NAME
Giacinto Luna
ALIAS
Moonlander
L'Occhio Lunare
COLOR
Forest Green
ALIGNMENT
Hero
IDENTITY
Secret
PERSONALITY
Beneath his many undiagnosed neuroses, born from a lifetime under the influence of a capricious celestial entity, Giacinto is a soft, gentle soul driven by a mixture of compassion and curiosity. Despite his skittish, reclusive demeanour and whimsical habits, he carries within a lot of well-intentioned playfulness and enthusiasm. He loves helping people even if he sometimes suffers the burden of being Moonlander.
As Moonlander, he lacks the gritty cynicism of many other private detectives, but nevertheless takes his work seriously. That said, though he does not have a specific, reasoned moral code that he abides by, there is nothing Machiavellian or coldhearted about his methods. There are lines he has not and will not cross, even to save himself.
Although he is a very solitary, socially awkward creature, seldom leaving his warm, comfy sanctuary in the countryside for anything other than a new mystery, he does find his own peculiar ways to bond with others. Even if he does not socialize much, he makes up for it with kind gestures from a distance. And while he is not the sort of person who tells jokes on purpose, his placid amenity constantly leads to him becoming part of a joke by accident.
In short, he is a bit of a smol bean.
COSTUME
Moonlander has no costume yet. Most of his cases have allowed him to have minimal contact with regular people, giving him little reason to disguise himself. And since he rarely gets in physical confrontations, he has no need for armour. Most of the time, he wears his regular clothes, a combination of old dark trousers and even older light-coloured sweaters. If necessary, he covers his face with some improvised mask. Even his neighbours are not entirely sure what his face looks like anyway. The only consensus among them is that he has long dark hair and brown eyes. This may change in the future, however, now that his attention is being drawn to Lost Haven.
ORIGIN
Many strange, fantastical things have long been said to occur under the influence of the night sky, be they full moons, meteor showers or lunar eclipses. In a world were the absurd and the surreal often seem to reign supreme, the Moon has often been blamed for much of it, whether it is birthing werewolves and other such horrors or giving witches and Satanists the dark energies needed to perform their terrible rituals. Even the least supernaturally minded amongst flat-earthers have their own grievances with the pale celestial object, accusing it of being a deceitful projection of the New World Order which exists solely to conceal its inexistence and that of the curvature of the Earth.
Most such accusations made against the Moon are, in fact, true. Where the Sun is a warm, nurturing force of Nature, one which directs the orderly ebb and flow of normal life on Earth, the Moon is a mischievous entity, an obstinate disorganizer of life. It is very much the celestial mother of all things unexplainable. Every illogical mystery, every bizarre phenomenon that seems to appear ex nihilo, can often be traced back to her influence. This is specially true in the dark-sky regions of the world, those where her cool, playful light is unimpeded by the overwhelming artificial lights of modernity.
The scholars and mystics who deal in such matters have long debated as to the nature of moonlight's power. Is it the manifestation of a personal divinity or an impersonal magical phenomenon? Is it supernatural at all, or perhaps merely an issue of astrophysics waiting to be scientifically explained? Some have even dared to suggest that it may all be entirely psychosocial, a collective imposition of meaning onto an inanimate object.
This is all, of course, self-indulgent philosophical filler. The Moon just is, and even the use of the verb 'is' is a bit pretentious for her tastes. Anybody who tries to explain her essence, if she has any, is not even barking at the wrong tree, because the tree probably does not even exist.
What is irrefutably true and real is that Giacinto Luna was born bathed in moonlight, at least figuratively speaking. There was a full moon shining from above during the fateful night of his birth, and his parents lived in a villa in rural Italy, in what would years later be officially recognized as a dark-sky community. And there might have been a moon-related pagan ritual involved in the delivery.
Though there was nothing necessarily supernatural to the whole affair, most mystics would have agreed that the newborn was asking for it. And his coincidentally fitting surname was the cherry on top.
As a child, Giacinto was a sweet but anxious little thing, prone to speaking of odd, incomprehensible things with a lovable lisp. A compulsive daydreamer and a prodigy in equal parts, he developed a precocious interest in metaphysics, astronomy and psychoanalysis as he struggled with hallucinations and night terrors. His parents, both of them art historians, nurtured his growing list of unconventional habits and obsessions, and even included him in some of their own. He learned how to read from books about space travel and Renaissance sculpture, and bewildered the other children with his pointed questions about life, the Universe and everything. He even made some good friends out of those who were morbidly curious about him by teaching them about Buddhist philosophy.
Giacinto's life was not truly normal as he neared adolescence, but it was still mostly tethered to reality. The world outside of his dreams made sense, it had a logic to it. And when he felt like letting go, he would spend his late nights bathing in the moonlight in his parents' garden, unknowingly absorbing the gift of the Moon.
Then came adolescence, and with it came a wave of tumultuous change. The Moon had come to fulfill her end of the bargain he had unwittingly made the day of his birth. For what humans referred to as the dark-sky places of the world were, in fact, part of an vast, long-forgotten nocturnal nation: the Moonlands. And Giacinto, with his family name and the circumstances of his birth, was now one of its citizens.
There were no peer-reviewed papers or books to explain this, nor were there any manuals to help him figure out why his daydreams had become more vivid and specific. No psychotherapist could explain why he felt like he had an unnaturally strong grasp of the meaning and function of all his dreams and nightmares. And despite their best efforts, which included a lot of road trips to Roman ruins and obscure museums, his parents could not comprehend why he spoke of nonsensical events and people they had never heard of.
What no regular book could tell, and what Giacinto was forced to discover all on his own, was that he was not just a child of the Moonlands, but that he had been given a very specific purpose in the chaotic system of life in the surreal world. He was a lunar paradox, someone so innately attuned to the nocturnal and the surreal, by virtue of his bond to the Moon, that his individual identity was but a fragment of a larger, disjointed totality. A totality that included the identities of other Moonlanders in other places and times, and which allowed him to know and to comprehend the secret kaleidoscopic irrationality of the world that most humans could not even perceive.
In other words, Giacinto Luna had been given the weirdest superpower he had ever heard of: the power of knowing the stuff that was, by definition, unknowable.
After enduring a months-long existential crisis and even dabbling in comic books to give this new dimension of his life some meaning, Giacinto eventually returned to a semi-regular existence as a gentle, sensitive but chronically anxious and eccentric loner. He kept a precious few friends, most of them stoners, got his heart broken twice before he even knew he was in love, and graduated with honors. Then his early adulthood as a college student began.
Unbeknownst to his loved ones, however, the young Moonlander was beginning to experiment. His curiosity and kind heart led to him testing out his lunar awareness by anonymously helping people affected by surreal phenomena and, occasionaly, totally regular nocturnal crimes. In doing so, he quickly made a name for himself as Moonlander, a secretive private detective who specialized in the absurd. All the while, he acquainted himself with the other fragments of his identity. That was how he came to form a close personal bond with Tian Yazhu, Nicholas La Follette and Yuzuru Murakami, Moonlanders from different times and places who, by coincidence or design, had formed part of Giacinto's orbit. Through their friendship, he learned how to work beyond the confines of his little corner of the real world, and how to control the worst of his awareness, lest it drove him genuinely mad.
Excited by his findings and heartened by the good he was doing as Moonlander, Giacinto finished his formal studies in almost record time, leaving behind a trail of exhausted study partners and an obscene amount of student debt. As much as he had enjoyed the university life, the lion's share of his enthusiasm belonged to his far less traditional vocation. With the money he made as Moonlander, he bought himself a small, cozy home in the countryside and a used van to take him on his adventures.
So far, Giacinto has had very little interest in working beyond the confines of Europe. Even though he has come to terms with having a superpower of sorts, he is not yet willing to acknowledge himself as a superhero or anything of the sort. He feels no kinship with the masked vigilantes from across the Atlantic and does not involve himself in the constant superhuman troubles that affect American cities like Lost Haven. But with the recent arrival of a series of anonymous letters to his doorstep, that may be about to change...
HERO TYPE
Other
According to Giacinto's home-made glossary of the surreal world, a lunar paradox is an object or being that, because of the Moon's influence, does not experience its own existence as a singular individual, but rather as the center of a larger totality, comprised of multiple juxtaposed beings, objects and even forces, often from multiple times and spaces. For a sapient being, being a lunar paradox is like living in a dream that is somehow both an incoherent mess of fragmented realities and a meaningful all-encompassing dream. In other words, Moonlander is not just Giacinto, but rather an amalgamation of multiple perspectives that contains Giacinto's own identity at its core.
POWER LEVEL
Street Level (Actual)
World Level (Potential)
POWERS
LUNAR AWARENESS
If the real world is like human consciousness, then the surreal world is like the human unconscious. It is a structure, a language, a cluster of repressed aspects of the real, which exists mostly hidden from our perception. Its occasional material manifestations are unintelligible to most, but not to the Moonlander. He is aware of the surreal, attuned to its secret functions like no other human is. He can push past the veil that separates it from the real and find meaning in its dreamlike juxtapositions and non sequiturs. Though he has not yet learned to manipulate the power of the Moon, his innate bond with it allows him to interpret this other world's movements, interact with it and even traverse it. He is all but immune to illusions and hypnosis, and can trace most unconscious phenomena to their physical source.
LUNAR CONJURATION
Giacinto is not a mage, a wizard, a warlock, a sorcerer nor an enchanter. He was not born with a natural gift for casting spells ex nihilo, nor did he train under a wise old master who cultivated in him a talent for magic. However, years of experimentation with the strange world of lunar absurdities has taught him how to perform a variety of complicated little rituals, rituals which allow him to manipulate some nocturnal forces in a small way. Lunar conjuration is, like the Moon herself, a very capricious art. Its fundamentals are opaque, its methods seem arbitrary at best and its results tend to be very delicate, ethereal and borderline useless. The rituals Giacinto has been able to reproduce so far are very time-consuming and precarious, very easy to mess up even during the most auspicious phases of the Moon. Generally, he only uses lunar conjuration as a way to enhance his senses, reveal the hidden properties of evidence he finds in his cases, or summon the help of a fragment of his lunar paradox.
ATTRIBUTES
HEIGHT 1,72 m
WEIGHT 58 kg
STRENGTH Normal Human
SPEED Normal Human
ENDURANCE Normal Human
AGILITY Normal Human
INTELLIGENCE Genius
FIGHTING SKILL Untrained
RESOURCES Average
WEAKNESSES
A Moonlander is still human and mortal. Giacinto can die just as easily as any regular person.
Also, although he is immune to illusions and hypnosis, he is vulnerable to his own lunar awareness. If he ever slipped too far into the irrational juxtapositions that comprise that secret world, he could well lose his sanity.
He also suffers from a growing addiction to magic mushrooms and blueberry shortcake laced with LSD, both of which he first tried back in college.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
TIAN YAZHU, a core fragment of his paradox. A warrior, scholar and mystic from the dying days of the Han dynasty.
NICHOLAS LA FOLLETTE, a core fragment of his paradox. A carpenter and werewolf from mid-19th century Appalachia, turned by a Confederate werewolf during the Civil War.
YUZURU MURAKAMI, a core fragment of his paradox. An astronomy prodigy from the not so distant future.
HUA ZHEN, also known as Moonbreaker. A scholar and mystic from the dying days of the Han dynasty and rival to Tian Yazhu, who famously sought to tear the Moon down from its heavenly abode.
