| Sebastian Crane was born July 13th, 1879,
in the home of independence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For many
years, all through his growing up, in fact, Sebastian was quite a
normal child… raised by a factory worker and his devoted wife, and was
the oldest of six children (two brothers and three sisters). Early
on, his parents recognized that he had great potential, and even
greater intelligence, and could be the one to break out of this
factory life, more so than any other member of his family. With every
extra dime they could scrounge up, Sebastian was sent to the best
schools, given the best tutors, and shown a preference that his
younger siblings never received. But he did not let this change him;
rather, he made sure his lessons were passed down to his brothers and
sisters, teaching them whatever they wanted to know for exchanges in
doing the chores, favors, and, later on, a small amount of spending
money. True, sometimes he could be the perfectly bastardly older
brother type, but he did actually care about his family. But he was,
in no way, the perfect man… especially in this time and place.
At the age of sixteen, one of his sisters discovered this dirty
little secret when she knocked on his door one night, and it opened
from the force. Even today, the sight of your older brother in bed
with another man would be a shock; in the late 19th
century, it was a cause to scream and run to momma. Immediately, he
was disowned, kicked out of the house, and threatened with many
things… including physical violence… if he ever returned to the house
of his family again.
For a few days, he lived on the street, doing his best to survive.
Everything but the clothes on his back were stolen the first night, he
was beaten up on the second, and he seriously considered jumping off a
bridge, or in front of a train, and just ending it all. Luckily,
before he could do this, one of his tutors managed to find him, having
heard he’d been disowned (and nothing more) by Sebastian’s parents.
Unbeknownst to him, however, his tutor was not any ordinary human. He
was Jordan Cole, a Son of Ether of little notoriety, but one who had
been around when the Etherites first left the Technocracy. He
recognized Sebastian’s intelligence, as well has his creative side,
and saw a great potential for Awakening. He took Sebastian into his
home, and began to teach him the fundamentals of Etherite Science,
without fully revealing what he was actually teaching. Within four
years, not only had Sebastian’s font of knowledge increased greatly,
but on the eve of the new millennium (yes, people were as ignorant of
the facts then as they were in 1999), his mind Awakened… and he joined
the ranks of the Sons of Ether in his own right.
After this, Sebastian went out on his own to study, his mentor
believing that he had no more to learn from him. Hearing through
friends in the Etherite community, he discovered the fights in the
world outside of Earth between the Void Engineers of the Technocracy
and the Ethernauts of the Sons of Ether. And, more than anything, he
wanted to join in on this. But to do that, of course, he would have
to find a ship, and someone who owned it… and, naturally, unless that
same person could, someone to pilot it. This took a little doing, but
just after he got his own laboratory setup, he managed this. An
inventor/Ethernaut/pilot by the name of Jonas Burke. They quickly
became friends and partners… and, eventually, lovers. Together, they
learned to fight the Technocracy with the best of them. Jonas using
his ship and piloting skills, and Sebastian, using his ever-feverish
imagination to create new and interesting devices to add to the ship,
or simply for their own uses. Their relationship, both as partners
and as a couple, flourished for almost five years. And then disaster
struck.
In a last-minute decision, Jonas had taken the ship up himself,
deciding to do a quick scouting mission, and believed he could handle
it on his own. He was not expecting to run into the Void Engine at
that time. He was not expecting to be outgunned in such a way. He
was, most likely, not expecting to die.
Sebastian was heartbroken. This man was his true love, the one
person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. And now, that
person was gone. For a year, he did little but invent, trying to
regain what he had lost with Jonas’ death. Unfortunately, his
concentration also suffered greatly from this loss, causing many of
his inventions to be failures. One such invention, however, did more
than just fail. In an attempt to channel cosmic energies
(Quintessence) in a device that, if successful, would increase the
speed and maneuverability of an Ethership immensely, he accidentally
forgot to set an inhibitor device to regulate the power buildup. It
exploded. Not very violently, but it did take out half of the
laboratory’s interior… and Sebastian believed it did something else as
well. His theory is that the mixture of cosmic energies, Paradox
energies, and perhaps some of the chemicals that blew up around him,
soaking him, created a cascade reaction within the cells of his body.
For after this moment, Sebastian never aged. Not one day.
And with this realization that, short of an unnatural death, he
would never die, came the development of a plan.
He would get revenge upon those that took from him his true love.
He would find a way to use his technology and his science to destroy
the Technocracy itself. After all, he, now, had the time to do this.
And so he spent the next near-century studying, designing, and doing
his damndest not to get discovered by the ever-growing watchfulness of
the U.S. Government. After all, knowing about a man who never seemed
to die would be a bad thing. Luckily, his contact in the Sons of
Ether (and that man’s apprentice, and that woman’s apprentice, and on,
and on) assisted him in forging a new life for himself (in the
official governmental records).
And now, in the year 2003, Sebastian has finally begun to lay plans
to do just as he desired. To lay waste to the Technocracy itself.
And he has chosen a most random location to do this in.
Brentford North, VA. |
