I hope you’re in the mood for some more evil, because I’ve got another purveyor of perfidy to bring a little menace into your life. And if you thought Graeme Grimstead was something, here’s a heavy you’re sure to find hot!
In delving into the backstory of Lucky Vega and his friends before they became the Environauts--stories to be chronicled in the Environauts prequel, The Adventures of Lucky Vega--I looked for what Lucky, his father Esteban, and Lucky’s friends were up to before the four boys acquired their powers. The idea is that before they became “super” they were still heroes. And as I sought the adversaries of their pre-super-powered past, I came across someone as sexy as he was dangerous!
You’ll recall from previous posts that my most frequently occurring character theme is a type of character that I call “the Prince”--the man with exceptional, extraordinary qualities beyond his Quantum-worthy looks that truly put him over the top. I defined the Prince as “the man you most want as a champion, a rescuer, a leader, and a lover.” Until I discovered this character we’re meeting here, all of my Princes were good guys. It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have an evil Prince--and then along came Cabroro, Prince of the Xiil!
This kid is every bit as bad as his looks are good: proud, arrogant, entitled, aggressive, vindictive--and dangerously intelligent. Prince Cabroro belongs to one of a pair of rival, secret civilizations that live deep in the Amazon rain forests of South America. They are advanced, possessed of technologies to rival Esteban Vega and Graeme Grimstead themselves. And they are isolationists, living outside of the civilizations of the rest of the world, but routinely spying on us to ensure we pose them no threat.
How did these cryptic cultures get that way? Well, science is aware that there are natural resources in the Amazon rain forest that have gone yet undiscovered and untapped by the nations of the “civilized” world--things with miraculous properties that could cure otherwise fatal or crippling diseases and transform the quality of human life, if only they were not destroyed by the short-sightedness of the world’s governments and corporations. One such is the wondrous Rumutu plant. The roots of the Rumutu can enhance the human body, improving a person’s ability to accrue lean muscle, increasing the endurance and resistance to pain, boosting the immune system, healing diseases and disorders, even preventing birth defects and harmful mutations. The flowers of the Rumutu affect the brain, the nervous system, and the intelligence. Extracts from Rumutu flowers sharpen the cognitive functions, the memory, and the reflexes, and enhance the health of the brain itself. Users of Rumutu can become borderline-superhuman.
The Rumutu plant is one of the best-kept secrets in the world, a secret known only to two hidden Amazon tribes, the benevolent Paramati and the aggressive Xiil (pronounced “zeal”)--until one day when an expedition from America, led by the scientific visionary Esteban Vega, comes to the Amazon seeking biological secrets that might help man in his conquest of space (and which could have saved Esteban’s late wife Rosita, Lucky’s mother, who died of cancer). Esteban, his son Lucky, and their companions stumble upon the two tribes and their secret, which sets off a dangerous rivalry between young Lucky and the proud, arrogant Prince of the Xiil tribe! It’s a rivalry that leads to the fall and expulsion of a Prince--and the Prince’s deadly vow of revenge. We’ll learn more about that in the next post of Quantum Comics Blog.
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