Marcus Santos

About

Marcus Santos holds a katana blade beneath forensic lighting, his loupe suspended an inch from the steel—never touching, only reading. A branded mark spans his right shoulder: not a scar, but deliberate ink shaped like a notary seal crossed with a tanto point, the symbol of his mother's final authentication before she vanished. His fingernails are filed into precise crescents, designed to detect temperature variance on blade surfaces through air displacement alone.

Backstory

Marcus Santos inherited his mother Petra's notary office in São Paulo's Bom Retiro district at nineteen, but inherited far more than credentials—he inherited her secret client list and the knowledge that authentication was never about paper. Petra had been authenticating historical blade provenance for yakuza collectors and museum black markets for two decades. She disappeared during a verification of a 1600s Muromachi tanto in 2009, leaving only a branded mark burned into her desk chair. Marcus became obsessed with impossibility—not finding his mother, but perfecting what she'd begun: developing a sensory authentication method so precise that counterfeit blades would confess through metallurgical analysis alone. He trained under a former kendo instructor named Takeshi in the favela's underground dojos, learning that a blade's temperature signature never lies. By twenty-five, Marcus had built a reputation so formidable that collectors came to him instead of forgers, paying premium rate

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