Complications
Fame: Ben Kane wants to be a Hero!
He wants to prove to the world that he is the space hero that he deserves to be. He is trying to be good, but wants to make a name for Zed Cosmos as a hero of earth.
Identity: Captain Zed Cosmos is afraid that the world will learn he is actually just Ben Kane, mediocre web comic creator. The genetic changes that the ship caused have completely obscured his identity, but his fingerprints will still lead back to Kane.
Complications
Monstrous: Artificial Intelegence. Appears as a young woman in a helmet and greek clothing when rendering herself.
Motivation: Responsibility: Responsible for the safety of Captain Cosmos and the ASTRAL ZEPHYR
Kane was 39 years old, slightly overweight and recently laid off from his last graphic design job. He was living on the couch of a friend in Brooklyn, with all of his stuff in storage at his brother’s house in Worcester MA. All he had with him in New York was a suitcase full of clothes, and his art supplies. There in Brooklyn with a view of a brick wall, Ben was making his comeback.
Since he was out of work, Ben had taken the time to work on an online Sci-fi comic, The Adventures of Captain Cosmos, based on a series of dreams he had been having. It was fantasti
Benc. for the first time in his art career, the ideas just kept flowing. Ben had just finished uploading Thursday’s comic to the web, and was congratulating himself for having 3 posts in the queue for a change. He certainly wasn’t expecting a call.
That call came from what he would later learn was a hyper intelligent artificial intelligence program called A.T.H.E.N.A. After a series of misadventures as the program convinced Ben that she was a real program, and not an elaborate prank from one of his friends, Ben agreed to help her. She needed him to travel to a very remote location in the Andes of South America. Once there, Ben had to scale high into the mountains, and dig deep into the snow. There, buried under 75 years of snowpack was his grandmother’s spaceship, the Astral Zephyr. Once they dug out the door, Ben’s DNA was sufficient to open the lock and restart the ship, and it acknowledged him as Captain. Ben collapsed inside and only later did he realize that it looked just like the ship in Ben’s Captain Cosmos comic.
ATHENA directed the exhausted Ben to a place where he could sleep. As he slept, the ship rewrote his body to the peak of health, based on his grandmother’s warrior profile, and loaded skills knowledge and history into his brain. When Ben awoke, he was not the same man who had gone to sleep. He felt years younger, and knew the basics of Mutai, an alien martial art. He knew how to fly the ship, and the controls of most Earth vehicles seemed quaint and trivial. Ben also learned the truth. He was the grandson of a blue skinned alien from another world who had fought the Nazis in World War 2.
Ben took on the name of his Comic Hero, Zed Cosmos, and declared himself a protector of Earth. ATHENA who had been working all of this time to prepare for a trip back to Zhodani was not amused, but as a dutiful AI stands by her Captain until he is ready to leave this backwater and return to civilized space.
