Dr. Mostro

**Dr. Giacomo Mostro** is a mad scientist of the old school. He is also a Shadow Centurion, a member of the Shadow Federation at the time when it existed, and lately an abomination against all laws of God and man. But all of that is less important. All that truly matters to him is the science, and the science he works in is insane.

Perhaps he was a normal man once, long ago, as normal as one born to be a villain can be. There are some who say that he was a regular (if slightly sinister and obsessive) doctor somewhere in Tuscany, a fairly able one by local standards, and this went to his head; when his wife died despite all of his efforts, his mind could not accept this outcome, and so he dedicated the rest of his life to turning back the tide. Others, however, state that this story is romantic nonsense, and that even as a boy young Mostro experimented on frogs, killing them and then bringing them back to life until he had an army, a morbid fascination ruling his existance from then and to this day. Whatever the beginning might have been, it still led to the same end result. By the late 1820s Dr. Mostro was already known and feared.

A striking and persistent feature of this Shadow Centurion has been his utter lack of either selfishness or malice. He cared not at all for profit except inasfar as it let him continue his great work, and he has proven adept to doing it on the cheap when needed, or else with the patronage of any number of less zealous and obsessed individuals that nonetheless had a very obvious stake in his success. Likewise, he appears physically incapable of bearing grudges. It could be said that he is incapable of discrimination; in the sense that neither religion nor nationality nor individuality could really matter much for one who regards all humans as overly tall and upright guiinea pigs. Those who have hated and hurt him the most have often been caught off guard when offered help by this kindly doctor, though of course the nature of that help has often been idiosyncratic to his one and only interest; conversely, allies have been... not so much betrayed, as carelessly and casually turned into shambling monsters, or cut up for parts without warning or sense (outside of the context of his research, of course).

One might expect this kind of behaviour to disadvantage him; and indeed, Mostro has made many enemies and often had to run or hide, the fact that he was capable of doing so an evidence of either a very strong self-preservation instinct or a remarkably inspired sort of madness. And yet, he had survived, and prospered. It helped, of course, that he was a genius. He hit upon the basic process quite early in life, learning to use electricity channeled in a particular way to revive, after a fashion, and control. It did not satisfy him, as it was at best halfway towards his ultimate goal of complete and perfect revival, that according to him was meant to leave one more alive than before. But for the moment, it worked, and for a long time he believed that the ideal path was to continue perfecting this technique until quantity could turn into quality. And in the meantime, small armies of increasingly sophisticated electrified corpses shambled all over Europe, kidnapping fresh victims and protecting their master. Among others, Armando Estebán Corroto and Herschel Babbage had tried to stop him, as had Manfred von Richthofen and his team and of course Teodoro Galba, but to no avail; at most they could get him to relocate, but before long he would continue his work, with time even obtaining a cult following and apprentices (though many of those soon joined the specimens or ran off, unable to withstand the doctor's brilliance or its side-effects; one of the few true survivors was an Englishman with the idiosyncratic name of George George, though it did not appear to do his health many favours either).

In the early 20th century, Mostro's determination - and attention - began to wander. Despite his own best efforts to improve his mind, he began to fear on some level that he might not be on the right track after all, that his incremental upgrades to the process would not bear fruit before his death or maybe ever. His insanity also deepened, exacebrated with age, and manifesting in increasing incoherence and whimsy. This crisis was happily resolved by two things: first, while harvesting fresh specimens from a small epidemic in Japan, he met the perfect apprentice, a polite and helpful young boy named Shiro, who both grasped the true greatness of the doctor's work and proved able of keeping him on track for more than five minutes at a time, skillfully organising his work for him. Second, he secured a new patron: Masque, who added him to the Shadow Federation to help plot righteous vengeance against those protecting the mighty of the world, not that Mostro was paying much attention to that part. But he now had some of his best facilities in twenty years, resources, protection - and all the corpses he could want for several months. And yet there was something more important still. Masque wished for Mostro's help to find a way to conquer death, but he had found a different approach, based on the alchemy of Ancient Aran. Initially miffed, Mostro soon came around; the alchemy appeared to offer a way out of his dead end, and if combined with his existing techniques... And with plenty of, ah, subjects to work on...

But this scientific idyll could not last, of course. The Centurions arrived and did what Centurions do; and before they could quite finish, Masque did what Masque did too, interrupting Mostro's work, shouting, demanding to know where one of his guinea pigs had ran off to, and worst of all, refusing to drink Mostro's latest attempt at his new, modern, scientific elixir of life formula, much more reliable than the products of both Masque's scheming and interrogations and Madam Czarna's superstitious hocus-pocus. The boy he fixed up just a little earlier had refused it too, and yet he had such a good feeling about this one... So Mostro unleashed his whole stock of undead creations and downed the elixir. Masque blew him into pieces with a bomb and ran away. And a couple of hours later, Mostro was feeling fit as a fiddle, as he and the quietly shocked Shiro escaped the war-torn Citadel, picking up another strange refugee along the way. An untampered-with Ancient Aranian would, Mostro decided in a lucid millisecond, be useful both for comparative purposes and as a source of information.

Since then, even though most believed he died, others saw cause for doubt in the appearance of undead creatures, first in Britain, then in Belgium... The beginning of the Great War distracted everyone from this, and yet it also let Dr. Mostro thrive like never before, as he scavenged straight from the battlefields and added those who interfered to the lot. On the Western Front, he did encounter some resistance - and some peculiar competition for the dying. The latter soon brought him into contact with the new player on the European arena: none other than he, Schwarzmeer! While the precise nature of their collaboration remains unclear, it seems to have inspired Mostro to relocate to the newly-opened Italian front, where the carelessness and incompetence of commanders on both sides created an ideal environment for his newest experiments. Despite being briefly chased off by Fernando in 1915, Mostro returned to the Eastern Alps by 1917, but by then his partnership with Schwarzmeer had gone south. So he took advantage of Fernando's pursuit of him to use it as a distraction allowing him to escape an (arguably) even more dangerous hunter: Schwarzmeer's enforcer, Maius. He then got on a giant undead bird and flew away to Switzerland with his helpers.

It must be noted that while Mostro alone in the Shadow Federation appears to have achieved their original goal of immortality, it is a rather peculiar sort of it, one that has left him in a monstrous, amorphous body. It may have had some untoward effects upon his mind as well, though frankly it is difficult to tell. If so it might also explain his increased reliance on Shiro and the Son of Oromassi.