#browncoatmando

@ockissweek

A friend of mine over on deviantart has created a whole set of G.I. Joe OCs

"…And he found himself flat on his back with Luchenko kneeling on his chest and her arm pressed down across his throat. That next unplanned but somehow not entirely unexpected moment when their lips, dry, cracked and bleeding, met surprised both of them, this made weeks of rivalry, competition and mutual verbal abuse irrelevant."

Caught

Angela Koenig and Alexander Steiner.

She's a merc with the Black Diamonds, he's a journalist and they met during her work in North Africa.

I was born a child of the dust like everyone else at home.   The thick red- brown sand gets everywhere, in your hair and clothes most importantly your lungs which is why we all wear tinted goggles and masks.  The mountains were tapped out years ago leaving us all to scratch out a living from the rocks, always baking under a clear blue sky that never sees a rainy day.   That’s what happens when an industry dies, a boom town gone bust, except an entire planet no one really bothers with anymore. No ships, no trade, no one to buy what little we can scrape out.  

My world is a desert stripped bare of anything of worth, I made my own way in it once with a pair of guns on my belt, a long coat on my back. With a hunting rifle in my saddlebag and a mask on my face.  I was a hunter- man or beast, I tracked them both on behalf of various parties.  Money isn’t much good so you work for the simple things like food, water or a roof over your head for a few days.

Where are we in relation to humanity’s birthplace, the world our ancestors left behind? The usual answer is “Three to the left.”

Are we really three systems away? - Couldn’t tell you, I was born long after the ships stopped coming.   Left?  No, Space doesn’t have any directions.

Space doesn’t have any life either. None that talks anyway, we use local critters since this rock wasn’t kind to Earth animals.

We call them “Stick Camels” they’re sorta like horses but a lot hairier and with six double jointed legs instead of four. ‘Stick’ is local slang- means leg so now you know where they got the name.  Can climb anything, live off nothing- perfect for this kind of place.

Interesting story how I got him- won a card game… But that’s another story for another time.  The story I want to tell all of you is about the Wasteland, the vast emptiness between the scattered towns.   We got animals out there too- shifter lizards, the birds that eat ‘em and whatever else they can find.

We call shifter lizards that because they change colors to hide against their background. That doesn’t always work. When they get cornered they get real loud trying to scare off whatever wants to eat it.  They also bite, they got teeth like needles. I got scars on the back of my hand from playing with one as a kid.  

You got all the background you need so on to the story…

It starts the day I went out to the wasteland to hunt a rad-slug.  

Near as we can tell they live in the deep veins- the stuff we can’t get to miles deep, crawling through the rock with an acid slime they leave behind them. You see the big ones up here on occasion- we all know to avoid them though. We call them Rad-slugs for a reason, we get all our minerals and such from food- they pull theirs right out of the rock and they really like uranium leaving them slightly radioactive.

This was a big one- probably thirty feet long, leaving a smoking furrow behind as it slid along.  This particular rad slug was hanging around, getting a little too close to a town- can’t have that.  

I was standing on a rock aiming down the scope of my rifle. One shot in the right spot later and it was taken care of, I just left it behind- nothing out here anyway, don’t need to worry about the radioactivity. Maybe somebody with the proper protection could do something with it.  

The shot echoed, the sound bouncing off the other spires.   Everything else out here is flat, makes them stand out that much more.  Something about that made me nervous, I looked around staring out the mesas somewhere off in the distance.   The echo eventually died out and I heard something else- heard Shifter lizards letting out quite a racket.

I knew something was up when the Shifter lizards got going.   I put my rifle back in the saddle and pulled my revolvers.   I waited there for probably ten minutes before the Shifters calmed down and I headed on my way, still a little rattled.  

My Camel climbed almost vertically down the side of this spire. We hit the soft sand and I looked back for just a second at the trail we left. The wind was already rubbing out the footprints. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong and that feeling stuck with me as I took the long way around.

Doing that took us into the setting sun, some might call the golden light on the red brown sand pretty but all I could think was that the temperature must have dropped about fifteen degrees in the few hours it took me to get back, I could see the tall shadows of buildings on the horizon. Just a few but enough to tell me I wasn’t alone anymore. I was headed somewhere safer and knowing that made some of my bad feelings go away but only some, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone behind me, I looked around and didn’t see anything.

It used to be a city of 50,000 people. It’s since dwindled down to about 8,000.   It was still a big adjustment every time I went into town.  I grew up in a town of about 500 people, and spent most of my time in the wastes.  I still need to go into them every so often- especially to get paid.  It was well after dark by the time I got there, no light but the moon, the shadows from decaying skyscrapers towering over me, my camel was getting just a little jittery and I’m not ashamed to say I felt the same way, though that was fading the closer I got to what passes for civilization in these parts.  

I was alone, no one in the towns, or anywhere on this rock heads out after dark if you can avoid it.   Don’t want to be stuck out there alone either.   I headed toward the only lights on.  

It doesn’t have a name, doesn’t need one it’s the only place for miles around that takes in travelers, certainly the only one in town.   It’s pretty run down and dirty, food’s not so great but it’s a roof, a room and some water.  The owner’s an enterprising kind of guy, figured out how to pump groundwater, uses solar panels and batteries to run the place and power something near miraculous- an ice machine.

I walked in and traded a pocketful of scrap I found a while back for a tin plate full of some stringy meat, I figured it was better not to ask what exactly, and couple cellar grown potatoes.  Here’s the important part I also got a message “There’s somebody wants to talk to you. Out back.”

Being the idiot I was I finished and headed out thinking this about was the rad-slug.  I was wrong.

He stood in shadow, a scarf around his neck and wearing a coat like mine but a little shorter and a ragged sand colored cloak over his shoulders. He had a wide brimmed hat pulled down over his face, I could see he wore tinted lenses over his eyes. Night vision maybe.   He looked like trouble and any doubts I had disappeared when one of his hands curled into fists, knuckles poking through the cut out fingers.  “Been tracking you for days… found you now…” He snarled, reaching his right hand into his coat, looked like he was going for a knife.  

No time to go for my gun so I launched a flurry of punches at his midsection only to hear them all bounce off something hard and metallic- why was this guy wearing body armor and night vision, where’d he get it?   That thought didn’t last long. I just switched targets aiming for his head and face.    He blocked every one of them, and swung an open hand at my neck. I brought my hand up at the last second.  He tried again using an old street fighter’s trick aiming his open palms at my ears.  I dropped and wheeled around him with my coat swirling around me my fists aimed for the back of his knees.

That’s when things got ugly.   He stumbled when my fists connected but he had the chance to pull his knife. A real beast of a blade, a foot long with a serrated edge. Mine’s nothing like that- mine’s a Bowie half that size.

I pulled mine anyway- I had no doubt this guy was trying to kill me but I wasn’t gonna make it easy for him.  We both froze for a second watching each other, trying to figure out our next move.  Knife fighting is completely different than your fists or a gun. You’ve really got to commit to it, nobody walks away without getting hurt.  Out in the dust a deep cut can go septic and kill you real quick, real easy.

He made the first move, counting on his armor to save him.   I sidestepped and we circled again, ready for another go, he shifted his weight to his back foot, ready to charge me again. He didn’t get the chance.  Neither of us had said anything so the voice that boomed out caught us both by surprise.

“HOLD! You aren’t actually trying to kill him…”  A gravelly baritone rumbled out of the shadows. “Sorry boss…” The knife wielding nut who’d just tried to kill me put the blade back in his coat and shuffled off into the dark as “Boss” stepped out into the light.

“My apologies for the rude introduction. I’m Charlie Boone and you, Ansel Nash, come highly recommended. You’re exactly the man we need for a job I’m planning.   Don’t act so surprised. I asked around… in my line of work it pays to be informed.”

He stopped, giving me a minute to study him.  He wasn’t a big man, average height and weight, midlength hair and a beard covering up facial scars, a few of them continued down to his throat and the scarf around his neck didn’t do the best job covering them up.  He wore a beat up brown coat over a long sleeved shirt, knee pads and tall steel toed boots and I could see a foot long knife and monster handgun on his belt.  He kept his hands at his side but I could tell he was ready to shoot me dead if he had to, I knew he could see the same from me.

“You mean thieving?  Nothing here worth stealing. You should know that bein’ a child of the dust.”

His answer told me I was wrong about that too.

“I’m not one of you. You have no idea of the universe beyond the dust… do you even know your own world’s name?   No one comes here, exactly why they went to the deep desert. Not even locals go there correct?”

“You’d have to be crazy.”  That short answer summed it up but there were still some things I was trying to think over.  

“Then I’m crazy.” He smiled a little bit “I’ve been called worse. This is worth a little risk… We pull this off and we’re rich beyond all our dreams. You can get off this rock, never have to work again. The ‘they’ here are the ones who are going to be guarding our prize.    That’s where you come in. We’re running on rumors and need information.  If anyone can survive out there and give us what us what we need it’s you, especially since we’re giving you supplies, we’re not going to just drop you in the middle of nowhere.”

“Appreciate that.”  I grumbled “You need to tell me more.”    I’ll admit, the thought of getting out of here and living out my days rich and prosperous was tempting. Boone just nodded and said “Come with me then. You have my word no harm will come to you so long as you don’t bring it on yourself. If I had wanted you dead you would’ve been dead a long time ago. I think you need a little geography lesson.”

I followed him, keeping my hands on my guns, he didn’t wait for me to answer before he started talking.

“Your world is one of three inhabited planets in this system.  The other two worlds, mine included see it as a backwater and not worth their time, not for the last seventy or so years.   My home was one of several nations that developed in the years since we lost contact with Earth. We were the last to hold out against an aggressive one that wanted the whole planet.  They got it and now we have nothing except revenge.  How or if we get it sort of depends on you.”

“Need the story first.  Wanna be smart about this.” My eyes narrowed a little bit, I did the same working the details of any job. Helps if the other guy is a little off balance, tend to get better deals that way. “That’s fair.”  He didn’t look at me, keeping his eyes on the broken road until we got to an open space near one of the old skyscrapers. That wasn’t the important part of the landscape- I saw a dark shape sitting in the shadows, she was something I’d dreamed of since was a kid- something I’d only seen in books.

“She isn’t pretty, she isn’t fast but she gets the job done. Kept us safe for the month it took us to get here.”  He said that like a man talking about a prized stick camel or his truck (We’re poor but not savages.)

She was the first spaceworthy vessel I’d ever seen. She wasn’t much, just some old broken down ore hauler with the ramp into the cargo hold down.  I followed him in, no sound but our boots on the rusty metal floor.  I don’t remember but I may have had a stupid grin on my face the whole time.

Hard to see from the inside but near as I could tell, she was about 100 feet long, a rusty old tub with stubby engines, not meant for speed but for mass, carrying a lot of cargo a long way so long as you weren’t in a hurry to get there.

I looked around, pays to have information in my line of work too.    Saw a half dozen guys all wearing raggedy clothes and body armor, carrying guns. Didn’t see knife nut though, must’ve had something else to do - he’s back in the story later.

“So where’d you get her?” I asked. I don’t like quiet, get enough of that out in the dust.

“I told you my planet wasn’t united. Both sides traded with that third party world and left us to manage our own business.  Needed ships for that. We stole this bucket on our way out.  Think she has one more trip left in her. That’s fine with us, we have nothing to go back home to. ”

“And you’re looking for revenge.” I reminded him.

“So we are.  Like I was telling you, they came to the deep desert, the “they” here is men loyal to a government official from the nation that conquered our home.   According to rumors he’s got a stash out there somewhere.  We’re going to steal it, ruin him and escape with enough money to retire.  We need you to confirm some of those stories.   Need information- how many men guarding the place, locations and such.   We have a month’s worth of supplies, 3 weeks of which we all need to feed ourselves on the final stage of our trip.”

“The deep desert with supplies you give me…”  I thought out loud, reminding myself of the situation here.

I was thinking this over already. More than just the money, I wasn’t sold on that, they didn’t know themselves if there was any to be had.

“You have the night to decide, two days of travel and two days to watch before come get you.”    

I jumped in, correcting him on the local geography.

“It’ll take me more than two days to get there, the deep desert is hundreds of miles from here, called “Deep” for a good reason. Best to drop us off nearby, give me a day to travel there, give me two days to watch and we go from there. You need me, I know this place better than you do and if I’m going to be a part of this I expect to have a say.”

He just nodded “That’s fair to us both. We help you help us, for an equal share of our prize.  It sounds like you’ll be joining us then.” He kept any sort of emotion off his face and out of his voice.

“I didn’t say that.”   I kept all the emotion from mine.  I didn’t give him an answer but my brain was already saying “yes.”  

“You have the night to decide, as I said. Though you may want to go up to the pilot’s chair and consult our maps. They might help you, I can’t guarantee that they’re 100% accurate so you may want to help us update them as well.”

“Better than nothing.”  I walked off toward the front of the ship, once again looking for info. I found it, knife nut sitting in a threadbare old chair staring out the window at the ruined city around us.  He heard me coming, his hand drifted to his knife. Twitchy, not sure that’s a good thing, but you gotta trust your instincts.  He and I shared that.

“Your boss sent me up here to take a look at your maps.” I told him and he just nodded, hitting a button on the controls.   What happened next almost knocked me flat.   They took it for granted but seeing a projection of a solar system projected from the ceiling was almost a miracle.  Three planets and their moons became just one image, my planet and her moon, zooming in further to show what little they had on the deep desert.    The projection was blue and crackly but had a huge amount of detail, much more than anything on paper.  Knife Nut(I learned his name later on but it isn’t important to the story) smacked the panel and the crackling stopped.  

“What you’re looking at is the area where our info tells us the cache is. We can’t get down there to know for sure. Like the boss told you that’s why we need you.”   He read like a pretty good guy now that he wasn’t trying to kill me anymore.    I studied the images, I’ve always been pretty good at keeping a map in my head. That’s a survival skill out in the dust too.

“Gimme the whole solar system.”  I had a couple questions- I also wanted to see it again.  I wanted to remember in case this didn’t turn out.

He hit another button and I saw all three planets again. “Explain something to me- took you a month to get here but it’s only gonna take you three weeks to get where we’re all going. How does that work?”

“It all has to do with orbital mechanics- don’t quite understand all the math myself.” He dismissed it with a hand wave.

“Where’d you get this tub anyway, you managed to store a couple months of food, how’d you manage that?”   I asked one of my questions.

“We had been planning this for a long time, we knew we couldn’t hold out when our enemies came calling,  this tub was supposed to carry us and our leaders out to that other planet the boss was telling you about. No one would notice a broken down old ore hauler running away.

We didn’t see it coming, we were on a mission when the nuke fell on the capital, killed our leaders and a lot of innocent people. It was all over in just a couple days and we just ran, barely made it to the secret hangar where we were keeping here. We lost everything…”

His voice was sad, pretty clear there was something he wasn’t telling me. Guessing he and his had lost his family too but I didn’t push it, I had everything I needed to know. So I just turned around and left, promising to give them an answer in the morning.

I got back and headed up the stairs toward my room.   I needed a roof over my head for the night,  I didn’t think the other guys had a reason to hurt me but I wasn’t totally comfortable around a bunch of strangers I’d just met.

I spent my night without much sleep, thinking about my choices. I could help a bunch of men I didn’t know get revenge in a cause I had nothing to do with. Or I could stay here and live out whatever was left of my life doing nothing, choking on dust hunting rad slugs and men trying to make a life like I was, just going about it the wrong way.   Wasn’t an easy answer. As much as I hated it sometimes it was still home and homes are never easy to leave behind.

This one though, this was home only because I’d made it that way, maybe it was time for a child of the dust to grow up.   No one here would care if I lived or died, I had no family and my name would blow away with the dust. The more I thought about it the more I realized I had nothing to lose either. I had a home but no reason to stay there, these guys had nothing to go back to, no home. That made us alike in a way, gave me a good reason to help them.  

I made my decision and finally fell asleep, waking up when the sun came streaming in through the dirty glass window.  I reached for my goggles, pulled my coat and guns on and headed downstairs, I had a meeting I needed to get to.

I walked with my camel following behind me, they’re smarter than you might think.  I was in, I pounded a fist on the closed ramp and stepped back when it opened up to show all of them answering the door armed. They saw it was me and lowered their guns.   Their boss showed up, barely awake but he saw me and that changed pretty quick.

“I take it you’re in then?”

“I am.”

I stowed my gear aboard, throwing it all in a storage locker and headed up to the bridge when I heard the engines warming up. I could feel it too, she felt like she’d shake herself apart.

My knuckles went white, I had my hands in a death grip around the back of the chair I was leaning on.    The shaking calmed down but I didn’t, we went through the clouds, I saw the sky go from blue to black and saw the stars around all around us. That struck me more than anything I’d ever seen.  It took my breath away, it was enough to calm me down and it got me thinking just how small I was and how in the end it didn’t matter

I saw a sunrise from low orbit only to get where I was going in the predawn dark.  Boone gave me a small, square piece of plastic with a single button “hit that button and we’ll come find you. See you in two days.”

Had the idea for a Highlander fan film a while back -even wrote up a sort of timeline for the character. 

From the Watcher Chronicle of Rodrigo Santos (1470-)

Current Watcher: Sophie Kane

·         ?-?-1470 born the son of Isabella Santos and German mercenary Erich Leichtfus (?-1469) goes by his mother’s maiden name

·         1484 commissions his sword(he prefers the outdated broadsword to the modern cut and thrust type swords)

·         1492-first death at the siege of Granada found by Muqtadah al Fais(627-1799)

·         1493 completes his training never sees Al Fais again, travels through N.Africa

·         1509  fights in the Siege of Oran, continues his travels afterwards

·         1510 defeats Eremaneric(Goth b. 390)

·         1517 witnesses  the battle of Marj Dabiq on his way through Egypt

·         1527 living in Rome he  defeats Jean Rousseau(French b. 1310) during the sack of the city

·         1531 defeats  Immortal Marco Caldetti(Italian b. 1221)

·         1532 ambushed by  Immortal Jens Nielsen  (Danish b. 1307 ) on his way to Florence he’s badly injured and barely wins

·         1545 returns to Spain

·         1550 opens a fencing school “killed” in a training accident forced to move.

·         1556 rejoins army under King Phillip II for 4 years

·         1560 deserts and  takes up sword smithing  in Toledo

·         1571 joins the navy just before Lepanto, meets and befriends Miguel De Cervantes(one of only a few who knows he’s an Immortal)

·         1572-75 continues to fight with Cervantes and  they stay in contact for the next several decades

·         1584 Defeats Carlos Marquez(born in  the Byzantine Empire in 925 as Claudius Paulinus,)

·         1590 travels through Spain France and England

·         1591 visits Ireland and Scotland

·         1609 returns to Spain

·         1616 Cervantes dies and leaves him a journal of unpublished ideas.

·         1618-48 fights off and on in the 30 years’ war

·         1650 moves to Fez, defeats Abdallah Bey (Turk b. 1370) sells his Yataghan for money to leave town

·         1651 meets and befriends Immortal Martin  Ducard (b. 1405 Tours first death 1440)

·         1660 moves to Mexico

·         1665 defeats Mayan Immortal Xulann(b. 1410)

·         1670 takes up cattle Ranching in Mexico for 10 years

·         1680 moves to Havana

·         1691 travels to the Philippines and through the S.Pacific

·         1693 meets and befriends Vietnamese Immortal De Nyugen(.1257-1693)

·         1694 Defeats Mongol Immortal Uruut Bartan(b.1260) avenging his friend Nyugen, who Bartan had killed the year before.

·         1697 travels through Asia stops in Greece

·         1700 back in Spain in time for the War of the Spanish Succession

·         1705 Lt. in army loyal to Phillip V defeats Nikolas Van Dyke(b. 1504)encounters Ducard on a battlefield during a skirmish  afterwards they sneak away and plunder a wine cellar.

·         1707 shot in the head just after promotion to Major goes to Germany befriends Immortal Stanislaw Jowarski(b. 1603 1st death 1652 Hussar at Vienna 9-11-1683)

·         1708 returns to Spain buys a farm, supplements income by blacksmithing

·         1714 farmhouse burned down by Thorfinn  Olafson (b.781)who he defeats

·         1725 moves again takes up a career as a travelling fencing instructor Ducard and Jowarski travel with him for a while

·         1735” bandit attack on a village where he’s staying stops them almost single handedly. But is ‘killed” and buried by the villagers. He becomes  a local legend when they see him dig himself out of the grave

·         1741 moves to Mallorca

·         1745 fights off a group of Barbary Pirates, “dies” from his wounds the villagers learn the truth but accept him anyway.

·         1750 starts a shipyard which goes  bankrupt by 1752

·         1753 moves back to Spain after defeating Constantine Marcopolis( Greek b.1201)

·         1754-57 lives in a Basque settlement

·         1757 they learn the truth, try to kill him in his sleep.

·         1758-65 lives in Valencia, works at a winery

·         1770 enlists in Russian army under the name Dimitri Koslov(taken from one of Ducard’s defeated rivals) almost gets into a fight with an immortal who knew the real Koslov

·         1774 left on a battlefield after “freezing to death”

·         1775 “executed” with others after failing to kill the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid I, “haunts” his palace for 6 months out of spite, leaving before he can be caught.

·         1780 moves back to Mexico moving from city to city every few years

·         1797 accidentally shoots himself. Forced to move, goes to Florida

·         1805 goes back to Spain when news of  The Penninsular War reaches him

·         1808 starts a band of Partisans who know the truth about him called “Los Hermanos en Espirito”.

·         1810 reencounters Jowarski riding with the King’s German Legion

·         1811 Ducard finds him, deserts and joins him until the partisan unit is wiped out later in the year, Ducard goes to Canada

·         1812 captured and sent to a prison in France

·         1815 released and stays

·         1817 goes back to Spain

·         1825 encounters Irish Immortal Corcoran in Salamanca, fight interrupted, don’t meet again until 2011

·         1833 moves to Madrid

·         1845 starts travelling again, is briefly an opera singer in Italy.

·         1846 chased out of town(exact cause unknown) and moves to Sicily

·         1848 moves to Argentina lives with different Gaucho groups

·         1860 moves back to Spain meets the recently widowed Margarita  Garza(b. 1838)

·         1862 tells her and her children the truth, making them part of a small group of people who he trusted enough to his Immortality to.

·         1863 Marries Garza adopts her children(Pablo b. 1857, Miguel b. 1859)uses his savings to buy a large house near Barcelona(had opened bank accounts across Spain through the years)

·         1865 his skills get him a job at a Barcelona newspaper

·         1866 Jowarski finds him and stays with his family for a few months

·         1867 takes his family on a trip around Europe ,stays in Portugal hoping to avoid the effects of civil unrest in Spain

·         1871 Immortal Anatash Paria( Persian b. 1542) comes after his family, They go to Cuba after Santos defeats him.

·         1871-1875 live in various locations across the Caribbean, central and South America

·         1876 return to Spain at the end of the 3rd Carlist War, living in Valencia again

·         1880 Margarita Garza Santos contracts the disease (diagnosis unknown) that slowly starts killing her.

·     

·     1893 Margarita Garza Santos dies and is buried near her home town of Barcelona.

·         1894 encounters the Immortal Tancred (Norman 1128-1922) near Margarita’s tomb they don’t fight (Cemeteries are Holy Ground) and they never meet again after their friendly conversation, neither learns the other’s name.

·         1896 returns to Spain to join the navy and requests a posting to the Philippines.

·         1898 witnesses the battle of Manila Bay but cannot take part in it due to a sudden illness(Immortals can get sick but cannot die from it)

·         1899 is in London  for the World’s fair challenged by and  defeats Sikh Immortal Akaldeep Singh(b. 1802 VERY young by immortal standards and  dangerously overconfident)  

·         1905 is invited to a weeklong party for Martin Ducard’s 500th birthday in Tours, he and Jowarski both go and several months later Ducard joins the French Foreign Legion but deserts within weeks and sends insulting letters to his commander weekly for over a decade

·         1910 almost loses to Immortal Laurent Duquesne (alias) (Zande 1541-1910) but ultimately wins his hardest fight in decades.

·         1911 joins a monastery for the safety it provides him and tells the monks the truth but leaves after 6 months

·         1916 goes back to France and joins a fighter squadron with Ducard  claiming to be an American volunteer under the name “Rod Saint” loses  his first dogfight on purpose(he hates flying the wood and cloth Nieuport 11s)  and sits out the rest of the war.

·         1927 his adopted son Pablo dies, he goes to funeral claiming to be a distant relative.

·         1932 Miguel dies and he uses the same cover.

·         1930 moves back to the village on Mallorca, amused to find he’s become a local legend. A few descendants of those he knew believe him when he tells them the truth.

·         Winter 1936 goes back to the mainland but only briefly. He leaves for America just after the start of the Spanish Civil War.  Challenged by Immortal William Fowler (Seneca 1st death 1763) only days after arriving in New York City. Fight occurs on a frozen lake in upstate New York

·         1938 moves out of the city and goes back to college after realizing he’s fallen behind the times some

·         1941 publishes a novel (now long out of print) based on what he knows about his father which fails due to anti-German sentiment.

·         1942 graduates college with degrees in History and English Becomes a High School teacher where he teaches until 1946 and fakes his death in a car accident and crisscrosses the country for the next several years.

·         1948 joins the Washington D.C police department and quickly rises through the ranks

·         1952 joins Secret Service and first becomes aware of Immortal forger Jakob Rubenstein (German Jew b. 1494)

·         1953 catches Rubenstein  and lets him go in exchange for the knowledge of how to make better  cover IDs enlists Jowarski’s help in pretending he was killed in the line of duty.

·         1954 starts wearing glasses (not prescription just glass in frames) as part of a cover ID and to buy a couple seconds in any future fights. Every cover ID from that point forward has glasses. (Note: Every cover is named “Rodrigo Santos” but their careers and histories are different enough to avoid suspicion)

·         1962 briefly appears in Kazhakhstan, but the Watchers quickly lose track of him.

·         1969 spends 6 months in Ulannbatar Mongolia but disappears again.

·         1974 reappears after being kicked out of West Point (discipline problems and many arguments with history professors)

·         1975 moves to Southern California and studies briefly at Berkley but quits after one Semester for unclear reasons(same reasons as West Point)

·         July 1976  He is living in Delhi when begins a brief relationship with Immortal Constance Brown( English  1743- 1977) it ends in a fight  during a monsoon when he realizes she’s trying to manipulate him into killing her rivals. He wins but does not kill her, one of her rivals does the next year

·         1977-1980 lives in Manila  

·         1981 moves to Australia simply because it’s one of the  few places he hasn’t been

·         1985 fakes a boating  accident with help from Ducard and Jowarski and moves back  to America

·         1985-1994 lives in various cities in the American Southwest.

·         1996 goes back to college under a new alias

·         2008 earns a doctorate

·         2009 starts teaching a class on Renaissance History, his Spanish professor friend learns the truth.

·         2011 Reencounters Corcoran and this time defeats him, finds Will Garrett (the two of them stop a bank robbery but he’s shot and “killed”. After pulling him out of a hospital morgue and getting him out of town he starts training him, enrolls him in his class to keep an eye on him. Sophie Kane assigned to them, she enrolls too to keep tabs on both of them. )

·         (Note: few people outside of the Watchers and Immortal communities know the truth about him across 541 years.  Currently the only person besides Will Garrett who does is a Spanish professor at the college where he teaches Renaissance History.   He’s forced to tell him the truth because he can’t come up with any other explanation as to why he subconsciously switches to  perfect 15th century Castilian in the middle of a conversation in modern Mexican Spanish)

Will Garrett (1988-)

First death 2011 robbery at a bank where he was a guard, Santos was present and could sense he was a latent Immortal and the 2 of them managed to stop the robbery from happening, he was shot and killed in the process.

Santos pulled him out of a hospital morgue and got him out town and concocted a story as to why he’s missing the next day, and enrolled him as a student in his class so he could keep an eye on him while training him with the sword he took from the recently defeated Corcoran

Sophie Kane

Former CIA, injured in action, recruited by the Watchers. Santos and Will Garrett are her first assignment, enrolled in Santos’ class so she can keep tabs on both of them.

(Voiceover)

From the personal journal of Sophie Kane 

This is a big adjustment, to be a “Watcher” assigned to a man who has lived for almost 6 centuries. More surprising to me, new as I am to a world more secretive than any of the CIA operations I was previously involved in, is that by Immortal standards 540 is still relatively young.   However the first other Immortal he has begun to train in that life, is by any standard. His name is Will Garret, a former bank security guard who only recently experienced his first death at the age of 23, a year older than his mentor when he died the first time at the Siege of Granada in 1492.

Garrett will learn or die. What the Immortals call “The Game” is a harsh proving ground and only the strong or very cunning survive it.  Rodrigo Santos has, based on what the other chronicles kept about him and his defeated rivals have told me, survived through cunning, fighting only when needing to. Still he remains a formidable opponent having fought across 5 centuries as a Spanish Knight ,born into Spanish nobility in 1470,  Partisan in the Peninsular War and multiple conflicts across the world in that time, all the while carrying the sword he has used since the age of 14.

We are not to interfere in the affairs of the Immortal world; however there have been breaches in our security over the centuries, Immortals who know of our existence and our mission to record the details of their lives to keep those truths from becoming lost or distorted. A few those cases ended in disaster and the deaths of many who died for no other reason than their allegiance to the Watcher Council. The cases in the late 90s involving Duncan MacLeod and the evil immortal Kalas come to mind.

I am unsure how to handle such a situation should it happen with Santos. During the brief time I have been watching him and his de facto apprentice there have been moments where it seems he knows he is being watched. He was a soldier and guerilla fighter, such instincts don’t vanish, they only atrophy through lack of use.

A Watcher is supposed to remain objective, but to think of our assignments as anything more or less than human takes something of the humanity from us. Rodrigo Santos is very much just a man, however different he may be by nature of his Immortality a man who saw friends and family die, lived through too many tragedies to imagine in a life spanning over 500 years.

There is perhaps a little madness in all Immortals but in the case of Rodrigo Santos time alone will have to tell however it will tell no one except me and the Watcher Council, nor will this journal tell anyone anything, not even my superiors, Watchers are not to keep journals nor are we allowed to interact with Immortals, however those rules have been broken in the past, so I may just be the latest in a long line of rebels with pure intentions.

I will continue to watch both Immortals with interest and do my best to adjust to a world currently out of my understanding. Perhaps in time I will see things more clearly, I crave such clarity, during my time at the Agency I never knew more than I needed to and often my missions and whatever unclear but evidently higher purpose they served were shrouded in mystery. Of course now with my injury and subsequent career change I am faced with a new mystery uncovering the secrets of a man older than the nation he currently calls home and something that’s a mystery to even the oldest of the Immortals who have seen and influenced history for millennia, why it is that they are immortal.

However thinking about those things will only distract me from my true mission, long term surveillance, something which is not something I’m inexperienced with.  But again like much in my life that changed with my injury and subsequent change of career.