To be true, it all began as a coincidence of
interests. Im interested in Mangas and anime, Im interested in videogames,
Im deeply fascinated by the cryptical figures of werebeasts in general and, last but
not least, Ive played Role Playing Games for over ten years (that is not really that
much, I know, but, to me, they were ten years of learning the ways of storytelling and
role play). Moreover, I must admit that, perhaps, my true greatest interest is in creating
and exploring stories never told and creating characters and worlds waiting to live in my
stories. It is difficult to reach back exactly to the real starting point, the Big Bang,
that generated the universe of the Scarlet Cobras, but I guess the whole story owes its
creation to Cammy from Street Fighter 2, to Savage Dragon from
Image Publishing and to a Playstation game I never played named Rapid Reload. Well, this
is a really strange blend that just cant seem to work, but, let me explain: you must
know that Im not really a big fan of Capcom and the Street Fighter series,
lets just say that it is to me what it is to any other of you out there that played
coin-ops for some time, oddly enough, besides, of the whole series, the one I played less
was the edition were Cammy appeared for the first time (and the last one too, at least
wearing her Delta Red, red hat uniform). Nonetheless, her character, her appearance at
least, for I never searched for any character Story till lately, stroke me deeply: I
dont know why, I just liked the artwork the artist made, and the subsequent works
that fanartists did, look, playing the game, even now, I must Say I dont even like
playing with her as my character, it was simply a patchwork of details that caught my eye
and made a really good impression. However since my lack of interest in the story Capcom
wove up for her (lets admit it , they were not the best storytellers around), I just
had a beautiful character without soul, a really cute pin-up girl, something I really
dont like, and I thought she didnt deserve that, so I just tried to make up
some simple story, to create a character from my own imagination with her appearance, even
simple or a little banal, while working to something better and here enters Savage Dragon. Meanwhile this idea came to my mind, I was in the middle of
one of my rare "USA Comics Periods", and I was enjoying the story of Savage
Dragon, a comic from the Image universe that, even if in line with the standard and abused
superhero style of American Comics, tried some serious introspective in its characters,
telling the story of a super powered man with slight reptilian features joining L.A. or
S.F. police (I cant remember now) against super powered criminals; anyway, coupling
the two things I came up with the Idea of a danger loving police girl to flank the hero
proposed by Savage Dragon, and, to make up for her humanity in a super heroes world , I
decided to give her great agility and speed, coupled with the ability to fire guns with
uncanny ability and quickness stating that "She should fire an automatic gun so fast
that it would seem a machine-gun". The base layout just needed a name, and here
enters the PS game: in the local Blockbuster I couldnt help but noticing a game that
caught my eye just like Cammy did, but what I liked was simply its label: Rapid Reload.
Well, probably it was just self suggestion, for the title I really like never effectively
existed, in fact for a long time I was convinced that the game title was "Fast
Reload" which in my mind probably better suggested the idea of a fast pacing
firefight where so many bullets had to be sprayed that changing ammo clip should be
accomplished in matter of instants. Adding all of these facts together, I just got the
perfect codename for the new character and I also stated that "She should be able to
reload so quickly that her bullet bursts would not be interrupted by the change of
clip". And this is the mad story of how Fast Reload was born.
However, as crazy as it could seem, this is the only point of the story that is really
explainable, for, you see, at this point of the story, her character was just another
Super hero comic Doll with little more than some ideas of her "Superpowers", but
as I said, I was just waiting for something better, to give her the spark of life, to make
her a real person in a pseudo-real world, or simply, as I like depicting the personal
process of creating a character, I was just waiting for her to tell me her story, piece by
piece, wishing me to tell it. And the pieces came, one by one, but so different and in
such a chaotic manner that I can hardly discern how myself. First of all, soon Savage
Dragon disappeared from the story, as the super hero world did, turning into a world made
of nearly normal people possessing superhuman training as their powers, probably
influenced by the Street Fighter/ King of Fighters/Fatal Fury style of Super
Characters, after that, I dont Know, details just came to my mind with no particular
order, filling out the world she lived in and a little bit of her personality; I decided
to keep her as a Cop (some kind of Super Cop, of course), but I think I just kept
wandering how a super soldier like her ended up working as a police woman, and, I suppose,
that the story of her involvement in a super military squad
of soldiers became evident (just like the Capcom Cammy was supposed to be) and it slowly
turned out to be a mercenary squad (differently from the Capcom plot) in my mind; perfect
place for a mercenary squad to operate was probably the middle-east or the Indochina/Laos
zone and, since I liked jungles more than deserts, it was Indochina. Then, probably,
I thought that Cammy really hadnt the face of a Leader, so I supposed there should
have been someone else to lead the squad and that there should
have been others like her, but more importantly I was perhaps tormented by the idea that
no one leaves such a super trained squad happily or by simple will and lives to tell the
tale and, in a flash of lightning, Cammy told me her odyssey
with Shugerg and her battle, and her escape, and, in substance,
her life
and so I guess this is how she was really born. And with her the
Squad was born, and the Squad was exactly like how Cammy was in the beginning, a
Silhouette waiting for more details to make it alive, another story waiting to be told,
and that Squad were the Scarlet Cobras. Why such
name? Well, this is embarrassing, but the story goes like this: the color was a necessity
mandated by Cammy original Appearance where Red was determining, and the Cobra, well
I didnt collect many pictures of Cammy by that time and I just trusted my instinct
and, well, I was just damn sure that on her breast Cammy had the symbol of her team (thing
which is true), and I was still surer that such symbol was a triangle holding the
depiction of some kind, and, well, I just remembered it to be a hissing Cobra (thing which
is entirely false, the symbol is a triangle, but it points down, while mine pointed up,
and the original is just a plain geometric figure). |