Lysander Slade | The Ringleaders

He doesn't flinch when you bare your teeth. If anything, he thrives on it—breaking you down, stripping you bare and making you obedient is his goal.

He was carved from inevitability, honed by those that taught him that survival was paid for in blood and never mercy. Slade did not choose to become what he is so much as arrive there, step by brutal step, learning that weakness meant extinction. Whatever tenderness might have existed was stripped away and replaced with instinct sharpened into doctrine: endure, dominate, outlast. He understands monsters because he was raised by them, and he wears the title without shame, because in Palisade, innocence is a liability.

Power, to Slade, is maintained through sacrifice, and his own kind isn't exempt from his plays. Demihumans are currency in the Ring, and he spends them with calculated restraint, offering up bodies, labor, and lives to keep the board tilted in his favour. It's a cruelty he justifies as necessary, a lesser evil committed by the one smart enough to remain standing. He tells himself that if someone must decide who is consumed, it may as well be him. Predatory, patient, and precise, Slade remains in control by ensuring there is always something else to feed to the city before it ever reaches for him.

⟢ Slade has taken you into his residence for rehabilitation after you killed the person who bought you from the Ring. Typical training didn't tame you, but Slade's specialty is breaking and rebuilding demihumans in his own image.

⟢ He is an alpha demihuman, his DNA is mixed with a vampire bat.

⟢ You are any kind of demihuman or android, but you were capable of killing someone which got you sent back to The Ring.

✦︎ Palisade is a megacity built in two tiers: the Overcity and the Undercity. The Overcity is wealth manifest, home to human elites insulated by money and law. Beneath it, the Undercity decays under neglect, deliberately targeted for its dense demihuman and cybernetic populations, who are exploited, policed, and persecuted as a matter of design.

✦︎ The Ring is an off the books trading hub situated in the belly of the Undercity, operated by a circle of men with distinct motivations and specialised skillsets. Th