Thomas Ephesian

The less-empowered types, the undecided, the morally shifty and most mundanes who get slapped around by greater powers go here by default.
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IamLEAM1983
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Thomas Ephesian

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Name: Thomas Ephesian
Age: 45 years old
Gender: male
Species: anthro goat

Strengths: his filiation to Leonard is fairly obvious to all. The same graceful masculinity, the same distinction and the same smidgen of Old America's precious old social mores characterize him. What he brings to the table is an added layer of liveliness, a higher level of personal and interpersonal sensitivity and an iron-clad sense of morality. Some things are very clearly right for this more ram-like fellow, and others are very clearly wrong, despite the paycheck that might be dangling at the end of it. If anything, he's proven that his own father was wrong in assuming that sacrifices to one's own principles had to be made to be able to sustain noble goals like securing your offspring's future.

Considering, he's fought long and hard to win his place not in the family's cabinet, but at Tanner and Associates. Ironically choosing the antithesis of his father's career, he opted to walk the long, hard, oftentimes ungrateful but always morally gratifying road of civil defence. A staunch idealist for all of his Southern flexibility, Thomas has the conviction and surety of purpose needed to turn his back on juicy cases and pick only those that sit well with him. The ever-present System doesn't really leave him much choice and he does work for Prosecution every once in a while, but when he does, his acute sense of social justice pushes him towards achingly precise summations and demanded verdicts.

At only forty-five years old, Thomas is now considered by Chief Alderan, Lord Holden and Sir Percival – among others – as being some sort of mundane superhero. With no overt abilities but a savvy dose of White Knighting, a firm grasp on the Penal Code and an intimate knowledge of all of the city's current, previous and future projects and procedures, he's been able to stare down and verbally destroy lifelong mafiosi, mages suspected of criminal negligence (including Zeb Buck) as well as the usual and ordinary single file of fraudulent vampires and aliens.

It won't surprise anyone to know that he's one of the few people who can push Aldergard into pleases and thank-yous, as the dragon would severely want to add him on Wyvern's Legal team, sensing that he and Katherine would make a nearly unstoppable team. Being his own man, however, and having grown fond of the Western dragon's more laid-back and plainly human approach to justice, his choice seems rather permanent.
Weaknesses: much to his chagrin, the Penal Code and the Vienna Accords can't stop bullets. They can't dull knives or drive back the effects of aging. They also obviously can't protect him from the potentially devastating effects of ever learning the truth of what has happened to his father.

Unfortunately, Thomas still loves his father. He loves the man he believes is still making that old heart beat. He misses and remembers early evenings spent comparing notes, those years when his having reached adulthood and having become an upstanding man signalled the beginning of a deeper, more earnest relationship between the two goats. The way he sees things, he was only starting to get to know his father. As of late, that's abruptly stopped.

He seriously wonders why.

Appearance: at six feet sharp and two hundred and ten solid pounds, Thomas has a lean, if sturdy physique that's never largely deviated from the ideal and slightly tapered shape of the male body. With broad shoulders and an appropriately circumscribed waist, he projects an image of someone who spends some time maintaining his physique – but only to a certain degree. He perhaps is ten pounds north of being considered “ripped”, with his physique appearing as merely flat and solid, simply healthy without any obsessive considerations. He otherwise displays a broader, slightly flatter face than his father, along with slightly lowered ears and horns that sharply curl inward and hug the sides of his skull fairly closely. This allows him to slip a fedora or other hats on, unlike his father.

His fur is handled with the same level of care Leonard displayed before his possession, leaving him with a healthy, white sheen that is merely indicative of good dietary habits and a minimum of research in selecting shampoos. His cologne is more affordable but still evokes that much-vaunted Ephesian professionalism and everything, from his suit's cut to his necktie patterns and cufflinks, feels more personable. Thomas, plainly speaking, feels like a happy medium between lofty sartorial excellence and the sort of bedraggled, rumpled looks his own junior years exhibited. With a little tips and tricks inherited from his dragon of a boss, he's managed to retool the family poise, the Old South prestige and sense of presence, by adding just a tad of nonchalance to it. He seems less affected and more genuine, and it doesn't take a lifelong participant in Grand Jurys to figure out that he's a family man – and a very happy one, at that.
Behaviour: if Thomas' visual motif seems to evoke stability and less concern with hiding Earthly flubs behind things with a price tag, the same goes with his attitude. A few twists and turns of his might still sound fairly antiquated to the average ear, but that's because being the first generation to be born and live beyond the crumbling family mansion means he won't be the one to excise Shreveport from the tip of his tongue. His own daughter might have that chance, provided she doesn't pick on Daddy's occasionally letting out a dismayed “Saints alive!” or his fondly calling Cordatus “Old boy”. Even so, Thomas is still a mite more Middle-American than his demon of a father, in that the expected twang is much more subsumed, only coming out in instances of exhaustion or exasperation.

Beyond his much-talked-about dedication in the courtroom and his strict adherence to ideals other lawyers might find naïve, Thomas has a much easier time than his father with leaving the courtroom at home. Similarly, if he finds himself collaborating with Shield, he'll welcome the chance to take a short walk to the kitchen to grab a drink, largely for the purposes of purging his mind of the throes and tribulations of legal wrangling. Between sleuthing his way through a case and finding an appropriate set of a thousand words for his court summation, there might be a few nights of excessive caffeine intake, rumpled ties, searing headaches and popped Ibuprofen tablets.

He's always had to work for his successes – unlike his father who, as of late, seems to have abandoned effort for the path of least resistance. This goes to the point where some scumbags are starting to think that both Ephesians are “easy”, and walk up to the younger one with a few words on their lips and a fat suitcase filled wish cash waiting in a nearby unmarked car... Hang out with him for a bit and you're liable to see this happen – and to bear witness to how utterly frustrated and insulted this makes Thomas feel. Justice, he feels, can't be bought. It can't be bartered, it can't be reasoned with. Otherwise, it isn't justice. It becomes pseudo-political pussyfooting or collusion or obstruction.

More importantly, though, it hurts him. Not because he has doubts about himself – far from it – but because he has doubts about his father.

You haven't been hurt until you've been hurt by someone in whom you've placed all of your trust. That's the kind of betrayal that doesn't require a smoking gun or broken laws. It's the kind of personal injury Thomas isn't sure he knows how to mend, and the sort of thing that makes him hug his daughter very, very tightly after a hard day's work. Seeing little Sophie, you might understand why he isn't willing to invest himself in Wyvern.

He still has a life of his own, and he still has love he needs time to expend on a little bundle of joy.

Goals: you could say righteousness is a drug of sorts for him, and knowing that what he does is done for the greater good of the public is more than enough to keep him going. Give him a case, no matter what it is, and he'll see to it that he becomes sufficiently invested to see it brought to its conclusion.

The one case he can't crack is his father. God only knows how much he desperately, achingly wants to rebuild those bridges he's stuck seeing fall apart, without any explanation as to why.

History: born in 1980, Thomas was treated to much the same treatment as his father. Books aplenty, a house that always seemed filled with friends and family, love and support, and a bright future ahead of him – regretfully paid for by his father's obliviously completed courtroom assignments.

Similarly, his road throughout adolescence and early adulthood was marked by an independent streak a mile wide and an inclination towards occasionally difficult self-reliance his father ruthlessly encouraged. Grants and prizes could be obtained, but Leonard didn't say much more than to check the campus website. As had been the case for himself, his son's higher education would teach him the value of hard work. However, a rebellious streak had him neglect a few exams and experiment with the much-vaunted party life far more than his father. He emerged from Hope University with “merely” a mention of excellent performance, and faced the difficult prospect of either trudging through one of the smaller cabinets, integrating his father's benevolently open fold, or sticking with his favourite campus professor, Faustus Cambrius Cordatus. A few shared pints of barley alcohol and lengthy private discussions had forged a fast friendship between the young man and the dragon, to the point where Thomas' entering his mentor's cabinet was met with a little party, some plastic kazoos and a dingy little cake shared with a few of his new coworkers.

Ephesian Legal Counsel had always nurtured a particular atmosphere, a sense that being a long-toothed boardwalk predator was expected and that performance was key. For Tanner and Associates, raw performance mattered less than the individual ability of each junior and associate to comfortably nod its head at the end of each day and hold he or she has done a good job. Friendships were part of this and, inevitably, some of that staid, performance-focused productivity was abandoned in favour of dashes of colour and personality that wouldn't surprise anyone who'd watched the more humane saurians shape their own endeavours. Cordatus' hallways and corridors buzzed with productive life – but also with Nerf darts on Friday afternoons, or the sound of someone down the hallway getting Rick-rolled by a colleague, right before lunch.

In 2019, Thomas met Christine Hamby during an after-court Happy Hour. She'd just finished defending her client against an overzealous officer who'd slapped a fine on her client's vehicle, when the time limit being busted depended solely on the client's need of mobility aids to walk around town. They compared notes, and soon found themselves comparing a little more than that...

One year later, Christine had moved in and little Sophie Ephesian had entered their lives. For a while, Leonard seemed to be the perfect grandfather and babysitter. For her first four years, everything went as could be expected. Then, after a fairly routine case, Leonard grew more distant. More judgemental, as well. Any grandfatherly fondness he'd worked up for Sophie seemed... faked, now. The baby herself didn't miss a chance at letting it be known that she found being around the old goat extremely unpleasant. No one would exactly know why...

A few years have passed and Thomas, while happy at home and at the office, finds himself desperately wanting to know just what the Hell happened, for his father to change in such a striking manner.
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