Watching Leverage can be a trip and a half. Especially because, like, how do all these people even find them? I mean, it’s kind of handwaved as Hardison’s computer algorithms and stuff finding them, but even so. And then! several people don’t want money, they want things like a horse, or even immaterial things like getting someone their self-esteem back. That’s some next-level shit right there.
Like, making deals with with the Fair Folk or demons type stuff.
Which means that the Leverage crew would be the demons/Fair Folk/supernatural entities having desperate people summon them, probably as a last-ditch desperation move they didn’t think would work.
Sophie is some sort of UnSeelie. She follows her rules and values manners and dispenses her kindnesses as she sees fit. Do not test her. You will not win.
Parker is a changeling, maybe. Or Seelie. Or maybe she’s just Parker, the only one of her kind. She hasn’t decided yet.
Nate is Human. An almost priest who hates himself and all his flaws and weaknesses while at the same time completely convinced of his own superiority. In the beginning anyway.
Eliot would have died years ago buy some unkind spirit liked his anger and blessed him and now he’s this sort of proto-god of soldiers who’s countries used them up and betrayed their ideals. He just doesn’t know it yet.
Hardison is something new. There is no word for him. He’s making a new world in which he will rule and he has no need at this time for a name or title.
When you cross the Threshold, you become something Other.
Fair Folk? Demigods? Archetypes? Perhaps.
The Threshold is always different. But when you return from it … you never really return. You are always Other. You are always Outside.
For those five, the Threshold was the warehouse explosion in the first episode.
And on the other side … no more petty cons and grifts. No more squalid thuggery. They have crystallized, become Archetypes: Grifter. Hacker. Hitter. Thief. Mastermind. Small gods? Perhaps, but most certainly Powers, dancing with ease on “alternative revenue streams” and even weirder magics.
Listen to their catch phrases. These are conjure words. Strange promises, barely comprehensible to their beneficiaries, whispering of justice in an unjust world, payment deferred or refused, because the true coin of their trade is payback.
“Let’s go steal fire from the gods.”
Oh my stars and garters, how much do I love the idea of the Leverage crew as small gods??? It is perfect and glorious! :D
*nodding vigorously*
Sans context… you tell me, would you expect this line to be coming from an entirely mundane insurance investigator, or from someone whose friends might be a little uncomfortable around iron and may or may not be holding a contract written in ink that seems to be smoldering on the page:
“People like that…corporations like that, they have all the money, they have all the power, and they use it to make people like you go away. Right now, you’re suffering under an enormous weight. We provide…Leverage.“
‘An alternative revenue stream’ he says, smirking at the private joke. Their accounts are balanced using the coin of an older realm. Yes by vengeance delivered, hubris crumbled, a brisk business in karmic debt-collection… but also the sense of despair and powerlessness their client no longer has need of, or a sliver of the hope they’ve stolen back for someone once robbed of it. They may not want your money, but they are well paid all the same.
@istezada !!!!!!!!!!!!!
