He is usually physically close to Eakran, and when he isn’t, it’s because he knows there are others that he trusts to keep Eakran safe. Since he first arrived at Eakran’s laboratory, Giovanni has been a loyal friend unlike any Eakran had known. Giovanni considered Eakran to be his best friend and also his mentor, a man that he wanted to become; smart and oozing confidence, attractive and very self assured. Eakran was incapable of making a mistake because everything he did, needed to be done, no matter if someone was hurt as a result. He had witnessed cruelty in Eakran’s laboratory basement, but the two would have lunch together when Eakran was in the lab and Giovanni would listen to him talk through his reasons for doing the work that could make a man wail with agony like a child for hours.
“Knowing is worth whatever agony,” Eakran said once as they ate, and Giovanni often recalled that particular lunch.
“Think about the age of the human race,” Eakran continued, “how long humanity has existed without a real understanding of itself. This is the reason Earth is so…” he struggled for a word, then seemed to find one and decide against saying it. “The point is, you must dig for answers that will produce a greater good for all of mankind.”
Giovanni knew that he wasn’t trying to justify his actions, he was simply talking Giovanni through it as he saw it and that felt like an honor to him.
Eakran had literally made the man that Giovanni is today. His tampering with Giovanni’s DNA that turned him into a veritable Earthling-Druont hybrid, made Giovanni lethal, the perfect security guard with cat-like reflexes and a sixth sense; an intense intuition that made him difficult to best in hand to hand combat. He wasn’t able to read the minds of others, but in a physical confrontation when emotions were high, he could almost feel his opponent and the anger that moved their body. Eakran’s tampering also gave Giovanni perfect recall memory and he could parrot long passages from books that Eakran read to him, no matter his familiarity with the subject. And these skills helped him to acquire the job at the CIA, the organization that he technically worked for, though all of his alliances were to Eakran. The CIA had meant to assign a security guard to Eakran’s laboratory as a means to spy on him, but Eakran was not easily manipulated.
Giovanni was anxious about the trip to space, and now, as he sits on a spaceship populated with alien creatures with huge heads and eyes, and one who is like a bird woman, Giovanni is pensive. Eakran, Maria, and Darker are on the ship as well, but Alia had left a while ago now, soon after they survived the attack on Eakran’s ship. Before she left, she said things to him that made him think. She was helping him to relax when they arrived at the IP headquarters after the attack, and she told him that he would survive whatever experience they would have in space so far away from Earth, and that he had something to do. She seemed to suggest that he was meant to protect Eakran, but Giovanni looks at him now, speaking with the bird woman and Maria, and he realizes that his respect and administration for Eakran, and the man’s mentorship, had led him to this moment and that it was just the beginning of his story. He can feel it, though he can’t put it into words if you ask him to.
Someone meant to assassinate Eakran when they attacked his ship, and since that time, at least three different groups of beings have become involved. This is an interstellar incident and he has a front row seat. He plans to do more than spectate, though. Everyone on the ship, the majority of which are the aliens with the large heads and eyes, is wearing premium issue IP combat suits that can resist low to mid-powered photon or proton blasts, as well as lasers and bullets. It can sustain the wearer in the void of space for up to three weeks RET. It is all so exciting to Giovanni and there are plans being made for retreat to a place called the Banned Regions. It’s scary, but very exciting and he is eager to be in it.
Giovanni would have taken a bullet for Eakran on Earth, without hesitation. But Alia had freed him of worry for Eakran, and he wanted to have his own adventure like Alia with the large rat people, Maria with the bird woman, who was the most beautiful woman that he had laid eyes on and he was flustered every time she spoke to him; the hard robotic voice of the universal translator only made her more intimidating. And even though Darker had been eerily quiet since they all reunited, Giovanni envied his experience on the underwater world.
Giovanni smiles and he wonders about Alia and her adventures with the rat people.
PRL Serials 