Faustino Saraiva (NPC)

[Adele D'Alteau]

<Faustino Saraiva>

Full Name: Faustino Rodrigo Baptista Saraiva
Age: 41
Civilian or Special: Civilian
Currently Located: Texas
Affiliated with: The Company
Celebrity Claim: Javier Bardem
Relation to You: Adele Couteau’s handler
Recruit Date: 1999
First Special Captured (Name/Power): Shannon Humboldt/Disillusionment
First Agent Partnered With (Name/Power): Marcelo Ferreira/Superhuman Speed, died rather suddenly in 2008 from an unforeseen and massive coronary.

Appearance

To describe Faustino rather bluntly, he’s built like a brick wall. He inherited a rather solid musculature from his father, and if someone were to punch him, they’d probably wind up doing more damage to themselves than they would to him. Standing at just over six feet tall and weighing nearly two hundred pounds, his stature is rather imposing.

His olive complexion comes from his heavily Mediterranean ancestry which is mostly Spanish and Portuguese. He has dark brown hair which he styles to a bare minimum for everyday work, though he knows how to groom himself and clean himself up quite nicely when the occasion calls for it. The look in Faustino’s eyes usually appears quite pensive, almost penetrating in its intensity. He isn’t easily swayed; coming from the roots of living amongst some of the greatest figures in Portuguese history, he had an extensive scholastic upbringing which placed a strong emphasis on logic and rhetoric.

Faustino doesn’t follow any set dress code, and would much rather dress for comfort than utility. If that means showing up to work in a pair of grass-stained sweatpants, a wifebeater, and a pair of ten year old flip flops, he’ll do it. But don’t be fooled by his drab, sometimes downright hobo-ish appearance; he also has a closet full of polished crocodile skin loafers and hand-tailored Italian suits in his care. In his forty-one years of life, he’s found that constantly being underestimated by his superiors ultimately works to his advantage. No one expects to be outwitted by someone who practically resembles a bum on the street.

Personality

He came from a large family of five sisters and four brothers as the middle child of the brood. Faustino was born to be a diplomat. From a very young age, he was always very charismatic and well-spoken, and had an uncanny way of diffusing arguments between his siblings. Balance has been and always will be something that is paramount in his life, and he doesn’t enjoy it when that balance is disturbed. Arguments only breed chaos, and while there is a time and place for pandemonium, it had no business being in a household. Perhaps it is simply his natural affinity for language, but he’s always had a way with words.

While he is charismatic, he is far from being manipulative, and views manipulation as an easy way out. He would much rather outwit someone than intentionally lure them down a path of failure. Challenging people is something that he enjoys doing purely because it keeps him intellectually stimulated.

Faustino has a warm disposition, though he can at times be a bit intimidating and overbearing, however unintentional it might be. People tend to be put off by his intellectual prowess. That coupled with his large stature make him appear as a confident and imposing figure—but the intimidation wanes rapidly once he opens his mouth to regale someone with an historical anecdote or some other type of story.

He deeply treasures the stories of the past and holds very true to the old adage that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Faustino is a civilian. Though lacking in the precise genetic component that usually produces powers, he’s done quite well for himself.

Skills:

Languages

He was raised in a household where knowledge was prized above all else. As such, he was schooled in several languages from a very young age, and developed a propensity for learning languages throughout his formative years. His father José taught him all that there was to know about Portuguese, while his mother tutored him in several different dialects of Spanish. During his younger years of schooling, he learned French and Italian almost immediately, quickly followed by English. Throughout his years at the university and post-graduate level which he spent at various schools across Northern Europe, Faustino picked up on several languages that were quite prevalent across the region in order to further enrich his studies.

Research:

Both his father and grandfather were noted historians of Portuguese history, and raised him to have a deep appreciation for ferreting out obscure facts and knowledge. Faustino has attended some of the best historical research institutions in the world. He seems to have an innate knowledge for being able to root out information from even the most unyielding of sources. If there is something that he wants to know, he will quite literally travel to the ends of the earth until he finds an answer to his question.

Patience:

If history has taught him anything, it is that patience is usually rewarded in the long run. The best war campaigns were the ones which were well thought out and planned with an ultimate goal in mind; the worst battles were the ones which were rushed into without forethought. He has the ability to meticulously think things through; some would even say that he has the patience of a saint when it comes to dealing with other people. He rarely gets upset, and believes in listening to every participant in a story before making a judgment.

Faustino was born on the twenty-third of October, 1969 to José H.B. Saraiva II and Maria Luísa Rodrigues de Bettencourt in Vila Franca do Campo, São Miguel, Azores. He was named after his great-great grandfather Faustino de Paiva de Sá Nogueira. His grandfather, José H.B. Saraiva I, sparked his interest in history at a very young age by walking him through their family’s extensive geneology, managing to trace it all the way back to Bernardo de Sá Nogueira de Figueiredo, the First Marquess of Sá da Bandeira. Sá da Bandeira was the original name of Angola’s capital city when it was under Portuguese rule.

On the maternal side of his family, he is related to the Bettencourt family of France, a name which gave him almost immediate access to all of the best universities in Europe. His family would often joke about how his body must have contained the reincarnated soul of his ancestor Jean de Béthencourt because of his intrepid and curious spirit. He’d always wanted to travel to foreign lands and immerse himself in their history and culture so as to have a better and more complex understanding of the world.

He lived a relatively normal childhood, surrounded by several siblings and the rest of his extended family. They were never too far off. As a child, historical tomes and books on the various different mythologies of the world always sparked his fancy, and he knew from a very young age precisely what he wanted to be. He wanted to be an historian of ancient mythologies. It was a difficult niche to get settled into, seeing as how there wasn’t much of a worldly need for people who could recite the tasks of Hercules in their original Greek. But he had such a passion for learning and storytelling that he refused to give up on his dream. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a respected expert in his chosen field of study.

To meet his ends, his education kept him busy studying history and anthropology at the Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal. From there, he spent several semesters at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he delved into the study of ancient world mythologies. Following his two years of study at Kent, he moved onto studying language, literature, and culture at Aarhus University as an exchange student. At the age of twenty-nine, he completed his education at Cambridge University in England, earning a Masters of Philosophy in Historical Studies.

Since then, he has written several treatises on the history of mythology and how ancient myths continue to influence modern times.

Faustino has been aware of godsends for quite some time. His brother Reynaldo could move things with his mind. Contessa, the youngest sibling, could force someone to remember forgotten things with just a glance. His elder brother, Benedicto, could put someone into a drug-induced haze. He never thought of what they could do as being strange or anything out of the ordinary. Having been raised around specials, their powers were something he had grown accustomed to seeing.

He moved to New York City when he was thirty in order to become a research fellow at New York University. It was there that he came under the watchful eye of the Company and was recruited by them. They were in dire need of more intellectual agents who could assist them with their progress as an organisation. At the outset, he made it quite clear that he would not be taking part (at least not directly) in their bagging and tagging operations. He would, however, work for them doing what he did best: research. It was easy for him to track people down using a number of normal sources. People were creatures of habit; therefore, it was relatively easy to put them under surveillance and learn their routines.

The first special he captured with his original Company partner, Marcelo Ferreira, was Shannon Humboldt. She had the very interesting power of Disillusionment which she used to deflect attention. She could instill feelings of confusion or even fear into her subjects. On a much larger scope, she could force the brain to rewire itself and induce dementia or other such mental diseases which attacked the brain’s natural processes of being able to store things in memory. Together, he and Marcelo had tracked her down in Oklahoma City where she was working as an insurance agent. She was making quite a good living off of the people who were her clients. with her uncanny ability to confuse people, she managed to swindle several million dollars from her clients, making them pay exorbitant rates which she then pocketed.

It started out as simple insurance fraud until she started hiring bounty hunters to take out her competition. She was on the Company’s radar almost immediately, and in the span of twenty four hours, she’d been bagged and tagged and dropped into a cell in Level Five until one of the mass breakouts occurred.

Once the Company’s New York headquarters was decimated, he was informed that he would be moving to Texas where he was to be partnered with one Doctor Adele Couteau. Her bloody massacre had already been scribed into the annals of the Company’s dark history, though for once in his life, he didn’t question the assignment. The last few agents he’d been paired with had done some rather stupid things which had resulted in their subsequent expulsion from the Company and its protection. Now he was looking forward to the challenge.

Preferred Weapons (3 max):

• His intellect
  
• Company-issued handgun
  
• Taser