Vergil Cesarino

### Date of death

28th of April 2020 8:23am (at least 28153312 deaths between 7:05am and 8:23am in numerous aborted timelines)

## Physical description

### Eye color

Green

**Vergil Cesarino** (born 15 January 1996) is a male metahuman of Irish nationality and Italian descent. He was the patriarch of The Scourge, a criminal organisation headquartered in Bristol, Ireland, which specialised in human trafficking and narcotics smuggling within the Western European dynasty. An overweight and immature sexual predator, he spent much of his adult life using his ability to grow his criminal empire while indulging in feasts, orgies and high purity opiates. An overwhelming majority of his wealth was inherited from his significantly more enterprising father, although he was still significantly more successful than his competitors in expanding his business due to the nature of his ability.

Cesarino was best known for being in possession of a power which allowed him to set a single save point in time and to return to it upon his death, rendering him effectively immortal and granting him an indefinite degree of precognition. With this ability, he made a fortune selling information to the Albionite government in addition to several organs of international intelligence agencies, being able to relay intelligence about upcoming disasters and high profile assassinations from the future.

Ultimately, Cesarino was killed through the concerted efforts of Evelyn S. Retherford, Kelli Ivananko, Caitlin Wandmarcher, Ryugo Saeki and Ryuju Saeki, all of whom were hired by Retherford in order to accomplish the task. His assassination was funded in part by a series of open contracts levied against his person by governments that his information brokerage had disadvantaged, as well as a number of rival criminal organisations which had been rendered defunct or obstructed in their activities by The Scourge.

Cesarino is currently in the custody of Albion Esoteric, who have designated him with the label of Sibyl-005.

## Appearance

Cesarino was an unattractive, overweight caucasian-Italian man with brown hair, green eyes and grey skin. He had an anemic complexion, practiced poor personal hygiene and dressed extravagantly (or not at all). He indulged in enormous quantities of alcohol and the drugs which his organisation distributed, leading to the enlargement of his nostrils, the perforation of the skin around the interior of his elbow and an excess of belly fat. He possessed a remarkably squeaky voice and consistently spoke much more loudly than was necessary, possibly due to having sustained hearing loss over the course of his illicit lifestyle.

Later, following his domestication at the hands of Evelyn S. Retherford, Cesarino came to resemble a large muscular humanoid with charred skin, several keratinous plates covering many of its flat surfaces and a vertical slit for a mouth containing a several metre long prehensile tongue.

## Personality

Cesarino was an emotionally retarded, narcissistic manchild. He had a nearly sociopathic disregard for the wellbeing of his peers and subordinates, berating his bodyguard, Santiago Drake, for failing to protect him and repeatedly ordering the former to embark on suicidal attempts to defend him from encroaching attackers. He treated a private contractor hired to safeguard him, Evelyn S. Retherford, as nothing more than a sex object and made repeated, unwanted advances on her that repeatedly crossed the line into the realms of sexual assault and public humiliation. He surrounded himself at all times with escorts, prostitutes and groupies while eschewing the responsibilities and leadership roles expected of the patriarch of The Scourge, instead choosing to sequester himself in his compound within Bristol, where he fired most of The Scourge's professional security force in favour of replacing them with his friends, a majority of whom were completely incapable of wielding a firearm. Overall, he was an unpleasant and ethically dissolute molester.

After being tortured by Retherford for 47 years, Cesarino's mind suffered severe degeneration, leaving him incapable of speech and rendering him almost dysfunctionally unintelligent. The process caused him to lose all of his memories as well, leading to the development of an obsession with Retherford, who was the only person that he had contact with throughout that five decade long period. She became the object of his lust and having intercourse with her became his sole objective. He showed an incredible degree of determination in pursuing this venture, dying across several years of loops without abating in his attempts to incapacitate her. Further, he exhibited a surprising amount of intelligence when he reconfigured his own body across several loops to improve his odds of being able to overcome the obstacles standing before him.

In the end, following seven years of reconditioning at the hands of Retherford, Cesarino became wholly subservient to her wishes, deriving immense carnal pleasure from obeying her commands. At that point his humanity had fully degraded, leaving him with the same intellect as a small and particularly attached dog.

## Abilities

Cesarino, like his father, was capable of setting a single save point at any point in time. Upon his death, his health would be restored and he would be returned to that specific moment, retaining any memories that he had gained in the meantime. Any events that had elapsed since that moment would be undone, resulting in the abortion of a significant amount of the timeline. Objects contained within his vital endogenous fluids (e.g. CSF, lymph and blood) were partially exempt from this effect, retaining any damage sustained and any information gathered in the case of books, timepieces and human brains, but not retaining the positions that they had occupied at the point when time reset. This meant that Retherford could give herself the ability to retain memories across loops by injecting Cesarino's cerebrospinal fluid into the base of her skull.

Cesarino was extremely difficult to kill for a number of reasons. Firstly, any attempt on his life will cause him to loop, giving him what is effectively knowledge of the future at no cost to his health or opportunities to avoid the event; his ability can trigger even while he is unconscious, inebriated or otherwise incapacitated. Secondly, across loops, all events - besides purely stochastic quantum processes - will occur as they did originally, unless Cesarino modifies the situation in some way through his actions. Generally, his ability suppresses the butterfly effect, making each loop roughly consistent with all others. Thirdly, though non-traumatic brain damage is conserved across loops (meaning that age related neurodegeneration and emotional disorders are mostly retained), he cannot die of age. He has theoretically infinite loops for as long as he retains the will to keep going and a desire to fight. After less than six months of fighting with a Retherford who could retain memories across loops; Ryugo and Ryuju Saeki; and Sophia Ashworth, he was familiar enough with his opponents' attacks and decision making processes to render the latter three individuals complete non-factors, and to be conventionally impossible to defeat by Retherford for at least the first 6-7 minutes of their fight due to each of them having memorised the other party's opening moves and every way that the fight could evolve within that period.

This means that there are practically only three effective ways to neutralise Cesarino. The first is to force him to place a save point in a situation which he has no chance of surviving, such as within a room which is rapidly filling with toxic gas and which has no exits. Though he might eventually manage to escape across uncountable loops, it is unlikely that he would be able to do so before age related disease could fully incapacitate him (~150 years). Retherford attempted to do this, but Cesarino was eventually able to escape the lethal environment by teaching himself how to lockpick over the course of 47 years. This method is much easier for metahumans capable of mind control or suggestion. The second method is to remove his will to fight, either through emotional manipulation or otherwise. This was the method that Retherford used to pacify him in the end, leveraging his unconditional love of her (produced by the previous attempt to kill him) to domesticate him. The third method is to restrain Cesarino, give him no way to kill himself, and to detain him until neurodegeneration incapacitates him.

The third method is impractical for several reasons. First of all, Cesarino would have to be restrained for at least 50-60 years and kept alive that entire time, otherwise he could die - whether through suicide or neglect - and return to his last save point, set before he was restrained. This would require full time care by dozens of medical personnel and full-body restraints in addition to preventing anyone from freeing or rescuing him, even accidentally. Another obstacle is the fact that after 60 years, Cesarino would die of natural causes and return to his save point anyway, because his body would have suffered the aging effects that his looping ability typically doesn't carry over between resets (due to the majority of his body not being covered by his cerebrospinal fluid), meaning that if this save point was set before the moment of his restraint, he would have exhaustive forewarning of the impending attempt to capture him.

Some elements of particularly traumatic injuries may be carried over between loops. When Cesarino was locked in his safe room for 47 years and killed repeatedly using vesicant gas, he came to mutate and to gain both superhuman strength and an incredible resistance to chemical weapons. Later, he displayed the ability to consciously mutilate his own body in order to change the structure of his limbs, organs and muscles, granting himself much greater combat potential, superhuman durability potent enough to deflect armour-piercing bullets, and superhuman strength. Also notable was the addition of several new limbs, especially a set of prehensile tongues which he could use to bend steel and crush bone.

## Biography

Cesarino was born on the 15th of January, 1996, to Flavio and Rachel Cesarino. Flavio had the same supernatural abilities as Vergil and used his control over time to relive every month of his life at least once, bringing back information from aborted timelines in order to inform his decisions and so that he could sell said information to international buyers, helping many regimes to rise to prominence or cement their holdings. His effective precognition allowed him to greatly outperform other criminal syndicates in and outside of The United Kingdom, turning The Scourge - a relatively minor subsidiary of a larger organisation - into one of the preeminent criminal enterprises in the European theatre within a few years of Vergil's birth. Due to this particular application of his ability however, Flavio aged slightly more than twice as quickly as a normal person, from the perspective of his peers (although from his perspective, his lifespan was completely normal). At the age of thirty five he passed away of natural causes, leaving his then sixteen year old son to inherit the empire that he had assembled.

Vergil immediately allowed The Scourge to fracture, showing no interest in stepping into his father's shoes and instead leveraging his personal fortune to provide a debauched and hedonistic lifestyle for himself as well as his closest friends. This led to the dissolution of The Scourge's international holdings and several attempted takeovers. Said takeovers met with no success, as Vergil responded to what he considered to be threats to his enjoyment of life, seeing into the future and providing information to Santiago Drake, who would then eliminate the offending party. Through this laisse-faire attitude toward the management of his syndicate, Vergil managed to live in comfort for a number of years, occasionally choosing to relive days or weeks that he considered to be especially pleasurable. By the time that he turned thirty five from his own chronological perspective, only twenty four years had passed for the rest of the world.

Eventually, Vergil began selling information in much the same way that his father had, netting large profits in the process. He did not consider his clients carefully however, and in conducting his business he antagonised various powerful entities who anonymously posted open contracts for his elimination. Unfortunately, due to his ability as well as a relatively poor understanding of what it entailed on the part of his would-be assassins, he was able to overcome every attempt on his life, making examples out of the assassins that he caught. Eventually he was blacklisted by most contract killers as an impossibly hard target, though the bounty continued to swell. On the 13th of April, 2020, Evelyn S. Retherford decided to see if she could kill him, acting out of a sense of boredom as well as knowing that if she did not take on a contract soon, she would not be able to make that month's rent.

Retherford hired Caitlin Wandmarcher, ostensibly an agent of the Albionite government but truthfully a highly independent vigilante with tremendous personal authority within the military, to eliminate Cesarino's most competent security apparatus with the sole exception of Santiago Drake. Wandmarcher did so with great efficiency, causing little damage in the way of manpower but severely reducing the talent at Drake's disposal as the head of Cesarino's security detail. Cesarino did not understand the damage that his organisation had suffered and showed no interest in replacing lost talent, forcing Drake to look for replacements himself. At that point, Retherford offered to work as Cesarino's bodyguard under Drake's command. Recognising her from the Trench-59 and Eidolon-23 incidents, he agreed to hire her.

On the day of Retherford's arrival at Cesarino's compound, a raid team that she had assembled beforehand attacked the compound, consisting of Kelli Ivananko - an element of a Russian PMC - and Ryugo and Ryuju Saeki, private contractors that she had worked with before. Over 87 loops, they repeatedly overwhelmed Cesarino's defences, cornered him in his home and killed him. Retherford and Santiago were instrumental in defending him across each of these loops, although they inevitably failed in each of them. Retherford's performance was especially impressive to Cesarino, as on multiple occasions she leapt in front of Cesarino in order to catch bullets meant for him, and managed to delay or eliminate more of the attacking force than Santiago was able to. This resulted in Cesarino developing a trust in her.

Eventually Cesarino, Retherford and Santiago evacuated the compound on motorcycles - moving quickly enough to avoid being sniped by Wandmarcher on their way out, as had happened during previous loops - and arrived at a warehouse in an unpopulated area of the city where Cesarino was to hide for several hours until reinforcements could arrive. Retherford escorted him into the safe room, locked the door, and instructed him to set a save point. He did so, whereupon she detonated a vesicant-filled canister which she had smuggled into the room right after they had entered. Due to Cesarino's most recent save point being within the safe room, each loop brought him back to the seconds leading up to his death with the door already locked.

For 47 years, Cesarino repeatedly died in his safe room due to the effects of the vesicant gas, while Evelyn kept track of how much time passed using a watch given to her by Santiago. The watch contained Cesarino's CSF, rendering it immune to his power and therefore giving it the ability to tally up how much time had passed from his perspective, rather than that of the rest of the world. He experienced incredible trauma throughout this process, losing all of his memories and developing an obsession with Evelyn, who was the only other person that he saw throughout the entire time that he spent in the room. The vesicant gas disfigured him and his power was unable to fully restore his health each time that he looped, keeping him alive but preserving small changes in his physiology. The gas mutilated him and transformed him into a roughly humanoid monster composed of many iterations of himself fused together.

Cesarino then broke out of his cell, having spent the last five decades testing out methods of escape. His eventual liberation was entirely the product of chance. Retherford threw Santiago, whom she had been speaking to at the time of Cesarino's breakout, into Cesarino, who immediately killed his former head of security. Retherford, still posing as Cesarino's security guard and relying on his newfound unrecognisability, commanded the staff of the safe house to fire upon him. This caused him to loop several hundred times, eventually landing upon a sequence of actions that allowed him to casually butcher the entire garrison without suffering any harm of his own.

From there, Retherford called for the assistance of the Saeki twins, who were able to arrive in short order and restrain Cesarino with a mound of ice. At that point, a woman who introduced herself by the name Sophia Ashworth appeared and expressed dismay at having been too late to interrogate Cesarino for information that he apparently possessed about a number of figures that she'd been pursuing. Cesarino then broke out, severely injured Ryuju Saeki and forced them to evacuate, leaving Ashworth and Retherford behind at the latter's insistence. They fought for a time but Ashworth repeatedly killed Cesarino, causing him to loop and granting him an effective knowledge of the future, causing his combat effectiveness to increase dramatically. He overwhelmed Ashworth and restrained Retherford who, in a last effort to eliminate him, struck him in the spine with an empty syringe; drew out a quantity of cerebrospinal fluid; and injected it into the base of her own skull. This act gave her the ability to retain memories across loops, as Cesarino's fluids were now surrounding her brain.

At that point the Saeki twins returned, acting out of conviction and a desire to 'finish the job'. They, alongside Retherford and Ashworth, killed Cesarino over and over again for a period of seven years which only Retherford and Cesarino were capable of remembering. Retherford spent the first few hundred loops simply killing him but eventually transitioned into causing pain, then using Pavlovian conditioning to control his impulses. Eventually, she was able to leverage the immense sexual satisfaction that he derived from making contact with her in order to make him obedient to her, essentially domesticating him. At that point the threat was neutralised, with Evelyn having aged seven years but the rest of the world having experienced only a few minutes of elapsed time.

Cesarino was subsequently tranquilized and remanded into the custody of Albion Esoteric, whereupon he was reclassified as Sibyl-005. Retherford received anti-aging treatment and deferred payment for Cesarino's elimination to the contractors that she had hired to assist in his elimination. Overall, she made a net profit of 670 USD while her assistants split the value of the 945,000 USD open contract between themselves.

## Trivia

* Cesarino is the second metahuman in the continuity of Twilight of the Gods that Evelyn S. Retherford has dealt with nonlethally, the first being Trench-59.