Saturnino Silva

Vampiric Proteges (ghouls) -x- Brenda's Statistics

Sobriquet: Nino. (a diminutive of his given name and one he doesn't allow anyone but Brenda to use without exacting his pound of flesh)

Appearance: Saturnino is one fucking big Brazilian. Naturally he stands over 7 feet, in metric that is over 2 meters tall. He literally towers over all the members of the coterie. His height is matched by his bulky muscular frame. Nino weights a solid 185 kilograms, that is about 410 pounds imperial. The majority of his bulk is muscle, though over the last few years he has started to develop a bit of a paunch as he doesn't have to work so hard for his food. Saturnino looks to be just a touch past his prime, probably in his late thirties. His dark hair has yet to show any sign of turning lighter with age and his naturally swarthy complexion is further darkened by regular exposure to the sun. His face would be considered handsome in a rough, outdoors-man kind of way, but for his cold, dark, hard eyes. In actually, his features are chiseled and his hard angular jaw is covered by a short, but well groomed beard. He has a broad forehead with a thick, almost Roman nose and thick dark eyebrows. Its Nino's teeth that bother most people, as they are fairly crooked and lightly stained, this is a legacy of a childhood without a dentist, which is actually quite common among those who grew up in Rio's various shanty towns. Unlike those other Moredores, Saturnino has never had a cavity in his life, which he owes to his mostly cannibalistic diet. In public Nino wears very expensive tailored suits and handmade leather shoes. In private he has taken to wearing Brazilian military surplus. Most of his civilized touches, like his wardrobe and jewelry are hand picked by his personal assistant who lives in terror of disappointing his employer.

Behavior: Saturnino is the primal alpha-male, one that even other alpha's fear. His nature is more akin to those of men during the Stone Age. A pure survivor with the predatory instincts of a life-long hunter. He rarely speaks, preferring to watch those who come before him for weakness, which he almost always finds. Yet his technique for manipulating underlings and opponents alike is pure unadulterated intimidation. Nor is this intentional, Saturnino doesn't boast or actually threaten, rather when pressed for a response to a given situation he is likely to describe his next actions in grisly detail and by the expression of his face most can tell that he is simple being honest. Then he follows through and the fact that few if any opponents have been able to physically stop him makes him frighteningly bold, such a behavior wouldn't stand long in the politically complex world of the Kindred and only works in the corrupt hothouse atmosphere of Rio de Janeiro's business world with judicious applications of hush money and extra bribes for greedy unethical police.

Of late, this pattern of behavior has begun to change, albeit very slowly. This is almost certainly due to his adoption of a vampiric path of enlightenment, the Path of Death and the Soul taught to him by his domitor. While the changes are subtle, the perceptive can detect them. One result of this conversion is a self-corrective mechanism found among the tenets of necronomist philosophy which has forced Saturnino to contemplate his actions logically rather than giving in to wanton urge-indulgence. Self-contemplation has opened the door to self-criticism, introspection the need for a logical life free of the incessant madness that had characterized most of Nino's existence. Thus he is now more likely to contemplate all the repercussions of a violent act before pursuing that tactic. If he finds that it is still warranted, cost-effective or unavoidable, he knows how to proceed. It also means that he is less likely to act on a violent whim because he knows he needs to maintain a facade of public respectability while still having the time to perform a thorough investigation of each and every death. In essence he is now more concerned with the quality of his murders rather than the quantity of them. Illuminated by the intellectual tenets of the necronomist philosophy, Saturnino must face the fact that he has committed literally thousands of murders and that his actions may well have created more than one ghost with whom he will eventually have to contend. A most frightening thought for one who has always assumed that death was the end and that in a confrontation with the angry dead, he is ill prepared to defend himself. For what does physical strength mean to those who can walk through walls and kill you in a dream?

History: Saturnino Silva was born into a poor and uneducated family of urban dwellers living on the fringes of Rio's slums, in other words, Moradores. He has dim memories of his father and mother who sold him to another family as a slave. His job was to hunt feral pets for the family meal, over time, he became frighteningly proficient at that activity. So much so, that when he was ten, he was sold again to a butcher, who gave him the unpleasant duty of digging through refuse mounds for morsels that could be made into sausage. While Saturnino quickly became proficient at this as well, the butcher beat him for the fun of doing so. When Saturnino reached adolescence, he rebelled rather spectacularly by slaughtering the butcher, chopping him up and grinding him into sausage to be sold the next day. His only regret in this, was that the butcher's death had been so quick, after all, once the deed was done, he knew he wanted to do it again.

From the late 1970s to the early years of the twenty-first century, Saturnino killed a shocking number of people, not that he kept track specifically, but he did enjoy his chosen vocation. He developed a nomadic-predatory-cannibalistic lifestyle that suited him well. His modus operandi consisted mostly of home invasion, which given his size and strength was frighteningly easy. But it is one thing to break down the wooden door of a ghetto shanty-shack and another to invade the homes of the fat and wealthy. Nino discovered quickly in those days that the rich had better taste, both in the stew-pot and in the goods they owned. However, it would take more than one man to break into a mansion, so he sought out the most desperate groups of moredores that he could find and cowed them into being his shock troops; as a strategy this worked far better than Nino could have imagined. He would work with one group of Moradores until he tired of their dynamic or lack thereof, killing them off and finding another fresh group that could provide him with the kind of obedience and sport to which he had become accustomed.

That all ended in the summer of 2002 when the group of moredores that he was traveling with kidnapped a family of French tourists and selected a seemingly empty beach-side mansion in which to squat. The mansion turned out to be perfect for Saturnino's use and so did the French tourists. Saturnino could pit the men against each other for the lives of their woman and child, for his moredores enjoyed watching men fight to the death as much as he did. Afterwards he planned to bake the little boy, for the flesh of children was the tenderest of all. And finally he would settle in with a bottle of whatever was available and amuse himself with the French woman. Unfortunately, the house his stupid group of moredores picked was owned by vampires and when they came home, they were not amused. The struggle didn't last long and Nino felt fear for the first time in many years as he wasn't used to have the tables turned upon him. In the end, his domitor, his mistress, his goddess let him live to serve her until she grew tired of him and devoured him as he had so many in his life.

With each night's passing, she would remind him that most likely on the morrow he would be eaten and he could only avoid that fate if he served her especially well. And serve he did, as the nights turned into weeks, the weeks turned into months, the months turned into years, and the years turned into decades. Slowly, Nino became aware that his mistress was simply taunting him, that he had value to her or she would have killed him long ago in one of her frightening experiments.

No longer homeless and in need of expanding resources with which to accomplish his goddesses' tasks, he pooled all his ill-gotten gains and opened a sausage shop. Of course being a cannibal, much of the meat was of the human variety, but the residents of Rio's slums didn't know that and consequently didn't care, for the meat was flavorful and cheap. As the years pasted, his financial successes seemed to pile up and he kept opening new sausage shops in new neighborhoods to meet the demand for his tasty product. In later years he would reflect with a new-found humor that the residents of Rio de Janeiro enjoyed cannibalism as much as he did. But there were difficulties to contend with and Nino had to develop an entirely new skill set or tax his old skills to their limit to solve them. He had to find workers stupid enough to ignore the peculiarities of his business or bribe, threaten or kill the others. Many of his former employees ended up as sausage themselves, while a select few deranged or jaded enough individuals, became complicit in his lifestyle and business. In the end, it came down to emulating the vampires themselves, for their way of going about things served as the template for his business and the security measures he took to protect it.

Despite his financial successes, the goddess seemed unimpressed and Nino began to search for new ways to please her. He notices that she spent considerable time reading old books and performing experiments upon the living and the dead. Emulation being the highest form of flattery, naturally he began to do the same. In hopes of finding any common ground with his queen of the night, he undertook the daunting task of learning to read; his frustration with the process resulted in several of his tutors dying, but eventually he succeeded in becoming literate. That of course was only the beginning, he undertook to improve his image and he selected people who seemed wise in such things to tutor him and again many didn't survive the process. These endeavors at self-improvement did eventually pay off as the goddess took notice of the cumulative changes and offered to teach him something magical called a path of enlightenment. Not that Nino cared what she taught him, as long he could spend time with his beloved mistress, he would have been just as happy if she regularly subjected him to torture, attention positive or negative was still attention.

It took time for him to understand what she was teaching him and he cringed when she became impatient or frustrated with his slow acceptance of the tenets and principles of the Path of Death and the Soul. The tutoring sessions or religious experiences as he saw it, were infrequent, but over time they began to make sense to him. He realized he had been living for the moment all his life; while it had made him happy, it had also blinded him to the reality that his way of life would one day end in death. Up to this point he had taken life for granted, for in his world view the strong survived and the weak perished. But the philosophy of death opened his eyes to the truth, everyone and everything dies. His own mortality suddenly and terrifyingly struck him. Worse still, with each revelation he began to understand that those he had killed might still linger on as ghosts and that they might want revenge for what he had done to them. Lastly, if he died, he also might become a wraith and have to suffer eternally for his deeds. For the first time in his life he experienced a crisis of conscience, purely in the realization that he actually had a conscience. He did belong to the human race after all and that thunderbolt from the heavens left him deeply distraught and depressed for the first time in his brutal life.

But he emerged from his depression with the goal of finding a solution to his perilous situation, since that time he has delved into every occult and specifically necromantic text he could find in the hope of escaping death. He has spoken to voudoun, witch-doctors, spiritualists and even priests in the hope of finding a way out of having to die. All his research has revealed only one measure that can free him from having to die the final death, he must convince his goddess to make him immortal as a flesh eating vampire of the Naga Raja.

Recent Events: Saturnino's goddess recently left on some sort of pilgrimage, but he knows from the ghosts he has spoken to that when she returns he will either die the final death or join her in the Underworld and while he fears these predictions, he has begun to feel a sense of relief that his fate will be finally resolved in one fashion or another.

• -- Saturnino Silva's Statistics