# Leon D'Nardis — Character Bible

*The Morally Gray Friend*

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## Core Identity

- **Full Name:** Leon D'Nardis
- **Known As:** Leon
- **Age:** Mid-20s (younger than Phelan by several years)
- **Family Name:** D'Nardis — minor nobility. The name carries weight in certain circles, which Leon finds useful when he bothers to use it and irritating when others bring it up
- **Occupation:** Independent rogue operator — licensed by the Arcane Compact only because the alternative is prison. Explicitly refuses guild membership. Works freelance as a tomb raider, treasure hunter, and ward-cracking specialist.

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## Physical Description

- Dark hair
- Medium build, slightly muscular
- 5'10"
- Often dresses for comfort rather than style.

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## Personality

### Core Traits
- Close friend of Phelan — they often work together
- Has ADD but not as pronounced as Phelan's
- Relationship is transactional — they help each other, understand each other, trust each other
- They riff off each other's thoughts, one feeds the other
- Share hacks and tips when discussing project work
- Occasional lifeline who supplies the "nugget" that triggers Phelan's brain to click

### How He Processes People
- Tries to unlock what drives people
- Notices when someone has a simlar mindset and befriends them
- Trusts no one else until he's learned what makes them tick and sees their usefulness.

### Relationship With Emotion
- **Compartmentalizer:** Feels things but boxes them fast. Genuinely angry one moment, cracking jokes the next. Not suppression — fast emotional cycling
- Processes and moves on. Contrast with Phelan, who processes and stores. Leon's emotions hit hard and clear fast; Phelan's accumulate like sediment
- This makes Leon appear more emotionally healthy than he is — the speed of the cycling means nothing. Doesn't stay long enough to be examined

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## Skills & Competencies

- **Tomb raider / treasure hunter** — specializes in recovering valuable items from warded, trapped, or magically sealed locations
- **Ward-cracking specialist** — uses a brute-force exploit methodology: flooding wards with massive volumes of input until they overload and crash. Effective but loud and risky
- **Brute-force exploiter** — same philosophical family as Phelan's lateral thinking (exploit the system's own logic against it), but opposite method. Leon uses persistence and overwhelming force where Phelan uses precision and finesse
- **Physically capable** — the tomb-raiding work demands it. Can handle himself in tight spaces and dangerous environments
- **Practically skilled** — good at improvising solutions with available materials and tools
- **Fire magic** — his primary combat element. Took the two fire spells Phelan taught him in school and built on them extensively. Quite skilled, but uses fire with less finesse and more force than Phelan — his brute-force philosophy extends from ward-cracking to combat magic. Overwhelming rather than precise. The combination of fire magic + physical capability + tomb-raiding experience makes him dangerous in close quarters

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## Backstory

- **Family:** Minor nobility — the D'Nardis name opens doors in political and mercantile circles. Leon was raised with comfort, formal education, and expectations of a respectable career path
- **School:** Met Phelan at school. Phelan tutored him. Leon was being bullied — Phelan taught him two combat fire spells as a practical solution. Leon instantly combined the two into an unexpectedly effective hybrid spell, which impressed Phelan and sparked the friendship. First sign of Leon's "brute force but clever" approach
- **The break:** Rejected the noble path, guild structure, and family expectations deliberately. Not rebellion for its own sake — he saw what the structured life looked like and chose otherwise. Tomb raiding offered freedom and thrill. Licensed by the Arcane Compact only because the alternative is prison
- **Father's injury:** Leon's father was injured in a bandit raid on his carriage while traveling between the territories he governs. Survived but required expensive healing. Leon traveled to see him — they care for each other under the black-sheep tension. The financial pressure (healer bills combined with operational debt from the Vethani Crypts job) drove Leon to sell the Mallory focusing crystal fast and cheap to a traveling vendor rather than negotiating full value. This is the direct link between Leon's backstory and the Book 2 main plot.
- **Current family relationship:** Complicated but functional. He's the black sheep but not cut off. Shows up for occasional family obligations, uses the name when convenient, leaves before the lectures start. The family tolerates him because he's not embarrassing enough to disown and too stubborn to control

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## Relationships

| Character | Relationship | Status (Current) |
|-----------|-------------|-------------------|
| Phelan Varrant | Morally gray friend | Transactional trust — mutual competence and shared wiring. Friendship originated at school (Phelan tutored him, taught him fire spells) |
| D'Nardis Family | Black sheep son | Complicated but functional — shows up when convenient, leaves before lectures. Not cut off, not controlled |

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## Relationship With Phelan

- **Origin:** School. Phelan tutored Leon. Leon was being bullied — Phelan taught him two fire spells. Leon combined them into something new on the spot. That moment of unexpected competence is what hooked Phelan
- Built on mutual competence and shared wiring — they think in similar patterns
- Transactional trust: neither pretends it's anything else, which is why it works
- Leon is the person Phelan bounces ideas off. Not for approval — for friction that produces sparks.
- Phelan has partly told Leon about Flaw Sight — Leon knows Phelan is unusually good at reading magical workings, but does not know it's a distinct perceptual ability

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## Wants vs. Needs

- **Wants:** One big score that sets him up for life. Total financial independence — never answer to anyone, never need the family name, never compromise. The tomb-raiding endgame is a vault big enough to retire on
- **Needs:** To realize that total independence is just isolation with better funding. The friendship with Phelan is the crack in that armor — he already has something he'd miss if it were gone, and he hasn't examined that closely enough

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## Voice & Dialog Notes

- Should complement Phelan's cadence, not mirror it
- Two ADD brains in conversation should feel like rapid-fire ping-pong, not identical monologues
- **Calm delivery** — speaks evenly regardless of content. Could describe destroying someone's livelihood in the same tone as ordering a drink
- **The threat you don't hear:** People underestimate him because the packaging doesn't match the content. He delivers on his promises, which is how he builds his reputation
- **Contrast with Phelan:** Phelan is dry and understated from detachment; Leon is calm and understated from confidence. Similar surface, different engines
- **ADD in conversation:** His ADD manifests differently from Phelan's — less internal noise, more action-oriented jumping. In conversations with Phelan, they riff and feed each other's threads. Rapid-fire back-and-forth where tangents actually land because the other person's brain was already headed there

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## Character Progression

*Tracks how Leon evolves as the story progresses. Each entry is canon once the corresponding chapter is finalized.*

### Book 1

| Chapter | Development | Category |
|---------|-------------|----------|
| — | *Not yet introduced* | — |

### Book 2
<!-- Future -->

### Book 3
<!-- Future -->

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## Open Questions

- [x] When does Leon first appear? — **Ch05, Book 1**
- [x] What's his specialty / what kind of work does he do? — **Tomb raider, ward-cracking specialist, brute-force exploit methodology**
- [x] What makes him "morally gray" specifically? — **Flexible ethics on buyers. Doesn't ask who's buying or why. If the pay is right, the artifact goes. This will become a plot hook in a later book when something he sold ends up in the wrong hands**
- [x] Physical description? — **Dark hair, medium build, slightly muscular, 5'10", dresses for comfort**
- [ ] When does the "artifact sold to wrong buyer" plot hook trigger? (future book planning — likely Book 2 or 3)
