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The sun beat down on the bleak landscape, an ocean of sand as far as the eye can see...and yet even this blasted landscape is dotted with random cacti, thorny shrubs and boulders that would tell stories of once being apart of grand forgotten mesas if they could speak to any save geologists. It is in the shade of one such boulder that a quartet of sullen eyes gaze out at the burning sands hatefully. The brightness of Sol is unbearable, even if the warmth of the sand and stone is appealing to the touch. Within that shadow a well of darkness has been opened allowing far more creature than should be able to, to take comfort in the gloom. That creature will in time answer to many names as long as they are spoken with reverence and terror, but the first he will offer of his own accord is Minase Orufe.

Minase is not of the human world, his birth came about in an embattled region we would call an underworld, a land filled with powerful degenerate beasts that wield power and savagery as a means of survival knowing little of compassion and cooperation. Those that rule usually do so briefly and with brutality difficult to imagine for those not born of strife. Minase was born of the union of two such rulers forced to share a form then foolishly summoned by a Caller from another world where war had just begun to be prevalent as a tool to end on such war. A contract was formed and the gestalt of kings released upon the enemy nation to end the war as they saw fit so long as they harmed no people of the Caller's nation. The war ended a week later when the enemy nation's capital was torn free from its land bound anchors and then dragged into the underworld to serve as the new focal point of leadership there.

New atrocities were created for the soft skinned creatures trapped in that floating city. Out of those atrocities came the birth of Minase from the third daughter of the royal family. To the underworld this marked a time of new entertainment, new blood and a new trend in leadership: Not just ruling the underworld, but adding a new piece to it, bringing some new flesh to be sampled by the horrors living in the pulsing volcanic shade that is the core of that underworld.

So began the tradition of the denizens of the underworld to answer the calls that they could feel or hear from other worlds whenever possible. These calls had been thought of as traps and slavery in the past, but now they were known as opportunities to rise to power and fame. Soon every monstrosity in the underworld had learned the joy of a hermit crab: rather than sleeping in natural caves or just out in the open in the bleak landscape of their world, they could expend as much power as possible and drag back a structure of whatever size they could manage to serve as their new lair and personal mark on their world.

Soon enough the broken remnants of various buildings dotted the landscape like boulders flung from an erupting mount. Often haphazardly placed, and partially destroyed by the act of inhabiting them, they ranged in size and style based on the monster that claimed them and the world they were torn from. Great cathedrals, sprawling mansions, fortress-like castles and even great phallic towers could be found in their own little corners of the underworld, gradually changing the blasted landscape with the bits of tenacious fertility that clung to the edges of the buildings and foundations in the guise of soil and plants.The central volcanic plains of the world first grew vertically with the floating city of Ruin, after many passing cycles it had become little more than a massive floating tableau depicting the ongoing forces of entropy. All but the central palace having crumbled in the mad dash to claim the residents for the sake of breeding stock, meat, toys, slaves and so forth. A precious few remaining as the leader's personal harem of slaves to serve and entertain him amidst his sycophants as he recovered his strength in secrecy lest it be known that the act of acquisition had overextended him and put his rule and lineage under threat.

A great forest spread from one of the larger acquisitions into the underworld, this one not a mansion or a tower, but a cloud scraping tree believed to be a fount of life for the world it came from and in truth it spread that same life to the underworld in the form of trees that grew steadily until the trees' interconnected roots had spread in a ring roughly fifty miles in diameter. A great mansion sporting a damaged magic fountain soon became the underworld's first lake. A great armored privateer of the underworld found himself in a world of sand and fury and immediately developed a love for the feel of the sand scouring his scales clean in the midst of great burning hot wind storms that left him smooth and shiny in ways he could not have achieved without such conditions of heat, pressure and buffing and thus drew over several great dunes of sand and a massive simoon to spread it, sacrificing the lives and domains of several of his followers to keep the storm fixed and eternal in the region, ever rolling in a loose territory of sand, burying and uncovering the shelters of his dead minions like trash and treasure alike.

So then came the time of maturity for Minase, his childhood form shed as the dual influences of his conjoined fathers overrode the nature and form of his mother to create a new horror amidst the devil kings of the underworld, one that fed not on flesh, nor blood, but on the energies of life itself. In his youth he drank greedily of the life force of any too weak to stop him, but as he aged he found that became less fulfilling forcing him to branch out and sample more specific energies until he came to realise that emotional energies had a much greater appeal to him and that they even supplied him with power that he could wield beyond simple sustenance. Glutting himself on the plentiful amounts of rage, hatred, lust and greed that drifted over the underworld like a miasma, his rise in power became a swift and brutal thing punctuated in in periods of slavering madness consumed by too much of one emotion or another and thusly reduced to a living force of nature with a malleable form that bent and twisted with his own out of control power.

It wasn't until his first calling that his roving reign of terror was brought to a halt, unlike the others he was not called by a great magic or science and placed under contract, no he was called to by the birth of a mind on his wavelength placed under the proper stress to resonate with him. In this case on a world of science and discovery, experimentation had turned an unassuming middle aged cerebral engineer into a raging juggernaut of psionic destruction. Years of failed research, rejected publications and the ridicule of his peers had culminated in a desperate drunken experiment that failed as well, but with spectacular results that at the time of Minase's advent: several industrial districts leveled as if they had picked a fight with a thirty story radioactive reptile, instead torn apart by the power drunk man infuriated by the attempted intervention of the local law enforcement and subsequently the regional military as well.

Minase's advent horrified the newly created esper, raised in a world that looked down on superstition, he viewed the roiling black miasma with burning crimson eyes glaring out at him as the pinnacle of mental decay, a sign that his newfound power was about to consume him. Rather than make contact with the darkness, which he likened to the black felinoid from the label of his favored alcohol bottle temporarily forcing coherence upon minase before the the perceived rejection came across empathically and set off a chase that would burn a swath through a lesser residential zone consuming the lives of many of the destitute and drug addled as a man with glasses and the tattered remains of a lab coat fled a misty black predator that became more and more like their world's reptilian stand in for a wolf with each new witness. The collective fear of those caught in the chase mixed with the rage of the responding authorities resulted in a burning pyroclasm that razed a commercial district into ashes as the military attempted to end their squabble with the use of napalm containment walls and then a tactical satellite beam strike. Surveillance footage from equipment still functional in the region showed the engineer locked in a struggle to hold back the coming darkness using flame and force until eventually they make physical contact, in that moment the beam strike touches down and everything vanishes in light and sound.

For decades thereafter the pair struggled with one another, Minase consumed with a lust to possess the man, to break him, to turn him into something that would accept him and a steady source of sustenance. Slowly he corrupts him with with the very things that led to his mediocrity: liquor, fear and the memories of failure. Eventually the man's weak spirit and cravings of flesh fail him and he finds himself a drunken fool in the corrupting embrace of Minase, drowning in the misery that the booze calls up, tainting his spirit and ruining his body until he becomes little more than a trophy formed of shame, power and glass, a single unquenchable shot that swirls with darkness and self-loathing between the ever present ice cubes with an occasional pair of sullen crimson feline eyes glaring out at whomever would dare toy with the addiction that had brought him low, determined to have them join in his misery soon enough..

Minase answered more traditional calls on occasion, taking perverse pleasure in turning on callers of particular arrogance or in special cases those he found that suffered from some terrible call of their own: the addictions of others had become his vice. The singularly sweet sensation of corrupting another was just too much to resist, he had to test them at every available turn, eagerly dragging them down and claiming them as his own should they fail to prove themselves stronger than the lure of the addiction. It was one of these that became his second great trophy and the motivation to enter the world of humanity.

Tirzo Villadelgado's abuela was a prominent Bruja in her day, not the scary eye stealign child snatcher kind, no...she was a kindly woman that whispered to the spirits of the natural world to help people find answers to troubles, mixed herbal medicines and did her best to turn aside misfortune and malicious beings. As it turns out that blood moved in his veins as he was near and dear to her sweet little heart, but once he stopped being a young boy he distanced himself from her with his pursuits of flesh and fun, not totally mind you, he would still visit her and pay respect, so he was not too old, but not too young to care when her time came to join her loved ones and friends in the grave. The loss of his abuelita broke him within leaving him with lingering memories of love a sense of adventure and the desire to run from the hole left in his heart. No matter how fast he rode his motorbike he couldn't escape the pain, so he rode the next wind, racing on the freeways for thrills, cash and the panties of groupies that showed up to such underground events. But still the tales of his abuela haunted him, talk of responsibility, talk of confronting pain and fear...of guiding the community by example, talk of strength from within. But all of that was too heavy, an anchor to reality, one that slowed him down enough for the pain to catch up, so he ran faster, but what was faster than the wind?

Tirzo soon found out how to ride the lightning, soon he could go faster than fear, pain and doubt all combined! White lines like the separation of the lanes he crossed when racing took him higher, faster and free from it all, his blood awakened and alive. That is until the day doing such a thing truly awakened his blood and allowed him to see the beast pursuing him down the road. Caught between worlds, summoned by the scent of addiction and the hint of power in his blood, Minase found himself caught between worlds chasing the succulent dream of a boy slowly corrupting himself, slowly awakening to a power that would serve him up to Minase's desire for corruption if he continued to abuse that white powder that occasionally reminded him of the white dust his abuelita used to seal away evil in the land.

The burning crimson eyes and the slather-dripping maw in his rear view mirror kept him running, staying far away from those he cared about, out of his head, of his heart out of his mind, running but unable to hide from the spectre of the black dog of the road chasing him down.He'd heard truckers talk of Black Shuck or Old Shuck running them down when they tried to drive too long, warning others on the road to beware of the black dog coming for his due. But what he saw behind him wasn't a dog in the truest sense of the word, it's form boiled with a misty malaise, shifting, warping and changing, growing more solid and terrifyingly otherworldly. Soon enough he could feel the heat of its breath snapping at his heels as they raced down the roadways, spurring him on to win each new race, seemingly only pleased when he took each new ride along the white lines, vanishing from his heels only when the moon left the sky, haunting his dreams during the day encouraging him to hide from the sunshine, staying far away from everything that had once made sense in his life.

It was when Tirzo reached the point of no longer trusting himself that he went to visit his Abuela's place one day, wallowing in old memories, eyes full of fairy tales and his ears echoing with her words of encouragement that he came across the mystic white powder that his Abuela had put up when her days as a bruja came to an end. Pocketing the powder he left her home in a rush, for the sun was setting and he could already hear the the growl of the old Shuck prowling around nearby, looking for him, ready to chase him onto the raceway. Back on the road he used a pinky nail to scoop up a bump of powdered courage forgetting that he'd placed the demon powder there. Snorting that powder blew away the boundary between the worlds, life washing away in waves of colour that took him off his bike and sent it hurtling into a guardrail and exploding shortly thereafter. He came to his senses on his back in the middle of the road, slowly rolling over onto all fours to cough up dust and smoke, slowly noticing the burning ruin that was his bike before looking up to see the great black wolf, the big bad watching him from several dozen feet away. Seized with rage at being pushed so far, he struggled to his feet, snorting both white powders, the jolt of magic and taint hitting his system like a bomb, fueling him with a righteous courage that sent him charging toward the wolf, fists cocked to strike repeatedly until the fire went from one of their eyes. In the end, Tirzo only managed to seal away the evil building within his own heart, but in doing so he fought MInase with his pride intact and what MInase took from the battle was not his life, nor his sanity, but the taint that had crystallized in his heart. A stone the shape of the sun, tainted black and ever leaking a white corruption. Tirzo for his part went on to ride the wind and take up the ways of his abuela, guiding his community as a reformed leader amongst the youth and a spiritualist for the traditional elders.

This brings us back to why Minase came to the human world again, a world in which he would eventually join an agency for the control of extraplanar entities such as himself as well as lesser nuisances like demihuman relations. That reason? Her heard her call...the cry of a child, the mere birthing wail of a first breath after exiting the womb. But somehow he knew that the voice of the child that called to him would provide him plenty of entertainment and opportunities to do what he had come to enjoy most: corrupting the weak and tearing them down, or shaping fresh young heroes as the crucible to test their souls. Which would she be, this Veronica Cruz, another young virtue or just another weak soul to toy with? He'd wait and see, remaining nearby to watch over her growth..not too close, but not too far, so he could be there when her flesh cried out for more, for the moment when he could no longer trust himself after hearing her call.