app for maskormenace

[pucci]

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Ida
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: ida
PLURK: idahna
RETURNING: n/a

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉

CHARACTER NAME: Enrico Pucci
CHARACTER AGE: 39
SERIES: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean
CHRONOLOGY: Volume 80: "What a Wonderful World"
CLASS: Grade-A Sinister Minister.
HOUSING: Random assignment is fine.

BACKGROUND:

enrico pucci @ jojo wikia
stone ocean @ jojo wikia

If luxury had a lapdog, its name was Pucci in every sense of the word: Enrico's family was blessed with notable blood, wealth, and abundance, and a strong pious bedrock that served as a foundation for every faction of life. His pedigree stemmed far into the upper-crusts of Catholic Venice, especially significant where the Italian half of his Italian-American heritage was concerned. Significant enough, in fact, that a direct ancestor of his became Pope of The Catholic Church in the 18th century. Despite hailing from a long line of gentry, however, inadequacy proved to be an equal opportunity offender: Enrico Pucci was born a twin in 1972 with a birth defect, a contorted left foot that gave him an noticeable limp for the first fifteen years of his life.

But two twisted toes wasn't all destiny had to offer in the way of misfortune. A few rooms down from where Enrico and his twin brother Domenico rested the night of their birth, a mother was struggling to cope with the birth of a stillborn son. It was a battle of acceptance that she would ultimately lose. Setting out in low tones as to shirk the attentions of the doctors and nurses, the young woman slipped into the Pucci room, took one look at the two babies laying there, and swapped her stillborn with Domenico. While Pucci's parents would be forever burdened with displaced grief, they approached the supposed loss in godly acceptance and moved on with their life, giving birth to a daughter, Pearla Pucci, two years later.

For a good while, Enrico Pucci fit the prototypical gilded childhood; undeterred by the limp in his gait, he was liked and respected among peers and adults as much as any young boy could hope to be. All the same, the wealth and adoration of his youth was not enough to banish thoughts of his supposedly dead twin brother before they could take root. Urged by a private question of circumstance, Pucci pursued seminary early, at the tender age of fifteen, eager to find why God had chosen him over Domenico. 

He didn't get any answers, but he did stumble over a pair of feet as he was wandering the halls of the Church one afternoon. These feet belonged to a man named Dio Brando, who was sprawled on the floors of the chapel, looking like a textbook example of an emperor off his throne rather than any typical vagabond off the street seeking refuge in the church's halls for a night. Unbeknownst to Pucci at the time, Dio was also a vampire — a one hundred year old vampire, give or take a few years, whose murderous ambitions towards the family of the man who's body he was currently taking over knew no bounds or limitations. "Taking over" in the most literal sense; at the time of Dio's and Pucci's first encounter in 1987, Brando, having been previously beheaded, had somehow attached his head to his mortal enemies' (and adoptive brother's) body, Jonathan Joestar, gathering followers in hope that he may one day eradicate the Joestar bloodline from the face of the earth indefinitely.  

That's another story for another time. Upon being questioned as to why a commoner would be lounging in the charnel outside the hours of worship, Dio responded that he was allergic to sunlight and had to remain in the shadows until nightfall. The two engaged in a brief, if not one-sided, philosophical conversation: Dio mocked Pucci's fallen books on scandalous adultery between priests, asked Pucci if he believed "gravity" allowed two people to meet, and gave him a small stone arrow through which Pucci should use to find him if he so desired. This arrow would have been promptly thrown in the trash if not for the fact that Pucci's left foot was completely healed after this confrontation. No small miracle, that much was for certain — again, Pucci had to ask the question why, but he kept the arrow in the pocket of his cassock, perhaps as a token of his gratitude.

A year passed without incident, but only a year's time. Barely straddling the fence of priesthood at sixteen years old, Pucci was helping clean the confessionals when a woman, subdued in both body and spirit, stumbled into a booth, begging for someone to hear her confession. Fate had it that Pucci was the only one around at the time, so with all due hesitation, he slipped into the booth as she spilled everything to him.

Everything — from how she had stolen a twin baby sixteen years ago and raised him as her own, now to be cursed with a terminal illness and a generous helping of guilt, unable to break the news to her 'son' or his real family just a town down from where she lived. Visibly shaken, Enrico only needed to ask one thing: the name of son's real family. Her response, just simply "Pucci", was exactly what he had feared. Enrico had the answer to his original question after sixteen long years, but he was bound by cleric confidentiality, a pledge he valued above his personal investigation. Or, as the events that unfolded soon after would prove, his own state of mind.

As for Domenico Pucci? His name was Wes Bluemarine, informally dubbed "Weather", and he lived as an undistinguished juice delivery boy through and through; unlike Enrico, Weather was a touch more brazen, and perhaps more than a touch less reverent. Just the same with inadequacy, fate, too, was an equal opportunity offender. During a routine stocking, a man snatched a girl's purse and started off into the street with it. He didn't get far, of course; Weather chucked a juice can through the store window, knocking the thief down enough style and ceremony to give any girl heart palpitations. He returned the purse to its blushing owner, and as far as introductions go... the two hit off quite nicely.

( Mentions of incest, racial violence, sexual assault, and suicide ahead. )

Turns out, the girl's name was Pearla Pucci. By the time Enrico found out —  Pearla had asked him to keep her secret relationship under wraps until she managed to get her grades back up — the two had been dating for two weeks. Before her wide-eyed brother, Pearla gushed about the cute boy she had met in the juice store, claiming she felt that "their hearts were connected". Incapable of revealing Weather's true identity, yet unwilling to watch helplessly as his sister initiated a chance incestuous relationship with her brother, he gunned out alternative methods of handling the crisis at hand.

For a considerable sum of money, of which Pucci was more than willing and capable of providing, he enlisted the sleights of a local private detective agency behind closed doors. The agency would threaten Weather into breaking up with Pearla, posing as bunch of menacing gang members for the intimidation factor. The stipulations? It would be carried out swiftly, nonviolently, professionally, no questions asked. However, Pucci failed to take into account two tools  at ill fortune's disposal:  human curiosity and prejudice.  The former of which spurred the agency, who had hidden, age-old affiliations with the KKK movement in the deep south, to discover that Weather was the product of an interracial relationship. Upon spotting the couple share a good night's kiss four days after Pearla had wised up to her brother, the latter took over with a malevolent rage. Within a span of one evening, Pearla was attacked and molested, and Weather was lynched from a tree. All the while, the Head Detective made a point to let them know it was Pearla's brother who had given them clearance. After all was said and done, Pearla cut Weather down, and in her despair, jumped off the cliff overlooking a nearby river.

Weather still had a pulse. 

Probably because news of a suicide was just beginning to spread, or probably due to that fact that the agency had set fire to the Pucci household just moments before assaulting Weather and Pearla, Enrico was on the scene in short order. At the sight of his sister's dead body being retrieved from the river, he scrambled through the water, forcibly pulling her out of the rescuers hands and carrying her back to shore. He had but a minute's time to cry out before he heard a familiar voice from seemingly nowhere remind him of the stone arrow in his pocket. Before Pucci could question the origin of the voice, he was stabbed. The arrow had moved on its own, impaling him cleanly through the chest, as per its owner's wish.

He was wounded, but only briefly, just as Dio had predicted one year ago. Using the arrow as a medium to soothe a bewildered Pucci, Dio explained that he was given an Stand, and while he could never bring his sister back, her "memory, heart, and soul" were his for preserving. When Pucci looked down, there was a CD protruding out of Pearla's forehead, one with her face imprinted on the disk.

On the cliff ledge above them, Weather's body lay, a visible arrow impression upon the nape of his neck. 

A resentful individual with a bone to pick with the world made for hasty revenge, which is precisely why Weather using his own newly-acquired Stand to kill the Head Detective by enveloping him in a swarm of poisonous snails. Weather subsequently attempted suicide, to no avail — his Stand wouldn't allow for it, first by waterlogging his gun, then by whisking his body ashore before he could drown himself. As Weather wrestled with feelings of self-reproach, rage, and a poorly-mastered Stand, a strange phenomena was beginning to unfold in nearby Floridan towns. Raining frogs. On a number of occasions, they would crop out of the most unsuspecting places: unopened refrigerator cans, cellphones, a sheriff's eye. 

Enrico was the only one who could comprehend this phenomality. Not only was it a sign his brother was alive, but perhaps more importantly, it was a distress signal foretelling of Weather's impending wrath. Enrico sent out for his brother with a renewed sense of purpose instilled within him. As far as he was concerned, the very same "destiny" Dio had spoke of left him one feasible option. During their confrontation, in which Weather made it clear that he wanted Enrico dead, Pucci revealed that they were brothers before swiping Weather's memory disk, so that "he might has well be a dead man". All at once, Pucci was left to his own devices, the memory disks of his siblings in his custody. 

The loneliness was short lived. In the years that followed, Pucci would become Dio's most loyal disciple. Dio's goals became Pucci's goals, and Dio's aspirations became Pucci's aspirations. Dio promised Pucci a road to 'heaven'; Pucci was more than convinced of his authority to speak on such pursuits. So when Jotaro Kujo, Jonathan Joestar's great-great grandson, murdered Dio in Egypt once and for all, Pucci vowed to take up the cross on behalf of the man "he loved as he loved God." 

Before his death, Dio was researching methods to conceive a perfect world through the use of highly-powered Stands, recording his in-depth analyses and comprehensive explanations in a journal — a journal that was read and consequently burned by Jotaro Kujo himself, as the potential repercussions of having the information made public would be staggering in scope. 

Fortunately, Dio had a "living conscience" with the means to propel his findings into motion.

Pucci had turned into quite the calculated mastermind at this point: in the subsequent decade, he took on the cloth of Catholic Fatherhood, and climbed the ranks of one of the most hierarchical systems in the modern world: a state prison. Florida's Green Dolphin Street Prison, to be exact, situated on an island off the wetlands of Cape Canaveral. Officially, Pucci was employed as the Prison Priest, and he performed his pastoral duties to the highest regard of the law. Under wraps, Pucci ruled the prison from the grassroots up: inserting Stand disks into criminals to create an entourage of hired muscle. The head guard? A Stand-User made by Pucci who had the ability to box people's short-term memory to a limit of three pieces of information. The prison shack watch? Plankton. Pucci threw a Stand disk into the sea to create a shape-shifting Plankton. Another inmate of Green Dolphin? Weather. Pucci had presumably engineered a illegitimate-sentence so he could keep watch over his twin brother, who lived slammer-life as a quiet, eccentric amnesiac. 

Fast forward to 2011. In order to mobilize Dio's plans, Pucci needed to know what was written in his journal. The only person who had read the journal was Jotaro, who had aged to his forties at this point, now a father of a 19 year old named Jolyne. Pucci cooked up an elaborate frame to have Jolyne jailed for an alcohol-induced hit-and-run manslaughter, thanks to the help of a handful of prison assassins and swinish lawyers. This scenario was executed under the assumption that Jotaro would soon visit his daughter to warn her of the framing. It all worked out impeccably: Jotaro did visit Jolyne, only to be ambushed and rendered torpid when Pucci used Whitesnake to steal both Jotaro's memories and his Stand.

Impeccably, short of one crippling flaw: Jolyne developed a Stand. Which would be relatively harmless in and of itself, short of another flaw, even more crippling than the last: Jolyne Kujo possessed a tenacity to put even the most stubborn of bulls to shame. Along with a small band of fellow inmates (including Weather and the aforementioned Plankton), Jolyne quickly learned that it was Pucci, having previously been regarded as the most innocuous suspect,  who was the mastermind behind the framing. She eventually succeeded in retrieving her father's Stand disk, but it was too late: Pucci had already read Jotaro's memories by the time of their eventual confrontation. Using a bone piece entrusted to him by Dio, Pucci fused with another Stand User and procured a whole new set of powers, making him one step closer in attaining "heaven". 

His entourage nearly cleaned out — Jolyne simply could not be overcome — Pucci tracked down three of Dio's four illegitimate sons scattered around Florida and awakened the Stands within them. Every single one of them suffered defeat at the hands of Jolyne and Co., but one of the more indifferent ones managed to steal Weather's disk from Pucci right before his death, as one big metaphorical middle finger to everyone who tried to manipulate him one way or another — Pucci included. After twenty-four years, Weather finally obtained his memories back, and to say that he was furious would be understating the matter by several degrees. Weather wanted nothing but a swift death, but not without taking Pucci with him.

And he almost succeeded. Right before Weather could administer the final blow to what was a bitter and bloody showdown between the two, a car crash right behind them set him flying, enough for Pucci to gather his bearings and emerge victorious. As Weather died, Pucci let him know that the only reason he had kept his brother alive in Green Dolphin was because he had thought to save him eventually, free Weather of the "curse" placed upon him from the day he was born. 

Pucci then proceeded to rank up one of the highest protagonist body counts a villain could dream of: killing off the rest of Jolyne's troupe... Jolyne and her father included. Hardly the worst of it, however. His final Stand finally made conscious, Pucci acquired the ability to alter time relatively to such a degree that he spawned a singularity, and well, rebooted the entire universe, effectively elevating himself to something akin to godhood. 

Like I said: Pucci's life is one ruled by circumstance, from beginning to end. In the end, a little boy named Emporio, no more than eleven years of age, followed Pucci into his "remade world" and killed him. How? Just before the end, right at the time of Weather's death to drawn times fine, Weather gave Jolyne his Stand disk in hopes that she may use it to finish his brother off for good. Jolyne then gave it to Emporio, knowing that Pucci was unaware of the boy's existence due thanks to Jolyne and Co.'s efforts to keep him from harm. Emporio led Pucci down a wild goose chase in a simulated layout of Pucci's choosing: Green Dolphin Street Prison. In an effort to make a lethal swipe at him, Pucci accidentally pushed Weather's stand disk into Emporio's forehead, causing the oxygen concentration of the room to climb exponentially. Immobilized, Pucci implored Weather's will to let him live, at least until his "ascension" to Heaven was complete, lest the universe be rebooted again without him.

Weather didn't want to wait. Pucci's death was one for the sake of retribution above all else, revenge a long time in coming. Emporio was returned safe and sound, but the damage was done: he had to live in an alternate reality, the only one who had an inkling of what had transpired before the reboot.

PERSONALITY:

 

"You're the kind of evil that doesn't know it's evil... that's the worst kind there is."

Absence of threat, Pucci mirrors the image of The Affable Priest, strict without seeming authoritarian, strong-willed without seeming overly obtrusive. He retains some lasting vestiges of classic religiosity: Dio describes him as a man without need for political power, fame, wealth, or sexual desire. His motives for taking over the prison are not so he can delight in the control that authority provides - on the contrary, he is more than content to follow the rules of his supposed superiors so as long as his goals aren't compromised. He sees through his plans by politely requesting of others, rather than doling out brash orders. He prays. He has the Bible learned by heart. He listens to religious worship in his spare time. Ideals notwithstanding, Pucci is somewhat an eccentric, a three-dollar bill relative to your average priest. His breadth of intelligence is almost limitless; contrary to what one might think, he exhibits a clear fascination with arithmetic, biology, and psychology. Where's it's animal physiology or subliminal messaging in campaign posters or cryptozoology, he's ready and willing to discuss it in great detail, no matter how trivial the hard facts. And like Dio, he's excellent in exuding a sense of compassion and charisma about him when necessary. It's the intensity of his devotion that draws the following and admiration of so many people - the prison guards, Dio's sons - Pucci really does believe he's doing the right thing. Not simply for his own sake, or for Dio's, but in noble pursuance of a better future for humanity as a whole, all in accordance to God's wishes. 

Depending on who you ask, some would say there are few who can rival him in terms of generosity, especially against the backdrop of grim prison wardens eager to dispense violence at any sign of disorder. There's no better study in contrasts. One moment he's cowering an a private corner counting primes in their 400s, another moment he's unleashing brief but ruthless bouts of anger (slamming a prisoner's head into the corner of a desk for stealing his cross pendant, for one), and another moment yet he's singing jubilant praises and challenging prisoners to see if they can eat a cherry with the seeds intact. It's in his best interests for people to hold him in their good graces as a Father of state prison. When the opportunity presents himself, he'd much rather delegate aggression to those deemed irredeemable sinners than handle the brow-beating himself, half in part for appearances' sake, half in part to reaffirm his own sense of virtuousness. As far as Pucci is concerned, either a person lives a life of sin, or they be utilized for a purpose bigger than themselves. He doesn't believe in personal reform to an extent - which either justifies or counters his official job description, depending on one's own assessment  - once you're born cursed, you die cursed. It's a simple matter of fate. Pucci is fated, Weather is cursed. Pucci is fated, the Joestars are cursed... as so is everyone else who opposes him.

It's this deluded train of logic that serves as a foundation for how Pucci regards himself in relation to the rest of the world. 

Fundamentally, Pucci is a man wholly incapable of examining himself in terms of right or wrong, because there is simply no "wrong" when he is concerned. Regret and shame have no place in his rationale. If they did, they would serve as unbearable reminders of the mistakes of his past - or even worse, the confounded question over personal responsibility with regards to Weather and Pearla. Since the moment he could hold a crayon, the motto "bad things do not happen to God-fearing people" has been vigorously indoctrinated into his psyche. To cope with his life's many contradictions, "bad things" are only obstacles, not consequences, which removes personal liability by extension, and "good things" are divine signs that he is destined. Of course, Pucci has no problem flexing his selective attention muscles everywhere he goes,  thereby fueling his sense of superiority to extreme heights under the most generous of estimates. His highbrow ideals, his devotion, his loyalty, all this is more than enough to justify his means, however sinister or corrupt they seem.

Pucci's brand of violence is underhanded, not barbaric, wholly Machiavellian in its execution: only dished out under necessity, brutal enough to rely a message of potential. Passive engagements are his most preferred tools of trade. He's inclined to fight in the presence of another present danger, and often times deliberately engineers his confrontations so that his opponents are faced with internal dilemmas of importance. Will it be me, or someone you love? For Jolyne, it was either killing Pucci or saving her father's memory disk from dissolving inside a dying body. For Foo Fighters, it was either killing him or diverting her attentions another threat likely to destroy her right after. Ten times out of ten, the conditional is so pressing that his opponents pick the latter rather than the former. Pucci didn't succeed by turning a blind eye to his own weaknesses. He is sharp enough to know that he can be overpowered in a simple game of brute strength, and always plans accordingly. And Pucci is nothing if not an expert planner, thanks to enduring patience and a strong divine map.

Even the slightest hint of uncertainty — hand in hand with the sense of losing control — is enough to give him restless bouts of nervous anxiety. Combined with a rigorous display of hand-wringing, counting prime numbers is his go-to coping mechanism in times of high stress, solely for the fact that they cannot be divided by any number other than itself and one: "God's number", a symbol of eternal invincibility. In his own words? It gives him strength. God is always in control, and since Pucci esteems himself as God's most devoted ambassador, he must also always be in control. Even his idea of "Heaven" is one where all humans would be born knowing what lies past the horizon of their future, so that they may be resign to their fate with dignity. Ultimately, Pucci subscribes to a radical form of religious fatalism, augmented by a childhood where the unknown had condemned him to turmoil. 

POWER:

Explaining Pucci's powers first requires a brief rundown of the nature of Stands in general. Essentially, Stands are physical manifestations of an individual's energy in avatar form that can be summoned or dismissed at the User's will. Varying powers non-withstanding, they act as an extension of the User's bodily senses: whatever the Stand sees, the User sees, whatever the Stand hears, the User hears. If a Stand's leg gets chopped off, the User can say goodbye to that leg in return. Distance from the User/Stand and strength are negatively correlated, with some notable exceptions. Perhaps the most relevant feature of Stands are that they are only visible to other Stand Users. Non-Stand Users affected by Weather's Stand, for example, can only witness the changing phenomena around them, not the avatar hanging off Weather's shoulder.

Generally speaking, an individual can only have one Stand. However, Pucci is an anomaly in that he "acquires" more Stands through a sequence of increasingly bizarre events, in true JJBA fashion.

( ᴡʜɪᴛᴇsɴᴀᴋᴇ )

Pucci's primary Stand, obtained upon being stabbed by Dio's Arrow. Whitesnake gives Pucci the ability to rob someone of their "soul" by materializing their memories and/or powers in the form of a CD disk. Upon being hit by Whitesnake, a disk will 'pop' out out the skull in a manner not unlike a CD drive popping out of a labtop. Despite the wince-inducing imagery it evokes, the whole process is fairly painless by and large, unless Pucci helps himself to both an individual's memories and their powers, in which case the individual falls into a deep, coma-like state. Whitesnake's disks have the faces of the individuals imprinted on them for easy identification, and cannot be destroyed unless they are inserted into a dying person's body. If a power disk is inserted into a person, the abilities on that disk will be available to them; much the same is true with regards to memory disks. This power is not without its mundane utility: at one point, Pucci used an injured man's body like a glorified iPod to blast a personal CD-copy of Handel's Messiah outside a prison courtyard. 

In conjunction with its disk-nabbing powers, Whitesnake can also produce a digestive mist causing graphic, atmospheric hallucinations for a limited amount of time. Keeping Mask or Menace's triple power cap in mind, Pucci will lose this ability upon acceptance. In consequence, the only power Whitesnake grants him is the ability to steal memory/power disks.

Halfway through the story, Pucci absorbs The Green Baby, which is the perfect segueway into...

( ᴄ-ᴍᴏᴏɴ )

 
Pucci's second stand. Pucci enjoys all the trappings of Whitesnake's original abilities, with the bonus capacity for gravity manipulation within a fixed range of 3 kilometers. Pucci can exploit the gravitational force between objects to suit his favor, which allows him to accomplish feats like orbiting around threats or inverting surfaces with a mere touch. He can even do this to himself (warning: not so much graphic as it is unsettling) as a measure in self-defense. Likewise, any moving object within a 3km distance from him will fall away from him due to transposed gravity.

In Mask or Menace, the range of this ability will be curbed to a manageable 30 feet (~9 meter) radius.

Naturally, Pucci won't be bringing Made In Heaven to Mask or Menace. Everyone involved breathes a sigh of relief.