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Background
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"You are something called alive in a place called the universe. You are the latest descendant of a race nearly as old as life itself. You are called Adam. Your father was called Adam..."
- - - - The first words ever heard by each Adam for eons
The origin of the race that is Adam is shrouded in mystery. One was already living a solitary life as a primitive hominid on his world (called Adamia, for lack of a better name) when the Guardians of the Universe discovered him. After they studied this race that had the unique quality (and misfortune) to only possess one soul; they found that the race existed in a cyclic family where the adult would die in a volcano and an infant would crawl back out shortly there after. The entire cycle, from birth to death took only about two and a half years. After observing a few cycles they decided to give one of these people a Power Ring shortly after his birth.
This may sound like a light decision, after all it would enable this poor lost soul to develop a culture, but it was not a light decision at all. After all, possessing a Power Ring means that the bearer is a Green Lantern, and that is no easy task. However, Adamia happened to be in a peaceful sector (#1055 as the Guardians numbered such things) and the Adams definitely seemed to have willpower to spare. Thus did the line of Adams become a Green Lantern almost twelve thousand years before Hal Jordan, the proverbial best and worst of the Corps.
The Adams, with the help of their ring, slowly developed a culture based on their continual rebirth. Linguistically they adopted the language of the Guardians, although it changed over the millennium, and various traditions began early on - such as a strong reliance on herbal remedies and seasonings. Innovations were either swift and minor or laborious and took generations to work out and complete; either way, however, the innovations were either found ineffective and discarded or kept, enduring generations to the present or, when needed, are replaced when a later Adam finds them outdated or no longer effective.
As the centuries and millennium passed the thing that stayed most constant in the lives of each Adam in succession was their garden. It seemed that no matter how many other interests might pass though the minds of the members of this race, they always find themselves to working with their plants in one way or another (it was long thought by some past members of the Green Lantern Corps that the Adams were genetically dependent on the plants of their world, but it would later be proven on Colu that this is just a habit passed down generation to generation in the family-race).
As a Green Lantern the Adams level of involvement and notoriety, while never extremely high, would ebb and flow without any concern by this family of Lanterns. However, the lack of his presence among them was never a concern, as they knew that if a Lantern is in distress that the Guardians would notify the Corps (or at least those in a local to do something about the issue).
As any member of the Green Lantern Corps, the lives of the Adams have been heavily documented in the famed Book of Oa. However, only a limited amount of this information has been read. The most oft read entries about the Adams are about the last two waking periods in Adam 4714�s life.
After a typical day in the garden, Adam 4714 was told by his ring that there was a ship in danger needing his assistance. Upon arriving, however, he met with resistance from that same ship despite the fact that it was out of control and heading on a crash coarse with his planet. Once the shooting stopped (because most of the crew had died from poisoning due to accidentally released cargo that was toxic to them) Adam 4714 dragged the ship to his planet safely.
When he went inside the ship, he found it full of an odiferous sludge and most of the crew had drowned, but the captain was still alive and Adam 4714 attempted to rescue him. For his efforts, the captain attacked the well intending Green Lantern (who was in full uniform). In a matter of moments, the alien died in the thrall of a hateful killing rage.
Adam 4714 then took the time to burry the alien crew in his garden (so that their lives could continue though the plants their bodies would fertilize) before he succumbed to the soporific effects of his volcano which had begun to erupt, as it always does to signal the end of an Adam�s life cycle (in actuality, as we will later observe, the Adams have adapted their life cycle to the volcano, not the other way around, but neither Adam, his ancestors nor the Book of Oa possessed that knowledge at the time).
Adam 4714 awoke after a ring-dream in which he had been shown his ancestor being given a ring and knew that it was the day he was going to have a son. However, wishing to be a good father, he did not want to leave the mess the ship had left on his world and in the process of cleaning he found out from the ring that the toxic gunk was foodstuff for a race of sentient photons. As an upstanding Green Lantern, Adam couldn�t abandon a people in need and so he flew off dragging behind him the canisters of food to the Anazrat system.
He was not, however, the first Adam to encounter these sentient photons he found out. The ring informed him that Adam 4696 encountered a scouting party of them passing though his system, but they had all died of starvation. The Anazrat photons, however, are not friendly beings and attacked Adam 4714, abandoning him for dead.
For most beings this would be the end of the story, but each Adam contains in them the will to live of an entire species and, in the effort of continuing his life or that of his species, he is able to draw upon reserves of willpower that most beings can only dream of. Because of this incredible reserve of will, which was focused entirely on getting to the volcano and fathering his son, Adam�s ring was able to carry him home and deposit him in the volcano, continuing the cycle of renewal.
After the birth of Adam 4715 the life of the family of Adam returned to the idyllic normal for his family. Once he reached the equivalence of a human teenager he took up the mantle of Green Lantern and began to �fight the good fight� so to speak � in the typical Adam quasi-pacifist approach. Then, when Adam was only about eighteen months old, a full year before �the time� would approach and thus safe to leave home for a while, his ring alerted him to a situation that needed his presence � a conflict was building between two species that shared a planet and the threat of a nuclear exchange was building.
Adam traveled to this system, which was a good distance away from his homeworld (since the Guardians left some Green Lanterns had expanded their coverage instead of narrowing as others had, but some places need more attention than others do) in order to intervene in the growing conflict. He visited both leaders and found that they were fighting over land and resources even though they could easily work together and form a mixed society though compromise if they simply set aside their disagreements. The fact that much of the struggle was over a disagreement over which of their staple foods should be farmed in the best land made this easier on Adam.
He showed them how, as a first compromise, they could have the air plants that one race needed grow in the branches of the trees needed by the other because there was no negative impact on the host tree like both races had previously thought; this compromise opened their eyes and allowed Adam to help them begin forming the foundation of their bi-species society over the course of a month. He then planned to stay long enough to be at their celebratory dinner, but had every intention to return home as soon as possible.
Then his ring disintegrated because Hal Jordan had gone to Oa and drained the Central Battery of all its power in the worst act of treachery seen by the Green Lantern Corps.
Stranded on Sarathia II, who�s people were without the means to put him farther into space than their own moon, Adam went into a depressive slump for about a week and then resigned himself to being the end of his line. Figuring he only had about a year to live he began a whirlwind tour of the planet where he taught the Sarathian farmers how to adapt to the new setup and make other improvements to their farming techniques. He became a major influence on the development of the new Sarathian culture but as he approached �the time� he retreated from social interaction and held up in a cave to await his death.
When the months began to tick on past his estimation for when his volcano should have been erupting, Adam became confused and wasn�t sure what was happening. It was in this mental state that he was in when he was found by a group of slavers who had decided to kidnap and sell a number of former Green Lanterns as a lark � after all there are many people in the universe who hold a grudge against the Corps and having a former member as a slave is a way to feel like you�re a success, right?
Adam and his fellow kidnapped, former Lanterns were later rescued by Guy Gardner (another former member of the Corps) who quickly handed them off to another former Corpsman, John Steward. John, as a member of the Darkstars, arranged to help the group back to destinations of their choice. Unfortunately, in Adam�s case, they didn�t know where Adamia was exactly and he was unsure without his ring where it was also. So, instead, it was decided that he should go somewhere where he can learn more about the universe at large.
John�s chose was to take Adam to Colu and call in a favor with the government of that world. He asked the Coluan government to find Adam a place to live and a way to help support himself as well as granting him access to their libraries so he could self-teach though their extensive databases. Because of past aid they had received from John and other Green Lanterns in the past they agreed to do so, although there was some doubt into whether or not this was because influenced by the fact that their guest was a former Green Lantern himself or not.
Adam was given a studio apartment which was both typically small but still luxurious in its privacy because it was exclusively his on a world who�s population was labeled Super Dense for a reason. As well as the apartment, on the hundredth floor of one of the city towers found on that world, he was given a job as a laborer in the receiving sublevel of the city-tower in order to earn credits to pay for food beyond simple dietary pap and any items he wished for other than a work uniform (plain gray coveralls) and replacements for them as needed.
It is not surprising that, given access to the seemingly limitless volumes of information available on Colu that Adam�s first and most often revisited studies were of botany and herbalism as it is found among the stars. Of course, he did cover other things and take tests to gain acknowledgement of a level of education that would be acceptable for a Coluan child (although it is more respected off world than on world).