable fate of the White anthros over their darker counterparts and African-American humans. That long history of caprine nobility, stretching equal parts in France and England, wouldn't do them much good, now that the clan couldn't simply afford to affect idle wealth.

Leonard was born in this climate, “raised with a brass spoon”, as he calls it. Of wealth, he earned certain trappings : the education, the expansive family libraries, the evenings filled with stories of travelling abroad, physical remainders of luxuries long passed. Of the middle class, he endured everything else : seeing his parents rediscover the need for gainful employment, the small and thankless jobs, the years spent slaving away so that he, and he alone would be able to afford decent tuition. There were plenty of community programs and colleges that would have given the billy goat all the expertise in the world as an attorney, but that brass spoon isn't so easily pulled away from between the teeth and cheeks... Jules and Marie Ephesian couldn't accept the fact that their son wouldn't be likely to enter Princeton or Yale.

Considering, Leonard discovered the virtues of early and fairly gruelling work. Lying to restaurant owners and gas station managers about his age, he worked just as hard as his parents in order to be able to afford that which he'd been brought up as being the only suitable solution. Seeing as only the entrance fees could be covered, he'd need to work and nurture an impressive string of report cards to persuade the dean to let the byproduct of decayed Southern wealth in with the rich daddy's-boys.

In essence, young Lenny did nothing but work. Even once he was accepted, he became the fraternity recluse. Poring into books well into the small hours of the night, furiously studying for exams while his frat-house colleagues attended hazings and keggers, he worked for every scrap of excellence he could get. These straight As came with grants, and each grant meant a few more weeks in the dorm, a few more weeks in the books, a few more weeks with his goal in sight.

Against all odds, in 1977, he graduated Magna Cum Laude, his grants allowing him to pay back only a fraction of his otherwise exorbitant tuition fees. It wasn't long before everyone between Louisiana and both Carolinas wanted a hand on that fairly short, if impressive resume. He found himself moving up north, much to his surprise, and joined Davidson Corporate Counsel in 1978.

As always, time passed. Leo Davidson had been a fixture in Hope for quite some time, but his star was beginning to fade. Finally, the incessant demands of everyone from Merck-Frosst to Goliath took their toll on the seemingly solidly built leonine figure. In 1980, Leonard's world was shaken to its core as Davidson transferred all of the firm's assets to him, even as the lion's secretary, Estèle, became engaged to the goat and gave birth to Thomas Eugene Ephesian, nine months later.

The new firm, rechristened as Ephesian Legal Counsel, exposed the goat to the vagaries of corporate law. Backroom dealings, hotshot young executives high on cocaine and their latest stock exchange spike, easily procured prostitutes and flowing alcohol were all placed within his grasp. Always, he tried to stick to his personal principles. He didn't touch the stuff, didn't sniff the stuff, didn't fondle it either. His job was to ensure that everyone from Enron's boardroom cowboys to Goliath's hopped-up executives almost vibrating with excess energy brought on by vampire blood would emerge unscathed. Like just about anyone with a job and a few unpleasant details, he put on blinders and assumed all that mattered was his paycheck, the commission he gave his own cabinet when things turned out well, his putting together a decent team of junior and associate lawyers, and his coming home to his loving, oblivious family. That's okay, alright?

Turns out, it isn't okay.

From beyond the limits of the mortal plane, beyond Flesh, Blood and Spirit, Leonard was being watched. The slippery slope of sin requires only consent, and not necessarily enjoyment. The billy had figured that it wasn't his place to judge or to even spare silent shock or disgust at what was being discussed. The money, the situation, and family. Only these three things mattered. Ideals could be trampled if that brought more money to Thomas' college fund. Indignities could be suffered and allowed for personal prosperity and happiness.

The Master of All Sabbaths recognized what was at the core of that old, decayed wealth, that black little seedling the goat had carried around without being conscious of it. It was pride, distilled to perfection and suffused throughout the poor man'e entire moral background, his entire goals. Thomas wasn't so much a son as he was an object of pride, something to buff and polish, to bring to a perfect shine in a perfect suit with a perfect job. Pride demanded that brick by brick, line by line, yard by yard, the old fortune be reconstructed. Why else was he looking for Italian cuts or driving a Lexus? Why else had he spared money to give his increasingly ailing wife a Cartier watch?

The fruit wasn't ripe, though. There was still conviction and a good few bits of idealism left in that narrow chest. The Fiend would wait. An instant by its time, forty-five years by the body's count.

Finally, just as Leonard freshened up in the men's bathroom after successfully defending one of Weasel's managers, a nightmarish version of his own reflection sprang up from the mirror. Hands closed off his windpipe; the goat realizing only too late that these hands were his own...

As far as anyone knows, what's left the bathroom on that fateful day is a more composed, cautious, ruthless and calculative take on the old gent from down South who's become so loved in West Willowdale, Mister Ephesian who makes white suits seem so current and who always spares a few slices of pecan pie for the kids down the road.

Only – he's not doing that anymore. He used to dazzle the minds of the neighbourhood kids with his talent as an orator ad storyteller, but it's like he's lost all desire to do that, now. When he looks at the kids, it's with some kind of frigid contempt – like he doesn't know them anymore...

As for the demon's history? Have you ever met an egotistical type who's been willing to talk about his biggest and only setback to date? Suffice it to say, the earliest civilizations in Humanity's history are involved, as is a woman. A woman with wings, who lost her feathers and traded them for leather. A woman who's not too happy about it, either.
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