The Lovelace family (ラブレス家 Raburesu-ka) are one of the thirteen noble families of South America. They are the least wealthy of the prominent families, and are based in Venezuela. Garcia Lovelace is the twelfth and current head of the Lovelace clan, succeeding his father Diego Lovelace, the eleventh Lovelace patriarch.
History[]
The first ancestor of the Lovelace family arrived to the Americas from Spain as a settler on a boat for one of Francisco Pizarro's expeditions to the New World.[2] In the first several generations, the family gained great wealth through its plantations and emerald mining, then attaining its status as a "noble family." However, the family had come under hard times in the 20th century, especially due to flooding of the tobacco farm, but still survived with the meager income from the plantations.[3] The Lovelace manor is located in Canaima, Venezuela.[4] With the formation of the family, throughout the centuries there has been a "head" of the family, having twelve heads as of the late 20th century. The family has a Spanish-language Christian creed that they follow, which goes:
Una bendición por los vivos (A blessing for the living). Un ramo de flor por los muertos (A bouquet of flowers for the dead). Con una espada por la justicia, un castigo de muerte para los malvados (With a sword for justice and a punishment of death for the wicked). Así llegamos en al altar de los santos (Thus we arrive at the altar of the saints).[5]
It is not known when Diego became the family's eleventh head, but it is known that he dealt with the family's decline upon succession and had one child (Garcia) during his reign. In 1989, the family got a Volpino Italiano canine with white fur for a pet and named him Lazarus. Additionally, Diego's wife died in 1990-1991,[6] and in approximately the same year Rosarita Cisneros, who was the daughter of a close friend of Diego's, agreed to take shelter under the latter's care since he felt that he owed a favor to her late father.[7] Rosarita herself was a FARC guerrilla who deserted from FARC due to her disillusionment from the group, becoming wanted by both FARC and the Colombian Cartel as well as Interpol for her terrorist acts, including her role in the U.S. Embassy bombing in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.[8] Helping Diego maintain his mansion as a maid and keeping Garcia company, Rosarita used the alias Roberta and donned a maid uniform. Sometime after her first return to Venezuela from Roanapur, Roberta became the head maid because the Lovelace family hired four other maids besides herself, including Fabiola, Tavica, Masica and Carina.[9]
Rasta Blasta[]
More recently, the Lovelace family discovered a rare earth metal, lutetium, on their plantation in a geological survey. Due to the expensive element, the Lovelaces had potential to make some money and immediately gained the ire and harassment of a Venezuelan crime syndicate, the Manisarera Cartel. Despite the harassment and threats, Diego refused to sell his land to the mafia, and Roberta provided additional backup to Diego. In early 1995, because Diego angered the mafia with his adamant refusal to sell, the Manisarera Cartel abducted his only child Garcia Lovelace in an attempt to get revenge on him. Trafficking the boy far from his home, the cartel's branch leader in Roanapur commissioned the Lagoon Company to ship the boy to Hat Yai, Thailand, most likely so that the Manisarera Cartel could engage in ransom.[3]
Garcia was then held on the Black Lagoon, with Lagoon Company soon discovering from Rock's conversation with the young boy that the cartel omitted various details about the child. Elsewhere in Venezuela, Diego was hesitant to send Roberta to track down Garcia, but Roberta left on her own decision, first interrogating and killing a cartel member to find out where Garcia was shipped to, leaving Venezuela to Roanapur upon gathering the information.[6] Eventually, Roberta used her extraordinary combat skills to successfully find Garcia at the Yellow Flag and got into a shootout with the Manisarera Cartel members, which led into a car chase with the Lagoon Company. As Roberta dueled with Revy, Balalaika and her Vysotniki intervened to put a stop to the fighting. Balalaika then told Roberta to return to Venezuela with Garcia since Hotel Moscow had destroyed the cartel's base in Venezuela. After admitting to Garcia that she was an ex-FARC fighter and having a fistfight with Revy, Roberta brought the unharmed Garcia back to Diego, promising the young boy that she would not murder anyone again.[8]
El Baile de la muerte / Roberta's Blood Trail[]
At some point after Garcia's safe return, a young girl from Caracas's barrios, Fabiola Iglesias, became a maid to the Lovelace family using her connection to a distant relative who was a farmhand on the Lovelace plantation.[10] Additionally, the Lovelace family hired three other maids, Tavia, Masica and Carina, to help out the head maid Roberta,[9] and Mr. Hidalgo took over management of the mineral mine.[1] Meanwhile, Diego began to express his support for the Venezuelan political party MVR, a party popular with the country's lower classes. Diego was a friend with one of the party's representatives and even met the leader. It was suspected that he allied with the booming party so that he could acquire military protection for Roberta.[11]
In 1996 when Diego went to the party's inauguration rally, Roberta accompanied him as extra security. Before he went on stage, she reminded him that he still needed to buy a present for Garcia's upcoming birthday, and she decided to wait in the car.[2] Minutes later, a controlled explosion under the stage killed the leader as well as Diego, but the Lovelace head was an unintended death. The group responsible, Grey Fox, only wanted to kill the leaders as part of the U.S. National Security Agency's Plan 117. Heartbroken by Diego's murder and empathizing with Garcia's grief at his father's funeral, Roberta decided that she would track down the killers herself knowing that the right-wing militia members who were arrested for the bombing could not have been the true culprits.[7]
Sometime after Diego's murder and Garcia's succession as the Lovelace clan's twelfth head, members of Venezuela's military sympathetic with the MVR visited the Lovelace estate to provide Garcia and Roberta with the intelligence that they gathered on the perpetrators, learning that three men of U.S. nationality and a former Venezuelan military intelligence official, Marcos José Lucientes, were photographed together six months before the bombing. The airborne troops also told Garcia and Roberta that Lucientes met the men at the same time that he resigned from his government job, adding that Lucientes and his six conspirators were in charge of the rally's security on the day of the bombing.[1]
Subsequently, Roberta left the Lovelace estate without informing Garcia of her leave and tracked down the conspirators using the sole photograph. She first tracked down, tortured, and killed Lucientes in Calabozo, Venezuela, then going to Caracas to capture, torture and kill U.S. Army Colonel Simon Dickens, burning down an abandoned hotel in Caracas to discard of his body.[12] With their information, she learned about Grey Fox and their next special operations mission in Southeast Asia, getting a plane ticket from Venezuela to Thailand via Miami and then buying a bus ticket from Bangkok to Roanapur and beginning her international travel. Finding out about Roberta's leave and knowing about her vengeful desire, Garcia planned to find her and bring her back to Venezuela, so the Lovelace maids had Fabiola Iglesias accompany Garcia as he traveled to Roanapur.[7] Soon thereafter, the CIA learned of the NSA's political interference from a statement made by a person directly connected to the Lovelace family.[13]
Upon arriving in Roanapur, Roberta demanded that Bao guide her to stores in town that would help her start a war. She hid from everyone in the city by hiring Richie Leroy to give her shelter.[14] At first, Kowalski of Hotel Moscow spotted Fabiola at Sankan Palace Hotel and mistook her for Roberta, spreading word of the maid's presence.[15] With Roberta and Fabiola's presence in the city, the various crime syndicates were on edge as they heard these rumors about sights of a woman in a maid dress. At a Council meeting, the Colombian Cartel in particular explained that Roberta took refuge on the Lovelace's land but they could never make a move since the Venezuelan government kept an eye on the place. Nonetheless, Abrego decided that the Colombians could finally pursue her once more upon confirming her presence in Roanapur from Mister Chang's testimony.[13] To secure the Colombian Cartel's relations with FARC, Abrego allowed FARC fighters travel to Roanapur to aid the cartel in killing Roberta.[16]
At the same time, Garcia and Fabiola hired Rock (who was accompanied by Benny and Revy) to ask people around town who interacted with Roberta, initially to no avail. Eventually, they were able to talk with Bao, Praiyachat and Tou Chi, learning that Roberta bought various supplies and weapons to wage war on the Grey Fox soldiers.[14] As Fabiola led Garcia into Roanapur with further protection from Revy, Shenhua, Lotton and Sawyer, Garcia came across the adrenaline-high Roberta in a building after she had bested the FARC brigade. Seeing her beat Alberto Camarasa to death, he fainted from shock and almost got killed until the U.S. troops saved him from being shot by the hallucinating maid.[17] In an alleyway, Garcia sat down after the ordeal and was terrified. He recognized Shane Caxton as the same man from the photograph that the military officers showed him, realizing that they were responsible for killing his father Diego. Grabbing a nearby handgun on the ground, Garcia thought about killing Caxton but was stopped by the U.S. soldiers, and their tense situation was further interrupted by Roberta attempting to attack Caxton, but she was pushed back by the Vysotniki.[18]
Likewise, the Vysotniki shot Revy and Shenhua to prevent them from killing the U.S. troops to rescue Garcia. Infuriated, Revy complained that she could not paid without rescuing Garcia, though Fabiola assured her that the Lovelace family would still pay her and Shenhua's group since they technically fulfilled their mission to find Roberta. Accordingly, she agreed to wire the money to them later.[19] While Roberta traveled to the Golden Triangle to confront the U.S. troops, Garcia told Fabiola that he wanted to save Roberta from her dance of death, and Fabiola responded that she would follow him to the end.[20]
Boarding the Black Lagoon up the Mekong River into the Golden Triangle, Garcia and Fabiola accompanied the U.S. soldiers in the jungle at night, soon being confronted by Roberta, who killed several of Grey Fox's men until Garcia convinced her to meet him in the open. Using Rock's plan to fire a fake bullet at Shane Caxton, Garcia assured Roberta that she was not hallucinating, asking her to have faith that his bullet would not harm her or Caxton. Kissing the confused maid, the boy managed to snap her out of her desire for murderous vengeance, and she commended him for emotionally maturing and sticking to his morals. At the riverbank, as the young Lovelace head and Roberta returned to the PT boat, Fabiola chastised Rock and shot him with a fake bullet for exploiting Garcia in his scheme. Once Roberta returned to Venezuela, she and Garcia met the family of Hironobu Satou at the Lovelace estate to make amends for her murder of Hironobu.[4]
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Chapter 49: El Baile de la muerte Part 6
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Chapter 44: El Baile de la muerte Part 1
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Episode 08: Rasta Blasta
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Episode 29: Codename Paradise, Status MIA
- ↑ Chapter 03: Rasta Blasta Part 2
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 02: Rasta Blasta Part 1
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Episode 25: Collateral Massacre
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Episode 10: The Unstoppable Chambermaid
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Chapter 48: El Baile de la muerte Part 5
- ↑ Chapter 52: El Baile de la muerte Part 9
- ↑ Chapter 47: El Baile de la muerte Part 4
- ↑ Chapter 50: El Baile de la muerte Part 7
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Chapter 53: El Baile de la muerte Part 10
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Episode 26: An Office Man's Tactics
- ↑ Chapter 45: El Baile de la muerte Part 2
- ↑ Chapter 57: El Baile de la muerte Part 14
- ↑ Episode 27: Angels in the Crosshairs
- ↑ Episode 28: Oversaturation Kill Box
- ↑ Chapter 68: El Baile de la muerte Part 25
- ↑ Chapter 71: El Baile de la muerte Part 28