His mother went by Kinkoro, likely a fabricated and claimed name of a woman of impressive esteem and magical power, long before the Veil fell. She was a practitioner of real rank, the kind other practitioners lowered their voices around, though Larry has never been willing to say more than that. The few who could fill in the rest are not the sort who talk. She raised him with the aid of hired caretakers in her absences, in a small home in Vice City on a thin income afforded to Larry and his two sisters. From before his clearest memories she and the caretakers she employed drilled into him in a martial discipline that treated the body, mind and the heart's intent as a single instrument, or a single weapon, according to need.
He grew up poor, even though in truth his mother was anything but. A humble upbringing taught humility, modesty... but also, aspiration for more. He learned from an early age that one had to become remarkable in an unfair, unjust world to ascend beyond one's own circumstances. Pristine grades and a personal desire to achieve only excellence saw him through his schooling with haste. This desire also extended to his own magical methodology, as he had manifested his inner wellspring at a young age.
He and his mother are estranged, by now. The estrangement is genuine and deep. He does not know where she is, he does not look for her, he flinches at the thought that she might be close, and if she turned up at his doorway tomorrow he would almost certainly leave the door shut and try to escape out the bedroom window. His reasons for the estrangement are good ones, in his humble opinion. The prospect of her return is the single thing most likely to cut clean through every protective outer layer of himself that he'd built up over the years, leaving only his vulnerable core of being that he hides beneath.
What he did in the years between that apartment and this city is not written down anywhere a person could find it, and he prefers it that way. He arrived in Los Santos with no record, no file, no thread anyone has managed to pull, and that kind of clean is not luck. It is the result of careful arrangements made with people who owed him in offices that hand out badges. Of favors enacted by people who owed him in offices that hand out policy. All the result of a long stretch of work he describes, on the rare occasions he describes it at all, as making sure the right things happened to the right people.
By various accounts that never quite line up, he was something between a fixer and a kingpin, the mind other people's operations were quietly built around. He was never once arrested. He never once kept the money.
Where it went instead is most of the answer to what he was doing it all for in the first place.
There is no honest way to describe Larry Essex without saying upfront that he is a person that is internally divided. He is in at least three pieces. And the moral argument between them is the running drama of his inner life.
The Caretaker is the one the social, squeaky clean world meets. He is gentle and easily embarrassed. He apologizes for things that were never his fault and means every apology. He listens attentively, with his eyes steady and his body turned toward whoever is talking and the small confirming nods landing in the right places, until people who have not been heard in years find themselves saying far more than they intended. He gives up his seat. He carries groceries up two flights for the old woman on the floor above. He mourns over patients he has known for an hour, and means every shed tear.
None of this is performance. It is the truest thing about him. It is also in his most private thoughts, a form of armor: as long as he is being the gentle one, he does not have to be the other things he is, and the gentleness keeps people near enough that he never has to find out what he becomes without them.
The Sensualist is the engine underneath. He does not run on only ideology or ambition, or even the patient stacking of advantage. He runs on intensity, on moments that mean something, on the thin bright edge where a life tips toward death and back. He steps into crises because they are meaningful to him. Medicine drew him because medicine is where the real things happen, where bodies fail and get caught, where the line is thin and you can see it in every moment and in every judgment. He explains this to himself, when he explains it at all, as compassion. It is not only compassion, and he knows it is not. A fact he takes no pleasure in the knowing.
In plain language, he is a man addicted to mattering. Comfort bores him. Stability in the long-term sense unsettles him in a way he cannot put into words. He needs the world to read as a place with visible stakes, and pressed hard enough he will walk toward danger before he thinks to walk away from it. He calls this his conscience. Some of it is appetite, and he can usually tell the two apart, which does not help his sense of morality.
The Masque is the part he does not discuss.
When Larry is alone, and now and then when he is not, a figure speaks to him. A robed shape with a smooth mask of pale white make where a face should be. It narrates his life as though it were staged, in a tone of amused, faintly ironic appreciation, and he answers it in his head more often than he would ever say aloud. The Masque, or simply Masque, as he prefers to be called, has opinions. Masque even has tastes. Masque, for all intents and purposes finds certain moments delicious in a way that Larry consciously finds unsettling and wants no part of.
The Masque is not him, nor was it born from him. But regardless, it follows like a devil on his shoulder. Almost symbiotically it reads Larry's inner workings, speaking in theater because theater is how a child makes adult violence survivable, and he does so dearly wish to make Larry face what he flinches away from. It hungers for drama for not only its own fulfillment, but because drama is the fuel Larry's deeper engine burns, and Masque is the outside observer in the audience honest enough to say so out loud.
You see her across the room.
That is almost always how it begins, and Larry has long since stopped correcting people in his own head about the pronoun trick the world plays on him. A soft, endearingly feminine figure standing at modest height. Five foot six at the highest, when he's bothering not to slouch. Moving with the quiet pace of someone who has been taught to walk carefully and stay unremarkable his whole life. Dark brown hair, hairstyle varied depending on convenience and situation. His hair length varying from as short as just above the shoulders, to as long as the upper back.
The face is the part that fools people. Soft cheekbones. A delicate brow. Grey eyes that read in most situations as gentle, but in others, as cold in a way that has nothing to do with mood and everything to do with his intentions. His skin is fair and unblemished in a manner that suggests either extraordinary luck or extraordinary skin care, when in fact it is likely both... with an added touch of magic.
The figure, however, stands out the most. Nothing about it screams 'masculine' in any capacity. His shoulders are narrow. His hands upon close inspection are elegant and uncalloused. There is no Adam's apple to speak of. There is no shadow of forming stubble on his face, or much of anywhere save for the finer hairs that both genders possess. Whatever the genetic dice rolled when they rolled for him at conception, they came up an unbroken run of feminine numbers, head to toe.
He is, in the most simple of terms, a femboy. He uses the term himself occasionally, when he has had a drink and is feeling honest.
HOW HE DRESSES
The clothes are where he draws his line of self expression and identity, and the line is firm.
He dresses masculine. Not as a corrective effort to compensate for the rest of him. He does it simply because it is what he likes and what makes him feel like himself. T-shirts, faded and soft from wash and wear, sometimes with band logos and sometimes plain. Hoodies, oversized with the cuffs frayed where he pulls them down over his knuckles. Jeans that fit well at the waist and loose at the leg. Cargo pants. Sneakers that quickly show wear after only days of owning them. Work boots when the weather demands them.
The aesthetic, when he bothers to consciously reach for one, is contemporary grunge with a blend of alt, goth and emo. The look of someone who came of age in a particular subcultural moment and never entirely left it. Dark colors and layers upon layers. A flannel tied at the waist. Chipped black polish on the nails some weeks, bare nails the next. Black lipstick and eyeshadow worn not for femininity's sake but for the style and expression.
When the occasion calls for formality, he adapts without complaint. A well-cut suit. A peacoat in winter. Dress pants pressed clean with oxfords polished. He cleans up rather nicely, which is the source of considerable private discomfort for him, because cleaning up beautifully draws exactly the kind of attention he has spent his life learning to avoid.
He will not wear feminine clothing voluntarily. He will wear it if pressured by friends, by circumstance or by the kind of dare that escalates from a joke into a thing he cannot back out of without seeming cowardly or uncomfortable in his own masculinity. When he does, he becomes a blushing, fumbling and unbearably self-conscious mess. The clothes fit him. That's the entire problem, for him. They fit him in a way he is not prepared to confront in a mirror, and the friends who put him in them are usually delighted.
