Ned L.

Name:	Ned L.
Pronouns:	He/Him
Aliases:	Espresso (Second Cafe), Employee No. 26 (Current Cafe)
Affiliation:	The Cafe and Diner (Astoria Branch), The Actuaries
Trivia:	Numbers, Statistics and Math

An Aztec temple, that's what my body is built like! Strong and st-hairy. HA! That's a good one, huh?

Ned L. is the bombastic Employee No. 26 of the Fourth Cafe, and one of the Actuaries of the Unknown, alongside his wife. He is very skilled with statistics, and is a very old hand in the coffee business.

Biography

Ned has one of the longest histories of the CaD, due to his various contracts with Satan, the first of which was completed in 1829. Because of this it is likely he, as with his siblings, was born sometime in the 18th Century. At some point before his first encounters with the Cafe and Diner, Ned met his wife, had two children - Manager No. 2 and Ex-No. 44A - and created Langley and Langley: Actuaries of the Unknown, to provide insurance to those in the coffee business.

Ned's first hands-on experience in slinging coffee came in 2001, when Sophie Grenbelrn recruited him and his wife to the Second Cafe, to use the names "Espresso" and "Doppio", respectively. He was excited to get into face-to-face customer service, but was also willing to use his Indigo connections to assist the CaD. He remained with the Second Cafe until its closure in 2004, and returned to actuarial business.

Though the Actuaries were noted to provide insurance to both the Third Cafe and the Palm Beach Cafe in 2017, Ned's next major interaction with the CaD would come in 2021, when he joined the Fourth Cafe having gotten bored of the office life and wanting to get hands-on with some customers again. It is likely that his daughter going down south helped him with that decision.

In the Fourth Cafe, he and his wife have been very useful, especially when it comes to customers who love to dance, and others who prefer orange juice with their meal. In recent months, however, the CaD has been more focused on drama with his family, specifically with his dad Bartholomew.

Personality

Ned is loud and vibrant, with a love for dad jokes. Indeed, he is rather paternal, caring a lot about his children, and can be rather protective of them. He does have a dark side, however, seemingly wanting to be a little more aggressive with customers than the CaD generally likes to be. Despite this, he is a great asset to the Cafe, and is a welcome presence.

Ties That Bind

• Is married to Employee No. 44, with whom he has two children: Ex-44A and Manager No. 2. He loves all of them a lot.
• He and his wife are both witches of Satan, and technically still owe him a couple of years of service.
• Due to his ties with certain distributors, he is the black sheep of his family, with his siblings seeming to prefer to distance themselves from him where possible.
• Has a dislike for the Myerscough family, believing them to be scam artists, and claiming their insurance to be the worst he's ever seen.