PIKE, ezra ivan {changeling}

Ezra can be summed up in three words: tall, thin and neat. He looks professional whether he’s working or not. His brown hair is carefully parted at the centre and combed to either side, curls tweaked neatly and held in place with gel or oil. His pale skin is clear and his pale blue-grey eyes are incisive and piercing; they tell of his brilliant intelligence. He can glare someone down without problem and is possibly all the scarier for being so mild-mannered out of the courtroom. Not that he comes across as nice, either. His chin is often lifted haughtily and he obviously thinks a lot of himself. He tends to give people the heebie-jeebies, and obviously relishes it. Especially when concerning mortals.

His accent is fairly neutral, though he hails from NYC. His job is to argue a point, so of course he speaks very well and confidently in front of large groups of people… however, when he’s nervous or flustered, he does develop quite a bad stammer. Being such a self-assured man, one would think that this never happened. On the contrary, Ezra is a very tightly-wound creature. It may have something to do with his OCD—it only manifests noticeably when he’s stressed or emotional, but when it does, it makes him jumpy and twitchy. Stammering is still extreme, however, and doesn’t happen very often at all.

In his wolf form, Ezra retains his brilliant blue eyes, though none of the intelligence that they usually display. Being a changeling, he loses control utterly when he turns at moontime, and becomes a bloodlusting, brutish beast. His coat is thick and fawn-coloured, and while his size is large, he tends to be quite clumsy. Even in human form, Ezra is a little bit graceless when he tries to move too fast. Not because of his size, however; mainly because he’s so lanky.

There’s something a little bit smug about Ezra. Maybe it comes from him being an overachiever; in the world of attorneys, he knows that he’s got game. Perhaps he isn’t so great at the socialising bit, but he is one clever mofo and he’s always been very smart for his age. He doesn’t always mean to, but he’s lightly condescending to most people completely unconsciously, and while he’s always sure to be polite, there’s usually a sly jibe or two disguised somewhere in his pretty words. He’s good at talking and arguing a cogent point, but not really so good at carrying off a normal conversation. Getting a compliment out of him is like pulling teeth. Difficult, painful without anaesthetic, but possible.

Most people notice within moments of meeting him that Ezra is really freaking uptight. This does not mix well with his arrogance. It turns him into something of a control freak, making him have to make sure that everything is just right, and that everything goes the way he’s painstakingly planned it. He is also ludicrously paranoid. All of this on top of his OCD can sometimes make him a bit twitchy. It isn’t a particularly bizarre or severe case: he loves the number four and tries to organise his life around it, he cleans and arranges the things he owns a lot… and occasionally he randomly freaks out. It tends to coincide with the coming full moon, when it gets harder and harder for him to be his usual ‘civilised’ self. Until he actually transforms into a raging wolf.

So Ezra doesn’t fit the ‘stereotype’ of the werewolf. However, since being changed, there are some personality traits that have started to break through that weren’t there before. He’s a lot more mercenary about getting what he wants, for a start, and tends to be a lot more possessive. The senses he acquired when he was changed are used to his advantage, especially in the courtroom when being able to smell someone’s anxiety or hear their heart rate can really play into an attorney’s hands. Since he came ‘out’ as a werewolf five years ago, there’s been a lot of controversy about allowing him to continue working… it’s one of the reasons he came to Chicago. The truce exists here: he’s a citizen like any other mortal or bloodsucker, and it’s his god-given right to do what he’s best at.

The basics: he counts obsessively. He cleans obsessively. He has an ego the size of the Chrysler Building. He enjoys battles of wit, but not physical battles (unless he’s in his wolf form). He’s somewhat controlling. He’s addicted to caffeine. He’s a brilliant lawyer, thinker and crossword-solver. He’s practically morally bankrupt. He twitches when obsessing, and stammers when he’s flustered. He’s paranoid and a hypochondriac. He’s usually one step ahead of the game. He’s very determined. And he isn’t all that he appears.

For all that he can be an unpleasant (not to mention downright odd, with his rituals and hand-sanitizer) person, Ezra is actually a decorated hero in some circles. Why? Because since arriving in Chicago three years ago, he’s gotten all sorts of werewolf rights acts passed in court of law, and amended issues that the old truce may have left out. And because of discrimination issues, many of the acts were also passed for vampires, though obviously he was mainly doing it for his own kind. He makes strong cases that calculatedly appeal to people’s sense of morals when it comes to this issue. The most high-profile of his cases was getting murder charges dropped to manslaughter when a changeling kills someone during moontime, because they were not in control of their actions. Other such details and re-defining of previously untouchable laws have made him infamous, practically a household name to those that are interested in law or the supernatural.

He’s also considered a champion of the truce: after all, he’s a living success story, right? He’s always been wide open about being a werewolf, and hasn’t let it slow his career down. Well, we’ll have to take it back a little bit.

Ezra was born in New York to two ordinary civilian parents. A little sister came along five years after him. He was always a nerdy, scrawny creature, swotting up on his studies and resenting the bigger boys that pushed him around. He was bullied fairly badly, though he rarely reacted to it. Still, it may have had more of an impact than he thinks, judging by the cold way he can react to people sometimes. He decided that he didn’t really like people—except for his little sister, whom he adored unconditionally from the moment she was born. He still does adore her, and she has him wrapped around her little finger. She brings out his sparse big-ol'-softy side. Bless.

Deciding to study law, as he developed from a spotty, stuttering adolescent into a tall young man with eyes like the arctic tundra, he was accepted at NYCU studying a law degree and went to lawyer school straight after he graduated, earning his J.D. in one year. He stayed in New York, training to be a defence attorney, and planning on getting wealthy and having his life made while the kids that used to bully him took up dead-end jobs. Or so he envisioned. He never bothered getting touch with any of them again.

When he was twenty-six, three years after he passed his bar exam first time at a younger age than most do, he was attacked by a werewolf. He survived the encounter, of course, but was bitten. And that changed everything. Suddenly he was capable of mass destruction in the night; suddenly he was a big, messy brute three nights of every month. He’d always had mild OCD, but his change triggered it into manifesting wildly. It took him a while to get it under control again; he quite his cushy job at the law firm he’d been with for the past few years and moved in with his sister. She looked after him while he got himself together, and kept him locked up on moontime nights.

However, once he got ‘control’ over his OCD? It was as though the path became clear again. So long as he arranged things into fours, so long as he ordered everything on his shelves just right, the lycanthropy problem seemed small and something he could deal with. It was a coping mechanism of sorts. And so he ‘came out’ as a werewolf, moved to Chicago to avoid being filled with silver bullets by disgruntled slayers whose pensions he might have slashed, and went back into the law game. He’d never been one for holding back in his work, but this time he took no prisoners.

Laws were repealed, passed, altered, reformed. In the state of Illinois at least, equality was fought for tooth and nail in the courtrooms, and other states—even other countries watched on. Their success could change everything. They were new wave pioneers. There were lots of them, of course, but Ezra was one of the frontmen of the entire campaign. And so he became famous; not in a traditionally celebrity-like way that appealed to the masses, perhaps, but he became known to those that had an interest. He made a lot of friends, especially with the supernatural and mortal activists that thought they deserved rights. He also made a lot of enemies, however. Especially among slayers and anti-‘monster’ civilians. That may account for why he’s so paranoid. There are lots of people that would like to see him dead.

So, after all this, why is he going back to get the biggest change of all—the truce—demolished? Because he thinks it’s counter-intuitive. Because he thinks it’s the absolute right of werewolves and vampires to hunt mortals as nature intended. So while people continue to see him as a groundbreaking lawyer that’s changing the face of paranormal law… Ezra’s far more old-school than you’d think. But he has to be careful about it. For people to discover his intentions would cause a scandal.

The cat sat on the mat.