Deimos

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speaker-to-trolls
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Deimos

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

I was going to do a full rewrite of this character, but all the information is there and I don't really have time or know how I'd go about it. The important thing is that since he's in Heroes and Villains he is now official, so he can officially be used in conjunction with other things.

Presenting.

Deimos
Biography

In the west of Africa, in a region of dense jungle in what those concerned with such things as nations today call Cameroon, the man who would be called Deimos was born. His father, and the men with whom his father consorted, were not concerned with nations. Nor with any such arbitrary, European ideas, save those which could be adapted to their purposes. They were a brotherhood of sorcerers, witchdoctors, shamans. They were those who wielded a power beyond that of normal men, which made a mockery of ordinary skill and science. They had their own secret name, spoken only in the most solemn of ceremonies, but for more common usage, where it might be heard by outsiders, they called themselves the Ghost Tree.

Deimos’ father was a powerful man in this secret alliance of magicians, forged in the last two hundred years out of the nebulous connections which had existed between such men for eons, and by their standards he was modern. Nevertheless, Deimos was frustrated by his father’s loyalty to ancient traditions which failed, consistently, to solve the problem which had gnawed at his father like a vicious and insistent insect since before he was born, the beasts of the red zones.

The red zones haunted his father’s territory, named for the evil red plants that seemed to resist all efforts to clean them, burned to the touch, destroyed all other plants and would kill men or animals while they slept. Still, these plants could, with great care, be controlled to some degree, ceaseless work by many shamans had made it possible to lessen their vigour and influence their growth. But the beasts that haunted the red zones, burning those who fought them and taking others away to some unknown fate, so untouchable the local people now left them young men and women as sacrifices, these were another matter.

The boy was both horrified and fascinated by these strange creatures, wishing to know more about them, that he might understand and control what so vexed his father. But as he grew older he saw that the ancient rituals practiced by his elders had no hold on the creatures. Still, he knew they must have some weakness that could be exploited by magic, and as he worked ceaselessly for his father within the Ghost Tree’s twisted and ages-thick canopy of political and familial alliances, the beasts were ever at the back of his mind. For fifteen years following his thirteenth birthday he did his father’s bidding among his own people within the forest and among his fellow shamans in their jungle strongholds. He learned much of the intricate politics of the Ghost Tree, and was himself integral in the struggles between its various factions, lending his innate wit and intuitive power to the wisdom and knowledge of his elders. It was only after fifteen years, though, that his father, old and hard and respected if not liked, and his allies, believed the young man fit for a special task, to go west and tour the cities and gather support for their faction.

Among the thronging cities of the west, that faced the coast, the rivers and the hills, the man from the forest saw things he could scarcely believe existed, and met others of his brotherhood utterly different from those he had known. Still, he was not to be overwhelmed by the experience, and indeed, his keen mind allowed him to impress even the city witches as he recounted to them his father’s goals and plans. He was impressed by the strange ingenuity of his urban brothers and sisters, and the huge scale of the society which they could guide and draw their strength from. This, he saw, was what his father meant when he spoke of the great mass of their people whom the Ghost Tree sheltered.

But this was new territory for his people’s traditions, almost as unlike the cities of the old West African kingdoms as they were unlike the simple and sparse dwellings of his own people. The huge, chaotic, sprawling hives of humanity, with so many traditions and ideas thrown haphazardly together, had no precedent. The potential power and diversity of magic to be found in these places was enormous, but it had to be ordered and deciphered by a calmer mind. Here he also came face to face with the agents of the European powers, and many times locked horns with the pestilential white men who sought to control or ruin his brotherhood.

It was also in the cities that he learned how he might defeat and control the red beasts.

He had known already what the red beasts might be; he knew of the War of the Worlds, and that a small group of the alien creatures had, towards its end, come to his country. It was not difficult to surmise that the red beasts that plagued him might be those same creatures. It did not seem important. But it was in the cities that he learned more, how the Martians had sustained themselves by transfusing human blood into their own bodies, and how the ancient spells of controlling people through blood might be adapted to suit this knowledge.

After five long years forging bonds which, in days still distant, he would need more than he could possibly know, he returned to his own lands, announcing to his fellow shamans a bold plan. He had concocted a mixture, based on ancient spells, which would allow him to control any creature that imbibed it, he would give this to some of the victims due to be sent to meet the Martians. Once the red beasts took up the victim’s blood, he and the shamans of the Ghost Tree would at last have power over them.

Furious indignation and anger met his proposal. This was folly, this was insolence of the worst kind, this was a perversion and a mockery of all their traditions, this was evil, this was an idea suited to a white man in its ignorance and arrogance.

Then, at the third council which he managed, with great pains, to arrange to listen to him, one of the eldest shamans, an ally of his father who was known as the Old Grey Spider, spoke up, to everyone’s astonishment. ‘Nonetheless,’ he said ‘it may work.’

His endeavour was still not popular, but with the Old Spider’s support he at least gained the backing of his father’s faction, enough to begin his work. Opposition was staunch, and if he should fail his faction would be struck a serious blow, and his father would have no choice but to cast him out in shame.

With trepidation they sent their victims out to meet the monsters, eyes dull and unthinking in a strange kind of mercy brought on as a side effect of the drug. For four days they sat in their circle, forsaking all other concerns as their relatives and zombies kept watch over them. Two of his band collapsed from the strain of constant ritual performance, but it was ordered they be left in the circle, since to move the bodies could disrupt the magic. On the fourth day, as the sun reached the centre of the sky at noon, the undergrowth trembled at the tread of a strange, metal beast. It approached the circle meekly, ignoring the panic of the shaman’s guards, and opened to reveal a creature of sinuous tentacles and huge, wet eyes that came forward, feebly reaching for its masters. The man who had hatched this daring plan touched the creatures tentacles, and though he did not know the beast’s tongue, a name came to him through the link between minds created by his spell.

Lord Deimos.


That had been the name of the beast’s master, the man smiled, it seemed only appropriate for him to assume it.

The Old Spider had been proved right, and he nodded slightly to Deimos as they faced one another across the circle, it could work.

It could easily be thought that Deimos’ task would become easier with this first and greatest obstacle, that of finding a way to locate and control the Martians, had been overcome, but in truth his challenges had only just begun. His lone Martian captive was able to give him cryptic, mute and confused information on the whereabouts and abilities of its fellows, and he knew that he had to act with great subtlety to avoid the Martians learning of his activities and motives. The sacrifices had to continue, that he could continue to sneak more of his drugs into the blood of the aliens, that he could gradually and painstakingly draw more and more of them under his power.

Even so, there were setbacks, many setbacks. Eventually he grew too bold, ordering his alien slaves away from their base for too long, and the village which had provided him with sacrifices paid for his arrogance, burned to ash as befits livestock stricken by an infectious disease. By this time, though, Deimos had already brought several of the Martians he had bewitched to join him, taking measures to trick their fellows into believing them dead. It was only the presence of these creatures that allowed him to continue his quest to defeat and master the remaining Martians, as they proved able to aid him with their expertise and knowledge of the their people’s ways. Even so, their minds were addled by drugs and their physical and mental condition deteriorated with every day they were forced to rely upon Deimos’ crude approximations of their own technology.

For years Deimos fought his long, subtle battle against the Martians, all the while balancing his slow war against the equally subtle, equally deadly demands of the Ghost Tree’s politics. The great struggle, as in almost all groups, was between old and new, but the points of contention were more numerous and more subtle than this, and many had to do with his own endeavour. There were times when he saw his duty within the Tree as a taxing, frustrating distraction. Nevertheless with the aid of his father and the weighty word of the Old Spider, he was able to win valuable support in his own lands, and as long as he did not neglect the connections he himself had made in the west, his faction grew stronger yet. His retinue gradually grew longer, bringing shamanic techniques even his exhaustive searches had never encountered. He learned new ways to manipulate the red weed, to use it to locate Martians and to gain increasing understanding of their alien minds, to control its growth more fully than anyone before him. He made use of those lost souls who had become infected by the weed, who wandered the jungles, woods and plains with vicious scarlet tendrils creeping beneath their skin. He discerned the means of controlling such sad creatures, making them his proxies and informants, and he learned to draw Martians out through them by the rules of like-attracts-like that govern all magic.

Through ceaseless effort, endless cunning adaptation of ritual, through a hundred slow battles, with the blood of ten thousand innocent sacrifices and the ashes of half a dozen villages, he wore the Martians down. He surrounded himself with a diverse company of sorcerers, coming from the deepest jungles all the way to the heart of the Congo, from the villages that had once been the seats of mighty kings, from the cities where ancient lore had bred with new science. With armed guards bound to him by mystic oaths and by weed that wound its way beneath their skin. With an ever growing cabal of slick skinned, snake limbed Martians, hideous fish-mouths ever slightly open and huge eyes blank with the half-waking stupor of the addict and the zombie. He became a figure of renown even beyond the shadowy canopy of the Ghost Tree. His power was known in half a dozen nations, and he was known as a myth, the Master of Martians. Though he had little contact with those outside the Tree, and his instincts as a shaman prevented him from divulging any more than necessary to mundane people, he made an effort to ensure that there was at least a rumour of his benevolence, that people knew he protected his people against the aliens.

Never insignificant, Deimos grew to become one of the greatest and sturdiest branches of the Ghost Tree, yet even he was not strong enough to ignore the wind that came in the last years of the 20th century, howling out of a wound in the very heart of Africa, carrying with it the stench of rotting death.

Mustafa Crimson seemed to emerge from nowhere in the strange summer of 1999, and with an almost supernatural speed he gathered a vile army that seemed to swallow up all the most violent and malignant forces in Africa. When his men, accompanied by shambling dead things compelled to walk by evil magic, by unidentifiable ghostly monsters and by grinning witchdoctors from tribes scarcely seen by anyone beyond their own dark realms, the Ghost Tree was unnerved. The unsettling aspect of these creatures was not enough, at first, to overcome the indignation that the shamans of the Ghost Tree felt toward this upstart from the east. They had rivals in Africa aplenty, but petty warlords assisted by freakish pygmies were not to be counted among them. They bought and sold such men by the dozen, they were weapons and tools to be used in contests between men of real importance. So they thought, at first.

That was before Crimson showed them his power, making an example of a score of the Ghost Tree’s eldest shamans, including Deimos’ father and his most trusted ally, the Old Spider. Each of them was slain in his own home, surrounded by guards and spells of warding, some only after terrible battles that left the lands around them burnt and cursed, others died barely giving a sign that they had passed. The Ghost Tree was a huge and fractious body, but within a year of his meteoric ascent to power the greater part of the Tree’s core, the old shamans of the forests and far flung villages, had either surrendered to Crimson or had retreated to strongholds of their own. Perhaps surprisingly, Deimos found himself among the former category.

Deimos had initially prepared himself to wage war against Crimson, to rally the Ghost Tree around himself and lead them into battle against the vile colonel and his Mwami sorceries, but, oddly, he was warned against such actions by none other than the Old Spider’s son, Nedo. The Young Spider, who had returned from an envoy to the city of Port Harcourt as soon as he heard the dreadful news, warned him that the Colonel was too distant and powerful to strike and the Ghost Tree too fractious to level such a blow, as of yet. The two of them, the sons of Crimson’s victims, would have to wait, prepare themselves and gather their strength, until they could at last strike at the Colonel, or they would fair no better than had their fathers.

In the meantime, Crimson took an interest in Deimos’ mission to find the last of the Martians. His own sorcerers knew something of the red weed and the creatures who walked with it, though the breadth of their powers could not hope to match his own. Immediately Deimos saw that he alone had an advantage, and he and his servants began immediately to examine all they knew of the alien plants and the creatures who tended to them to find whatever advantage they could over the accursed Mwami’s. Drawing on all his expertise, and with the sacrifice of several of his degraded but valuable Martian servitors, Deimos learned a control of the plants and the latent spirits of dead Mars so intimate, so fine, that even he had never believed it possible.

While Deimos did all this, balancing it against his efforts to find allies among the shamans who had remained in their territory, Crimson sent his own man to oversee the hunt for the last Martians. The huge, handsome, genially cruel man who called himself Colonel Cobra quickly earned Deimos’ loathing by his casual and brutal authority, his flippant pleasure in displaying power through the infliction of pain. They were traits, Deimos thought, which the two serpents shared, to see pain as its own goal, and he hated both of them for it. He knew that he had committed horrors, and he believed it his right to do so, but his had been for a purpose, for knowledge, for power, and even, ultimately, for the guidance of his people.

Nevertheless, he was forced to work with Cobra, and he had to admit that the man’s resources were useful, even if his methods were crude and he grew to hate the man a little more with each tribesman he tortured for information, each patch of forest he destroyed by fire. It seemed that, between them, they were indeed closing in on the Martian’s primary base, and it was as they approached it that Deimos extracted from Cobra a promise, reinforced by blood magic and the consumption of red weed, that when they found the base Deimos would have his fair share, half the material they found there.

On the day they found the primary Martian base, the culmination of the task at which Deimos and his father had strived for their whole lives, it rained. The ground turned to mud beyond the gleaming perimeter of rock and metal that surrounded the Martian’s cave, the gunfire of Cobra’s men competed with the roar of the clattering raindrops, the Martian heatrays cut through the air like swords of mist, and men and vehicles steamed even as they were set alight. The battle was long, it was bloody, and many a man and Martian died because of Cobra’s foolishness, or perhaps, as Deimos thought more likely, he preferred a battle to bring as much pain and death as it could. Martian technology, tenacity and hatred battled with Cobra’s savagery, the dark magic of the Mwamis and Deimos’ subtle enchantments that struck at them through their shared connection with the very spirit of long lost Mars. Eventually the aliens were forced to yield the stronghold that had sheltered them for almost a hundred years.

Amongst the wreckage the two men began to divide the spoils; what little technology Cobra had left intact, and the few Martians that who had survived and who had been bound and locked in iron cages. As they looked over the wreckage, Cobra drew his gun, and told Deimos that he would have to take his fair share, in the next life. Deimos threw a curse at Cobra, but found even his connection to the red weed blocked by the powers of the Mwamis with wards he did not have the time to overcome. Fortunately for him the brutish man was wounded and exhausted, and only hit him in the leg as he dove for cover. Furthermore, the battle had been far harsher on the men who followed Cobra’s brash and bloodthirsty leadership than those under his more cautious command, and he was able to escape, despite all the efforts of the Mwamis to halt him.

It was now, Deimos knew, that his time in Crimson’s good graces had passed, and he was glad of the chance to finally begin his war against his father’s killer and the upstart who had sought to undermine his order. He sent his most trusted allies to rally his followers from all over Africa and prepare for the coming war. But Cobra, now armed with the power of the Martian weapons and styling himself Black Mars, was faster. His first strike, which seared through the jungles of Deimos’ home, was terrifying in its swiftness, striking down his allies almost anywhere they raised their heads and burning whatever red zones they thought he might have power over. The strike did not remove all of Deimos’ followers, by any means, and the guerrilla warfare in that region rages to this day, but it forced Deimos to retreat, into the west, where the allies he had made among what his people had dismissed as the outer branches of the Ghost Tree were ready to receive him.

He had cultivated those alliances with careful attention, and by now they were the least touched by the schemes of Crimson and his subordinates and the least willing to be. Moreover, anyone who might have been a source of weakness to be exploited by the dire Colonel was quickly sought out and dispatched by Deimos and his allies. For those that remained, the threat of Crimson’s domination was one that galvanised their desire for unity, not only among his brethren, but among other occultists, warlords, tribal leaders and even politicians and powerbrokers of every kind. He spoke to all who would listen in the years that followed about his desire for unity, his desire to help them, whoever they might be, to retain their own sovereignty. He spoke of the menace of the Martians, which he had subdued, of the menace of ‘rogue’ shamans, his enemies who he had destroyed, of the menace of foreign imperialists seeking to break the hard-won independence of African nations. But most of all he spoke of the menace of Crimson, whose agents lurked behind every rock and tree, within every rock and tree, his soldiers ever beyond the horizon or behind the mountains.

He assured all his allies that it was he, and he alone who was best suited to lead them against this greatest menace. It was, after all, he who had conquered the red infection of Mars, it was only fitting that the festering crimson cancer should be the next to fall before his power.

Abilities and Weaknesses

Deimos is a gifted with an sharp, adaptable mind and an innate understanding of the mystical forces of the world which puts older and wiser men to shame. This has been combined with a furious sense of purpose which has compelled him to learn all he could of many different disciplines of African magic, and even a little of foreign, European techniques when he has been able to adapt it to his own purpose. Over the years he has learned to control people through the use of drugs, blood magic and various forms of hypnosis, as well as his own particular and almost irresistible techniques based upon the red weed.

The red weed is, today, the source of almost all his power. The wards he uses to defend himself against curses from Crimson’s Mwami shamans, are based upon drawing strength from the latent spirit of Mars buried within the alien plant, combined with and bound to his own will. He can also, by allowing the weed to grow over and draw the vitality away from its victims, trap their spirits, their memories and minds, within the plant, to be called up as he wills. He can also make the plant grow or recede as he wishes, and use its life-draining, malicious power to sap the strength from his enemies through his own person (as it is said he has infested himself with the plant) or to make it infect and grow within people, lending them strength or killing them from within as he sees fit. His power over a number of Martians, whom he has slaved to his own will using a variety of rituals and drugs, has also given him access to their memories of their own technology, and by combining this with his power over the weed he is literally able to grow crude approximations of Martian machinery. These organic versions of ‘fighting machines’, ‘building machines’ and other such contraptions are unreliable, although he has at least had great success in producing the deadly black smoke, something which a number of his enemies have found to their cost.

As Black Mars and Colonel Crimson will constantly remind their followers; for all his power, Deimos is a man, and not only a man but a man now pushing 55 years of age and with a wound in his leg from which he has never recovered. They insist that he can still be killed, if only an assassin could get close enough to him.

Occupation and Relationships

Deimos considers himself the de facto master of the Ghost Tree, an order of African magicians which has existed for almost two hundred years to give a measure of cohesion to the disparate wielders of supernatural power across the west of the continent. In truth the amount of control he wields over it is difficult to gauge, since doing so first requires one to determine who is truly a member of the brotherhood, but in any case he has the respect and allegiance of a great many magicians throughout Africa. His followers are widely dispersed, but his greatest power these days is in the coastal nations of West Africa, in particular in Nigeria. Ever a forward thinking man, Deimos was one of those who made sure that the branches of the Ghost Tree remained in touch with the rich and powerful, and his allies and agents have the ears of many in positions of authority. His most trusted lieutenants within the brotherhood are Nebo Uchekwe, the Young Spider, an old and extremely experienced shaman who has stood by his side through many trials, and Mazi Owoh, the most respected witch in the great city of Port Fortune and the cornerstone of Deimos’ support in many other cities.

He has added to the advantages of his well placed friends by making himself a friend of the rich and poor alike in West Africa, a task which he began with his quest to control the red weed and defeat the Martians and which has become much easier with the arrival of Mustafa Crimson. The Colonel is a powerful man, wealthy and terrible, but his savagery has earned him more enemies and resentful vassals than friends. Deimos has exploited the threat of Crimson to make himself indispensible to many as their only hope of defending against the Serpent of Africa’s depredations; thus there are villages who are happy to tend his gardens of red weed for him, and it is he who trains the President of Nigeria’s witch-bodyguards. In many places he is considered a hero, while in others he is grudgingly acknowledged as too useful and too powerful to be worth fighting.

This is not to say that Deimos has no African enemies, far from it. A number of politicians have spoken out against him, in some cases at considerable personal risk, and such prominent figures as Nelson Mandela have decried his methods as sorcerous strongmanism, little better than that of Crimson. There have also been a number of African superheroes who have opposed him and sought to fight against his interests through various means, as well as splinter groups of the Ghost Tree opposed to his power monopolisation and heterodox methods. Then, of course, there is Crimson, who sees in him a considerable thorn in his paw, and the warlord known as Black Mars, who blames Deimos’ magic for the fate which has befallen him.

While Deimos hates Crimson and his servants more than anything else on Earth, his hatred and resentment of the European and American powers is also formidable, and he has resisted all attempts which they have made to aid the African nations, particularly in the matter of bringing Crimson to justice. This has brought him into conflict with many Euro-American groups, notably including the Wayward Son, the Awesome Archwind, various agents of the GLS (Guild of Light and Shadow) and regular UN and British Intelligence and RACKET forces. He has also at one point come into conflict with the Tellurian, an apolitical difference based upon the Guardian of Earth’s disapproval of his use of the red weed.

The UN and various other organisations have alternated and disagreed over whether to attempt to bring Deimos to trial for his various crimes against humanity (which are known, if not proven, and which he still carries out against his enemies) or to attempt to make common ground with him against Crimson. Unfortunately he has been uncooperative toward both ends and is sufficiently important to many local governments that extracting him is difficult, in fact he was until recently on the GLS’ official supervillain register, but was removed due to protests by no less than 5 African governments (he is, however, still very much on the unofficial register).

This is all to say nothing of his conflicts with the less legitimate forces of imperialism. Deimos’ forces have many times come to blows with members of Saintly Concerns and the EVIL Corporation, who have attempted to ply their unwholesome trade in his territory, and he has made a good many friends by attempting to stamp out the presence of foreign mercenaries and bandits in Africa.
"Little monuments may be completed by their first architects, but great ones; true ones leave their copestones to posterity. God keep me from completing anything."
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Shroom Man 777
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Re: Deimos

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I love this. This has gotten great comments in the Character Concepts threads, so yeah, it's awesome. But one of the things I love about this is that it not only describes the character and his story, but its also an exercise in worldbuilding since through Deimos we see all sorts of stuff in Comix Africa.

And I must commend you Speaker, the crazy Comix Africa you've sculpted is great. Who on Earth would think of going all voodoo with Martians and Red Weed? Man, that's bloody genius.
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"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
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