Ladon Ceto (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
justamobster) wrote2012-09-25 01:38 pm
justamobster) wrote2012-09-25 01:38 pm
Entry tags:
Character History Part 1: The City by the Sea
Ladon hatched in the mountains a good two hundred miles south of the city of Nieve on the Aberna continent. He was one of twenty-two hatchlings in his clutch that managed to emerge from their eggs, and one of the sixteen who survived into adulthood. Ladon grew up in the system of caves with his immediate family and several other unrelated families, roughly 500 dragons total.
From the time they hatch, baby dragons are taught that humans are bad. Their parents and siblings raise them with an almost unhealthy fear, solely to keep them from venturing out of the mountains and into places where their parents can't protect them. The older dragons utilize stories to tell about the wickedness of human beings. By the time a dragon is old enough to sneak out of the caves, they're well aware of what fate would meet them if they did: killed by bipedal savages and made into boots. As dragons get older, they start to learn that the stories aren't necessarily true, but they have their reasons for being told. Eventually they learn that their existence is kept secret because of an ancient grudge stemming from a war wherein the humans threatened to hunt down and kill all non-human, magic using races. They're severely out-numbered and humans have been known to slaughter their own kind, let alone anything different or threatening. Whether or not modern humans would actually kill dragons (or worse) if they found them is unknown, but on whole it's agreed that finding out for sure isn't worth the risk. Dragon culture is based heavily on the protection and cultivation of the family, and no adult dragon in his or her right mind would willingly put their clutch in danger of being massacred-- with exceptions. Like Ladon.
Ladon grew up with your average hatchling's fear of humans. The world outside of his mountains was a scary, unknowable place, and he looked to his parents and all the other dragons for protection. Normally, he would never have ventured outside his safe space as a child, but Ladon was helpful to his mother. When he was nine, there was a heavy snow. The winter was brutal and cold, enough that it claimed the life of one of his clutchmates who had always been on the sickly side. His mother was grief-stricken on top of being gaunt from the lack of food. While dragons spent most their winters hibernating, they did have to eat now and then. The hunting party had little success, and what could be found was often given to the hatchlings while the parents did without.
When the snow finally began to melt, Ladon ventured out to find food. He wound up lost in the forest. He was able to catch a fox, but wasn't sure how to get home with the corpse. While in the forest, he stumbled on a hunting party of a different sort-- a human and its two children. He observed them with both fear and curiosity. The adult human treated the two smaller humans much like his father did him. After watching them a while, Ladon started to understand that humans weren't as terrifying as he'd been told. Though they never saw him, the humans believed they were being tailed by a hungry but friendly animal, and they tossed him scraps from their meals, including the meat of a buck the adult had used some kind of loud and scary stick to kill.
After a couple days, Ladon found his way back up the mountain with his dead fox. When he told the clutch what he'd seen, the other dragons warned him never to sneak off again.
He proceeded to ignore their warnings for the next ten years, and learned everything he could about human beings. This cost him a lot in his relationships with the other dragons. Even after his younger siblings were born and Ladon started to share the burden of raising the new clutch, he still found time to steal away and continue observing human life. There were times he was afraid for his own life-- not because of the humans he watched, but because of his family. His brothers and his father had threatened to kill him if he kept up his visits to the farms at the base of the mountain, or the village further west along the mountain chain. Eventually Ladon was brave enough to walk away from his clutch and dive head-first into another world entirely: Nieve, the city of the humans.
On one of his outings, Ladon had befriended a red dragon named Draig who was visiting the area and who had alerted him to the fact that dragons could not only learn the magic necessary to change their forms, but that a few clutches were living in cities on other continents, alongside humans. Ladon told his closest friend and cousin Aza, an adopted gold dragon, about his plans. His cousin then tagged along in the hope of changing Ladon's mind. With Draig's guidance, Ladon located an incubus willing to teach him transformation magic, and after some time, he was eventually able to maintain a human form. At that point, the friends headed to the human city of Nieve to give their new life a try.
Ladon quickly learned that Nieve was not THE city of the humans, just one of them-- not even the largest one. He finally started to understand how immensely out-numbered his kind were. There were more humans in a single city than there were dragons in the whole world. He had thought his clutch was large, but then he moved to the city and he really started to understand why the others had feared the sheer amount of these beings that existed.
City life wasn't what they were expecting, and culture shock was the least of their troubles. They were suddenly in a very aggressive and violent environment. Ladon had been prepared for some aspects of city life-- the stories had told of humans as murderers and thieves. What he wasn't prepared for was the truly dark nature of the city. Rape, child abuse, drugs, extortion, poverty, apathy... None of these existed in the dragon culture of which he was familiar. Ladon was beginning to understand why his kind considered humans monsters.
Thankfully, they encountered an underground grouping of vampires who had been intrigued by the smell of dragon blood, and got to know the other mythical creatures living in the city, including incubi and succubi. With their help, the dragons started to learn and grow accustomed to city life and all its little social idiosyncrasies. It was then that the dragons finally encountered a culture where they could thrive, one that acted outside the influence of Nieve's extensive laws and policies.
Aza, Draig, and Ladon struggled to scrape money together for the rent for their single bedroom apartment, and each had issues getting and keeping jobs. The boss of the vampires, Joseph Nason, was willing to help them so long as they were willing to help him in return. Joe found employment for Aza with a doctor who worked on men who'd been injured in illegal activities, including shoot-outs, robberies, and drug deals gone wrong. Draig took up the saxophone and played in a couple of the sleazier clubs that Joe owned, and Ladon was handed over to one of the human crime lords that Joe kept on a leash, acting as both a thug for the human and a spy for the vampire.
Adopting a criminal lifestyle changed Ladon in several fundamental ways. He'd been a wide-eyed kid when he came to live in Nieve, but after seven years in the service of two different crime bosses, he'd become jaded and much less hesitant to harm others to make a point. It was rare that he killed, but when he did, he was cold about it. He'd learned to shut off the part of his brain that tried to talk him out of taking drastic measures, and he felt no sympathy for the men he electrocuted and kicked about while they reeled from the shock. His friends were worried, particularly Aza. While his cousin had fallen in love with pharmaceuticals and now had the goal of curing one of the sicknesses threatening to wipe out their kind, he didn't approve of how Ladon was making his money. Enough pressure from Aza had Ladon considering a change of career. His break came when his human boss stepped out of line and killed a young actress. The murder was messy and caused more trouble for Joe than he wanted to handle. Joe gave Ladon the go-ahead to bring a group of vampires with him the next time he was called in. The vamps slaughtered everyone involved in the woman's murder.
Ladon took the opportunity to step up and fill the newest opening in Joe's criminal empire. A succubus he was acquainted with clued him in to an antique bookstore where there were several encrypted tomes the human owner thought were locked family registries. He bought them up and taught himself glyphomancy through their spells. He enlisted Draig's help, made a deal with a resident were pack alpha, borrowed starter funds from his boss, and made a deal with a weapons smuggler he knew. A few months later, he started selling charmed guns to multiple crime rings. While the criminals he sells to are none the wiser that he's been using magic on the guns, he's developed a reputation for selling the best weapons in the area. He's made bank ever since, was able to pay back Joe with interest and continue to cut him in on the profits. He amassed a large family with a nicely stocked base of operations, a large clientèle, and plenty of income-generating real estate to cover any gaps between. He bought a jazz club, named it the Golden Apple, and utilized it as a legitimate front for laundering money on top of generating income. Things were looking up.
For a while, anyway.
Thus far, Ladon had managed to keep to his initial plan of living around but outside of a human population, benefiting from them and capitalizing on their self-centered world view but not getting involved on a personal level. That is, except for one woman. Camilla Flow, wife of one of the men he'd worked with, had somehow wormed her way not just into Ladon's daily life, but into his thoughts and interest. They'd formed a friendship, one taunt with unrequited feelings and constant arguments. Ladon couldn't lie to himself-- he felt strongly for her-- but he knew the feeling wasn't mutual, and even if it had been... She was human. And there was simply too much at stake.
When Cammy killed her husband, he helped her hide the body. He did all he could to turn suspicion off her, and told Joe he'd killed the man because he'd found out about his not-exactly-human background. He defended her honor even when she told him not to. In late Spring five years later, a bookie from Garevia named Freder Meyet showed up wanting to collect on Cammy's husband's debt. Soon the "missing" Mr. Flow would be declared legally dead, and that meant Cammy could collect on a lucrative life insurance payout. Meyet threatened Cammy and when Ladon found out, he decided to deal with the situation before it could jeopardize her any further. He arranged a meeting with the bookie, stating he intended to "settle things." Ladon figured maybe he'd wind up with some bloodied knuckles from teaching the bastard a lesson, but Meyet was one step ahead of him. He showed up with Ladon's little brother, Conrit, in tow.
Conrit had run away from home two months prior, and had been living in the city without Ladon's knowledge for a couple weeks. It might have been the shock of seeing his little brother in human form, knowing he'd been in danger while just under his nose, or it might have been the way Meyet tried to use the kid as a bargaining chip, reasoning that if Ladon gave him twice what he was owed, then he wouldn't put a bullet in his little skull... But whatever it was, Ladon snapped. He hadn't killed anyone himself since he'd left his thug days behind him. Regardless, he didn't hesitate to shoot Freder Meyet point-blank in the face.
The younger dragon was, naturally, frightened, and Ladon spent most the night tracking down where he'd run off to after the alley shoot-out. A succubus sovereign encountered Conrit at the boardwalk and kept him safe until Ladon arrived to collect him. After that, Ladon went to Joe to figure out what to do about the alley massacre as well as the errant hatchling.
Conrit was a bundle of trouble that Ladon simply didn't need. On top of that, he couldn't in good conscience let his little brother stay with him when he led such a dangerous lifestyle. To Ladon's relief, the vampire boss agreed and made arrangements for both brothers to take a train back to their mountain home. Ladon balked on the idea of going back to his clutch, even "just for a visit" as Joe put it. Instead he arranged for two of his employees (a green dragon named Guivres and a were-bear named Domino) to escort his little brother home. That plan backfired when someone held the train station up, and Conrit took off with the daughter of a rich architect and found his way to Camilla Flow's maid service.
Things grew more and more complicated from there, until Ladon found himself in the middle of a custody battle over a little girl that had a complicated past for a 6-year-old. Violette Montange was the mystery that had a new layer every time one peeled back. She was at first the daughter of a rich man targeted by a washed-up private investigator looking for ransom, but soon Ladon and Conrit uncovered the truth, that Violette was not Montange's biological daughter nor a normal human herself. Her real parents were two mages from another city, and one of them-- the man who had held up the train station-- was already dead.
From the time they hatch, baby dragons are taught that humans are bad. Their parents and siblings raise them with an almost unhealthy fear, solely to keep them from venturing out of the mountains and into places where their parents can't protect them. The older dragons utilize stories to tell about the wickedness of human beings. By the time a dragon is old enough to sneak out of the caves, they're well aware of what fate would meet them if they did: killed by bipedal savages and made into boots. As dragons get older, they start to learn that the stories aren't necessarily true, but they have their reasons for being told. Eventually they learn that their existence is kept secret because of an ancient grudge stemming from a war wherein the humans threatened to hunt down and kill all non-human, magic using races. They're severely out-numbered and humans have been known to slaughter their own kind, let alone anything different or threatening. Whether or not modern humans would actually kill dragons (or worse) if they found them is unknown, but on whole it's agreed that finding out for sure isn't worth the risk. Dragon culture is based heavily on the protection and cultivation of the family, and no adult dragon in his or her right mind would willingly put their clutch in danger of being massacred-- with exceptions. Like Ladon.
Ladon grew up with your average hatchling's fear of humans. The world outside of his mountains was a scary, unknowable place, and he looked to his parents and all the other dragons for protection. Normally, he would never have ventured outside his safe space as a child, but Ladon was helpful to his mother. When he was nine, there was a heavy snow. The winter was brutal and cold, enough that it claimed the life of one of his clutchmates who had always been on the sickly side. His mother was grief-stricken on top of being gaunt from the lack of food. While dragons spent most their winters hibernating, they did have to eat now and then. The hunting party had little success, and what could be found was often given to the hatchlings while the parents did without.
When the snow finally began to melt, Ladon ventured out to find food. He wound up lost in the forest. He was able to catch a fox, but wasn't sure how to get home with the corpse. While in the forest, he stumbled on a hunting party of a different sort-- a human and its two children. He observed them with both fear and curiosity. The adult human treated the two smaller humans much like his father did him. After watching them a while, Ladon started to understand that humans weren't as terrifying as he'd been told. Though they never saw him, the humans believed they were being tailed by a hungry but friendly animal, and they tossed him scraps from their meals, including the meat of a buck the adult had used some kind of loud and scary stick to kill.
After a couple days, Ladon found his way back up the mountain with his dead fox. When he told the clutch what he'd seen, the other dragons warned him never to sneak off again.
He proceeded to ignore their warnings for the next ten years, and learned everything he could about human beings. This cost him a lot in his relationships with the other dragons. Even after his younger siblings were born and Ladon started to share the burden of raising the new clutch, he still found time to steal away and continue observing human life. There were times he was afraid for his own life-- not because of the humans he watched, but because of his family. His brothers and his father had threatened to kill him if he kept up his visits to the farms at the base of the mountain, or the village further west along the mountain chain. Eventually Ladon was brave enough to walk away from his clutch and dive head-first into another world entirely: Nieve, the city of the humans.
On one of his outings, Ladon had befriended a red dragon named Draig who was visiting the area and who had alerted him to the fact that dragons could not only learn the magic necessary to change their forms, but that a few clutches were living in cities on other continents, alongside humans. Ladon told his closest friend and cousin Aza, an adopted gold dragon, about his plans. His cousin then tagged along in the hope of changing Ladon's mind. With Draig's guidance, Ladon located an incubus willing to teach him transformation magic, and after some time, he was eventually able to maintain a human form. At that point, the friends headed to the human city of Nieve to give their new life a try.
Ladon quickly learned that Nieve was not THE city of the humans, just one of them-- not even the largest one. He finally started to understand how immensely out-numbered his kind were. There were more humans in a single city than there were dragons in the whole world. He had thought his clutch was large, but then he moved to the city and he really started to understand why the others had feared the sheer amount of these beings that existed.
City life wasn't what they were expecting, and culture shock was the least of their troubles. They were suddenly in a very aggressive and violent environment. Ladon had been prepared for some aspects of city life-- the stories had told of humans as murderers and thieves. What he wasn't prepared for was the truly dark nature of the city. Rape, child abuse, drugs, extortion, poverty, apathy... None of these existed in the dragon culture of which he was familiar. Ladon was beginning to understand why his kind considered humans monsters.
Thankfully, they encountered an underground grouping of vampires who had been intrigued by the smell of dragon blood, and got to know the other mythical creatures living in the city, including incubi and succubi. With their help, the dragons started to learn and grow accustomed to city life and all its little social idiosyncrasies. It was then that the dragons finally encountered a culture where they could thrive, one that acted outside the influence of Nieve's extensive laws and policies.
Aza, Draig, and Ladon struggled to scrape money together for the rent for their single bedroom apartment, and each had issues getting and keeping jobs. The boss of the vampires, Joseph Nason, was willing to help them so long as they were willing to help him in return. Joe found employment for Aza with a doctor who worked on men who'd been injured in illegal activities, including shoot-outs, robberies, and drug deals gone wrong. Draig took up the saxophone and played in a couple of the sleazier clubs that Joe owned, and Ladon was handed over to one of the human crime lords that Joe kept on a leash, acting as both a thug for the human and a spy for the vampire.
Adopting a criminal lifestyle changed Ladon in several fundamental ways. He'd been a wide-eyed kid when he came to live in Nieve, but after seven years in the service of two different crime bosses, he'd become jaded and much less hesitant to harm others to make a point. It was rare that he killed, but when he did, he was cold about it. He'd learned to shut off the part of his brain that tried to talk him out of taking drastic measures, and he felt no sympathy for the men he electrocuted and kicked about while they reeled from the shock. His friends were worried, particularly Aza. While his cousin had fallen in love with pharmaceuticals and now had the goal of curing one of the sicknesses threatening to wipe out their kind, he didn't approve of how Ladon was making his money. Enough pressure from Aza had Ladon considering a change of career. His break came when his human boss stepped out of line and killed a young actress. The murder was messy and caused more trouble for Joe than he wanted to handle. Joe gave Ladon the go-ahead to bring a group of vampires with him the next time he was called in. The vamps slaughtered everyone involved in the woman's murder.
Ladon took the opportunity to step up and fill the newest opening in Joe's criminal empire. A succubus he was acquainted with clued him in to an antique bookstore where there were several encrypted tomes the human owner thought were locked family registries. He bought them up and taught himself glyphomancy through their spells. He enlisted Draig's help, made a deal with a resident were pack alpha, borrowed starter funds from his boss, and made a deal with a weapons smuggler he knew. A few months later, he started selling charmed guns to multiple crime rings. While the criminals he sells to are none the wiser that he's been using magic on the guns, he's developed a reputation for selling the best weapons in the area. He's made bank ever since, was able to pay back Joe with interest and continue to cut him in on the profits. He amassed a large family with a nicely stocked base of operations, a large clientèle, and plenty of income-generating real estate to cover any gaps between. He bought a jazz club, named it the Golden Apple, and utilized it as a legitimate front for laundering money on top of generating income. Things were looking up.
For a while, anyway.
Thus far, Ladon had managed to keep to his initial plan of living around but outside of a human population, benefiting from them and capitalizing on their self-centered world view but not getting involved on a personal level. That is, except for one woman. Camilla Flow, wife of one of the men he'd worked with, had somehow wormed her way not just into Ladon's daily life, but into his thoughts and interest. They'd formed a friendship, one taunt with unrequited feelings and constant arguments. Ladon couldn't lie to himself-- he felt strongly for her-- but he knew the feeling wasn't mutual, and even if it had been... She was human. And there was simply too much at stake.
When Cammy killed her husband, he helped her hide the body. He did all he could to turn suspicion off her, and told Joe he'd killed the man because he'd found out about his not-exactly-human background. He defended her honor even when she told him not to. In late Spring five years later, a bookie from Garevia named Freder Meyet showed up wanting to collect on Cammy's husband's debt. Soon the "missing" Mr. Flow would be declared legally dead, and that meant Cammy could collect on a lucrative life insurance payout. Meyet threatened Cammy and when Ladon found out, he decided to deal with the situation before it could jeopardize her any further. He arranged a meeting with the bookie, stating he intended to "settle things." Ladon figured maybe he'd wind up with some bloodied knuckles from teaching the bastard a lesson, but Meyet was one step ahead of him. He showed up with Ladon's little brother, Conrit, in tow.
Conrit had run away from home two months prior, and had been living in the city without Ladon's knowledge for a couple weeks. It might have been the shock of seeing his little brother in human form, knowing he'd been in danger while just under his nose, or it might have been the way Meyet tried to use the kid as a bargaining chip, reasoning that if Ladon gave him twice what he was owed, then he wouldn't put a bullet in his little skull... But whatever it was, Ladon snapped. He hadn't killed anyone himself since he'd left his thug days behind him. Regardless, he didn't hesitate to shoot Freder Meyet point-blank in the face.
The younger dragon was, naturally, frightened, and Ladon spent most the night tracking down where he'd run off to after the alley shoot-out. A succubus sovereign encountered Conrit at the boardwalk and kept him safe until Ladon arrived to collect him. After that, Ladon went to Joe to figure out what to do about the alley massacre as well as the errant hatchling.
Conrit was a bundle of trouble that Ladon simply didn't need. On top of that, he couldn't in good conscience let his little brother stay with him when he led such a dangerous lifestyle. To Ladon's relief, the vampire boss agreed and made arrangements for both brothers to take a train back to their mountain home. Ladon balked on the idea of going back to his clutch, even "just for a visit" as Joe put it. Instead he arranged for two of his employees (a green dragon named Guivres and a were-bear named Domino) to escort his little brother home. That plan backfired when someone held the train station up, and Conrit took off with the daughter of a rich architect and found his way to Camilla Flow's maid service.
Things grew more and more complicated from there, until Ladon found himself in the middle of a custody battle over a little girl that had a complicated past for a 6-year-old. Violette Montange was the mystery that had a new layer every time one peeled back. She was at first the daughter of a rich man targeted by a washed-up private investigator looking for ransom, but soon Ladon and Conrit uncovered the truth, that Violette was not Montange's biological daughter nor a normal human herself. Her real parents were two mages from another city, and one of them-- the man who had held up the train station-- was already dead.