Edison Axeman

"Sin isn’t sin without someone to call it that."

- Edison’s stance on morality

Edison ‘Eddy’ Axeman is the son of Jack ‘The Scratch’ Axeman, a senior Devil appearing in multiple stories, typically those involving Faustian deals, competition, and debate. A Royal not believing in complete adherence to his own story so much as ‘performing the role better than the old man ever could’, Eddy is musical of mind and voice, a charmer with a surprising amount of understanding for a Devil, Eddy cannot be contained, compressed, or silenced. Constantly making deals and a firm believer in a smarter work ethic rather than a harder one, his ‘Sin isn’t sin without someone to call it’ line is something of a war cry, a condemning of what contains or constricts him and his friends, and an absolute promise that he will do all in his power to live his own way with almost no compromise.

As personable and freedom-oriented as he does seem, just… hang on to your soul if you know what’s good for you.

Personality
Edison is what could be described as an optimistic nihilist (more subscribing to Existential Nihilism -- the belief that meaning can be carved out of a meaningless universe by the individual -- than Cosmic), but has little patience for anything that does not resonate with him personally.

He is comfortable following rules but those rules must make inherent, untouchable sense to him if he’s to adhere to them.

His words are often not chosen with carefulness so much as speed and efficiency, and he will cover most mistakes he makes in his reasoning or speaking within a few sentences, as he’s likely already moved on to another point by the time his audience’s/target’s brain has truly processed things. He’s quick, speaking with an urgency of pace but a casualness of tone.

Believing many human constructs to be petty and deliberately designed to antagonize one another, he is a strong advocate of moral relativism, but more specifically that ‘sin’, as an umbrella term is a complete fabrication designed to control others. He doesn’t believe in excessive cruelty and is big on coexistence, but he is also entirely comfortable using a situation to further his own gain. He’s an odd Devil, being liberal in his demonic duties. Uncompromisingly honest, but will argue tirelessly for something he doesn’t actually believe in, stepping into another’s shoes to argue a truth from another perspective.

A Holistic Trickster. An ENTP.

Appearance
Eddy has auburn hair with a slight curl, and green eyes. He exhibits what is simultaneously a good standard of grooming and inherently scruffy, slightly wild countenance. Anomaly Carter compared his physical appearance to ‘A coyote with an effortless dress sense’. Dangerous, rough, but beautiful. Slightly 1800s. His jaw is distinct and powerful, and his chin has a slight dimple. His smile lights up his whole face and is usually completed with an arched eyebrow, though his forehead/ space between his eyes displays ‘Eleven Lines’, or evidence of scowling. Thin, quick, and charismatic, he commands a room not through promise of violence but through coercion of presence, sheer charm and magnetism and a healthy does of good looks.

Both hands are adorned with some series of glyphs, black psuedo-tattoos that seem to shift or change from day to day, but his one wrist reads ‘Art is Dead’, consistently.

How the Story Goes
Versions of a smooth-talking, multi-talented Devil appear throughout fairy tales, Christian-anchored and otherwise, throughout most of history. Jack ‘Scratch’ Axeman was one such Devil, and appears in many forms and stories. Whether it’s engaging in a music showdown for a golden fiddle/ soul, appearing before the bar to stand as a literal Attorney from Hell, dragging someone off into a storm for violating the terms of their agreement, or acting as an especially morbid magician in a remote Austrian town, the Devil always gets his due.

How does Edison come into it?
Eddy is the son of Jack ‘the Scratch’, and has big shoes to fill in his multiple roles and stories he must take part in.

Family
His father, Jack Axeman, was a senior demon and had his fair share of deals and exploits under his belt to the point of having his own little mythos behind him. That said, Eddy has said of his father ‘The worst part about Jack was that he had absolutely bought into his own legend. He believed he really was that good and that anybody else who would had to fall short. He held himself up as the paragon, the be all and end all for what a person -- or, devil -- should be and that made him a disagreeable, unapproachable bastard.’

He recognizes that his father did decent work but that his methods were brazen and callous and lacked finesse and intelligence in some ways, and as such he must viciously assure himself of his own individuality and success at every convenience. While Jack believed in pure, unflinching evil, Eddy believes in seeing the world as a whole and recognizing the merits, drawbacks, and fundamental absurdity of all things.

Needless to say, Eddy resents his father almost entirely. He openly makes jokes about the emotional trauma about his upbringing, but they’re worded and delivered in such a way one barely has time to dwell on them before Ed’s off to his next point. He claims his little sister, Ken, who’s about 8, is his favorite member of his family and that one day she’ll surpass everyone, including himself.

Friends
His roommate, Finch Webster, has earned the nickname ‘Atticus’, and is a good friend aside from some ideological differences. They’ve been known to get drunk in their dorm, at which point Eddy will try to convince Finch to sell his soul. Even while intoxicated, Finch has maintained excellent logical faculties to the point of it irritating Eddy. During these debates, Eddy has only bested him a handful of times, and even on those occasions, Finch has managed to retroactively negate the deal in the days following.

Pet
Eddy’s dog, Phineas Gage, is a cute little black mutt… with a piece of rebar or some kind of black pipe stuck through his jaw, lending him a slightly Frankensteinian effect. A few more jagged bits of onyx seemed to be painlessly embedded in parts of him and some actually float at a suspended point.

Romance
Edison believes in love in that he doesn’t believe that the concept is fundamentally non-existence but rather that humans have perverted it into something too deliberate and petty.

Enemies
Eddy’s primary enemy is seriousness. Convention. Human messiness. You consider yourself to be too important, Eddy will be there to cut you down a little and show you the true futility of life. You harp upon virtue or some similarly individual philosophy like it’s the only one that matters, Eddy will show you how unimportant you can be. Laugh a little. Sign away your soul. Live. Don’t take yourself so damn seriously.

Outfits
Eddy wears a black, slightly rumpled jacket with a white button-up, complete with a bolo tie. His black and white wing-shoes are kept polished. He wears his clothes like he’s never taken them off, but that somehow makes him more approachable in his sort of oddball charm.

Eddy favors dark colors and generally monochromatic dress schemes, but he can appreciate a splash of deep blue or colors on the brighter end of the spectrum.

Miscellaneous

 * He’s capable of blowing fire out of his fingertips/ hands
 * He plays ukulele, fiddle, and bass.
 * His car is a black 1968 Ford Mustang. The license plate reads NO-44
 * Smokes for the Aesthetic™ because he’s not actually capable of getting lung cancer.
 * He exhibits a slight accent, but it seems to vary or at the very least is hard to pin down. Some have said it sounds distinctly 'Southern Gentleman', others claim it's closer to being a New Orleanian, partially Cajun one. There's a possibility his voice sounds incrementally different to each that hears it, no doubt as a method of gaining trust.

Quotes

 * ”Who killed the Kennedys? I can’t remember, it’s for a research project.”
 * ”Good Lucifer, I wish I was back in Saint Petersburg...”
 * ’Y’all can call me Pilate, because I’m washing my damn hands of this whole thing.”
 * "Just... have some common courtesy, will you?"
 * "Politesse saves souls, man."

Trivia

 * His ability to manipulate flame, specifically in the context of his hands, was directly inspired by the line in Devil Went Down to Georgia, which references ‘fire [blowing] from [the Devil’s] fingertips as he rosined up his bow’. As such, Eddy plays a violin.
 * His car is a Ford Mustang (a reference to the black horse appearing in ‘The Devil and Tom Walker’), with 1968 being the same year the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil track came out; several of his quotes are also references. The plate on the car, No. 44, is a reference to Mark Twain’s ‘The Mysterious Stranger’.
 * His love of music is constant, but some of his prefered genres are connected to different songs in specific. Bluegrass stems from his Southern inspirations, his love for classic rock from the aforementioned Stones’ song, and his love of jazz -- as well as surname -- from the exploits of a New Orleans murderer/ folk figure ‘The Axeman of New Orleans’, who claimed to be a demon that would kill those that did not appreciate jazz.
 * His dog is named after a railway foreman that survived his skull being pierced by a metal spike after an explosives accident.
 * Bits of his personality and simultaneously happy but infinitely nihilistic worldview (the same worldview that bleeds into his music) was directly inspired by American comedian Bo Burnham. As such, Eddy’s tattoo ‘Art is Dead’ shares a title with one of Bo’s songs.