𝑫'𝑬𝒏𝒇𝒆𝒓

Name: D’Enfer Cortex (née Granata)

Pronunciation: Don-Fair

Other names: She is commonly referred to as “Mrs Cortex” or “Miss Granata”, or “Agent Granata/Cortex”. Infuriatingly, she is dubbed “bandicoot”, “animal” and “marsupial”. Besides that, D’Enfer is (very rarely) called various petnames by Neo (“dear”, “sweetness”, “darling”, etc.) and her especial yet bizarre pet name of “melonball”.

Titles: “Miss”, “Mrs”, “Ms.” and “Madam” (Tropy tends to dub her this when he's annoyed with her). As she is officially a special operative, “Agent” is also appropriate.

Appearance: Very tall, standing at 6’2” (6’5” with her horns) and is heads above almost everyone else. Voluptuous with a slender, hourglass figure, narrow waist and broad hips. Long luxurious black curls that fall to the waist, turquoise eyes which are heavy lidded and seductive in appearance. Despite her anthropoid appearance and as to most the creatures made with mutagenic techniques, she possesses an overall animal appearance including short, orange fur with a white underbelly, a black button nose, a snubbed muzzle, and pricked ears. Due to her jinn heritage partially responsible for her creation, she also possesses a set of curved horns, the right one of which has a chip in it, and a tapered tail with a spade on the tip. Her demonic features are scaled and cool to the touch.

Birthday: Officially not known, though her experiment date when she came into contact with the Evolvo-Ray is recorded as July 13.

Birthplace: Palermo, Sicily, Italy (evident by her thick Italian accent)

Hometown: Wumpa Island, Australia.

Deathdate: Inapplicable as of current, though has led others to believe otherwise by having faked her death multiple times for mission sakes.

Known languages: European English and Italian. Due to the lack of Italian speakers however she speaks the former more often than the latter, and attempts to pick up parts of the Australianised variant.

Finesse: D’Enfer is particularly skilled with firearms, most notably small guns and SMGS, as well as timed explosives and traps. Due to her training, she is also a proficient gymnast, master thief, good at hand to-hand combat, is a skilled hacker and lockpicker and—on a far less violent note—is talented at crochet.

Ineptitudes: Because of her tall stature in comparison to those around her, D’Enfer finds piloting or driving anything besides motorcycles or hover devices difficult unless they have been made for her especially. She is also a notoriously awful cook, a common misconduction is that she would be wonderful at it as she is Italian. She also cannot use melee weapons to anywhere near the same finesse as guns.

Temperament: Though she is cool and distant with the mutant henchmen Cortex and his doctors surround themselves with, mainly because she does not associate herself with an animal, she is greatly different to the humans. She carries a weakness for Neo personally. She is coquettish by nature, coy and seductive, being so if only to relish in the discomfort she spreads amidst the gawky humans. Brave, quick witted, intuitive and sly, gets what she wants, though when insulted she is a force to be reckoned with.

Lures: Intelligence, wealth, muscular builds, dominant state of mind, submissive state of mind, grasp of the Italian language, wit, humour.

Hobbies: Shopping. Especially for dresses. And crochet.

Equipment: Two MPT-9K SMGs (dual-wields), Desert Eagle .50 semi-automatic, sticks of dynamite, C-7 foam contained in a spray can and a reinforced hookshot/grapple gun. She also has an advanced hacktool and a monocle lense that acts as an x-ray device. These all stand as her typical field gear though after joining N. Labs she also carries a MP-443 handgun, M67 fragmentation grenades, experimental flashbang grenades, experimental incendiary grenades. She usually field-tests Neo's creations and devices, including her most prized possession R053R3D (ROSERED), an N. Labs prototype LRP sniper rifle, crimson in colour, which has a grenade launcher built into the underside of the barrel. It was the first thing Neo gave to her, and thus considers it precious.

CB1 - CB2

After leaving Doctor Cortex's employment following the former's defeat at the hands of his eccentric, failed experiment and harbouring a vicious jealousy, Nitrous Brio embarked on an expedition around Europe to continue his scientific pursuits.

When his travels brought him to Italy, ironically working the bar at a science convention, he met the acquaintance of Professor Bea Dazzle. Though Dazzle’s studies dabbled more in the occult sciences—alchemy, astrology and natural magic—she had a deep interest in mutagenesis and an equal dislike of Cortex and his known habit of taking credit for inventions that were not his, and thus a new friendship was formed. After a night of heavy drinking and much back-and-forth of “it can, it can’t”, the two fixated on the notion to create a creature with both scientists’ specialty. Dazzle allowed Brio to move into her laboratory in Palermo and make full use of her research and notes and in turn aided him in rebuilding his Evolvo-Ray, studying beneath him as his apprentice.

The two worked implacably over the course of a year to design the perfect creature: part animal, part jinn. Brio had insisted early on in the project that the creature used was to be a bandicoot, having seen (and been beaten the absolute shit out of) their potential, dexterity and litheness. Crash had proven, if nothing else, hard to put down.

Brio’s goal: to set his perfect creation on those who had wronged him.

Dazzle's goal: to prove her side of the argument that magic and science would work.

With the true inventor of the perfected Evolvo-Ray behind the switch and Dazzle’s preternatural input, the result was D’Enfer—French for Devil, name given for the nefarious horns and tail she had developed. Brio left not long after D’Enfer’s “birth”, his passion for world domination and revenge renewed thanks to the experiment’s success, and continued his journey around France and England, leaving the beast in the hands of Dazzle to be trained. He ended up returning to Australia, to build a laser.

CB3:W

During his absence, D’Enfer was put to work against the Palermo laboratory’s intense defensive A.I. and unworldly phantasms Dazzle had cooked up to pitch her against, honing her skills. She became proficient in small firearms, stealth, infiltration, hand-to-hand combat, hacking, lockpicking and gymnastics - as dexterous as Brio said she would be. Her greatest skill and excellence by miles was her finesse with explosives, which had earned her the nickname "Granata" amidst the laboratory’s goons – grenade in Italian, which D’Enfer took as her surname.

By the time he returned, following the crash of Cortex’s space station, Brio was elated to discover D'Enfer had been in action as a fully-fledged secret agent, thusfar and successfully having been sent out all over the globe by Dazzle to pilfer various data and prototypes from other visionaries, sabotage rival companies and even assassinate a handful. He was heralded as the creator of these many devices that she had stolen, no one the wiser to the truth. She was the most adapt, adroit mutant in the history of his career.

Though Brio couldn't move on.

When Cortex reared his head once again, this time alongside Uka Uka, being as difficult to keep down as his idiotic creation, Brio was seething. Harbouring that same, hateful spike of vengeance that had stayed with him since the start if not grown worse, he sent D’Enfer to Australia to carry out her ultimate assignment yet. Her mission was to infiltrate N. Labs, steal all of Neo Cortex’s research data, bag any prototypes that were small enough to carry, and blow the place to hell. It would result in Brio claiming credit for everything Cortex had in the works - a befitting revenge.

Pre & CB4:WoC

It was a move that was ultimately his downfall. When D’Enfer reached N Labs, she found the infiltration surprisingly easy but had not expected the sheer level of security thereafter, the army of mutants and clones, nor had expected the fellow human masterminds he surrounded himself with. Brio had failed to mention that, given he had left Cortex’s service years before it had truly established itself.

She was apprehended, personally interrogated by N. Gin and Cortex and immediately (and rather unashamedly) sold-out who had sent her and for what purpose. Cortex was bemused by her sheer level of honesty, which was complimentary perceived as “despicable”, and coloured impressed she had wormed her way around a tight-knit security system. He released her into his custody, much to the serious contention of Uka Uka and the other doctors, though the move proved worth it in time. She was trained up, debriefed and with trust established, finally installed as Head of Security (and why not? Given she was the only one who had ever hacked the advanced network it made sense to do so). She brought something to N Labs everyone there had yet to see: results. Positive results.

In a cruel twist of fate, for her first assignment as an agent of N Labs, Doctor Cortex turned her back on her creator, armed with not only the same level of femme fatale competence she had always had but also with technological superiority. She returned to Palermo, robbed Dazzle and Brio, and burnt the laboratory to the ground.

CB:TS

Her interest in Cortex had exceeded employer-employee status. Smitten with him, D'Enfer found him inadvertently amusing, charming, and outright laughable. Despite her attempts to seduce and woo him, which were not at all subtle, her feelings were not returned. At all. Cortex—even though he was gawky and very awkward about it—rebuffed her multiple times, even after he returned from the Antarctic three years later and saw her feelings had only grown more apparent. Eventually he came to see past the animal and saw the intelligent, lethal, diabolical woman behind it. He continued to refuse her, until she captured Aku Aku (with a grappling hook to the forehead), bagged an armful of crystals and took the rest of Crunch’s arm from the shoulder down during the scuffle to escape. The act of “unparalleled villainy” was lastly enough to win the doctor over. The two eloped to Amsterdam, and were married within the week. CB: MoM, and onwards

D'Enfer now spends her time carrying out missions and assignments as required of her by the company: thieving, sniping, seducing, infiltrating, hacking and spying her way over the globe and as such, she is usually absent from the base in Australia. .