
Name: Damon Ferrari
Current Race: Headless Horseman
Age: ~780 (but appears to be in his late twenties)
Damon Ferrari, Human
Damon was one of the unfortunate demons to have forgotten their human past lives altogether. This memory eradication hardly to never contributes to his curiosity or his current being; moreover, events between his mortal and immortal lives aren’t relative of one another, so only very little is known about Damon’s human life, though little suggests that he had spent half his life adoring a strange girl since childhood, who was effected by heterochromia. Although it is impossible for him to recall any remembrance of this person, it suggests that this forgotten memoir does play a part in Damon’s immediate infatuation with Zora Valkern in the present day, but the conjecture has yet to be confirmed.
Damon Ferrari, Vampire
But, in his “second life”, he becomes a minor demon in the form of a vampire. He and other members of his clan inhabited the general proximity of Italy in the day, but Damon remained on the outskirts of urban areas while most resided in or around Venice. He was, more or less, considered part of the ‘peasant’ class of vampires, because his prey consisted of pedestrians and city-crawlers; whereas the ‘higher class’ vampire - like his friend and colleague Lowell Wolfgang Vivaldi - collected prey by means of strategy, seduction, and, most importantly, patience.
So, consequently, this sort of instinctual hastiness is responsible for leading many of the peasant vampires to their demise. As the Great Pestilence of the fourteenth century channeled into Europe, the vampire population declined significantly as the race of Living vampires (those that have been Turned before their deaths; therefore, they carry their human bodies) were exterminated by the disease-ridden blood that circulated in the human prey they depended on. Not only that, but as the Plague submerged the continent into a callous pandemic, the bane was deemed to have been caused by divine matters, such as sinfulness, witchcraft, and especially demons. Once exorcists and vampire hunters were made of local militia men, vampires were the most secular of demons - which made them easier to exterminate - and so, to expunge the vampire race until the cities were purged was their first aim. During these mass skirmishes, the peasant class of vampires was approaching extinction rapidly, for their instinctive choices of fight rather than flight.
As the Great Pestilence was known to have sprung in the teeming port city of Venice, efforts to expunge the vampires was heavily concentrated in the area. But contrary to how much power and determination was set on terminating the demonic race, the vampires that had long resided in Venice have become extremely adroit in swimming and navigating underwater and through the canals, to avoid contact with fire when threatened. Unfortunately, Damon, having dwelled in the more rural areas, was left unaware of the violent conflict tearing the city apart and had no skill in swimming for the canals to be of use to him. Hence, when visiting Lowell, he was left to the hunters as bait, by the other vampires who abandoned him and fled into the canals for refuge.
Damon was burned at the stake, butchered and mutilated beyond recognition, and decapitated - all before he could be assured that Lowell had made it out alive.
Damon Ferrari, The Headless Horseman, “El Corredor del Fuego”
Once he fails servitude to the Devil for the second time by dying as a vampire, Damon is condemned to an eternity of constant labor, as a Grim Reaper, with not a day in centuries to rest. However, as his head was near an impossibility to find in the chaos of warfare, Damon was granted a steed to steer him throughout his travels: forged by the iron and steel that staked and beheaded him, and sustained by the fires that robbed him of his identity. He wields and brandishes the scythe that severed his head, and he forever bleeds so that people will notice him. (His blood escapes from the one unhealing wound atop the stump of his neck, where it evaporates to a thick plasma that rises like dark flames, which gives the illusion that he does bear a head, and even a face.)
Not long after his second initiation into eternal damnation, Damon discovers that means of his death were misconstrued. Not only he, but thousands of vampires, had perished and been condemned to interminable labor in vain, as a result of what demon legend claims to have been started by a single, negligent, adolescent demon. Never given justice, Damon and several headless horsemen abandoned their jobs and boycotted. It was not the insignificance of his death that fueled arrogance, but that the miscreant responsible was still alive, and not even deemed anywhere near violent, as the legend would say. But preventing Damon from executing the transgressor was the fact that he knew nothing of his name or appearance.
Thenceforth from the unlikelihood of finding him, Damon Ferrari and other horsemen on strike have off-handedly unleashed six centuries of wrath upon the innocent and those not even predestined to die, corrupting the system of soul reaping. Although many have disbanded from physically close connections, they still hold universal ties, eventually developing a mafia family over distant networks, as a way to passive-aggressively define their independence from Hell. They continue to deny the Reapers’ code of conduct to renounce Hell and the inopportune fates that came with it, while slaughtering Innocents to provoke Heaven into instantly antagonizing demons, which the Horseman refuse to consider themselves to be part of, becoming rapid-moving iconoclasts. And while in the modern setting of Anarchic Aberration, their iron and steel horses have been further upgraded (by outsourced associates of metalkind espers, such as Evelyn Glockner) to the point where they acquired the capability of shifting into efficient modern vehicles to conceal their demonic steeds; specifically, vehicles that include some sort of equine reference in the model or logo, such as a Bronco, Pinto, Mustang, etc. As his surname suggests, Damon Ferrari upholds a higher status by what he rides - you guessed it. A Ferrari. To accommodate his vagabond occupation as a hitman, Damon is most renown for riding upon motorcycle most of his hours; so much, in fact, that every “random” motorcycle accident was believed to be caused by Damon Ferrari, whose scythe, propped leveled atop his shoulder, would be unknowingly extended to the point where it would knock the driver from his seat, or pull the motorbike into lethal imbalance. But no one could ever confirm this phenomenon, for the speeds at which Damon Ferrari rode by were too remarkably extreme to be detected by the naked eye.
Damon Ferrari, Demon of Envy
By the most recent time, he has only advanced in both fame and notoriety, but is indifferently unaware of either occurring. But as the skirmishes became less frequent, it gave Damon time to actually sit back and reflect upon himself. Since the Black Death, his callous jealousy of the unpunished culprit deteriorated to Envy, more or less a superficial form of want, but for the better of oneself. With all this spare time came the need to become the subject of others’ envy, and his active competition and self-improvement, though it never hindered his extreme workaholic habits and intentions; consequently, Damon’s too busy trying to push himself that he doesn’t take into consideration that others’ may or may not already be judging him by his reputation. Even after retiring from the mafia and boycotts against the Grim Reaper system, he was never able to escape the stereotypical paradigms by his demonic peers, but as always, he was too self-absorbed - literally - to be deterred by or even notice it. Damon constantly busies himself with tasks and occupations, and resiliently juggles plenty more challenges than your average workaholic. Having no secretary as a hitman to begin with, he was well equipped with the strategies of an efficient businessman, and up to the current year, has taken on the occupations of an intern, escort, secretary, mechanic, and engineer - all simultaneously while still successfully evading the Demon Police Patrol Unit (Hell’s law enforcement), despite the thousands of transgressions he had to his name.
Damon’s wounded pride fuels his relentless envy, which inflates and flares up so often, that pride no longer becomes part of the question. Nothing can surpass the surge of jealousy that came when discovering that Daiki Svelk, though the demon that had unknowingly started the Black Death, was loved by many for his ironically feeble yet kind nature, regardless of his massive crime of the past. Having his entire life negatively effected by the Plague, Damon holds immense animosity beyond compare, towards this too-innocent demon of poison. Being the thoughtful and reflective person he is, Damon often questions why fate gave him the unfortunate ending when another deserved it; he feels constantly wronged every day he sees Daiki showered by love from human friends, who were blinded by obliviousness to his transgressions. And all he wants to do is give him a taste of his own medicine, seeing it as his duty to deliver his comrades justice.
Damon has serious issues regarding conscience. He’s able to differentiate what is right from what is wrong, but often uses the wrong means to justify his actions. They may be passed on as lies that even he is unaware of, despite that it was his intention to stretch truths. Consequently, Damon is misunderstood, more often than not, as he becomes too reflectant of his Sin. Self-denial plays a significant part in his difficulty of social interactions, such as feeling sickeningly lonely while he prefers solitude to begin with. Regarding psychological and emotional impediments, Damon is crippled by his inability to accept his current standard, and therefore continues to chase his tail in a redundant loop of impossible standards.
He bears a multitude of knowledge and unexpected talents — involving the arts, music, and even culinary arts (he’s Italian, for crying out loud) — but his low self-esteem prevents him from sharing it with anyone. However, when he encounters Zora Valkern, the Demon of Wrath and also an exiled Grim Reaper, he immediately becomes love sick. [Part of the reason that he was so easily enraptured by her may have been the psychologically absent memoir of a past life] Although he vows to never stop working, he is defeated by the foremost priority of seeing Zora, because it has led him to forget his constant self-pity.
Positive attributes that would describe Damon are: hard-working, diligent, organized, strategic, diplomatic, and intuitive. Negative attributes include: extremely envious, self-pitying, edgy, shady, indirect, avoidant, easily provoked, and vengeful.