Leander Tseng (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adrinkbeforethewar) wrote2011-12-23 07:50 pm
adrinkbeforethewar) wrote2011-12-23 07:50 pm
basic bio
Name: Leander Jianjun Tseng
Fandom: n/a
PB: Takeshi Kaneshiro
Physical Description: A tall Chinese guy in a tan trenchcoat, Lee has short black hair and usually a serious, maybe even glum expression. He's built lean without looking particularly fit — someone who probably has a good metabolism and isn't regularly active. His usual choice of clothing tends toward dressy, but in a haphazard way. He doesn't take care of his clothes or they're secondhand and tailored: good shirts, good suits, good shoes, things fit right, but also signs of wear, subtle stains, and just a general carelessness to the way he wears them.
Sexuality: Though Lee considers it better if people don't get close to him (his reasoning is that he's a shit magnet), he otherwise has a fairly relaxed mindset regarding sex. He's bisexual, open to a lot of things and very laidback about polyamory and multiple partners, but respectful of other people's preferences. He himself tends towards monogamous behavior, and he gets attached to and cares about people fairly quickly. He has no preference for dominance or submission, and is not particularly good at either — in general he's pretty boring in bed, but extremely accommodating.
World Information: The outer face of Leander's world is our world, 21st century modern day Earth. Its less obvious, if not wholly hidden aspects, resemble already existent works of gaming material/fiction such as the (old) World of Darkness, David Wong's John Dies At the End, Hellblazer, the film Constantine, the X-Files, and John Connolly's Charlie Parker detective novels. Basically, there is a supernatural side to this world that is poorly charted, and not entirely unknown to the right people in the right place at the right time. Magic is wild and dangerous and tricky to use, yet at the same time, there are no biological or mystical qualifications necessary to learn how to use it. Certain individuals will, for any number of reasons, be better at others. Magic remains a mostly underworld activity, but recognition is beginning to spread, and with it comes the attention of the law and the government in general.
Leander hates magic, hates dealing with magic, and has never admitted to himself that his own "knack" (which, to be fair, does seem a bit more naturalistic/all-encompassing than what is being practiced) may be magical in nature as well. He often employs partners who are magical practitioners themselves so they can work together: Lee finds the object/person, the partner removes the obstacles. As such, he is known to the magical community, and they to him. Their circles are not the same circles, but there is definite overlap. He has also been around for a good number of years, so he has a reputation (not necessarily a good one).
History: Born the younger of two siblings, Lee was babied and spoiled as the only male child. It isn't that his parents were that unenlightened, but despite his older sister's dutifulness, they did display a marked preference for Lee when he and his sister were young. It was never outright or obvious, but they were more enthusiastic about his achievements, more supportive of his failures, and his activities always took precedence over hers. It could also be argued that he received more attention because he demanded it — he was a really energetic kid, all over the place and getting into trouble. By the time they were both in high school, however, things had changed. Cassandra, the more studious and obedient of the two, became the more praised child, and Lee learned to settle down.
It was around this time that he began to become conscious of his "knack". He'd always had it, and he'd always vaguely known he had it, but what he hadn't realized was that it was unusual. Intellectually, he had experienced and knew that other people lost things from time to time, or got lost themselves. It had never happened to him, but never in any dramatic fashion. If he had ever accidentally been separated from his mother, he simply found her again and she never noticed. When people around him mentioned having lost items, he would sometimes know where they were, in a vague way, and he might suggest to look there, or he might not. If the item wasn't in the vicinity, then he would feel where it was (somewhere off to the east, perhaps), but have no way of knowing where exactly it was. These had always been vague feelings, slight senses. Now they were becoming stronger, more specific.
So what? Great. Powers. Awesome.
Then a girl from his high school went missing after a football game.
This presented Leander with a few problems. He knew (vaguely) how to find her, but how could he justify this knowledge to the police? First he had to find the location himself (it would be a while before he figured out he could use maps to find things/people too). Then he would have to drop some kind of anonymous tip convincing enough to get the police to investigate it. This sounds simple. It was not. His only method of finding the missing girl was "drive/walk in the direction he felt she was in until located". This took pretty much all day and he ended up in some dangerous neighborhoods along the way. Once he found the house, he called the police from a payphone. After that it was a matter of waiting. It's not intended as a slur on the Chicago police that their first visit to the house turned up nothing — the girl was cleverly hidden. Frustrated, Lee realized he needed to be more specific about where she was. He needed to see, maybe even get inside the house. As he thought of different ruses to get in, the thought did cross his mind that he might "take care of" things himself, but he immediately dismissed it. He was seventeen. He trusted the police.
He would only get one shot at seeing more of the house, and it sank — the man was too paranoid to let anyone linger at his door very long. It didn't take too much thinking to realize he would have to take action himself. He would have to break in, disable the guy, and let the girl go.
Things went smoother than anticipated except the girl was already dead.
This story would repeat itself a few times throughout his senior year, and each time, to the detriment of his grades and life in general, Leander would go crazy trying to use his ability to help. Sometimes it worked out. Most of the time it didn't, and he came very close to being in serious trouble in several cases. To this day, Lee does not do missing children cases unless he's punishing himself.
In college he went through a period, about half a year, of ignoring his "knack" the best he could. He got into Buddhism for a while, going so far as to have a dharma wheel tattooed on his back, between his shoulder blades. But with his ability came the compulsion to use it, and by the time he graduated, he was making extra money off of finding things and pets. For a few years, he worked at small newspapers, wrote articles for online publishing, and basically worked as a normal person would work. During this time he reconnected with a childhood friend, Alex Elliston, and they began to run their agency on the side. Alex too had a knack, but his was for opening things. Together, they were Trouble, and they had a reputation for it in certain (journalistic/private investigation/magic) circles.
Even today, Leander hasn't figured out every detail of what exactly happened, who they must have pissed off, or why Alex died. The location they were checking out was a set up, that much was clear, but whoever was responsible kept their hands clean. They went in with the idea that they might find some interesting paperwork pertaining to the Christian ladies' modesty movement (look, it was a slow week). They ended up in a veritable warehouse maze of traps, some low tech, some high tech, and some (more disturbing of all) magical. Alex died almost immediately, and Leander was trapped there for several hours with his corpse. Then the police arrived. Needless to say, he was in trouble for more than breaking and entering, and it was a huge mess that actualfax took years to clear up. For several years following this, Lee again swore off the agency and the general use of his powers. In time, however, he befriended a teenage psychic, Shadi Shahriar, and was gradually coaxed back into the lifestyle by dint of trying to prevent Shadi from dying horribly. While he did indeed succeed in preventing Shadi from dying horribly, one of their misadventures went more awry than usual, resulting in Shadi going blind in one eye. This actually increased his psychic abilities, but his parents were less than thrilled and now Leander has a lovely restraining order that probably expired once Shadi turned eighteen but regardless, they haven't made any further contact in person. They have a project they collaborate on long distance for missing people, particularly children: Leander locates them as best as he can, Shadi arranges proxies for physically finding them through a variety of means, practically none of which are legal.
Turning back to his agency once more, as it was hard to find work with his criminal record, Leander went through a series of partners, his relationship with whom each ended in a variety of ways. Jocelyn Calero, a lively, stern demonologist and exorcist in her 50s, parted ways with him amicably when she was diagnosed with bone cancer. Ben Westmore, a curse breaking expert in his mid 20s, parted ways with Lee less than amicably, due to personality clashing (lesson learned: do not date your partner). Alain Arlotte, a wheelchair bound magician in his late 40s, worked with Leander several times over the course of a year, but they decided in the end that they weren't suited for each other. Irish magician Dara McDermott simply disappeared one day about eight months into their working relationship. Thoroughly burned on partners, Lee was ready to create a cocoon and transform to the final stage of his development, which would be the crusty, hardhearted, cynical PI... and then he met Rebecca Wymer, who casually forced her way into his life, rearranged things so they went more smoothly, and got him back on the road to being human rather than a stereotype. Rebecca was one of the big players in the magical scene that Leander never understood and honestly still doesn't. It's a complex political situation in which he was only ever a pawn, sometimes not even on the board, and for most of the time in which he knew Rebecca, he wasn't even aware it existed. He'd thought of all these magic practitioners as sort of academics or people with unconventional jobs, people who had organizations, yes, but not really for doing things. Jocelyn, Dara, and Alain did give off that impression. Ben did not, but Leander always assumed Ben was an exception and not the rule. His four previous partners were also not big players. Jocelyn and Alain were respected voices but not in positions of authority, while Dara was more connected to the European societies and Ben was not at the time highly thought of in his association (something which has now changed).
Rebecca, on the other hand, was one of four to five top powers in the Chicago area, probably in the top ten of the midwest and east coast, top twenty of the North American continent. Big time. If there were an actual story about this world, it would be about her. Leander is more of a footnote, an unexpected complication. Rebecca's association with Leander was, on her end, purely a part of the greater machinations of her life as one of these influential people. On Leander's end, he was a little bit in love with her and thought she was the greatest. Everybody is the star of their own story, but Leander had at this time of his life a particularly acute sort of tunnel vision that probably has as much to do with being a guy as it does his personality. It was this self-absorption that made him ignorant of the bigger picture, of what Rebecca did when she wasn't helping him (cultivating a useful resource). When she "died" as part of a maneuver for power against another group, the Conclave, Lee was not informed of the artifice. He had a small role to play, but he went overboard.
The problem is that Leander has good intentions, he lives more or less decently, he cares about people despite his selfish tendencies. He also destroyed the Conclave, a group of 25+ individuals of varying magical strength, and the building they used to run their organization. Leander doesn't know magic, but after years of being partnered with some of the best in the field, he'd picked up things here and there. So he used his knack to find the Conclave's strongest destructive spirit, used their own wards of containment against them, and unleashed vengeance. The spirit slaughtered or maimed every member of the Conclave, and Leander killed those who were still alive after the spirit was finished. He took their financial records, their data, and some of their relics before burning down the entire place. (The vault they kept their valuables and relics in was warded against fire and would be ravaged by the magical community in general.)
More than aware that this would not be without consequence, Lee stowed what he'd taken and took off. There's absolutely no way he would have made it if Rebecca hadn't interceded and helped, as much to keep him out of the way while still on a leash as anything. She remains in Chicago salvaging the situation and turning it to her own advantage while still utilizing Leander's knack. His little murder pique has definitely changed the nature of the game and if people knew he was responsible, he'd probably be killed by dozens of different groups or get abducted to be used in a far less kind way than Rebecca is using him.
Powers: His "knack" is for finding things, people, and places. He is never lost. He always knows where he is and where to go. This is because there are two aspects to his "knack" — a constant geocentric spatial awareness paired with an ability to identify/tag something and track that tagged thing.
The spatial awareness is something he must concentrate on, because in day to day life it's not really useful to be constantly aware that you're on a spinning planet flying through space around a star which is in a solar system in a galaxy which is also rotating and flying through space. Here the limitation is really the human capacity to understand and process distance. The farther he tries to track, the harder it is for him to follow. Accurate maps and GPS can help extend his sense-of-place; Google's satellite option can also be of use when he wants to look for something that is very far away.
Identifying/tagging varies in difficulty. People, stationary places, and distinctive objects are the easiest. Leander doesn't have to concentrate at all to know where the people he loves or favorite possessions are. But when he doesn't know the person he's looking for, if he's never seen or held the object he needs to find, if he's never been to the place he's trying to track down or if that place keeps moving, then things get complicated. He has to be shown pictures, told about the objects/places/people in detail, given things that belonged to the people/place, something. Trying to find multiple objects or generic objects is almost impossible if it's long distance. You could ask him "does anyone in this room have a gun?" and that would work, you could ask him "where's the nearest place that sells tacos" and he could do that (except you might end up at someone's house where someone's making tacos), but the longer you go, the vaguer you are, the harder it is.
Personality: A little vain, a little unreliable, a little lazy, a little more of a taker than a giver. A guy who has a lot of seemingly small faults but is otherwise reasonably moral, well-intentioned, and genuinely nice. The thing is, those faults add up to a significant amount. This is a guy who shrinks from responsibility and commitment, who can be kind and generous but is often too self-centered to see that those qualities should be used more often. He doesn't have much ambition, he's reflexively cynical as a way of remaining passive and not fighting for change of any sort. He's capable of hard work and bravery, but it would take a crisis to bring that out. If he were truly put to the test, there's a good chance he would come out the better for it, but for the most part, there haven't been any real tests for him, and he avoids situations that would lead to that because he's afraid of it and of change. He would rather fuck around with his little pawn shop and eat well and go to the gym and live comfortably in as much style as he can afford.
Leander is reactive and self-centered, for the most part keeping the range of his actions limited to a personal realm. He drinks too much, he ignores too much, he relies too much on his one talent and modicum of charm and does not make attempts to cultivate more skills or better qualities. He doesn't hold himself accountable for enough, and he also doesn't hold other people accountable for their actions as much as he should. He's an adult who doesn't act responsibly, yet has had more influence over people than he understands. There is a HUGE amount of difference he can make in people's lives, although doing that kind of thing would be extremely risky: when everyone knows you're the guy who can find anything and anyone, your life is more or less over, and the lives of the people who matter to you are forfeit to anyone who wants control over that. He does as much as he can that he can do safely, mostly the project with Shadi, which he has some unease over because it has at times amounted to vigilantism. The fact is, he cannot go to legal authorities with what he knows, and he can't approach family or friends of missing people because then he'll be a creepy nutbar and get arrested and outed, etc. It's more dangerous than ever now because of what he did to the Conclave. Only Rebecca knows for sure, but Ben and Shadi both suspect.
Because murdering a bunch of people, or to be technical, turning a malevolent supernatural entity loose on a bunch of people and watching them get killed, is kind of a big deal.
Fandom: n/a
PB: Takeshi Kaneshiro
Physical Description: A tall Chinese guy in a tan trenchcoat, Lee has short black hair and usually a serious, maybe even glum expression. He's built lean without looking particularly fit — someone who probably has a good metabolism and isn't regularly active. His usual choice of clothing tends toward dressy, but in a haphazard way. He doesn't take care of his clothes or they're secondhand and tailored: good shirts, good suits, good shoes, things fit right, but also signs of wear, subtle stains, and just a general carelessness to the way he wears them.
Sexuality: Though Lee considers it better if people don't get close to him (his reasoning is that he's a shit magnet), he otherwise has a fairly relaxed mindset regarding sex. He's bisexual, open to a lot of things and very laidback about polyamory and multiple partners, but respectful of other people's preferences. He himself tends towards monogamous behavior, and he gets attached to and cares about people fairly quickly. He has no preference for dominance or submission, and is not particularly good at either — in general he's pretty boring in bed, but extremely accommodating.
World Information: The outer face of Leander's world is our world, 21st century modern day Earth. Its less obvious, if not wholly hidden aspects, resemble already existent works of gaming material/fiction such as the (old) World of Darkness, David Wong's John Dies At the End, Hellblazer, the film Constantine, the X-Files, and John Connolly's Charlie Parker detective novels. Basically, there is a supernatural side to this world that is poorly charted, and not entirely unknown to the right people in the right place at the right time. Magic is wild and dangerous and tricky to use, yet at the same time, there are no biological or mystical qualifications necessary to learn how to use it. Certain individuals will, for any number of reasons, be better at others. Magic remains a mostly underworld activity, but recognition is beginning to spread, and with it comes the attention of the law and the government in general.
Leander hates magic, hates dealing with magic, and has never admitted to himself that his own "knack" (which, to be fair, does seem a bit more naturalistic/all-encompassing than what is being practiced) may be magical in nature as well. He often employs partners who are magical practitioners themselves so they can work together: Lee finds the object/person, the partner removes the obstacles. As such, he is known to the magical community, and they to him. Their circles are not the same circles, but there is definite overlap. He has also been around for a good number of years, so he has a reputation (not necessarily a good one).
History: Born the younger of two siblings, Lee was babied and spoiled as the only male child. It isn't that his parents were that unenlightened, but despite his older sister's dutifulness, they did display a marked preference for Lee when he and his sister were young. It was never outright or obvious, but they were more enthusiastic about his achievements, more supportive of his failures, and his activities always took precedence over hers. It could also be argued that he received more attention because he demanded it — he was a really energetic kid, all over the place and getting into trouble. By the time they were both in high school, however, things had changed. Cassandra, the more studious and obedient of the two, became the more praised child, and Lee learned to settle down.
It was around this time that he began to become conscious of his "knack". He'd always had it, and he'd always vaguely known he had it, but what he hadn't realized was that it was unusual. Intellectually, he had experienced and knew that other people lost things from time to time, or got lost themselves. It had never happened to him, but never in any dramatic fashion. If he had ever accidentally been separated from his mother, he simply found her again and she never noticed. When people around him mentioned having lost items, he would sometimes know where they were, in a vague way, and he might suggest to look there, or he might not. If the item wasn't in the vicinity, then he would feel where it was (somewhere off to the east, perhaps), but have no way of knowing where exactly it was. These had always been vague feelings, slight senses. Now they were becoming stronger, more specific.
So what? Great. Powers. Awesome.
Then a girl from his high school went missing after a football game.
This presented Leander with a few problems. He knew (vaguely) how to find her, but how could he justify this knowledge to the police? First he had to find the location himself (it would be a while before he figured out he could use maps to find things/people too). Then he would have to drop some kind of anonymous tip convincing enough to get the police to investigate it. This sounds simple. It was not. His only method of finding the missing girl was "drive/walk in the direction he felt she was in until located". This took pretty much all day and he ended up in some dangerous neighborhoods along the way. Once he found the house, he called the police from a payphone. After that it was a matter of waiting. It's not intended as a slur on the Chicago police that their first visit to the house turned up nothing — the girl was cleverly hidden. Frustrated, Lee realized he needed to be more specific about where she was. He needed to see, maybe even get inside the house. As he thought of different ruses to get in, the thought did cross his mind that he might "take care of" things himself, but he immediately dismissed it. He was seventeen. He trusted the police.
He would only get one shot at seeing more of the house, and it sank — the man was too paranoid to let anyone linger at his door very long. It didn't take too much thinking to realize he would have to take action himself. He would have to break in, disable the guy, and let the girl go.
Things went smoother than anticipated except the girl was already dead.
This story would repeat itself a few times throughout his senior year, and each time, to the detriment of his grades and life in general, Leander would go crazy trying to use his ability to help. Sometimes it worked out. Most of the time it didn't, and he came very close to being in serious trouble in several cases. To this day, Lee does not do missing children cases unless he's punishing himself.
In college he went through a period, about half a year, of ignoring his "knack" the best he could. He got into Buddhism for a while, going so far as to have a dharma wheel tattooed on his back, between his shoulder blades. But with his ability came the compulsion to use it, and by the time he graduated, he was making extra money off of finding things and pets. For a few years, he worked at small newspapers, wrote articles for online publishing, and basically worked as a normal person would work. During this time he reconnected with a childhood friend, Alex Elliston, and they began to run their agency on the side. Alex too had a knack, but his was for opening things. Together, they were Trouble, and they had a reputation for it in certain (journalistic/private investigation/magic) circles.
Even today, Leander hasn't figured out every detail of what exactly happened, who they must have pissed off, or why Alex died. The location they were checking out was a set up, that much was clear, but whoever was responsible kept their hands clean. They went in with the idea that they might find some interesting paperwork pertaining to the Christian ladies' modesty movement (look, it was a slow week). They ended up in a veritable warehouse maze of traps, some low tech, some high tech, and some (more disturbing of all) magical. Alex died almost immediately, and Leander was trapped there for several hours with his corpse. Then the police arrived. Needless to say, he was in trouble for more than breaking and entering, and it was a huge mess that actualfax took years to clear up. For several years following this, Lee again swore off the agency and the general use of his powers. In time, however, he befriended a teenage psychic, Shadi Shahriar, and was gradually coaxed back into the lifestyle by dint of trying to prevent Shadi from dying horribly. While he did indeed succeed in preventing Shadi from dying horribly, one of their misadventures went more awry than usual, resulting in Shadi going blind in one eye. This actually increased his psychic abilities, but his parents were less than thrilled and now Leander has a lovely restraining order that probably expired once Shadi turned eighteen but regardless, they haven't made any further contact in person. They have a project they collaborate on long distance for missing people, particularly children: Leander locates them as best as he can, Shadi arranges proxies for physically finding them through a variety of means, practically none of which are legal.
Turning back to his agency once more, as it was hard to find work with his criminal record, Leander went through a series of partners, his relationship with whom each ended in a variety of ways. Jocelyn Calero, a lively, stern demonologist and exorcist in her 50s, parted ways with him amicably when she was diagnosed with bone cancer. Ben Westmore, a curse breaking expert in his mid 20s, parted ways with Lee less than amicably, due to personality clashing (lesson learned: do not date your partner). Alain Arlotte, a wheelchair bound magician in his late 40s, worked with Leander several times over the course of a year, but they decided in the end that they weren't suited for each other. Irish magician Dara McDermott simply disappeared one day about eight months into their working relationship. Thoroughly burned on partners, Lee was ready to create a cocoon and transform to the final stage of his development, which would be the crusty, hardhearted, cynical PI... and then he met Rebecca Wymer, who casually forced her way into his life, rearranged things so they went more smoothly, and got him back on the road to being human rather than a stereotype. Rebecca was one of the big players in the magical scene that Leander never understood and honestly still doesn't. It's a complex political situation in which he was only ever a pawn, sometimes not even on the board, and for most of the time in which he knew Rebecca, he wasn't even aware it existed. He'd thought of all these magic practitioners as sort of academics or people with unconventional jobs, people who had organizations, yes, but not really for doing things. Jocelyn, Dara, and Alain did give off that impression. Ben did not, but Leander always assumed Ben was an exception and not the rule. His four previous partners were also not big players. Jocelyn and Alain were respected voices but not in positions of authority, while Dara was more connected to the European societies and Ben was not at the time highly thought of in his association (something which has now changed).
Rebecca, on the other hand, was one of four to five top powers in the Chicago area, probably in the top ten of the midwest and east coast, top twenty of the North American continent. Big time. If there were an actual story about this world, it would be about her. Leander is more of a footnote, an unexpected complication. Rebecca's association with Leander was, on her end, purely a part of the greater machinations of her life as one of these influential people. On Leander's end, he was a little bit in love with her and thought she was the greatest. Everybody is the star of their own story, but Leander had at this time of his life a particularly acute sort of tunnel vision that probably has as much to do with being a guy as it does his personality. It was this self-absorption that made him ignorant of the bigger picture, of what Rebecca did when she wasn't helping him (cultivating a useful resource). When she "died" as part of a maneuver for power against another group, the Conclave, Lee was not informed of the artifice. He had a small role to play, but he went overboard.
The problem is that Leander has good intentions, he lives more or less decently, he cares about people despite his selfish tendencies. He also destroyed the Conclave, a group of 25+ individuals of varying magical strength, and the building they used to run their organization. Leander doesn't know magic, but after years of being partnered with some of the best in the field, he'd picked up things here and there. So he used his knack to find the Conclave's strongest destructive spirit, used their own wards of containment against them, and unleashed vengeance. The spirit slaughtered or maimed every member of the Conclave, and Leander killed those who were still alive after the spirit was finished. He took their financial records, their data, and some of their relics before burning down the entire place. (The vault they kept their valuables and relics in was warded against fire and would be ravaged by the magical community in general.)
More than aware that this would not be without consequence, Lee stowed what he'd taken and took off. There's absolutely no way he would have made it if Rebecca hadn't interceded and helped, as much to keep him out of the way while still on a leash as anything. She remains in Chicago salvaging the situation and turning it to her own advantage while still utilizing Leander's knack. His little murder pique has definitely changed the nature of the game and if people knew he was responsible, he'd probably be killed by dozens of different groups or get abducted to be used in a far less kind way than Rebecca is using him.
Powers: His "knack" is for finding things, people, and places. He is never lost. He always knows where he is and where to go. This is because there are two aspects to his "knack" — a constant geocentric spatial awareness paired with an ability to identify/tag something and track that tagged thing.
The spatial awareness is something he must concentrate on, because in day to day life it's not really useful to be constantly aware that you're on a spinning planet flying through space around a star which is in a solar system in a galaxy which is also rotating and flying through space. Here the limitation is really the human capacity to understand and process distance. The farther he tries to track, the harder it is for him to follow. Accurate maps and GPS can help extend his sense-of-place; Google's satellite option can also be of use when he wants to look for something that is very far away.
Identifying/tagging varies in difficulty. People, stationary places, and distinctive objects are the easiest. Leander doesn't have to concentrate at all to know where the people he loves or favorite possessions are. But when he doesn't know the person he's looking for, if he's never seen or held the object he needs to find, if he's never been to the place he's trying to track down or if that place keeps moving, then things get complicated. He has to be shown pictures, told about the objects/places/people in detail, given things that belonged to the people/place, something. Trying to find multiple objects or generic objects is almost impossible if it's long distance. You could ask him "does anyone in this room have a gun?" and that would work, you could ask him "where's the nearest place that sells tacos" and he could do that (except you might end up at someone's house where someone's making tacos), but the longer you go, the vaguer you are, the harder it is.
Personality: A little vain, a little unreliable, a little lazy, a little more of a taker than a giver. A guy who has a lot of seemingly small faults but is otherwise reasonably moral, well-intentioned, and genuinely nice. The thing is, those faults add up to a significant amount. This is a guy who shrinks from responsibility and commitment, who can be kind and generous but is often too self-centered to see that those qualities should be used more often. He doesn't have much ambition, he's reflexively cynical as a way of remaining passive and not fighting for change of any sort. He's capable of hard work and bravery, but it would take a crisis to bring that out. If he were truly put to the test, there's a good chance he would come out the better for it, but for the most part, there haven't been any real tests for him, and he avoids situations that would lead to that because he's afraid of it and of change. He would rather fuck around with his little pawn shop and eat well and go to the gym and live comfortably in as much style as he can afford.
Leander is reactive and self-centered, for the most part keeping the range of his actions limited to a personal realm. He drinks too much, he ignores too much, he relies too much on his one talent and modicum of charm and does not make attempts to cultivate more skills or better qualities. He doesn't hold himself accountable for enough, and he also doesn't hold other people accountable for their actions as much as he should. He's an adult who doesn't act responsibly, yet has had more influence over people than he understands. There is a HUGE amount of difference he can make in people's lives, although doing that kind of thing would be extremely risky: when everyone knows you're the guy who can find anything and anyone, your life is more or less over, and the lives of the people who matter to you are forfeit to anyone who wants control over that. He does as much as he can that he can do safely, mostly the project with Shadi, which he has some unease over because it has at times amounted to vigilantism. The fact is, he cannot go to legal authorities with what he knows, and he can't approach family or friends of missing people because then he'll be a creepy nutbar and get arrested and outed, etc. It's more dangerous than ever now because of what he did to the Conclave. Only Rebecca knows for sure, but Ben and Shadi both suspect.
Because murdering a bunch of people, or to be technical, turning a malevolent supernatural entity loose on a bunch of people and watching them get killed, is kind of a big deal.