Swamp Monster Tempest - This universe’s M’kk Dal’Ton was pretty much the same as ours, apart from slightly different physiology (notably retaining the shredding claws of an ancestor who the canonical Maerinyans have long since abandoned; for this among other reasons, this version of the species never founded the Maera religion and continue to call themselves Vognilds), but his escape pod crashed much further from civilization, landing in a swamp and destroying his universal translator. Once he staggered his way across miles of mud and rot and managed to locate some locals, much of his mind had regressed to a feral state from the stress of this miserable experience, and the first humans to see him did not see a funny-looking foreigner that they could push around a little, but a flat-out monster deserving only of immediate violence. Only capable of subconsciously exercising his weather-control powers to ensure that he always appears on a dark and stormy night, his efforts at capturing one of the more docile residents of this planet to try and explain himself inevitably provoke a savage backlash, and while he knows he ought to give up and just hide, the same vengeful streak that provoked “our” Tempest to defeat Warlord Voss has instead been turned upon the human race.
Phantom of the Opera Adept - Not much to say about this Virtuoso of the Void; he’s a little less sociable than our version, but not all that much really, since ours is too busy to pay much attention to other people either. His costume choices are entirely a touch of theatricality on his part, a subconscious plea for attention to make up for the self-imposed isolation which is slowly driving him mad. He has a lot more in common with Franz Vogel personality-wise than is entirely healthy, and thus instead of creating Drake’s Pipes, he shaped void power into an immense pipe organ which he can recreate inside any building of sufficient size, creating much more powerful and far-reaching but much slower versions of the same kinds of spells with which the pre-Prime Wardens version of the Argent Adept used to single-handedly defeat every monster he encountered. It’s interesting that despite being virtually an identical person, his modus operandi is so different that he would be better represented by a Villain deck rather than a Hero one (allowing for a sort of reverse Vengeance mode, if you wanted to make Hero-style playable decks for some of his opponents).
The Feral Haka - He’s a werewolf. Not much to add to that, beyond the fact that his amiable personality and his employment as a substitute teacher were casualties of whatever incident bestowed the curse of lycanthropy upon him. It was probably merciful when the “retroactive annihilation wave” created by La Commodora caught up with him, merging him into “our” Haka and removing him from reality.
Heretic Spectre Fanatic - Discussion of this character depends entirely upon knowledge of the massive Spoiler from the Fanatic and Apostate podcast episodes.
In our reality, the Host spirit of Judgment’s first significant interaction with the human world was when it inhabited a nameless Peruvian girl, who was killed moments later, and for reasons and by methods which remain unclear, the Host spirit presumably took the place of that girl’s original human mind/soul/etc, whatever exactly is true of that concept, and restored life to the body which the Host spirit now occupied in place of its original inhabitant. In the reality of the Heretic Spectre, none of that happened; the Host spirit of Judgment did inhabit the little girl, who was then killed, but she remained dead, and the Judgment spirit took a different, equally unprecedented action in response to the tragic outrage of her death.//The factual existence of spiritual beings which at least sometimes loosely map to the theological understanding of the concepts of angels or demons (for those who see these not as physical creatures from other dimensions called Heaven and Hell, but rather as spiritual entities inhabiting our same reality but remaining imperceptible to us) does not change the fact that, in the Sentinel Comics universe, Christianity and other such religions rely heavily on the concept of faith…faith in higher ideals of Justice and Mercy and Charity and so forth. And those ideals are not always observably true, even within the person of church leaders; people are human, whether those people claim to speak with the authority of the Creator or not, and those who devote their lives to following the principles laid out in the Good Book do not always fully understand, or faultlessly obey, those same principles themselves, while preaching regularly of them for the benefit of a flock.//All of that preamble is simply to confirm that, despite the reality of miraculous forces which could in fact have intervened to prevent them, tragic miscarriages of theological justice have happened throughout history. One of these occurred in 14th-century Spain, where a girl named Theodora claimed to have received visions from God one night, and was roundly condemned as a heretic by her village’s Catholic priest. Though the common practices of burning or drowning suspected witches didn’t come along until a couple centuries later, they were not unprecedented at that time, only significantly more “trendy” for lack of a better term, in the wake of such events as the publishing of Kramer and Sprenger’s book on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of Witches”. Despite lacking such a book to give him the idea, the priest chose to interpret scripture as requiring that the little girl with the apocalyptic visions was possessed by evil and needed to be killed; maybe he genuinely believed this was the only way to keep the entire village from being condemned to Hellfire (or simply from dying in a bloody riot in response to these provocative hallucinations), or maybe he was just protecting his own position as the fat and wealthy spiritual authority over his community. History has not recorded any of these details; it simply records the fact that the girl was “mercifully” executed for her “blasphemy”. And, for roughly six hundred years, her spirit having moved on to whatever final fate exists beyond the comic panels, the girl’s physical remains rotted within her grave, her death unavenged.//All that changed in the 20th century, at the moment of the death of a girl who would never go on to be rechristened Helena after her resurrection, since she did not in fact resurrect. Instead of restoring life to her own body, the Spirit of Judgment somehow went delving into her past, and the past of her various blood ancestors, and eventually found a distant foremother of Not-Helena’s parents, before they emigrated from Spain to Peru, dwelling in a village where a simple gravestone marked the resting place of her firstborn daughter. The Host lack the power to actually alter the past; they can perceive it as easily as they can flip back to the first page of a book, but rewriting the book is beyond their abilities. So, if it was 1987 when a Spirit of Judgment happened to notice an injustice, then 1987 is the soonest that the spirit can act to correct it. Having become aware of Theodora’s tragic fate, the Host entity somehow and somewhy inhabited her ancient remains, just as “our” Judgment-Spirit had done for a much fresher corpse of a girl not named Helena.//But once that act was complete, the two beings were much the same thereafter; the Host-spirit can likewise transform reality in basically undefined ways, subject only to the limitations of the quasi-human identity it has chosen to assume. The memories of Theodora somehow remain within her physical body, even though it now consists of little more than a few crumbling shards of dry bone covered in sterile organic dust; a fragmentary remnant of the former physical consciousness lingers, at least enough that the erstwhile Justice-spirit can manage to piece together an identity for itself as “Theodora”. Just as Helena has no connection to the former life of her body’s original inhabitant, this “Theodora” isn’t actually her, but she didn’t have a kindly nun to give her a new name, she just had a gravestone to go on. From that, and from what little sense of the body’s original identity she retains, this version of Fanatic has reconstructed a Christian-themed vision of right and wrong and good and evil, only slightly more brutally Medieval than that of “our” Fanatic, who is after all hardly a 20th-century person in any sense other than simple chronology. Ergo, as ridiculously different as the path Judgment took in order to end up with a human form, the end result is pretty similar.//(And, having written all that, I realize that I didn’t even remotely account for why the spirit of a long-dead little girl would be wearing Templar armor or have chains on her arms. I could spin out even more lore to try and explain that, but I think I’ve written enough; we’ll just say that the Judgment-spirit liked the motif and leave it at that.
Apparently you can’t have paragraphs in a spoiler box, so to render that absurd mass of text legible, copy it and insert a blank line between each pair of // slashes.
Cursed Corsair Captain Cosmic - One of the ancestors of Hugh and Nigel Lowsley was the uniquely savage 16th-century British privateer Terrance “The Black Terror” Lowsley. In our world, Black Terry eventually gave up preying upon Spanish galleons and settled down to raise a family with a nice Cornish girl named Anna, but in this world he was far more of a brute, and Anna ended up raising a single child on her own instead of a family of six with her husband; this direct linear ancestor of the modern Lowsleys took Black Terry’s family name over his mother’s wishes when he learned from others of his heritage, fancying himself something of a badass and wanting to inherit his father’s “street cred” in the rougher neighborhoods of London. Meanwhile, instead of dying from consumption in his own bed, Terrance Lowsley ran afoul of a sea-dwelling witch (a precursor in the mystic tradition of Rose Griggs, who was always somewhat amoral but nowhere near as much so as they would later become), and she cursed him to become an immortal spirit who would “sail the endless black” on a ghostly yellow ship. Only centuries later was his orbit across Infinity allowed to bring him back around to the planet Earth, where the sepulchral brigantine crashed to earth, killing Nigel and flooding Hugh with the eldritch energy of the curse. Now driven half-mad by the tormented spirit of his vicious forefather, Hugh and his periodic partner-in-crime Galactra have become the scourge of a dozen worlds in the local star cluster; regardless of his current planet, he appears in the anachronistic trappings of his predatory profession, forging a cutlass or marlinspike or belaying-pin of dimly glowing cosmic energy, with which to waylay any victims he may take a perverse fancy to. (Of note, La Capitan has never visited this reality; one historical space pirate per universe is quite enough.)
