application ( recolle )

[protegge]

PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Anne
18+?: Yes!
CONTACT: passiones or PM
CHARACTERS IN GAME: N/A
RESERVATION LINK: voila

CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Guido Mista
AGE: 18
CANON: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure ( Part 5 : Vento Aureo )

CANON HISTORY:

🔫 Guido Mista, which covers up to Spice Girl and then abruptly stops for some reason ( Jojowiki )
🔫 Vento Aureo synopsis, Spice Girl through Vento Aureo's end ( Jojowiki )
🔫 Purple Haze Feedback, the canonical post-Vento Aureo light novel ( Jojowiki )

CANON PERSONALITY:

At first glance, Guido Mista is pretty unremarkable and, frankly, shallow. In comparison to the overwhelming charisma of other characters in the Vento Aureo arc, a guy who's introduced by yelling about the number four and wanting to eat strawberry shortcake seems obviously slated for the comic relief role. Mista seems kind of stupid in an average-dude way, an easygoing joker with a propensity for roughhousing and not much else going for him.

The truth is, Mista is a simple guy, but simple is not the same as stupid necessarily. He's an eighteen-year-old kid, so his emotional intelligence is not the best; he has a tendency to make insensitive remarks when he's overwhelmed, caught off-guard, or simply hasn't thought before opening his mouth. On the other hand, he's got something of a normalizing effect on the oddball bunch he hangs out with. He's one of the more normal of Bruno Buccellati's foundlings, although of course that must be taken with a grain of salt given the conditions of extreme abuse and neglect the others were found in. Mista, though, is Just A Dude, one who likes movies--spaghetti westerns and romcoms especially--and pretty girls and fashion and teasing his friends and making up stupid dances to celebrate a successful torture session.

Wait, what?

Well, Mista, like anyone in Buccellati's gang, isn't even close to your standard normal. There's the obvious extreme tetraphobia--more on that later--but even beyond that, Mista has the potential to be vindictive, both personally and professionally. The vindictive moments in his personal life are relatively minor and non-explosive, especially when compared with the other people in Buccellati's gang--but again, that's sort of like comparing a car wreck with a car wreck on fire. Neither are exactly good. For example, when Mista gets sick of listening to Narancia's Snoop Dogg tape for the millionth time, he distracts Narancia and then pours a soda into his boombox. Casual property destruction is (again, relatively) not that big a deal in this household.

And this is just the interpersonal stuff. On a professional level . . . well, let's not forget that, goofy as Mista can be, he is a professional assassin, part of an assassination squad. He's incredibly good at what he does. When he's on the job, when he's working to take down someone he figures (or has been told) deserves it, all of the laidback attitude he usually displays flies out the window. There are no smiles, there's no laughter; he doesn't even talk much beyond what's tactically necessary. The truth is that Mista can be pretty terrifying when he wants to be, when he has a goal in mind. In assassination he's found something he's genuinely good at, and on some level he relishes it. On another level, he's incapable of not taking it seriously. It's part of his body and soul to remove threats from this world, and he sees it as entirely righteous.

Mista sees himself first and foremost as an avenger, a protector of the weak. It's not exactly a mystery where that might have come from; his love of the Clint Eastwood-style outlaw hero combined with Bruno Buccellati's fervor for protecting the used and abused of society to create the man who would later become Giorno Giovanna's bodyguard and right-hand man. But on the other hand, that protective personality existed long before Mista met Bruno, even if it was dormant. The first formative movement towards change in Mista's life was when he chose to step in and protect a total stranger from being attacked by a group of men; he chose to do that, and he did it automatically because he felt it was the right thing to do, not because he thought he'd get rewarded for it or because it was heroic. It's telling, too, that he displayed his first hints at having a Stand during that encounter. Even on a psychological level, there was an urge to protect himself in order to protect the girl being attacked.

It's clear that Mista is willing to work outside the law to do what he feels is necessary to protect those that need protecting. This was the case before Bruno as well; obviously, he made the choice to shoot the girl's attackers before he met Bruno. On the other hand, Mista is not a leader on his own, nor is he particularly good at pushing himself towards his full potential. Put another way, Mista sees details and not the big picture. He cares about people, but he's not capable of constructing a macrocosmic plan to improve their lives--which is very much necessary in the setting of Napoli during Vento Aureo. He's well aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and as such knows, too, that he needs a guiding purpose, even if this latter knowledge is more subconscious than conscious. While it's never explicitly stated that his initial guiding force was religion, given his extremely Catholic surroundings it's not a tough leap to make. After he met Bruno, he found a new (or perhaps additional) purpose: to follow Bruno and help Napoli in the small ways he was able in that way. And of course, when he met Giorno, he combined a near-religious devotion to one person with an unshakeable belief in a mission.

Regardless of what the source of his faith, if he has a strong connection to it, Mista is absolutely unshakable in his devotion. He trusts what he believes in to keep him safe. There is a clause to this, at least in Mista's mind: he has to follow certain rules that, to most people, probably seem very arbitrary. The most-cited one is the one mentioned a ways up: his tetraphobia, or fear of the number four, which is so severe that he won't eat a fourth piece of cake, even if he really wants cake. It's so ingrained that even the separate bullets that make up his Stand are numbered 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7--note which number is conspicuously missing.

Obviously this phobia demonstrates extreme irrationality and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. But despite this (and despite the fact that there are several points in the arc when Mista is proven right, that four is an omen of death), Mista is somehow, miraculously, probably the most emotionally resilient person in Vento Aureo. His magical thinking actually has the effect of helping him to be the easygoing guy's guy that everyone knows him as. Sure, bad things are going to happen sometimes, but unless he screws up and invokes a four, everything will be okay. He's quick to bounce back from upset and has a relatively easy time healing from emotional and even physical hurts, because he doesn't consider himself responsible for his own well-being. Someone else is watching out for him.

In other words, Mista has a tendency to place the burden for his own safety outside of his own hands. His faith is tenacious, and if he has someone or something to truly believe in, he simply can't believe that anything that happens to him, in life or in death, is anything other than right and just. As great as it sounds to believe everything will work out in the end, though, it's got a pretty significant downside. Until and unless he's told otherwise, Mista is absolutely willing to die for his cause if someone doesn't tell him not to. He wants to be a hero and will die for it if necessary. It's not that he wants to die so much as that he feels that there's a higher power that will determine whether or not it's the appropriate course of action, and who is he to question it? Canonically, it isn't until Giorno makes a big deal out of not wanting Mista to die--for the cause, and for him--that Mista begins to recalibrate, to try to figure out a way to exist in the world where he can have faith in something outside of himself while also recognizing that that external power never wants to lose him.

It's a work in progress, of course. He's only eighteen; he's got time.

SKILLS/ABILITIES:

🔫 RESILIENCE. Mista is an extremely physically resilience person, along with his aforementioned emotional resilience. He spends much of his time in canon getting shot(/stabbed/beaten up/etc) and essentially getting up and powering through it. This isn't anything particularly supernatural; it's more a combination of shonen stubbornness, higher-than-average physical fitness, and the knowledge that he has people to shoot before those people shoot his people.

🔫 CRIMINAL STUFF. This one's pretty vaguely defined by canon, but it's clear that Mista's picked up a few Crime Tricks™ since he joined Buccellati's gang. He's decently versed in stealing cars, for one; for another, he's free and easy with vandalism, and is probably an acceptable thief and con artist on a very small scale. Most significantly, he's not only adept at torture but sees it as an average, everyday activity. Just par for the course.

🔫 MARKSMANSHIP. While Mista's Stand (see below) is gun-based, even before his Stand was awakened in him, Mista's been an eerily good marksman. The very first time he picked up a gun, when he did so to protect the girl he saw being forced into the car, not only did he make every shot, but none of his opponents' bullets hit him. More than that, when Mista gets into shooting mode he gains a sort of focus that he almost never has in the rest of his life. He's jovial and goofy while torturing a man, but with his gun in his hand he seems very aware of his purpose and the importance of what he's doing. So for once, not only is he good at something, but invested in being good at it.

🔫 SEX PISTOLS. And finally, we get to the Stand stuff. In brief: a Stand is a psychic manifestation of one's fighting spirit--think Personas, kind of. They canonically have a lot of rules which are routinely broken to suit plot needs, because why not, but Sex Pistols are at least fairly consistent. They are a group of six bullet-shaped manifestations, numbered 1 through 7--with the number 4 omitted per Mista's tetraphobia, leaving them named Uno, Due, Tre, Cinque, Sei, and Sette. They are a long-range Stand and, as with many long-range Stands, are not that powerful. Unlike almost all Stands, the Pistols are each independently sentient, although they certainly reflect different aspects of Mista's psyche, and are able to act against Mista's express wishes. Indeed, they spend much of their time griping and fighting amongst each other and won't work unless they get fed. They like pepperoni. Mista brings picnics along to feed them on long trips. Essentially, Mista treats his Stand like tiny bullet-shaped kids.

As far as Sex Pistols's specific limitations and characteristics other than being tiny yelling kids: what they do is, according to Mista, kick his bullets around so they hit better. They don't function without a gun, and they don't provide limitless ammunition or anything like that; they literally just aim Mista's bullets. Which makes them sound kind of useless, except their range is pretty enormous--as much as a kilometer--and they work every aspect of the assassination process, from loading to shooting. Even after shooting, Mista is capable of using the Pistols to cause additional damage by having them kick bullets around the target's insides to thoroughly destroy their organs. Fun! The Pistols will also defend Mista even if he's unconscious, and because they're independently intelligent, they're capable of a decent amount of tactical planning. He can also send one or more of them to protect someone else, because (if they're feeling cooperative) the Pistols are more than capable of protecting Mista or anyone else from projectile fire. And while it's possible to capture the Pistols and render Mista helpless, they're smarter (and meaner) than they look.

CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Guido Mista
AU AGE: 18
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: The only physical difference is that Mista has a smattering of minor scars (from broken bones, fights, various accidents), whereas in canon he was completely healed by Giorno during White Album and left scarless.

AU HISTORY:

🔫 Mista grew up in Naples, Italy, the only child of a single mother with a very limited income. He was raised a devout Catholic but was in his own way disillusioned by the church's inability to combat the sway of the Neapolitan organized crime families known as the Camorra. He became very protective of his mother and, by extension, others that he saw as vulnerable in his community.

🔫 When he was 15, Mista saw a single, unarmed man forcing a young woman into a car. He confronted the man, who was open about the fact that he was planning to attack this girl and entirely unrepentant. In response, Mista snapped and beat him so severely that he later died in hospital. With her son facing manslaughter charges against a man who, as it turned out, had mafia ties, Mista's mother became terrified for his safety. She bribed the police and smuggled Mista out of the country, to live with his aunt and uncle in Recolle.

🔫 In the first few days living with his aunt and uncle, they quickly realized that they had no idea how to properly supervise or take care of a sudden fifteen-year-old with blood on his hands. They called family friend Mohammad Abdul, who didn't have experience with kids but was a lot more level-headed than any of Mista's family. Abdul quickly became one of the few law-abiding adults Mista actually trusted and probably the person he most looked up to in Recolle.

🔫 True to his mother's wishes, Mista enrolled in high school, at which his performance was lackluster but not the worst it could be. She wanted him to focus on moving towards college, but instead he began to pick up odd after-school jobs--retail, food service, delivery, barista--at which his performance was also lackluster. He was fired from all of them, one after another, usually for shoddy attendance or minor infractions.

🔫 Even so, Mista is very connected to the local parish. His mother insisted that he keep attending church, and he is, even though his behavior and general irreverence tend to make church leaders treat him as a lost cause. He has recently become close with Karl, on whom his case was foisted by church higher-ups; they do get along, though, and Mista trusts him enough to confide in him how purposeless he's beginning to feel.

🔫 Of course, no matter how much guidance he's got, he's still going to get into trouble sometimes. Every once in a while, especially in the first few months in the city, he let off steam by picking pockets or starting fights. An up-and-coming detective, Kyouko Kirigiri, was hired to look into the case of one of the people he'd pickpocketed and was surprised and aggravated to find that it was Mista, who she'd actually met before--when she visited Naples as a kid, Mista happened across her and took her on an impromptu tour. Because they knew each other before, Kirigiri reluctantly didn't turn him in, and since then they've been pretty close. They talk about their respective work a lot, and Mista happily carries her stuff for her when they go shopping. He's even considered telling her about why he left Italy--all she knows so far is that he got in "some kind of trouble".

🔫 Shortly before Mista's scheduled graduation from high school, he found himself in trouble again, although he also quickly found a way out of it. He was hanging around a movie theater and heard a guy shittalking Clint Eastwood, which naturally he started a fight about. Fortunately, Majima was at the theater, too, and he pulled the two of them apart and escorted Mista away to calm down. He's one of Mista's better influences now; it's through Majima that Mista's gotten his first seriously steady job. He started as a bouncer at Majima's host club about six months ago and slowly started to take on host shifts, which he's found himself surprisingly adept at. At this point he's working about one-third bouncer shifts, two-thirds host shifts, and is pretty startled that somehow he has two jobs now. Weird.

🔫 Mista finished highschool with okay-but-just-okay grades and pretty much dismissed the thought of college offhand. He's still in touch with his aunt and uncle, but lives on his own now in a less-than-great part of town, although he doesn't mind the neighborhood at all. He spends all of his money on rent, food, $hopping, and movies. He doesn't have much (okay, he doesn't have anything) in mind in terms of life plans. To anyone on the outside looking in, Mista seems like he's drifting, and that's incredibly accurate. Having a job helps keep him on a regular schedule, though, and he's actually invested in Majima's success.

🔫 Additionally, Mista has some other friends and assorted acquaintances! He's a pretty popular guy for a loser.

AU PERSONALITY:

Overall, Mista's personality in Recolle will be more like he might have been pre-canon or in early canon. The disconnect from his homeland and his family have had a significant effect on his ability to trust in the faith that used to support him through the hardest times. There's no little amount of guilt for leaving his mother behind and making her worry.

Surprisingly, though, there's no guilt for the crime he committed. He feels strongly that the man he killed deserved to die, and that he did not deserve to be punished for it. Because he was ripped from his moorings so quickly after that crime, he never had a chance to process his feelings about it; he also never had a positive influence like Bruno Buccellati with whom he could be entirely truthful about the event. With no one to listen to the full truth and redirect him towards positive activities (or, okay, assassination, but positive activities in the sense of not sitting on his butt all day), Mista has fallen into heavier resentment of the legal system and a tendency to thumb his nose at it when he's in a particularly bitter mood. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

His disconnect has also lead him to be very directionless. While he has positive influences in Recolle, he doesn't feel at home there; he feels more disconnected from his faith than he did in Napoli, where he had grown up in the church. Overall, his faith is wavering, and he doesn't have "one thing" to put his faith in, to lead him in a positive, constructive direction. This has led to his frequent job turnover and a tendency to not take things seriously in general. He has no desire to push himself in any particular direction, because he doesn't have anyone or anything to work for. Even his mama's an ocean away.

Additionally, while he doesn't have a cause he'd die for right now, if he came across one or was given one, he wouldn't hesitate to die for it if he felt strongly about it. This reflects his attitude pre-White Album, before Giorno made him come correct and realize that sacrificing yourself for a cause sucks and he is worth more alive and working towards a better future than being a cowboy martyr. This is a tendency that will either need to be corrected in the future or will lead to him making increasingly dumb decisions if/when he finds faith again.

SAMPLE

🔫 thread with majima on the test drive
🔫 thread with shuji on the test drive