Agaté

"It was your responsibility to know, as much as mine, Agaté. I was a child when you brought me into the Brotherhood and made me an Assassin. You pretended to protect me, to root out the enemy!"

- Aveline to Agaté, regarding his position as Mentor, 1777.

Agaté (c. 1722 – 1777) was the Mentor of the Assassin Brotherhood in Louisiana, operating from his hideout in the Louisiana Bayou.

Enslaved from a young age, Agaté came into contact with revolutionary disruptor François Mackandal, who taught him the ways of the Assassins. Following the death of his Mentor in 1758, Agaté traveled to Louisiana, a marked man, and hid in the bayou.

Agaté subsequently established the local Assassin guild, recruiting Aveline de Grandpré and Gérald Blanc, whom he trained to be his agents in New Orleans. After the Templars' presence in the bayou notably increased in 1766, Agaté went further into hiding, constructing a hidout deep within the swamp.

Although Agaté cared for his students, he was quite secretive in his dealings with them. Due to Aveline's natural impulsiveness and disinclination to follow orders, Agaté clashed with her frequently and eventually began to doubt her loyalty to the cause. Over the years, their mutual distrust of one another caused the two to grow apart.

When Aveline returned to Agaté in 1777 to tell him that Louisiana's head Templar had been her own stepmother all along, Agaté attacked Aveline, believing her to have betrayed the Assassins. His student managed to prove victorious, however, causing Agaté, who was overwhelmed with humiliation, to leap from the top of his treehouse to his death.

Early life
"He calls himself François Mackandal, my own mentor – the leader, the priest, the Brother, to whose cause I devoted my life. He was put to death by fire. I failed to prevent it."

- Agaté, on his Mentor, 1766.

Born on the western coast of Africa around 1722, Agaté was captured by slave traders at the age of seven. Transported to the Americas, he eventually ended up on a plantation on Saint-Domingue. There, he became acquainted with two other slaves, Baptiste and Jeanne, and fell in love with the latter.

In 1732, the trio came into contact with the Assassin François Mackandal, who took them under his wing and taught them to read and write. Unlike Jeanne, who was kept in the dark about the Brotherhood, Agaté, along with Baptiste, was trained to become a full-fledged Assassin, receiving tuition in the use of poison and weapons. When Jeanne found out about Mackandal's violent ways, she grew frightened of him, causing the relationship between Agaté and Jeanne to become strained.

In 1738, Agaté officially joined the Assassin Brotherhood, following which he escaped the plantation at Saint-Domingue with Mackandal and Baptiste; Jeanne refused to join them and stayed behind. For many years he fought alongside his Mentor, until a failed attempt to poison the colonists of Saint-Domingue resulted in the capture and execution of Mackandal in 1758. Abandoning Baptiste, Agaté tried to reestablish contact with Jeanne, whom he still loved, but found out she had been sold to a merchant and taken to New Orleans.

Mentor of the Louisiana Brotherhood
After he arrived in the city, Agaté soon learned that Jeanne had already left Louisiana, her destination unknown. Following his discovery that Jeanne had a daughter, Aveline, who still lived in the city, he decided to remain in New Orleans and keep watch over her. In 1759, Aveline took it upon herself to rescue a slave, but was caught in the act, prompting a swift intervention from Agaté.

Impressed by her dedication to pursuing freedom and justice, he took Aveline on as his pupil and, following a few months of intense training, inducted her into the Assassin Brotherhood. That same year, Agaté also recruited Gérald Blanc, Aveline's childhood friend, and trained him to become a spy and information officer. In tutoring them both, Agaté became more of a Mentor for the Assassins than a warrior, which made him a target for the Templars, who were gaining power in the region.

Agaté subsequently hid in the Louisiana Bayou for safety, establishing a network of servant contacts and designating Aveline and Gérald as his agents within the city. When a nascent cult came to the swamp in 1766, Agaté, suspecting Templar influence, retreated further into the bayou and built himself a hideout. After he learned that the followers' leader was calling himself "François Mackandal", Agaté sent word to Aveline to come meet him.

Following the arrival of his student, Agaté informed Aveline of the situation and then assigned her the task of uncovering the false Mackandal's identity and affiliations. Before his student's departure, he handed her a blowpipe to use and recommended she seek out the smuggler Élise Lafleur, who might be able to help Aveline in locating her target.

Some time later, Aveline returned to inform Agaté that the imposter, who had been working together with Rafael Joaquín de Ferrer, had been eliminated. When her Mentor inquired further, Aveline remained deliberately vague; in actuality, she had discovered from the imposter, who had been Baptiste, that Agaté and her mother had known each other. The fact that Agaté had chosen to keep this connection hidden from his student strained the relationship between the two, with Aveline visiting less in the coming years.

In 1768, Agaté sought to deal with the perpetrator of a rash of disappearances in New Orleans. Like Gérald, Agaté believed the Templar governor Antonio de Ulloa to be responsible and subsequently sent word to Aveline to meet him in Saint Peter's Cemetery, his last safe haven within the city. There, he gave her the order to assassinate de Ulloa to prove her loyalty to the Brotherhood, as Agaté found his trust in Aveline to be faltering.

While Agaté remained in the cemetery, Aveline carried out her mission, setting up an ambush and then cornering the governor. However, she decided to spare his life in return for more information that could help her dismantle the Templars' slave trafficking operation.

Regardless of her success in procuring a valuable Templar lens and learning more about the Templars' machinations, Agaté lost faith in his student, as she had disobeyed his direct orders. When Aveline then expressed her intention of journeying to Chichen Itza to seek out the Templars, Agaté explicitly forbade her to go, though his student defiantly ignored this command and went anyways. In the years that followed, Agaté and Aveline began to grow apart.

During Aveline's absence, rogue Spanish soldiers began raising havoc in the bayou, intent on seizing control of it. In response, Agaté set up several voodoo signs near the swamp's only road, in an effort to scare away the troops. In 1771, Aveline returned from Chichen Itza, hoping to make amends, though Agaté refused to acknowledge her and only grew angrier when she presented him with a piece of a First Civilization artifact known as the Prophecy Disk.

Agaté told Aveline that she should not have unearthed the relic, ordering her to remove it from his sight at once. As she put the object away, Aveline attempted to warn her Mentor of the troops that had been bribed by the Templar Vázquez, though Agaté replied that he was already well aware of their presence, having made plans to outwit them.

Aveline then offered her help in ousting the intruders from the bayou. Agaté begrudgingly accepted, instructing his student to silently poison members of a patrol as they passed his voodoo signs, thus making the troops believe they had fallen under a voodoo curse. Despite this brief success, Agaté and Aveline remained distant and would not meet again for several years.

Confrontation with Aveline
"You would fit me a coward's slow, pointless death? As you did Ulloa? I will not live with the dishonor. I–"

- Agaté, right before committing suicide, 1777.

In 1777, Agaté was visited at his hut by Aveline, who had discovered the identity of the Company Man, Louisiana's head Templar. However, embittered as he was by her long absences, Agaté was less than welcoming and, upon the revelation that the Company Man had been Aveline's own stepmother, came to believe she had been turned to the Templar cause. His paranoia pushing him into attacking her, he threw down a bomb of hallucinogenic poison, causing her to experience visions of the Templars she'd previously slayed.

While Aveline was tormented by phantoms, Agaté ascended his treehouse and taunted his student as she attempted to chase after him. The Assassin eventually managed to see through the poison-induced illusions and followed her Mentor, trying to make him see reason and tell her what the shards of the Prophecy Disk were actually for.

Agaté refused to answer, however, and was eventually cornered at the highest point of his homestead. Despite Agaté's bitter raving, Aveline chose to spare her Mentor, ordering him to run and never return to New Orleans. Overcome with shame and humiliation, Agaté instead jumped from the treetop platform. Despite Aveline's attempt to save her Mentor, she was only able to grasp his necklace which snapped as he plunged to his death.

Legacy
"Initial reports on Aveline de Grandpré led us to believe she would be too controversial and impulsive to appeal to a wide audience. Teenaged memories show her brainwashed and trained to kill political foes of her highly unstable Mentor, Agaté."

- A biased market analysis of Aveline's memories.

In the 21st century, the Templar-run Abstergo Industries, a corporate giant, had one their subsidiaries produce a video game based on Aveline de Grandpré's genetic memories. In it, Agaté was portrayed as an unpredictable psychopath that manipulated individuals such as Aveline and Gérald into doing his dirty work, glossing over his life as a slave and love for Jeanne.

Personality and characteristics
"Mentor, do not force my hand! The Agaté who trained me is a man of truth and courage. I know he still lives within you. Let him out again!"

- Aveline, trying to get through to Agaté, 1777.

Suffering much abuse while he was on Saint-Domingue, Agaté's experiences on the island would severely scar him, both physically and emotionally. To cope, he dedicated himself to the teachings of Mackandal and spent the remainder of his free time in the company of Jeanne, whom he loved dearly. However, Agaté was eventually forced to cut ties with Jeanne to prove his commitment to the Brotherhood, a decision he would come to regret in his later years. Indeed, throughout most of his life, he would have trouble mentally processing their broken relationship.

Nonetheless, Agaté remained devoted to the Assassin cause, even after the death of Mackandal, establishing a guild in Louisiana and assuming the position of Mentor. Although a recluse, he appeared to be a very experienced and invaluable mentor to his students, as evidenced by his interactions with Aveline. With his stern nature serving to balance out the young Assassin's more impulsive tendencies, Agaté patiently trained Aveline and was not above offering her advice before she left on missions.

However, Agaté was also secretive, never telling Aveline of the past relationship he had shared with her mother. As well as this, he appeared dishonest at times, stating that the blowpipe he had given to Aveline had originally been Mackandal's. This claim was later contested by Baptiste, who said the blowpipe had been his originally, calling into question the veracity of Agaté's words.

Agaté's secrecy would eventually damage his relationship with Aveline, as his student would later find out about his connection to Jeanne by herself. Already suffering from paranoia due to the experiences he endured in his youth, Agaté believed her growing distance signaled a faltering loyalty to the Brotherhood. On one occasion he even admitted to having a dream of Aveline turning her back on the Order.

As these feelings took root, Agaté grew harsher in his interactions with Aveline, openly calling her loyalty into question and insinuating she was conspiring with Gérald. Aveline's subsequent decision to spare governor de Ulloa, when Agaté had explicitly ordered her to kill him, shattered Agaté's trust in his pupil. Despite the fact that Aveline wished to pursue the goals of the Brotherhood by traveling to Mexico, Agaté forbade her to go, his judgment clouded by his feelings of anger and betrayal.

When Aveline returned several years later, Agaté had grown so embittered he claimed he didn't recognize her and refused to acknowledge her successes. So resentful had he become of his student that he no longer wished to indulge her questions, as he might have done before, instead relishing in the lack of them.

In the end, Agaté's paranoia drove him to attack his student, after she had called him out on his failings - particularly, his tendency to inaction. Employing a hallucinogenic poison, he gained the upper hand and taunted her, his former affection for her having been twisted into hatred. When he was beaten, however, Agaté's lifelong frustrations, shame and self-doubt drove him to commit suicide.

Equipment and skills
"No! It cannot be! Agaté... What have you done to me?"

- Aveline, under the influence of Agaté's poisons, 1777.

Agaté was a skilled freerunner, being able to navigate the bayou's many trees with ease. Similarly, he constructed his hideout in such a way that it was only accessible to the most adept of climbers. On one occasion, Agaté requested his student to meet him in New Orleans' graveyard, and could subsequently be found perched on the roof of a chapel.

Agaté was also proficient in the use of poisons, making use of them on several occasions; he used them in conjunction with voodoo signs to make a patrol believe they'd fallen under a voodoo curse. When confronted by Aveline, he used a certain hallucinogen that hindered her ability to see and made lifeless practice dolls appear to be hostile and human, as well as creating the illusion that he could vanish and reappear a distance away.

Trivia

 * Both Agaté and Baptiste considered the avenging of slaves by killing white colonists a life goal of theirs, even as Assassins, despite the fact that doing so would be tantamount to breaking the Creed's first tenet.
 * Agaté's battle with Aveline was similar to the one between Rashid ad-Din Sinan and Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, as both featured a Mentor figure summoning illusions of their pupil's former targets to defeat them.
 * Agaté's relationship with Aveline also mirrors the relatonship between Achilles Davenport and Ratonhnhaké:ton, as both Mentors lead guilds that are relatively small-scale or non-existent at all, with a headstrong Assassin under their tutelage. However, where Achilles steadily warms up to Ratonhnhaké:ton, Agaté instead loses faith in Aveline, to the point of resenting her.
 * Agaté was a practitioner of Voodoo, for which varying symbols could be spotted on his person and his hideout – his right bracer adorned the symbol of, the door on his cabin's first floor displayed the symbol of , while the second floor altar showed the symbol of.
 * Concept art of Agaté could be seen hanging on the walls of Abstergo Entertainment's offices in Montreal.
 * Agate is a gemstone renowned for its bright hues and fine grain. A Greek name, Agathe, also exists, which is derived from the word agathos meaning "good".