Island of Dark Science

In 1894, a strange meteorite impacted with a small semi-dormant volcano in the Pacific Ocean, close to Australia. A large, violent eruption followed, and a great black swirling spire of ash grew from the crater. Soon after bright pink electrical bolts of lightning shot through the sky above this newly formed land mass, and the base of the column glowed with an unnatural light. News spread from local village to village, until it reached the crew of a touring cruise ship, populated with Explorers, Scientists, Industrialists and Mystics calling themselves the Society of Science.

 

The Founder of the Society, Victor Vaultex, decided to arrange an expedition of 12 others to visit the island. What they found was baffling; A great jungle had already consumed the island, but the trees were strange and alien and great man eating flowers dogged them ruthlessly. The fauna was deeply disturbing too; Great mollusks and crabs, man-sized lizards and pterodactyls, wandering packs of great lumbering feathered bears. The source of the strange glow was the centrepiece of the island, a great volcano climbing over the island that bubbled with neon pink magma.

 

Vaultex and his expedition explored, actively encouraged by the danger and interested in the source of the strange molten rock. Some began to experience strange mutations from the environment, while others began to experience radical inspiration in their fields of choice. Vaultex became obsessed with the idea that the island was some sort of nirvana for intellectuals, a fountain of youth for the mind. And he believed the source of this strange power was the rock that had fallen from the heavens.

 

His group arrived at the summit of the mountain different people. Super people. There, Vaultex put the society to work creating a diving bell that could withstand the heart of the magma so he could search for some trace of the cosmic stone. It took them a week of planning and gathering, with some mining the iron from rocks with their minds, or burning the metal into shape with fingertips alone. It was still days of work to create technology hundreds of years too advanced, but when they were complete they knew that together they would shape the world. Vaultex descended into the volcano alone, wearing a diving suit that could have take the world single handedly. He returned wearing nothing, having become one with the starpiece which shined brightly in his breast.

 

And with him he brought purpose.

 

Those twelve broke away from the Society of Science, creating a cabal called the Secret Society of Science.

 

Vaultex wanted them to use their powers to create a new world in their image, manipulating the nations they come from for the better. Firstly, the group had to return to the cruise, hiding their mutations or claiming those too rapidly changed had died in the strange expedition, sending private ships back to collect them in secret. Then, Vaultex purchased the island and hid it from anyone who thought to return, using shielding that rendered it invisible to the eye. He told the others that they would have to carefully use the island’s strange properties only when the time was right.

 

The start of the First World War changed much of the Society of Science, with a large number of members becoming hostile to one another. Vaultex and his group created the Secret Society of Science out of the ashes, working across borders as they heralded in the beginning of Superheroics as a lifestyle. A number of their Scientists and Industrialists worked on projects to create more superhumans for their governments to further the war effort, but were also working secretly to Vaultex’s designs of a sustainable process to create more of their kind, so that they might benevolently rule the world.. His hopes were dashed with the invention of the Atomic bomb by a group of mundane scientists, a weapon that could possibly destroy even him.. There was also the small problem that those few projects that were successful created a wildly different person they couldn’t control. Hardened soldiers, incorruptible, brave volunteers who believed more in their nations and causes then in Victor Vaultex and his visions.

 

He gathered the members of the Secret Society of Science and laid down his final plan; To seclude themselves to the island they discovered so long ago, where they would work in a moral vacuum to make the greatest inventions the world had seen. The shady nature of their work caused some of the members to rename the group as the Secret Society of Dark Science.

 

Before long they had settled the island but their morally grey work was not unhampered. The island attracted “Masked” adventures often because of their strange inhabitants and geography. Those masked adventurers became Superheroes after the 1950s, and a culture of Supervillainy began to grow. Vaultex decided to take the name Starvault, rapidly becoming the world's Greatest villain and mind. Many others chose names and costumes to compliment their powers and soon the world had been bitten by the craze as a whole. It spiralled rapidly out of control of the Secret Society of Dark Science, with independant heroes and villains sprouting up in America and Europe, Africa and Asia in more confusing arrays.

 

None were as great as the Society of Dark Science, who have travelled through time, created empires spanning continents and galaxies, duelled with themselves from across dimensions and created their own worse enemies. They never attained lasting domination of the world, and time kept moving on, however. Six of the Secret Society of Dark Science were killed, some murdered, some dead by experiments that went too far. Four retired, leaving the island to go to space, or back to their homelands, with one even leaving reality itself for greener pastures.

 

Others were invited to fill the missing ranks, with the island becoming less of a beacon for the Secret Society of Dark Science now, but simply a place where the super intelligent without morals could work in relative peace.

 

CURRENT RESIDENTS OF THE ISLAND OF DARK SCIENCE

 

Starvault, Father of the Superman - Born in 1863 in England, Victor Vaultex founded the Society of Science to embrace the coming new millenium, which he believed would be a turning point of humanity. When he came to the Island, he seemed immune to the radiation weeping from its volcano, but fused fully with the meteorite when he descended into its heart. His hair turned a radical shade of deep purple, speckled with bright little dots of bioluminescence, and his irises have taken on a violet shade. Gifted with the power of super strength, invulnerability, flight and an intelligence beyond almost any other. He has locked himself in the Reliquary of the Island for forty years since the death of his greatest nemesis and Earth’s greatest hero, Captain Star, refusing to come out for anyone.

He is apparently focused incredibly hard on a single experiment.

Minions are often hard “star”light constructs or drones/turrets with laser guns.

 

King of Gears, K.O.G. - Born in 1870 in Germany, Rudolf Krieger was an industrialist who made expensive diamond studded watches. When he came to the island, he was attempting to impress Sherie Luo, a woman he had a tempestuous romantic relationship with, and only succeeded in getting himself nearly shot. The bullet missed his heart because of his pocket watch, which shattered very spectacularly and left him a network of cuts. As the expedition went deeper into the island, Rudolf found that the wounds were scabbing with metal slivers. As time went on in the jungles and on the mountain, Rudolf began having feverish fits and ended up secluded at the summit in a small tent. Here, he underwent a radical re-evolution from organic to synthetic; A clockwork human. He proved invaluable in constructing the Magma diving bell after the transformation, but his friends saw a marked change in his personality as time went on; Previously he had been an overly dramatic individual, but the fire within him burned lower as time went on until he became something of a cold, unfeeling robot. His greatest adversaries all come from the same dynasty of family, Rocketeers who always call themselves Jet Lightning.

Prefers working with engineering, especially with androids/robots, which often serve as his minions.

 

Miss Mana - Born in 1868 in the Philippines, Sherie Luo del Rosario was a mystic taken in by a small clique in the Society of Science who believed that Natural Philosophy should extend towards the mystical side of humanity. She had minor prophetic powers which amplified after she visited the island, along with a sense of other worldy sources of power. Sherie Luo used these powers to go on a pilgrimage of knowledge, finding every source of magical knowledge she could. She recruited and surrounding herself with a cult of magical followers, becoming an official subgroup of the Secret Society of Dark Science, the Society of the Occult. Her greatest adversary are now the Hidden Gods, beings of magic who select champions to send against her as she attempts to achieve godhood.

Creates magical potions and entirely new schools of thought for magic and spells alike, her minions are almost exclusively cultists but the occasional demon is made. Cillian Krieger is a glorified minion.

 

Cillian Krieger - The 23 year old son of an alternate universe Sherie Luo and a Rudolf Krieger, Cillian was lured to this world by Mana promising him as much power as he wanted. He is still learning the ins and out of magic but seems to have a strange approach that gives him a great edge over other magicians, his insistence on ordering the magical realm giving him strange and new powers. He spends almost all of his time in the Astral plane. Masked adventuring has taken a back seat to his understanding of this realm, but this is sometimes interrupted by the Spectral Watchers and Minister Hex, who understand that Cillian’s tampering can have devastating consequences in reality. Looks excessively like Adam Ant.

 

Tefnakht, Terror of the Tomb - Born in Ancient Egypt, sometime around 750 BC, Tefnakht was a surprise success of the Twenty Fourth dynasty of the Egyptians. The civilization of pyramid builders had long since declined, leaving a series of small kingdoms on the Delta, but he united them and made a civilization that might have once blossomed again, if it wasn’t for the interference of the Nubian nation. Tefnakht lost control and fled into sands, where he stumbled into a forgotten Pharaoh’s tomb. There, cultists ritually turned him into a Mummy, a servant for a Pharaoh forever. And there Tefnakht stayed for thousands of years, decaying in the sand as the Cultists bones turned to dust. Sherie Luo discovered his crypt when on her pilgrimage of magic, and since the earliest days of her career of Masked Adventuring he has served her humbly, granted more and more of his intelligence and his original form as time passed. He has adopted incredibly well the 21st century, far too much in Miss Mana’s opinion, often now wearing Hawaiin shirts and shorts over his sacred wrappings. He is also deeply involved in therapy and Anger Management now, causing his Mistress to sometimes compel him into becoming his mindless shambling self. He can control sand and insects innately, and knows ritual magic while having all the gifts of being undead. His main adversary is Minister Hex.

Interested in ritualistic magic, especially ancient world spells and fetishes. His minions are almost exclusively undead of the Mummy variety, although some Jinn or Anubis like monsters do exist.

 

Phantom - Priscilla Black is a second wave Super Scientist who attempted to create phasing technology. Everything went wrong when her body was permanently made into a wisp of nothing, her mind trapped in a strange limbo between life and death. Since then she has poured research into creating a way for her to step back into the real world, often using other people as vessels for her to fill. Her biggest adversary is Ultrathought, a hero who can influence the world with his mind alone. Her form outside of a body is a spectral shape with a bright almost neon-black skeleton inside of it.

Desperate to create phase technology that can return her to her original body, but until then she has figured out a way to repurpose and reinvigorate Frankenstein-like dead bodies with electrodes and sheer will, whens she’s inhabiting them.

 

Doctor Owlbear - The Island of Dark Science has many strange beasts and plants, but none were as strange as the bear-like-birds. Unbeknownst to the Secret Society during their time away, these creatures were able to create a small, primitive civilization. When Vaultex and the other Dark Scientists returned to the island they discovered these strange creatures and decided to leave them to their own devices. Vaultex decided to institute a program where he would apprentice one of them each generation, however, interested in watching how their society might grow when the previous one retired to live among their people. The identity and name of Doctor Owlbear has been passed down through six/seven generations now, and the current Doctor Owlbear is not pleased with the current arrangement; Starvault has yet to meet his apprentice face to face, and only communicates via intercom from within the inner sanctum, making this awkwardly gangly beastman permanently disgruntled and dissatisfied. His biggest adversary in the Superheroic community, when he rarely does venture into it, is Binary Bomb.

 

Interested in offensive weaponry and defensive alike, from rayguns to force fields. His minions are often other Owlbears who volunteer to be apart of his guard.

 

Plutonia - An alien from the edge of the Solar System, exiled to Earth by her own people for wiping out an entire caste of her peaceful Insectoid species by accident. Made bitter by being far away from home, she has decided that if she cannot return she will start a new race on Earth. A 9 foot tall, thin black insectoid creature who has natural (but mild) mind control abilities and is armed with advanced alien technology and a small army of private mutant aliens.

Primarily interested in mental manipulation and genetics, but only so she can remake her race upon Earth and force them to be subservient. Numerous different racial classes of her insectoid like people make up her minions, farmed from humans she has abducted.

 

Contrail - The first of a long list of backwards reincarnations of a woman named Dana Day, Contrail has served three entire life times in the Secret Society of Dark Science and has possibly countless more beyond that she is currently unaware of. A strange phenomenon of some sort is meant to occur during her future, which will kill her between the age of 29-31 and then send her back to be reincarnated 29-31 years before she was born. Contrail II served through the Secret Society of Dark Science until she reached the same age and died mysteriously, apparently of nothing. 29-31 years before that, she was reincarnated again as Contrail III. Before that she has found very little hard evidence, which makes her worried about where she might be born or what might happen. She has control of speeding up her timeline to move faster, but doing so ages her quicker and brings the strange phenomenon closer by microseconds. The most frightening thing is the further back she goes, the more she remembers of her “future” lives. The protector of Time, Watchman, has a huge headache over Contrail’s attempts at manipulating the time stream to break this strange retroactive immortality.

Interested in technology related mostly to time travel, like the previous Contrail (Named Contrail II) and the one before that, named Contrail III. Her minions are made up of a series of “afterimages” of herself, or often strange duplicate timeline versions of other people.

 

Professor Primeval - Claiming to be from the future, Professor Primeval seems sure that the only way to save the Earth is to repopulate it with dinosaurs. He is also obsessed with the idea of evolution and devolution, forcing humans into becoming cavemen while birds are changed back into great lizardy monsters that he can then rapidly escalated down other paths of evolution. Believed to be generally insane, only the B-heroes deal with Professor Primeval, and some on the island believe him to be completely ill fitted for the rest of the island’s inhabitants. His only saving grace is that he can influence the packs of Pterodactyl’s filling the island’s skies.

DINOSAURS. ALL OF THEM. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. Genetics is his field, with a minor love affair of rapid evolution or devolution technology. Velociraptors are his main bread and butter for minions, along with Pterodactyls.

 

Mr. Articulated - Archie Axis was once the leader of a four person team of experimental miners, who were working on digging down to the core of the Earth in drill capsule. While they were deep below the surface of the planet the drill collided with a strange pink magma that rapidly mutated the interior occupants. His brother-in-law turned into pure flame, burned brightly and sucked up most of the oxygen before winking out of existence. His wife phased out of the vessel and fell to the centre of the earth while his best friend became an immovable, solid stone. It took all of his strength to reach the surface, where he found his physiology had become soft and malleable, allowing him to stretch to great distances and even become inconsistently wet and goopy. He joined the Champions of Earth, but found his dislike for Superhumans and a world where they can be so violently made and destroyed unbearable. Starvault, interested in papers on Archie’s thesis of activating super powers, invited him to the island where Mr. Axis became morally corrupt.

Originally only interested in general fields like Starvault, he has become deeply interested in Mind control and the rapid mutation of cells in others, whether to give them super powers or take them away. His minions often wear hazmat suits and are walking piles of putty or chemicals.