Headcanon Post
Oct. 7th, 2011 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
passed_torchDisclaimer that this is WIP and may end up shifting if canon fills things in or if there's anybody else bringing in First-Gen; I'm perfectly happy to work out any conflicts with castmates and tweak things on anything that's heavily relevant to one of the others, just ping me (assuming I don't ping you first >.>; ) !
{Something that's actually been mentioned in game so far, and therefore would be harder to retcon}
canon
{Full name - Giotto Cipriani.}
Born - 10/13/1854 - Died 1895
{While he's unsure about the Catholic church and kind of broke away from formal Catholicism - being involved in the fighting over the Papal States on the side of the rest of Italy didn't help - he DOES have a decent amount of faith in God. His religious status is a little weird; he has a VERY firm faith that there is a "highest power" creator-God that is basically benevolent and guides things, is still basically Christian, and has always figured that God does, in fact, have a purpose for him and MEANS for him to be in a given place dealing with whatever. Basically, "I don't end up in horrible situations because God is unhappy, but because God wants me to do something to the best of my ability". His formal beliefs are a little on the "go for the greater good/protect the weak/try to help others" and ".../assumption humans probably DON'T know God's specific will all THAT well".}
Somewhere back in his family tree, he's related to a now-functionally-extinct race; whatever they were, they seem to've been roughly "demigods" by human standards, with much longer life spans. He's only got traces, although the Intuition and some of the hereditary Sky Flame abilities may root from that trace bloodline.
{Giotto's family were craftsmen originally; glasswork and some minor jewelry-repair and the like.} The larger extended family was from Venice; his father'd moved to the mainland coastal area when he'd been young, and met his mother there. They were basically lower middle-class; well off enough to live, but they basically had a small home attached to the shop and weren't really wealthy, plus they weren't exactly in the best area, hence a lot of his early experience with some of the organized crime groups of the area - they made just enough money to be periodically cleaned out on protection dues and picked on. His mother took ill when he was little and never really shook it off; she cared, and would sometimes be up to helping, but as he got older it was more often him helping take care of her than vice versa. She lasted long enough and was lucid just long enough for him to know that she had been a fairly strong woman before that, loyal and protective of her family; before her death, she'd fussed over him when he'd come home hurt from fights, although it was usually couched in questions and grilling him to make sure he was getting into it for sticking up for others and doing the right thing and not just to get into fights or picking on anyone. His father was often busy with the shop, but did teach him a lot of the trade, and was basically loud, good-natured, stubborn, and energetic. Both parents were Catholic and pretty strong in faith, and raised him to do the "high road" thing; while his mother got gray hairs over his fights, his father would slip him sweets if it was for a Good Cause, especially if he'd won.
He was seven when he ended up first meeting G, mainly due to getting in a fight; not so much with G, as that Giotto'd ended up in a fight with a couple of the local childhood bullies that happened to often also end up in fights with G, and G decided to get involved. After that, Giotto'd actually brought food out and offered G a place to stay for the night, which cemented things right there; little like feeding a stray dog. His parents adopted G as well, although his mother passed away when he was ten, three years later.
After their initial meeting, the two of them went on to be the scourge of the neighborhood bullies, occasionally even getting in fights with older kids that weren't too thrilled with the "young upstarts"; the two of them were already learning to be fairly formidable, and G was a predictably AMAZING influence on Giotto, while Giotto would occasionally try to rein in G's temper. This ended up with them creeping up the food chain until they were taking on some of the adult criminals in their area, something that didn't really endear Giotto to the same criminal groups that tended to shake down his family; the threats and hassling got worse, and Giotto ended up discovering the Dying Will state the hard way during a fight that broke out on one such incident. This pretty well led to a short, pitched war between that small local group and Giotto and G, one where the two boys actually managed to drive out the older group; his father supported them on it, and they ended up being recognized in the area as "local town heroes"; it was somewhere around this time period that he ended up running into Cozarto, as him, G, and Cozarto all tried to help one of the poorer people in the town by "accidentally" losing their wallet - and Cozarto returned Giotto's. His father extended the same "you're family whenever you're in this house" to Cozarto that had been established for G.
As Giotto got older and the local criminal groups got more aggressive towards the old man for not wanting to pay them off, his father did pick up some injuries that didn't really help his health. His father was one of the supporters of the Vongola in their early days, at least until his injuries and related health issues caught up to him; after a nastier attack, he packed up the shop, sold it off, gave part of the money to Giotto and then slipped off into the country to retire, which Spade had helped cover so that there wouldn't be risk of their enemies hunting the old man down in his last few years. He passed away before Spade's betrayal.
Giotto and G had met Ugetsu when they were still pretty young; Ugetsu's family had traveled abroad at the time, visiting the Venice and coastal area. This was when Ugetsu'd made the promise to find a way to come help them if they ever needed it. When Giotto and G were starting to form the Vongola and were the most hard up, Giotto'd mentioned missing him; while the message was sent to Japan in his name, it was likely Cozarto that sent it, since Giotto was hesitant to ask Ugetsu to make a huge journey like that and drop his life in his home country. (Cozarto had rightly guessed that Ugetsu would've considered Giotto silly for this and considered his oath to help them more important.) While he did feel a bit guilty over it, he deeply appreciated the sacrifice.
Lampo they had met fairly young, possibly while Ugetsu was en route to help them, when the two "Famiglia" were still basically just a couple people each. While the age difference wasn't as dramatic as the age difference between the rest of the 10th Gen and Lambo, it was still a noticeable gap, and he was young enough to be a target at first. He'd been traveling with a few of the family servants and been attacked in ambush by a group that planned on holding him hostage against his family; the early Vongola and Simon intervened, rescuing him, and escorted him home, earning the appreciation of his family. They ended up hanging around to deal with the rest of the group that'd come after him, and he started sneaking out to tag along, partly out of boredom, and partly to get out of his studies; he ended up learning how to fight as a bit of a necessity, and proved to be good at it, even if he was often the bratty younger sibling of the Vongola family.
Knuckle they'd met while on the move; the church he'd moved into was being targeted, and they'd gone to help protect it, picking up ( +1 ) Ex-Boxer priest who took it was something of a divine mission to try to help and support them.
By this point, Cozarto had started to pick up his own inner circle; while the Vongola and Simon gangs collaborated often, they'd hit a point where there was a lot of ground to cover, and they started functioning more as two separate allied groups than one larger group, often moving somewhat independently of each other or splitting up to hit different targets simultaneously, with other incidents of cooperating to outflank an enemy or back each other up.
Alaude was the second to last of the group to get recruited; it was both more and less standoffish than Hibari - Alaude noted that Giotto and company were going after the same people he was, and were MUCH more visible, often leading to the people he was pursuing coming out of the woodwork to aim at Giotto; Alaude declared them "useful" in that he could just sort of hang around somewhere in their area and use them as bait, something that got occasional growls from some of the other Guardians, but since Alaude was perfectly good about coming in when they needed it and being a deus-ex-machina rescue, as much as he'd never admit he was intentionally helping, Giotto was perfectly happy to accept him. He was willing to occasionally drift in and drop information on Giotto's desk, even go along with the rest of them and throw in on larger fights, but would never admit any official relation to them, and would quite happy state that he was only using them for his own ends, much to G's irritation. He'd been following them and investigating them before they actually met; it was mostly a matter of dumb bad luck - they got in over their heads assaulting the base of a nastier group, and Alaude saved their skins. Technically some of his verbal hostility was plausible deniability, since he was still a government agent.
Giotto met Elena thanks to his association with Lampo's family and getting drug into aristocratic circles occasionally; Elena was a philanthropist and, had she been born in modern times, probably would've been an activist in her own right. She'd heard of them, and on getting to meet them in person to get a feel for which stories were true, threw in as a supporter; she was already involved with Spade at this time, and since Spade had been doing bits and pieces of more pointy crusading of his own, she introduced them. This quickly led to Elena and Spade ending up adopted into the Vongola as part of the inner circle.
Spade would occasionally abuse the same spectrum of powers modern illusionists use to mask and hide things as a mute button for Knuckle. Spade was also the one that taught Giotto how to deal with poltiics; Elena and Spade had made sure his education was caught up and filled in. Giotto ended up using Spade as an advisor, sounding board, and confidante where, for one reason or another, it was something that he couldn't or wouldn't bounce off the others; it hit a point where there was a period where Spade was probably the one with the most real "trust", in that Giotto had the fewest things to mind in dealing with him and considered it safe to drop some of his various acts, covers, and defense-mechanisms that he wouldn't around the others.
Giotto had developed an excellent mental "Alaude to Normal Human Being" translation filter; he could carry on perfectly normal and in-depth conversations with Alaude ... while Alaude was insulting him, dropping jabs, and generally being Alaude. Occasionally, if it was sure enough nobody else was around to overhear, there'd be scarily normal and both-directions civil conversations between them. Spade and Ugetsu figured out the "Alaude to Normal Person" filters, G never did, Knuckle tended to just get confused/lost or have his own "Alaude to Normal Person" filter called "Obliviousness", while Lampo concluded that Alaude was kind of frightening and that it was easier to let the others deal with him directly. (Lampo did at least have the buffer of being someone in a station where there'd be a perfectly plausible excuse for him to be interacting with Alaude.) While at first, he'd mostly bounce tactical things off Alaude and have exchanges of dropping information and intelligence back and forth, after Elena's death, he ended up shifting more and more of the "Sounding board and advisor" thing to Alaude, making their conversations increasingly surreal.
The pact where they were given the Vongola rings had involved a case where they'd actually been pinned down in a group and weren't doing too well; it's entirely possible it may've been an early clash with something else unusual like the Mare Ring bearers. Giotto was aware that it was the kind of thing that was a "duty beyond death", but since it was the only way out at the time, he kept that to himself; Spade and Alaude figured it out anyway.
A lot of the harsher trials, challenges, etc., as well as the basically two seals on the rings - the one limiting their power, and the one tied to his blood to keep them from evolving - were things he set up in the time between Ricardo beginning to test him and being forced to step down; the entire idea was to make it as difficult as possible for a successor who was going to seriously abuse the power to get any of it, if not get some of them to Darwin Award on the harsher trials.
Current headcanon on his death - he outlived all of his Guardians except for Spade. After they were basically forced out, they scattered a little into retirement, and were hunted down not long after; Spade had a hand in organizing that, whether it was an act of spite, taking out any residual grudge blaming Giotto and the others for the "weakness" that led to Elena's death, or just aiming at them in case they came back together to reclaim control - and was there, either illusion-disguised or via possession, to make sure Giotto was dead. Giotto was just as capable of picking up on Spade's presence as Tsuna's proven with Mukuro, and was aware of this; at that point, with the rest of his Guardians dead and all he could do to limit the power of his more dangerous successors done, while he did lead them on a bit of a wild goose chase for a while, once they caught up he didn't really put up much of a struggle - it was more of an execution/Spade losing his temper and Giotto letting Spade kill him than an attack.
{Spade had orchestrated an attack on the Monastery Knuckle was from, covering over his involvement so that it was unclear and looked like one of their enemies trying to pick them off, although Alaude suspected him. G'd fallen ill due to some of his old injuries, and while Spade didn't kill him, there was a hostile tangle that definitely made things worse, enough that while he escaped it alive, he didn't survive much past it; after that, Alaude had found enough evidence to try and go after Spade, and the original plan had been to meet up with Lampo and confront Spade. Spade managed to arrange for Alaude not being able to make it in time and killed Lampo, then headed to Japan after Giotto and Ugetsu with Alaude in pursuit.}
{He'd married in Japan and had a four year old son by the time they got some warning that someone was coming after them; he tagged some connections to send his family off into hiding, and then, realizing that as long as he was alive he'd be a target and that he didn't have the resources anymore to defend them, he went a different direction and basically didn't bother too hard avoiding getting caught/cornered; he made it a point to avoid leaving anything that'd give them the idea there might be people close to him to target.} His wife was from a family that'd owned an inn in the small town he'd initially settled in with Ugetsu; the inn had pretty much been the center of town, leading to them being basically people a lot of the town looked to and her ending up being a sort of pseudo-mother to half the town. {Her name was Miyu.}
Since then, he's been somewhat aware of the people that've held the ring; while he's capable of doing a flat-out rejection on someone, it's not always quite blood-bound - the first few generations after him weren't related. {The next that he knew of his own family was Daniella, who WAS related, and basically went to Italy to track down the family history and do something about it after preparing for what she'd be walking into based on what'd survived there of the story of what happened. As much as he'd worried for his own family, he's still massively proud of her for the way she handled things.}
{Daniela fought in World War 2; he noticed it, dimly, although he doesn't have details.}
{Something that's actually been mentioned in game so far, and therefore would be harder to retcon}
canon
{Full name - Giotto Cipriani.}
Born - 10/13/1854 - Died 1895
{While he's unsure about the Catholic church and kind of broke away from formal Catholicism - being involved in the fighting over the Papal States on the side of the rest of Italy didn't help - he DOES have a decent amount of faith in God. His religious status is a little weird; he has a VERY firm faith that there is a "highest power" creator-God that is basically benevolent and guides things, is still basically Christian, and has always figured that God does, in fact, have a purpose for him and MEANS for him to be in a given place dealing with whatever. Basically, "I don't end up in horrible situations because God is unhappy, but because God wants me to do something to the best of my ability". His formal beliefs are a little on the "go for the greater good/protect the weak/try to help others" and ".../assumption humans probably DON'T know God's specific will all THAT well".}
Somewhere back in his family tree, he's related to a now-functionally-extinct race; whatever they were, they seem to've been roughly "demigods" by human standards, with much longer life spans. He's only got traces, although the Intuition and some of the hereditary Sky Flame abilities may root from that trace bloodline.
{Giotto's family were craftsmen originally; glasswork and some minor jewelry-repair and the like.} The larger extended family was from Venice; his father'd moved to the mainland coastal area when he'd been young, and met his mother there. They were basically lower middle-class; well off enough to live, but they basically had a small home attached to the shop and weren't really wealthy, plus they weren't exactly in the best area, hence a lot of his early experience with some of the organized crime groups of the area - they made just enough money to be periodically cleaned out on protection dues and picked on. His mother took ill when he was little and never really shook it off; she cared, and would sometimes be up to helping, but as he got older it was more often him helping take care of her than vice versa. She lasted long enough and was lucid just long enough for him to know that she had been a fairly strong woman before that, loyal and protective of her family; before her death, she'd fussed over him when he'd come home hurt from fights, although it was usually couched in questions and grilling him to make sure he was getting into it for sticking up for others and doing the right thing and not just to get into fights or picking on anyone. His father was often busy with the shop, but did teach him a lot of the trade, and was basically loud, good-natured, stubborn, and energetic. Both parents were Catholic and pretty strong in faith, and raised him to do the "high road" thing; while his mother got gray hairs over his fights, his father would slip him sweets if it was for a Good Cause, especially if he'd won.
He was seven when he ended up first meeting G, mainly due to getting in a fight; not so much with G, as that Giotto'd ended up in a fight with a couple of the local childhood bullies that happened to often also end up in fights with G, and G decided to get involved. After that, Giotto'd actually brought food out and offered G a place to stay for the night, which cemented things right there; little like feeding a stray dog. His parents adopted G as well, although his mother passed away when he was ten, three years later.
After their initial meeting, the two of them went on to be the scourge of the neighborhood bullies, occasionally even getting in fights with older kids that weren't too thrilled with the "young upstarts"; the two of them were already learning to be fairly formidable, and G was a predictably AMAZING influence on Giotto, while Giotto would occasionally try to rein in G's temper. This ended up with them creeping up the food chain until they were taking on some of the adult criminals in their area, something that didn't really endear Giotto to the same criminal groups that tended to shake down his family; the threats and hassling got worse, and Giotto ended up discovering the Dying Will state the hard way during a fight that broke out on one such incident. This pretty well led to a short, pitched war between that small local group and Giotto and G, one where the two boys actually managed to drive out the older group; his father supported them on it, and they ended up being recognized in the area as "local town heroes"; it was somewhere around this time period that he ended up running into Cozarto, as him, G, and Cozarto all tried to help one of the poorer people in the town by "accidentally" losing their wallet - and Cozarto returned Giotto's. His father extended the same "you're family whenever you're in this house" to Cozarto that had been established for G.
As Giotto got older and the local criminal groups got more aggressive towards the old man for not wanting to pay them off, his father did pick up some injuries that didn't really help his health. His father was one of the supporters of the Vongola in their early days, at least until his injuries and related health issues caught up to him; after a nastier attack, he packed up the shop, sold it off, gave part of the money to Giotto and then slipped off into the country to retire, which Spade had helped cover so that there wouldn't be risk of their enemies hunting the old man down in his last few years. He passed away before Spade's betrayal.
Giotto and G had met Ugetsu when they were still pretty young; Ugetsu's family had traveled abroad at the time, visiting the Venice and coastal area. This was when Ugetsu'd made the promise to find a way to come help them if they ever needed it. When Giotto and G were starting to form the Vongola and were the most hard up, Giotto'd mentioned missing him; while the message was sent to Japan in his name, it was likely Cozarto that sent it, since Giotto was hesitant to ask Ugetsu to make a huge journey like that and drop his life in his home country. (Cozarto had rightly guessed that Ugetsu would've considered Giotto silly for this and considered his oath to help them more important.) While he did feel a bit guilty over it, he deeply appreciated the sacrifice.
Lampo they had met fairly young, possibly while Ugetsu was en route to help them, when the two "Famiglia" were still basically just a couple people each. While the age difference wasn't as dramatic as the age difference between the rest of the 10th Gen and Lambo, it was still a noticeable gap, and he was young enough to be a target at first. He'd been traveling with a few of the family servants and been attacked in ambush by a group that planned on holding him hostage against his family; the early Vongola and Simon intervened, rescuing him, and escorted him home, earning the appreciation of his family. They ended up hanging around to deal with the rest of the group that'd come after him, and he started sneaking out to tag along, partly out of boredom, and partly to get out of his studies; he ended up learning how to fight as a bit of a necessity, and proved to be good at it, even if he was often the bratty younger sibling of the Vongola family.
Knuckle they'd met while on the move; the church he'd moved into was being targeted, and they'd gone to help protect it, picking up ( +1 ) Ex-Boxer priest who took it was something of a divine mission to try to help and support them.
By this point, Cozarto had started to pick up his own inner circle; while the Vongola and Simon gangs collaborated often, they'd hit a point where there was a lot of ground to cover, and they started functioning more as two separate allied groups than one larger group, often moving somewhat independently of each other or splitting up to hit different targets simultaneously, with other incidents of cooperating to outflank an enemy or back each other up.
Alaude was the second to last of the group to get recruited; it was both more and less standoffish than Hibari - Alaude noted that Giotto and company were going after the same people he was, and were MUCH more visible, often leading to the people he was pursuing coming out of the woodwork to aim at Giotto; Alaude declared them "useful" in that he could just sort of hang around somewhere in their area and use them as bait, something that got occasional growls from some of the other Guardians, but since Alaude was perfectly good about coming in when they needed it and being a deus-ex-machina rescue, as much as he'd never admit he was intentionally helping, Giotto was perfectly happy to accept him. He was willing to occasionally drift in and drop information on Giotto's desk, even go along with the rest of them and throw in on larger fights, but would never admit any official relation to them, and would quite happy state that he was only using them for his own ends, much to G's irritation. He'd been following them and investigating them before they actually met; it was mostly a matter of dumb bad luck - they got in over their heads assaulting the base of a nastier group, and Alaude saved their skins. Technically some of his verbal hostility was plausible deniability, since he was still a government agent.
Giotto met Elena thanks to his association with Lampo's family and getting drug into aristocratic circles occasionally; Elena was a philanthropist and, had she been born in modern times, probably would've been an activist in her own right. She'd heard of them, and on getting to meet them in person to get a feel for which stories were true, threw in as a supporter; she was already involved with Spade at this time, and since Spade had been doing bits and pieces of more pointy crusading of his own, she introduced them. This quickly led to Elena and Spade ending up adopted into the Vongola as part of the inner circle.
Spade would occasionally abuse the same spectrum of powers modern illusionists use to mask and hide things as a mute button for Knuckle. Spade was also the one that taught Giotto how to deal with poltiics; Elena and Spade had made sure his education was caught up and filled in. Giotto ended up using Spade as an advisor, sounding board, and confidante where, for one reason or another, it was something that he couldn't or wouldn't bounce off the others; it hit a point where there was a period where Spade was probably the one with the most real "trust", in that Giotto had the fewest things to mind in dealing with him and considered it safe to drop some of his various acts, covers, and defense-mechanisms that he wouldn't around the others.
Giotto had developed an excellent mental "Alaude to Normal Human Being" translation filter; he could carry on perfectly normal and in-depth conversations with Alaude ... while Alaude was insulting him, dropping jabs, and generally being Alaude. Occasionally, if it was sure enough nobody else was around to overhear, there'd be scarily normal and both-directions civil conversations between them. Spade and Ugetsu figured out the "Alaude to Normal Person" filters, G never did, Knuckle tended to just get confused/lost or have his own "Alaude to Normal Person" filter called "Obliviousness", while Lampo concluded that Alaude was kind of frightening and that it was easier to let the others deal with him directly. (Lampo did at least have the buffer of being someone in a station where there'd be a perfectly plausible excuse for him to be interacting with Alaude.) While at first, he'd mostly bounce tactical things off Alaude and have exchanges of dropping information and intelligence back and forth, after Elena's death, he ended up shifting more and more of the "Sounding board and advisor" thing to Alaude, making their conversations increasingly surreal.
The pact where they were given the Vongola rings had involved a case where they'd actually been pinned down in a group and weren't doing too well; it's entirely possible it may've been an early clash with something else unusual like the Mare Ring bearers. Giotto was aware that it was the kind of thing that was a "duty beyond death", but since it was the only way out at the time, he kept that to himself; Spade and Alaude figured it out anyway.
A lot of the harsher trials, challenges, etc., as well as the basically two seals on the rings - the one limiting their power, and the one tied to his blood to keep them from evolving - were things he set up in the time between Ricardo beginning to test him and being forced to step down; the entire idea was to make it as difficult as possible for a successor who was going to seriously abuse the power to get any of it, if not get some of them to Darwin Award on the harsher trials.
Current headcanon on his death - he outlived all of his Guardians except for Spade. After they were basically forced out, they scattered a little into retirement, and were hunted down not long after; Spade had a hand in organizing that, whether it was an act of spite, taking out any residual grudge blaming Giotto and the others for the "weakness" that led to Elena's death, or just aiming at them in case they came back together to reclaim control - and was there, either illusion-disguised or via possession, to make sure Giotto was dead. Giotto was just as capable of picking up on Spade's presence as Tsuna's proven with Mukuro, and was aware of this; at that point, with the rest of his Guardians dead and all he could do to limit the power of his more dangerous successors done, while he did lead them on a bit of a wild goose chase for a while, once they caught up he didn't really put up much of a struggle - it was more of an execution/Spade losing his temper and Giotto letting Spade kill him than an attack.
{Spade had orchestrated an attack on the Monastery Knuckle was from, covering over his involvement so that it was unclear and looked like one of their enemies trying to pick them off, although Alaude suspected him. G'd fallen ill due to some of his old injuries, and while Spade didn't kill him, there was a hostile tangle that definitely made things worse, enough that while he escaped it alive, he didn't survive much past it; after that, Alaude had found enough evidence to try and go after Spade, and the original plan had been to meet up with Lampo and confront Spade. Spade managed to arrange for Alaude not being able to make it in time and killed Lampo, then headed to Japan after Giotto and Ugetsu with Alaude in pursuit.}
{He'd married in Japan and had a four year old son by the time they got some warning that someone was coming after them; he tagged some connections to send his family off into hiding, and then, realizing that as long as he was alive he'd be a target and that he didn't have the resources anymore to defend them, he went a different direction and basically didn't bother too hard avoiding getting caught/cornered; he made it a point to avoid leaving anything that'd give them the idea there might be people close to him to target.} His wife was from a family that'd owned an inn in the small town he'd initially settled in with Ugetsu; the inn had pretty much been the center of town, leading to them being basically people a lot of the town looked to and her ending up being a sort of pseudo-mother to half the town. {Her name was Miyu.}
Since then, he's been somewhat aware of the people that've held the ring; while he's capable of doing a flat-out rejection on someone, it's not always quite blood-bound - the first few generations after him weren't related. {The next that he knew of his own family was Daniella, who WAS related, and basically went to Italy to track down the family history and do something about it after preparing for what she'd be walking into based on what'd survived there of the story of what happened. As much as he'd worried for his own family, he's still massively proud of her for the way she handled things.}
{Daniela fought in World War 2; he noticed it, dimly, although he doesn't have details.}