Leon Krauss

Leon Krauss is better known as Der Kunstler (the Artist), and is an internationally wanted metahuman serial killer, known for stylizing the corpses of his victims into grisly "art". Despite his infamy, the identity of Der Kunstler has never been ascertained within his some forty years of villainy. Anonymity is Leon's greatest weapon moreso than his powers, and he is unlikely to give it up any time soon.

## Biography

Leon Krauss was born a bastard child to Anna Strauss, a young woman from Dresden, and a Special KGB Agent by the name of Mikhial Belov. Anna was a young and naive teenager whose family had suffered much in the Second Great War, her father having been killed when she was just three years old. Living a hard life with her mother, it was easy for Belov to groom Anna, whispering sweet nothings to her and promising her a shining new life in Moscow. But she was nothing more than a cheap fling to satisfy his own depraved desires. Once he had her where nobody would know, he used his psychic abilities to compel Anna to sleep with him. Before promptly leaving Anna, who was now carrying his child.

Anna was practically excommunicated from her family, eeking a living off of the charity of strangers and whatever odd-jobs she could find, including prostitution. Thus Leon was born into a world of hardship and desperate misery, a quiet child by nature; Leon was often at the receiving end of his mother’s violent outbursts. While for some this would drive them to be a volatile mess that would lash out at anything, Leon exhibited a remarkable ability to sustain abuse with little to no outward expression of hurt. Which only encouraged his mother.

It wasn’t until he turned eleven that his powers finally manifested. During a particularly violent episode of abuse, in which Anna tried to strangle Leon, his metahumanabilities awakened. And he ruptured the blood vessels in his mother’s brain, making her suffer a violent death. Leon was disturbed by this but also…thrilled. Instead of panicking and running to the police, he calmly packed his things, and disappeared. It would be many months before anybody found Anna’s body. Leon, alone in the world, abandoned his name and identity, becoming a nameless drifter for many years. Seemingly disappearing from the face of the earth.

Leon emerged again in the late 70s and early 80s again, now called Otto Braum, a university student studying economics and international relations. To the public at large he was Der Künstler, “The Artist”, a metahuman serial killer who was active in East Germany throughout the 1980s. Often he would use his powers to pose his victims in snapshots of everyday life, brain dead but with enough awareness to realise their awful situation, left to starve. Or he would command rooms to butcher each other, often slowly, while they sobbed and begged to be stopped.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reintegration of Germany, Leon began to spread his operations throughout the rest of Germany, and to Europe as a whole. Indeed his biggest atrocity in Paris in 1993, was having an entire theatre kill each other while the actors were forced to continue their performance, unable to call for help. Many attempts were made to capture Der Künstler, with Interpol ranking him amongst their most wanted list. Europe became gripped with the black legend of Der Künstler, and throughout the next few years hundreds of people were said to have been identified as the culprit. But Leon himself was never accused, nor did he ever appear on the radar. He simply lived out his life, name after name, identity after identity shed like snake-skin. Periodically embarking on a killing spree, today in Hungary, tomorrow in Romania, next week in the Czech Republic.

Now at the age of sixty, Leon has come to America. Age is slowly catching up with him, and conscious of this, he seeks to find an apprentice. A promising metahuman to corrupt so that his work will continue well into the future.

## Physical Appearance

Leon looks exactly his age, if not slightly older. A face beset by deep wrinkles, intelligent but seemingly kindly grey eyes set in a thick brow of white hair. He is almost bald, with his hairline set far back, the same cloudy white as the thick beard which adorns his face. Giving him the impression of a warm grandfather. Somebody who you could confide in and would answer with wise words of advice.

## Personality

On the surface Leon comes across as a down-to-earth, wizened, if slightly senile old man. Compassionate and patient, a man who cares for those around them and wants to do the best for them. This however is merely a facade, for behind the thick veil of paternal charm there is a truly empty monster. One who commits murder for seemingly no reason other than that he enjoys the suffering he is able to inflict on others. He has no favourite books, no capacity for romance or love besides what he can pretend, no food that he cherishes. Nothing connects him to this world save for his “art”. Exceedingly manipulative, cruel and incapable of real empathy. Leon is pure evil, and pays no heed to any authority. Even other villains would do well to steer clear of him, as he subscribes to no righteous struggle of metahuman rights or world domination, if anything his goal has always been to bring out the monster in the whole of humanity. His “masterpiece” would be to turn the whole of the world against itself, and leave him as the last person on earth.

## Powers

Metahuman Physiology: Thanks to his father's metahuman genes, Leon has inherited metahuman abilities.

* Puppeteering: A psychic ability that allows Leon to assume full control of a person’s bodily functions. Everything down to their blood vessels, muscles, nerves, and everything in between. With an effective range of one-hundred metres, it is an extremely potent power. And since Krauss utilises a sixth sense that specialises in detecting organic matter, a line of sight  is not needed for it to take effect. His puppeteering can be extended to pilot a large crowd of around 250 people at the same time. However, the more people he is controlling at once the more effort he must exert and thus limit his own mobility and awareness of his own surroundings.  This begins at around the one-hundred or so mark.

## Skills

Leon Krauss is a genius, able to seamlessly pick up seemingly unrelated skills with ease. With professor-level knowledge in the fields of mathematics, literature, art, the natural sciences, politics and economics. He is a master of switching identities and can make himself disappear with ease, erasing any evidence of his presence. Leon is also a talented linguist, and can speak and write German, French, Spanish, Russian, English, Arabic and Latin with no trace of an accent. He also has a perfect emotional intelligence, and a well developed sense of others. Allowing him to create a psychological profile of whomever he comes into contact with within mere moments of meeting them. Which in turn makes him a dangerous manipulator, targeting a person’s vulnerable emotional spots to make them dance to his tune, whether they follow willingly or are drawn along by his grand design.

## Trivia

* Leon never goes by the name Leon himself, and in fact has abandoned his true name. To himself he is merely Der Künstler.