Leona Sandric
From Ars Arcanum Wiki
Contents |
The Mun
- Name: magistrate
- Contact
- Email: magistrata@gmail.com
- GChat: magistrata@gmail.com
- AIM: draegonhawke / third corvid
- LJ: http://draegonhawke.livejournal.com/
The Character
- Name: Leona Sandric
- Age/Birthdate: 104 / 1905
- Canon: Original/Beyond The Rift
- Canon Entry Point: Just after the Christmas ball
- Journal: http://sinsofskin.livejournal.com/
- Card: [[Knight of Wands (Upright)
- Card-Related Abilities/'Card Tricks':
Defining Abilities and Attributes
BTR-verse demon. Higher than normal body temperature, heart and respiration rate, greatly increased oxygen requirement. Extremely strong, fast, and resilient. Black blood. A pair of clawed but otherwise batlike wings concealed in her back; with them out, she becomes even stronger, faster, and more perceptive. Leona is a Rakshasa, which means that while she doesn't have any special powers like causing sickness or influencing emotions, she is born and bred for the hunt.
Personality
Leona is the sort of demon who will protect her interests the way a mama lion protects her cubs. Her interests are, more than usually, people, so she's got some reputation as a protector – albeit the kind of protector who will turn around and kill you herself if you put her to more trouble than she cares for.
Leona's aggressive, confident, and clever. She doesn't take shit from anyone, even if they're her elders or superiors. She'll ally and work for people only so far as she thinks it will benefit her, and it seems as though her only real master back home was the Organization – she'll do quite a lot for them, because it pays off so richly in the end. She's fiercely individualistic, which may account for her falling to the Upright side. That said, she'll eagerly work with a team so long as the arrangement benefits her.
With her perceived inferiors, she's fair but frightening. She was never one to kill employees for shits and giggles (and there were more than enough transgressors to keep her occupied in that regard), but she did to drive points home. She's the sort who will coo over you when someone has bruised you, kill them and bring you an ear as a keepsake, and then kick you out of her office because she gets work to do. Or pet and coddle you if you've sprained your ankle until the moment it heals, and then break your wrist for wasting her time.
With her peers, she's amiable (in her own, frightening way) and good-spirited. They're all in this together, like her merry sisterhood of whores in the Second World War.
She's absolutely unabashed over anything she's ever, ever done.
Background
Mama was a Rakshasa. Papa was a Glaysa-Labolas. At any given time, no one had a clue who wore the pants in that family. They lived in New York, in a little, cramped rooming house full of demons. Leona was six when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory went down, which her mother swore until the day she died was the doing of her cousin's son's lover or some such, but in any case it just had to be an Afreet. Young Leona spent a good portion of her childhood wanting to be an Afreet. This was not to be.
It was always pretty clear she'd wind up Rakshasa, and mama dearest sent her off to work for an Italian butcher, which went great until he tried to cop a feel and she took him apart. Literally. She tried to sell the pieces in the store, but people knew better about cuts of meat in those days, and weren't too keen on something they couldn't identify. The entire family packed up and moved across the city, from a small, insular borough to lovely Manhattan.
In the Roaring 20s, Leona found that the flapper lifestyle suited her to a T. Few rules, wild behaviour, casual sex, casual killings. ...the last element was a bit of a demonic addition, but she added it with gusto.
Of course, then came Black Thursday and it all came crashing down.
The Great Depression was no kinder to demons than it was to humans, and Leona soon learned that she had a couple of avenues open to her, when no one wanted to hire a young-looking flapper whose only work experience was butchering and wrapping meat: she could kill and take what she wanted, or she could find something to offer that people still wanted. She did a little – rather, a lot – of both, mugging and robbing in the wee hours of the morning and selling herself in the cooling hours of the evening and night.
World War 2 came around and offered the perfect opportunity for a resourceful demon to indulge her tastes for sex and violence at the same time: she weaseled her way to Europe, following the front as closely as she dared and "helping" the soldiers there. In return for squalid living conditions and constant danger she got a fair amount of money, a tour of the world in chaos, and a first-hand education in the mechanics of war. She lingered on in war-torn Europe for some time, returning to America in the mid-1950s, era of social repression and the death throes of that era of conservativism. She went to work undermining it in her own way, gathering up local whores and pulling them together into a respectable (for sex work at the time) business. They had their own house and everything. Leona scalped money of their takes and made sure that no one roughed them up, usually with a brutal death coming for anyone who dared. Leona's Girls came to be known as a fiery group of women with no fear and no shame, with the occasional man thrown in for those of alternate tastes.
They thrived in the 60's and 70's, becoming one of the few brothels catering to and employing both men and women on as equal a basis as prevailing society could provide. And they expanded, becoming something of an underground chain, leaving Leona more money for travel and the like. Though, to be fair, her travel more commonly took her on revenge trips against those who dared mistreat her girls.
She employed guards and administrators, giving special consideration to demons, overseeing everything. The 80's provided a special challenge as governments began to crack down on the sale of flesh, but by that they were too large to effectively stamp out – and they had attracted the attention of the Organization.
Integration came slowly, over the course of five or so years while Leona convinced herself that she'd be stronger for it and they wouldn't try to leash her. They didn't – at least, not so much that she felt the power gained wasn't worth it – and Leona went about organizing the masses of whores in America under her banner, or subsidiaries of her banner, or whatever.
As of 2008, she's the most powerful and well-connected patron of sex workers around.
