Maristella Fausti

Sergio Fausti is one of the capos of The Grandlake Mob, an outfit with -unlike, say, those dumb neophytes in Team Rocket- no formal name, and instead about a dozen vague titles. This is because the Mob is one of the oldest crime organizations in the city - even if it's blown out of the water by crime outfits older regions, the East Side Mafia has a hell of a legacy in Grandlake. Unfortunately, all but the most deluded in the Azelf Town Outfit know full well that it has seen significantly better days, with periods of stricter law enforcement and better resources ensuring that the stranglehold they once had isn't so mighty. Still, The Organization is still up to some of its business, and has adopted a different outlook - calmer, steadier, quiet enough to not rock the boat enough to get major resources sent at taking them down, but consistent enough to slow the decline. Sergio is an ideal figure for this new era of the Lakeside Gang - soft-spoken but firm, Sergio avoids the hotblooded and often tyrannical whims of other capos of the Mob, being understanding without being enough of a pushover to get unseated. He may not be the type to resort to murder or torture... but sometimes there are just other ways of ruining a man utterly.

Maristella Fausti, raised in this context by Sergio and by her mother Lucrezia Fausti, a rather un-moblike accountant for the mob, is a very interesting figure. Doted on by her mother and given careful guidance but never too strictly punished by her father, Maristella ended up practically the definition of spoiled sweet, being a cheerful and kind little girl who turned into a cheerful and kind teenage girl and then a cheerful and kind young adult. In a sense, she became a sort of a mascot to the mob - though she's not the don's daughter or anything, a good portion of its members recognize her at least in passing, and the other leadership of the mob tends to view her more or less like a favored niece, something helped by her demeanor - sweet, cheerful, and calm at all times, acting as a gentle supporting figure.

Maristella has always been very eager to actually pursue a totally different line of life than her family - being a bright girl raised by bright parents with a *lot* of resources, Maristella has often excelled academically, graduating with honors from a cushy high school to make her way easily into Grandlake U. As a result, there's been a sort of understanding about how she operates - she doesn't get told what to do, and she can oft benefit from those connections, but she's expected to not give anything away. She's developed a very particular style of doing this, becoming a master of lie by omission, which is where one of her less savory character traits comes in - it is very rare that Maristella will tell anyone everything about anything. It would not be true to say that her cheerful, supportive demeanor is a facade, because it is a very real core of who she is - but she's a more calculating individual than she seems, and there's an entire world within her head which others don't get to see, just the same kind smile that never seems to falter.

Because of her singleminded devotion to dodging the physical world of crime in favor of peaceful academics, she is woefully underprepared for... actually many kinds of physical activity that simply may come up in life, and she's never actually even handled a Pokemon! It was in her first year of college that Maristella had her eyes opened to some of the ways in which she was out of touch, and her attendance with Mr. Grabaur is an admission that, yes, she does have to actually participate in the world in more than just the easy way she intended. Mr. Grabaur, though not mob and not even mob-affiliated, is a known old hand who still isn't hostile, and Sergio and the other mob leadership trust him to take good care of her - so this seemed like a good opportunity to get involved with the Pokemon part of the Pokemon World!