Giovanni Mantegna

"Can't say what use it's for, but I'm not gonna ask questions."

- Giovanni Mantegna

Giovanni Mantegna-Hunter has appeared in CAHniverse! somehow. Also happens to have the voice of Vin Diesel, yeow.

Appearance
A humanoid mutant lizard that stands roughly six feet, two inches whose scales and hide are a nice dark greyish purple hue. Scale spines also dot around his face, resembling a spiky beard. Giovanni's tail is only about as long as his legs are, if not just a bit longer. Seen as quite skinny, but he does have an nicely athletic build. His eyes are probably the most notable feature considering the black sclera with the vibrant violet hue of his iris around a slitted pupil. As far as attires go, he tends to wear dark hoodies and whatever else he could find that would fit him. Pants usually has a hole cut into them to accommodate his tail and belts used to keep the pants up. Giovanni just dresses as a street punk, and may often be mistaken as part of the locale crooks. The only thing that stands out are his eyes, which pierce through the shadows much like headlights.

Personality
Giovanni is incredibly intelligent and highly adaptable, since he lives and works on the streets as in incredibly skilled individual. He can be very creative in what he does for a living, despite that he's not much of an overly artistic individual. Quite adventurous, but never strays from his home town. Witty quips, observational comments are his usual thing, considering how calm and mellow he tends to appear as. In fact, Giovanni is always pretty placid and this persona usually never changes.

However, he can be obsessive to the point when it comes to taking precautions and when it involves his paranoia. It's very rare for him to trust anyone, given how he lives and does. Often times, he's shown to have a pretty nasty temper whenever someone tries to con him out of a deal or trick him. While he is necessarily cautious, he's outright dangerous when provoked. He had picked up on his adopted father's violent rage and ends up showing his true colors. Gio will go as far as beat someone until they were permanently crippled, and some cases they would be in a pretty devastating coma. To top it off, if it were a gang that pissed him off, he'd display his chosen victim for the gang to see. He makes a pretty clear emphasis in “don't fuck with me” because of what he'll do if that happens.

All in all, he's not a person to mess with and not someone to underestimate. He's also a kleptomaniac, to a small degree, and tends to take things. The fact that he steals was what made him a skilled thief and smuggler to begin with. Only thing he cares about is money, usually, and does what he can to offer his services for it. Sometimes, he might stoop low enough. However, there has been cases that he might work for free, if he sees them as a very good friend and trusts them which is very rare.

Abilities
As far as mutant abilities go, Giovanni's only 'powers' are most of the temperaments of a bearded dragon. Territorial behavior but otherwise docile or mellow, inflating his beard, enhanced senses, etc. Though, being a lizard makes it easier for him to move more quickly and perform otherwise difficult feats. It allows him to effectively parkour and get around very easily.

He has learned street smarts after been working and living off the streets for some time. Giovanni exceptionally skilled as a thief with sleight of hand techniques and charismatic enough to make deals with others. His services range from giving seemingly valuable information to smuggling, sometimes involving assassination if someone "convinces" him enough. Due to living long enough in his life style of choice, he has acquired enough underworld knowledge of usually illegal activities, items, and crime syndicate to be fully aware of what to deal with.

Giovanni is incredibly observant and intelligent for someone who works and lives on the streets. Thanks to being raised by an retired militant named Augustus Hunter, he'd honed on his intelligence to be a little above average and become more aware. He had been closely trained with advanced survival skills and intermediate military training (which includes combat techniques, basic medical proficiency, etc) and is very fluent in Italian, Russian, and Korean.

Story
Originally human, Giovanni has always lived on the streets or on the side of poverty. Parents having named him after a renowned renaissance painter. He grew up in pact groups and learned things on the street as he grew older despite no loss of any parent. It was only when he was about eight did everything all change for him. He used to have a pet lizard that was abandoned by some kid who was no longer interested in it, a bearded dragon no less. One day, he found an old closed off area that had signs stating not to trespass yet looked pretty abandoned. It was on this day he had taken his pet lizard with him as he ignored the signs and managed to get through the fence via opening in one of the areas. Beyond the fence was some kind of factory, which looked like, with faded large letters that only made out to be “TC”. Anything else was too faded to tell. Entering the building, he explored it for anything that might've been worth trading on the street, soon discovering some sort of old lab that had a lot of rather old equipment that was used for something. What, he wasn't sure.

It was when he was fumbling around the equipment and shelves did it happen; heavily bumping into one of the shelves after nearly tripping over an object on the floor, a canister that was on top of it fell right onto Giovanni and spilled a glowing substance right onto him. Covered in this gooy glowy substance, that was when he lost the bearded dragon he had with him during his attempts of scavenging. He had to wipe off the substance and tried looking for his lost bet lizard. The search didn't go for very long, as whatever that goop was started a change in the little boy. It was incredibly painful as his body changed. Bones re-shifting, skin crawling, it was to much to bare. He passed out during the transformation, waking up hours later to find that he's been mutated into a dark skinned bearded lizard! Shocked to this discovery and forgetting about his pet lizard, he stayed in the factory until he got used to his new body. Some digits of his fingers and toes were lost, but he had a tail and shredded up clothes to go with it. There was hardly any human features in him other than a humanoid shape and being bipedal. Hair was gone, nothing but scales and hide.

Unsure what else to do, he gathered some of the things he collected and returned to the city where he worked on getting himself new clothes and keeping his appearance hidden from others. He was different now, and is sure that he wouldn't get any good response if anyone saw him like this. Giovanni became more of a loner because of this, distancing from others while continuing his life on the street. He completely separated from his family, letting them assume the worst that happened. Only focusing on surviving and honing his new-found lizardhood, it was different from here on out. He soon encountered another mutant that was far older than he, one named Augustus Hunter, and the mutant decided to adopt him as one of his own and began teaching him how to be a survivalist hunter. Giovanni's life was pretty great, though he still spent quite some time on the surface as he wanted to make a living as a street punk by selling junk and smuggling illegals that most others aren't able to get so easily.

Eventually joins the Purple Dragons after impressing the leader with a couple jobs. Though he never makes it obvious and continues as a freelance master thief and smuggler.