Name(s):
In another lifetime, there was a man named Logan Fletcher – Captain Fletcher. That name died long ago, however; its mention has been scrubbed from every databank, and lives on only within the memories of a few of the eldest gods who have survived the centuries and their closest confidants.
For the past four hundred years, there has been only Zeus.
Titles and Roles:
Zeus is known by many titles: the Highest, the King of the Gods, Lord of the Sky, Rainmaker, the Thunder-Bearer, Father of Gods and Men.
His temples are too many to count. The mountains and high places of Hellas have many shrines to honor him, but every city or town of importance has a temple to him too. The greatest of his temples and holy places have long had microphones and cameras installed within, so the prayers of mortals are indeed heard and monitored by Zeus and his staff within Olympus – occasionally they’ve even been answered. His voice has been known to the priests to occasionally echo out from within the great statues sculpted in his likeness, carrying with it the word of the King of Gods and the pantheon itself. When they hear his thunderous voice, they quickly carry his commands to the local tyrant or council. The will of Zeus is then respected lest they peril storms coming to wash away their whole city.
Artifacts and Powers:
At nearly all times, Zeus carried a great white-gold scepter styled so as to look like a lightning bolt. Its length is telescoping and can be compressed into a baton small enough to fit into a pocket, but more often than not he kept it fully extended and bore it prominently –
that was the symbol of his power, not some crown. This scepter is linked to the great satellite arrays in orbit of Hellas, and can control the weather manipulation devices in real time. It also has the ability to project a holographic, scaling model of the planet with all its weather, structures, and even people as viewed in realtime from the heavens.
Zeus wore a great deal of devices cleverly disguised as ornate jewelry. Several rings of his conceal highly advanced batteries and capacitors. The stored energy is used to power his scepter as well as various anti-gravity devices contained within armbands and a few other devices normally hidden beneath his toga; these anti-gravitation engines allow him to hover or fly. But the capacitance rings that he wears can also discharge electricity into tesla coils disguised as the gemstones, which enabled Zeus to shoot arcs of electricity from his hands. Various shields and failsafes prevented him from ever shocking himself or uncontrollably discharging this power, and supposedly this jewelry also would protect against a variety of weapons and make him quite difficult to assassinate. Obviously, his killers found some sort of workaround.
Zeus also possessed the Administrative Function Remote for IRIS, which allowed him to keep tabs on most of the pantheon. He was sure to keep that device very carefully hidden and rarely even spoke of its existence, lest it ever be stolen or lost. Still, the mere knowledge that he had seized it was enough to keep Hermes in line and prevent him from doing too much damage were he to go rogue.
The final artifact that Zeus carried about his person was the Key to Olympus. Rather than anything so mundane and crude as a physical key, this was his ID and access card from the ship and original mission… though the insufferable bit of plastic with the picture of his past self and that name ‘Logan Fletcher’ were of course stripped off the card, with its magnetic and electrical components put into a golden brooch. His Key granted him administrative control and unfettered access to all the technology, doors, and systems aboard the old vessel, and it does much the same in the city of Mount Olympus, for much of its technology was taken straight out of the now-dismantled vessel. In any case, Olympus’ life support and climate control panels, great treasury vaults of ancient technology and unused equipment, databanks from Old Arith, and even a menagerie of bioengineered horrors (created mostly through the efforts of Athena and Artemis) are all accessible to the Key’s holder. Some specially and more recently designed systems might not be programmed to allow him to override their protections and gain access with his Key, though Zeus discovering such a system designed to shut him out would not please him. Such systems would likely have had to have been kept secret from Zeus.
Persona:
Zeus had always been prideful and haughty. Captain Fletcher had been a narcissist that thought himself better than others, maintaining a stern and ever-professional distance and rarely socializing with his crew. This isolation was not a conscious decision on his part – just the natural consequence of his intimidating status and persona. He expected friendships to simply come to him, but never extended the first kind gesture or word himself. He was also petty, with a long memory for any slights (real or imagined) and an adamant refusal to ever be the first to extend an olive branch and apologize or make amends. He
would be sure to let you know if ever he was disappointed in your work, however; he sometimes did as much in public, and people usually withered under his gaze when he dissected all of their supposed failings and told them what to do
next time.Beyond an abrasive personality, Logan Fletcher was a diligent but otherwise very unremarkable man. In the space stations of the Fleet Academy orbiting Old Arith, he applied himself fully and utterly to his studies in the hopes that he could have his own command over one of the many military vessels that patrolled the system and kept order. He graduated with high marks and was commissioned as a minor officer. In time he likely would have quickly risen through the ranks and had his own ship, but he ultimately had a short career in the military. He would tell you that he left in disgust after realizing the rigidity of their structure and thinking, and after growing tired of licking the boots of incompetent and foolish superior officers. There’s surely some truth to that, but rumors always followed him; in his youth, he was salacious and abused his status as an officer on a few occasions.
In any case, as a former captain-lieutenant for a military force and one with an impressive academic history, it was easy enough for him to find work on civilian vessels. He quietly commanded freight shuttles for several years without incident before eventually growing restless and hungry for more. When the opportunity came to command the rescue mission to investigate and possibly save a distant colony, he jumped at the chance. His pride and ego made the prospect of being their savior and immortalizing his name very appealing, but as the lonely years whiled by in transit to that distant system, his thoughts began to stray, and he started to wonder if he couldn’t do more than merely save those fools… to wonder if he didn’t
deserve more.
Once he took the mantle of Zeus, his former nature became only more exaggerated. He made a conscious effort to maintain an aura of command lest the others think themselves too familiar or contemplate defiance. That said, he recognized the advantage of kindness too. So while his grasp on Hellas and Olympus was tight, he was also sure to be ever respectful and magnanimous to those that demonstrate their loyalty, and especially cruel and terrible to those that rebelled against him. The carrot and the stick, working in concert, kept him in power for a very long time.
His old perversions and lustful nature also returned. With his status as King of the Gods and access to the whole of Hellas, trysts became tenfold more effortless, frequent, and flagrant than when he was sneaking around a mere captain-lieutenant aboard a military vessel. For all his dalliances with the mortals and demigods and even former crewmembers, he never did fall in love with anyone, not even his ‘wife’ Hera. He doubtless thought himself too far above them all.
Background and Relationships:
It was Zeus alone who concocted and orchestrated the plan to recreate the legends of old with himself as ruler of a pantheon. The idea genuinely appealed to some of the crew, and for others, his force of personality and intimidating status as captain made it easy enough to coerce them into going along. Only a very brave few stood up to him, with the Isaac – the Head of Security – as the most notable and unfortunate of these dissenters, but it wasn’t enough; Zeus ultimately engineered the Coming of the Gods and the subjugation of the primitive ‘mortals’ trapped on their failed colony, with all the brutality that the plan involved. Those that opposed him, be they his own crewmen or defiant mortals, were slain or imprisoned, their names either forgotten altogether or forever vilified and associated with chaos and evil. For his violent and destructive departure and relentless attempts to create warform armies and overthrow the gods, Isaac inp particular has been demonized to the mortal denizens: they now know him as Typhon.
Yet just as history and reality were rewritten in accordance to his will, the very land itself was renamed. The planet he called Hellas, for his fascination with an archaic nation called Greece that existed on Old Arith long ago. The seas, the mountains, and the plains were similarly designated by classical names that he’d pulled from ancient maps and atlases. At his direction the primitive men and women who dwelled on the planet below were arbitrarily split into many tribes and nations and scattered across the planet.
He ordered the construction of Mount Olympus and his great palace within, and he has ruled from it ever since. Through guile and lightning and fear, he maintained an iron grip over both gods and mortals alike for more than four hundred years, suppressing too many heresies and rebellions to count, and performing a careful dance of trying to juggle staving off the decline of the gods with impeding the rise of the mortals, all while managing his own people so as to not fall prey to intrigue.
While overseeing the rest of the pantheon in their workings (to varying degrees – he left most with a good deal of autonomy, realizing the value of properly delegating the administration and upkeep needed) he’s also maintained direct control over some reactivated and repurposed terraforming equipment. Notably, during the coming of the Gods he saw to the deployment of vast constellations of satellites that employ advanced technology to control, stabilize, and manipulate the planet’s previously tempestuous and unpredictable weather. He has diligently managed the weather controls and their maintenance operations as part of the purview of his divine name and role. He had no prior experience in terraforming, meteorology, or climatology of any kind, but his fascination with the Zeus of the original mythos and his desire to perfectly and believably slip into that role gave him the desire to micromanage this one particular thing, as well as the motivation to learn how to do it well. In the centuries that followed, he came to master his understanding of Hellas’ weather and his unique system like no other could, or likely ever will. Not even his cloned successor understands the intricacies nearly as well as him – an unfortunate reality that will doubtless come to the detriment of the mortals.
His hand was in all things, and he loomed larger than life and larger than the gods, until his sudden demise changed everything.
