Legal Name: Zucca Prometheus Xerfantes (Extraterrestrial Tunguska Hybrid Experiment, Mk. 1)
Aliases: The Traveler, Interloper, The Old Man
Sex: Male
Age: 564,141 (physically in late 20’s)
Place of Birth: Victory City, Egypt
Legal Status: Wanted in Some Dimensions
Occupation: Nomadic Explorer
Allegiance: N/A, Recent member of SPEAR
Height: 6’
Weight: 185
Sexuality: Bisexual
Marital Status: Married multiple times throughout lifetime
Known Relatives: Accuz, Amon, Ajax, Harabec, Masudah, and Cuzca Xerfantest (genetic siblings), Raven Xerfantes (wife), Eshoq and Na’eema Xerfantes (children)
Vehicles of Choice: The Cryok, anything with an open cockpit
Creator: Zucca Xerfantes
Voiceclaim: Zucca Xerfantes
It all began with the Tunguska Event.
A blue light appeared over Tunguska in the Russian steppes. It slowly descended, too slow to be a comet, fragment, or meteor, yet when it touched down, it released a burst of energy that flattened the surrounding forest and carved out a small lake. The initial search team never found out what had fallen; it took a hundred and fifty years for scientific instruments to become tuned enough to detect the signals emerging from the Tunguska Crater.
The science team from Prometheus Labs in the multi-cultural city of Victoria, Egypt traveled there and unearthed a crystalline shard about the size of a coffin. Within they found genetic material unlike anything they had ever seen along with a mathematical cypher that contained detailed instructions on how to create a hybrid from the local dominant species. These humans were perplexed, but they began to carry out the instructions under tightly controlled conditions. Alas, they found through simulations that a zygote produced by the fusion would be unsustainable. It required genetic material to create a viable organism. Since they had already used the finest human samples they could find (Olympians, astronauts, orators, negotiators, business moguls, scientists, artists, etc.) they took the best stock from what their simulations showed to be the most compatible lifeform on Earth…
Canis Lupus.
The Gray Wolf.
The Wolves of Yellowstone’s Druid Pack were selected to donate material and a hundred zygotes were finally produced. Ninety-nine were placed in cold storage while the promising wone with the strongest genetic pattern was selected to gestate.
As nine months passed, the scientists began to have strange dreams: voices, like whispers in their heads started to pervade their minds. They would dream of crystalline landscapes and towering structures that glittered under an alien sun, and dwelling among those crystals were beings that defied description.
On December 1, 2120, the day when the experimental embryo had matured enough to birth from the synthetic womb, and the lab staff gathered around the tiny creature they had created, this new life, opened his ocean blue eyes for the first time. Not tears or screams, only joyous laughter and smiles.
It was the moment that the staff knew they would never terminate the project.
They named him using a mishmash of the Eyptian word for “sarcophagus” and a respectable Spanish name…for “Ladies’ Man.”
Thus began Zucca’s first year of life out of countless years.
The other ninety-nine pre-embryos were kept in stasis while the hybrid infant grew to maturity. The CEO of the lab company had taken a deep fondness for the child and became the prominent father figure in his life while the lab staff became like aunts and uncles. He grew, often sneaking out into the streets to wander the desert, explore, swim in the Nile, or walk among the humans. People who interacted with him would act surprised when they were asked why they didn’t react to such a strange creature walking about, but they insisted he looked pretty normal to them. The boy had been using what the science team determined were potent psionic powers to influence others so they would not be alarmed. His good nature kept him from more nefarious and dangerous uses of that power.
All was well until the day the Alpha Centauri invaded Earth.
They had developed faster-than-light travel and had set their eyes on Earth for its resources and its territory. These were not the mysterious aliens behind Zucca’s origins; these were similar to humans: easy to understand, easy to fight.
All resources on Earth were called upon to resist this invasion, and Prometheus Labs were no exception. The militaries learned of Zucca’s ability to influence minds and saw a silver bullet for the campaign against the invaders. They took the fourteen-year-old child, training him in the art of war as well infantry tactics and the most effective martial arts. They also extensively conditioned him, breaking down and instilling in his mind certain rules: Always protect humanity, always do as humanity asks, and so on.
As labs reverse-engineered captured Centauri starships to unlock the secrets of interstellar travel, the training and conditioning carried on. He soaked in the information like a sponge, and soon Earth’s finest generals found themselves being upstaged as the hybrid studied battle reports and drew upon the minds of all strategists to create composite tactics. Under his leadership, both in the trenches and behind the curtain, the forces of Earth rapidly overwhelmed Centauri’s defenses; it was as if he knew where the Centauri would be before they did. Zucca stayed the Terrans’ hand after crippling the Centauri combat infrastructure, recalling their forces under that belief that they knew better than to attack again.
Not long after his victorious return, a twenty-two-year-old Zucca was approached by one of the lab techs who had raised him. She had an impossible task for him. Something he could not do. Something that contradicted his entire mental conditioning.
She wanted him to kill.
He couldn’t. But she was asking it of him. He had a mental breakdown, and, enraged, she attacked him. His training kicked in, and before he knew what he was doing, she lay dead at his feet.
And just like that, Earth’s favorite hero had become a murderer.
Knowing they could do little to stop such a powerful psychic, humanity did they only thing it could: it banished him. He took a single starship and, in his grief, unlocked a new ability: his ability to travel between dimensions! Thus began his endless journey.
When he was sixty, he realized his body was not aging at all. However, on account of the patchwork nature of this genetic structure, native medicine rarely heals him well, and his wounds are long-lasting.
On a world with a psychic dampening field, his life took a dramatic turn when he imposed himself between a disgruntled factory worker with a monstrous gun and those he was holding hostage. The worker first blew his lower legs off when he fired with the intent to kneecap the hybrid. Zucaa continued to plead for the lives of the hostages while holding himself upright with his arms. That cost him his left arm. His silvery blood spread across the ground as he lifted his head, begging now…not for his own life, as the military conditioning still solely dictated his actions. He found himself staring into the barrel of the weapon and, after a bright flash, found himself standing on a beach as a woman in a black dress offered her hand informing him that he had met his demise. Unwilling to accept that fate, he asked if there was some alternative and he was told survival could be attained if he could beat her, Death, in a game.
Meanwhile, the friends who had traveled with Zucca at the time had slain the worker, saved the hostages, and were desperately working to restart Zucca’s heart. He won the game, returned to his body, and his friends realized that while alive, he had suffered severe trauma and massive brain damage. One of his friends, a living machine, engineered prosthetics for him that could disguise themselves as normal skin and fur. While his limbs had been more or less replaced, the brain damage was another challenge entirely. He had regressed mentally, forgetting how to perform basic tasks, and he had lost a massive amount of motor control.
Weeks became months, months became years, and years paved away as physical and neurological therapy restored speech, locomotion, and motor skills. He had lost massive amounts of memory, and his friends found he had a completely different personality.
What’s worse…they found they liked this new Zucca more.
He was warm and kind, gentle in touch and in word, where before he was a true soldier’s soldier, single-mindedly dedicated to the conditioning that had been inflicted on him.
Freed from that, he was no longer forced to help people.
Now, he simply wanted to do it for its own sake, content to walk in the shadows in nudge people receptive to change towards helping themselves out of their problems. Zucca’s travels saw his gathering many friends over his long years, but one that stood out was Grim, whom he considered a brother until Grim lost his wife and, unable to reconcile the loss, sold his soul, became a demon, and usurped that dimension’s neck of Hell. Unsatisfied, he turned his rage on Zucca, destroying the hybrid’s first worldship and all the dimensional refugees living aboard. It was from this interaction that Zucca gained his cold demeanor where beings demonic are concerned.
He met others, including iterations of Aries Passadar, the Tengu Vi, and even the god Hextor…
He is never alone, his mind bearing the sum total souls and minds of the psionic, lithoid race that sired his alien side and, as such, his mind is a lattice of trillions of half-asleep minds contributing to the function of the overall whole. This manifests as a combination of uncanny intuition, empathy, and insight that akin to a non-linear computer that process information. Just the same, he’s never alone.
By the time Zucca had his 100,000th birthday, it occurred to him that he may simply not be mortal. Fallible, capable of error, able to be wounded and die, sure, but essentially ageless. He found the idea as hopeful as it was unsettling and wandered in a century-long fugue state, deep in thought all the while as his body simply walked, slept, ate, and breathed. “What am I supposed to do with ostensible immortality?” he asked himself. “Why, travel! Explore! Help people who need it! The best things in life!
‘But to live so long…we’ve outlived so many friends, wives, husbands, loved ones, found-family.
‘Indeed, but we remember them all, don’t we? And in so doing, preserve that memory forever!”
So he traveled, explored, rended aid, and continued to find love where he could. Lacking the means to house people who had nowhere to go, or whose native dimensions were collapsing, Zucca began his most grandiose project yet. His crystalline starship, the Cryok, was capable of housing a theoretical volume akin to a solar system, but that was not sufficient. He traveled to numerous dimensions, gathering species capable of the engineering feat he had in mind and captured a star withing the Cryok. Having total dominion over gravity within the vessel, the star would always maintain a relative position.
For fifteen-thousand years, the construction ensued, building massive continents, vast oceans, with all if etched across a surface of roughly 1,600,000,000,000,000 square kilometers, encompassing a wide range of biomes and housing millions of trillions without their being within a lifetime’s walk of each other. This would do.
And unlike the Primus Nastruum Navis, this vessel would not succumb to demonic incursin. With someplace safe for people to live as well as a proverbial place to hang his hat while on the go, he traveled between dimensions, mostly just following his whims. In one such dimension The Cryok needed a year to vent certain built-up radiation. These were harmless to everyone else but him, so he was forced to leave the ship and go planet-side. He had taken to sleeping on park benches until he got the lay of the land, but, alas, he was arrested for vagrancy.
Cordial, he was cheerful and thanked the police for giving him a roof, a cot, and a hot meal. And it was then there that he met Doc Mallory, forming a lasting friendhip. Mallory became one of the “special ones” whom Zucca would invite on his journeys.
The day Zucca showed up at Doc Mal’s house with a black vixen in tow, the ferret knew that things had changed. Che could see a shift in demeanor in the old man; his cheer was annoying infectious.
“We’re pregnant!” Zucca announced.
Poor bastard, Mallory thought. Did he forget he’s sterile and shooting blanks?
“Nope! The children on their way are of my own stock! I’m going to be a biological father for the first time!”
“I don’t cheat on my men,” Raven interjected.
Doc Mal stared into space for a few moments as the gravity of that statement hit him. “Zucca…you old Spanich peacock…that’s….I’m just…bloody fuckin’ hell….Congratulations!”
It would be some time before Zucca introduced Mal to his children, but growing up they had always regarded him as an uncle.
STRENGTHS
- Deeply Compassionate: When he is able to clearly hear surface thoughts, he can come off as downright empathic and is always cordial to the needs of whomever he is around.
- Untold Millennia of Experience: Having been alive for hundreds of thousands of years, Zucca has a broad spectrum of experience to draw upon to solve problems. His friends have com to dread when every he says, “This is a new one on me!”
- Powerful Psychic: Though Zucca’s abilities were dampened when he took a bullet to the head, they were not fully extinguished. He is capable of many astonishing feats, from creating air crystals of interchangeable density to fogging the memory of others to telekinetically aided strength.
- Calm: Zucca is rarely rattled, and that calm becomes a real rock for friends to hold onto in tumultuous times.
- Dilated Sense of Time: Zucca is able to perceive the past, present and future at the same time, but due to Observer Effect, the future is constantly changing. This makes it almost impossible to sneak up on or surprise him, but given its unreliability and the length of time he can envision changes all the time, it is not unheard of, especially if he is too focused on one thing to pay attention to certain details.
- Hive Mind: Zucca’s soul an dhis mind is a gestalt of the psychic essence of the long dead alien race that sired him. Each Lithoid spirit functions much like a brain cell, and this was deeply suppressed before his head injury. Afterwards, his true nature as able to reassert itself, though the individual spirits mourn the loss of the voices no longer there after the brain wound.
- Mentor: Zucca rarely feels the need to step up to the role of hero, though he will do it without hesitation when he feels otherwise. He prefers to advise, guide, and nurture others along their highest and best paths, viewing himself as a soldier against apathy and entropy.
- Cybernetic Prosthesis: Zucca’s prosthesis, which can look like normal limbs if he wishes, are packed with useful technology. His legs can transform into jets which allow him to hover and fly. They also increase his land speed significantly. The flight can last four hours before he has to land and let their atmospheric power generators recharge. His arm is equipped with a magnetic fusion cannon which he rarely sets above stun, and his hand conceals a multitude of useful gadgets, from lighters to corkscrews to skeleton keys to arc-welders. His artificial eye is capable of vision in multiple spectra, including infrared, ultraviolet, and radio oscillation.
- Resilience in Space: Zucca is capable of surviving the vacuum of space for up to twenty-six hours, after which time he’ll slip into a comatose state until returned to atmosphere.
- The Cryok: His crystalline starship, containing a pocket dimension, is nimble and swift, controlled by thought alone and contains a Dyson Ring inside with a multitude of biomes, He will rarely go hungry.
WEAKNESSES
- Scatterbrained: With his perception of time so broad, it is sometimes hard for him to bring his attention to the here and now. Another side effect of this alien perception of time is that he will often come off as gaslighting, referring to conversations or interactions that were never or had not yet occurred.
- Migraines: Overuse of his psychic abilities begins to give him sever headaches, and the stronger the power, the more pronounced the effect. He can hold off the pain but this also makes it worse when it is finally time to pay the piper. He has been known to collapse in a twitching, whimpering heap if not outright seizures after a particularly powerful display.
- Limitations of Psychic Powers: Zucca’s mental powers naturally have no effect on non-organics, and can be useless against particularly strong-willed or intellectually rigorous individuals such as for example, well-catechized members of the Church of Revenance.
- Average Strength: While physically fit, Zucca is no stronger nor more enduring than a typical soldier. He often supplements his strength with his psionics, and his alien physiology makes for odd mealtimes habits, such as his seeming immunity to hot sauce.
- Slow Healing: If injured, Zucca takes a very long time to heal. His overengineered genetic code while it suffers nothing from radiation or the effects of age, causes this. If he breaks a bone, it will stay broken for a whole season, if not longer.
- Wanderer: Zucca is not prone to staying in one place for long. Either because he fears those who pursue him across the multiverse catching his tail or the mere fact that he has a nomadic streak, he might leave unless something compels him to stay.
- Reliance on Prosthesis: While shielded against electromagnetic interference, concentrated bursts from weapons meant to disrupt machines can make them cease to function, leaving him virtually helpless.
- Extremely Toxic Blood: His blood contains traces of heavy metals and silicate. While not deadly to the touch, it is if it gets into any openings.
POWER GRID
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BEHIND THE SCENES
-Bio by Zucca
-Image 1 by fcsimba
-Image 2 by Eggplantm
-Image 3 by kibaandme
-Image 4 by PMDragonGirl
-Image 5 by Pyrodox
-Image 6 by Belise7
-Image 7 by Sherharon
-Image 8 by Pyrodox
-Grid Average: 3
