Franco Barbi

Franco "Il Bambino" Barbi is a Prime Asset and one of the antagonists in The Outlast Trials. He is the outcast son of a Mafia Don who is a perverse gun-wielding man-child.^[4]

Background[]

Franco Barbi was born to a Louisiana mafia don and an unnamed woman. According to him, he never knew his birth mother and instead grew up with his father's numerous wives. He committed his first murder at the age of 12^[2] and would later become a debt collector and hitman for the crime syndicate. He would become problematic for the Mafia due to his total disregard for human life, especially to those he attempted to engage in sexual activities with. Due to his impotency^[2] he would frequently murder his sexual partners for psychosexual^[2] reasons. Franco would eventually be sent to Miami^[2], supposedly for Mafia business but the real reason was far more complicated. At some point, Franco engaged in a sexual relationship with his stepmother Angelina Barbi, as her degradation brought him sexual pleasure. Franco's father found out about the affair and severely beat him^[2] before exiling him, his life spared due to their blood relation.

Franco would eventually move his operations to Cuba and briefly become involved in CIA operations. He participated in numerous raids against revolutionary forces. However, he would once again begin to indiscriminately murder just as he did in New Orleans, seemingly for no benefit to the CIA, leading to his expulsion from operations. Franco would eventually catch the attention of Murkoff after he witnessed a Reagent commit an assassination^[1]. Seemingly inspired by the kill, he would go on to murder seven people^[1], leading to Murkoff dispatch Clyde Perry to investigate. Perry would later track down Franco to a hotel where he was meeting a prostitute. Perry was alerted by the hotel clerk that there was an incident in one of the rooms, upon investigation he found a dead prostitute along with Franco's possessions, including his shotgun^[5], Lupara. When Perry attempted to investigate, Franco emerged from the dead prostitutes chest cavity. Clyde Perry was nearly beaten to death and sent to Texas for leg reconstruction and skull surgery^[6]. Franco Barbi was later captured and sent to the Sinyala Facility.

Physical Description[]

Franco Barbi is a man of average build standing between 5'9 and 5'10 feet in height. His outfit consists of a large white stripped suit and blue bowtie, common for gangsters of the time. He has a brown bandolier around his upper torso that has slots cut out to hold his buckshots for his shotgun. Interestingly, in contrast to this intimidating outfit Franco wears a yellow and pink pacifier around his neck at almost all times. His skin is pale white, he has hazel eyes and blonde hair. Franco is mostly bald, with his remaining hair in disarray. His most prominent feature is his extremely large head, almost double the average size of a man. Franco's eyes are bloodshot, indicative of hemorrhage, or brain damage. The left side of Franco's skull is heavily mutilated from probable head trauma. Franco Barbi is in remarkable health and physically operational despite his sustained injuries. Franco's head deformation is a mix of a birth defect and the result of frequent abuse from his father^[2].

Characteristics[]

Franco Barbi poses a unique threat to Reagents due to his ranged shotgun attack. While he is still significantly dangerous up close, his ability to attack at a distance forces Reagents to break his direct line of sight or seek cover to avoid damage. His ranged attack has a short "windup" period where he aims his weapon before firing, which can give Reagents time to seek cover and avoid the shot. When Reagents are within his line of sight, Franco remains stationary and continues firing his shotgun. Once they break out of his direct line of sight, the Reagents can gain distance while Franco will attempt to catch up. When hit by the Lupara, Reagents become staggered and briefly deafened. Since the Lupara fires a spread of projectiles, each shot can hit multiple Reagents at the same time so it is best to split up while being chased. Due to the Lupara using tooth-filled shells instead of proper shot, it will not outright kill a healthy Reagent unless the trial has Deadly Prime Asset variator.

Franco still behaves similarly to other prime assets, when in melee range he will prefer to simply beat Reagents with the stock of the Lupara, but his melee attacks do not have any additional effect. Like other Prime Assets, he is resistant to hits from throwable items but the effects of rigs will work on him.

Franco can be somewhat difficult to track during a trial, as his weapon does not produce any kind of audible noise like Mother Gooseberry's drill, though he speak very loudly while patrolling. The primary audio cue to listen for is his heavy breathing, which can reveal his approximate location to perceptive Reagents. When Franco is alerted by noises, he will quickly shoot at the direction of the sound. Reagents are advised to avoid stepping on broken glasses and minimize noises from walking, jumping, and running.

Story[]

Outlast: The Murkoff Collections[]

Appearing in Issue 3, after Clyde Perry narrows his location down to a hotel he was visiting while soliciting prostitute named Jenny. He finds her corpse on the bed and reaches for the phone, when Franco emerges from the stomach of the corpse (believing that Clyde was reaching for Lupara). He hits Clyde's gun out of his hand with a bottle before whacking him over the head with it. He then picks up Lupara and shoots Clyde in his right leg, which alerts a passerby who comes into the room after hearing the noise.

Clyde is able to flee with the phone into a separate room as Franco shoots the other man to death.

The Outlast Trials[]

TBA

Personality[]

Franco Barbi tends to act as a stereotypical gangster, using blunt threats and aggressive displays of violence to prove a point. Franco is also extremely sexually depraved in nature and takes pleasure in murdering out of arousal, killing one of the female Giants and engaging in necrophilia with her corpse. In particular, he has a fetish for being infantilized; in his origin comic, he goes so far as to sleep inside the torso of a prostitute's corpse to simulate a womb. He frequently expresses his fetish with a twisted sense of humor, sardonically and sadistically threatening Reagents while referring to himself as a "little baby" and using childish expressions such as "caught with your hand in the cookie jar". His compulsively infantile behavior causes him to bawl like a baby^[7] when he is frustrated, although he is embarrassed by his habit of crying and defensively claims "that's just water from [his] eyes". This defensive action is likely to protect his fragile ego.

His aggressive and explosive nature reflect a deep-seated insecurity, stemming from his abusive childhood and his feelings of sexual inadequacy. As a result, he views Reagents as interlopers who threaten both his territory and his ego, and he is determined to hunt, punish and kill them using blunt force and homemade buckshot from his shotgun. Franco does appear to possess a level of intelligence and craftsmanship, being able to produce his own ammunition within the trial environments as well as having instincts not dissimilar to a hunter. According to his own quotes and Dr. Easterman, Franco's ammunition is produced by using human teeth which is likely ripped from Reagents or anyone else foolish enough to approach him.

Player death animation[]

Front: Franco approaches the Reagent and steps on their hand before hitting them in the face with Lupara's stock, forcing them to lie back on the floor. He plants his foot on their E.S.O.P. and removes the empty shells from Lupara, tossing them down at the Reagent. After reloading Lupara with fresh shells, he shoots them in the face.

Back: Franco approaches the Reagent from behind and crouches down, making them turn around, and shoots their hand. As they fall back onto the floor in pain, clutching their hand, he shoots them in the kneecap. He taunts the Reagent by dancing around before jumping and stomping on their head.

Right: Franco hits the Reagent with Lupara's stock, forcing them to lie down on the floor. He then jumps and lands on their hips, and beats in their face with the barrel of Lupara before flipping it around and shoving the stock into their face.

Left: Franco pushes the Reagent onto their back and kicks them square in the crotch. He then shoves the barrel of Lupara into their mouth and runs his hand through his hair, before shooting them.

Patch notes[]

October 29, 2024 (Program Geister)

Trivia[]

• Prior to his reveal, Barbi was mentioned in the documents and appears as a silhouette mugshot for secondary objective TVs during the Prime Time event.
• Barbi is known under a number of aliases: "Il Bambino^[3]", "Lupa^[8]" and "Lupara^[8]".
  • "Il Bambino" is Italian and means "The child".
  • "Lupa" is also Italian and means "The Wolf". Notably, this is the feminized version of the word. Initially, Dr. Easterman assumes that this was Spanish - due to Murkoff's contacts being native Spanish speakers - for "magnifying glass".
    • Barbi being nicknamed "The child" and "The She-Wolf" simultaneously, as well as his apparent Italian heritage, may allude to the story of Romulus and Remus, the mythological founders of Rome.
  • "Lupara" refers to Barbi's weapon of choice, namely his sawed off shotgun, which is called lupara in Italian.
    • Said weapon saw prominent use among Sicilian gangsters and proves very useful for hunting in wooded areas and confined spaces, in which a regular shotgun is rather unwieldy. Weaponry of this kind has been highly regulated after 1934, whereafter a ban on shotguns with a barrel shorter than 18 inches - 45.72 Centimeters - had been put into place.
    • A lupara had also infamously been used to murder New Orleans policeman David Hennessy in October of 1890, in the culmination of an Italian Mob war between gangs of Sicilian Fruit companies.
    • Barbi's "Lupara" in specific differs from the more commonly seen, being an "Over-and-Under" double barrelled shotgun rather than the standard side-by-side barrel configuration, it also has an extremely, exaggeratedly short barrel in comparison to most "standard" sawn-off shotgun lengths.
• Barbi's facial features and enlarged skull are reminiscent of those seen in people born with Pfeiffer Syndrome Type One.
• In the Outlast Trials: The Murkoff Collections Chapter 3, Barbi drinks a cocktail called "Wolf's Milk" and it consists of amaretto, egg white, gin, and milk. When it was recreated in real life, the drink has a yellow hue that makes it resemble colostrum. Which is the first form of breastmilk that is released by the mammary glands after giving birth. It's nutrient-dense, high in antibodies, and high in antioxidants to build a newborn baby's immune system.
• Barbi collects nipples^[9].
• Barbi's ammo being made of teeth could be a reference to the Montreal Mafia being known for collecting teeth.
• Unlike Mother Gooseberry and Leland Coyle, Franco Barbi is the only Prime Asset who does not have any unique callouts when pinged by the Reagents.
• According to one of Red Barrels' founders, Franco Barbi was inspired as a collage of movie references and was created to represent the ideal son of the mother figure, Mother Gooseberry and father figure, Leland Coyle.^[10]
• Barbi is the second Outlast antagonist that possess a ranged attack. The first is Laird Byron.
• Barbi is the first enemy in The Outlast Trials that can attack Reagents from a distance. The second is the Pitcher.

References[]

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