Henry Nwachukwu was born in Abuja, Nigeria in 1974. As a young man, he was studious, taking a particular interest in the tribal histories of the Igbo. In 1991, his father, a professor at the University of Lagos took his son with him on an expedition to study the first ruins of Eri, the cultural ancestor of the Igbo people. During that expedition a 17 year old Henry and his father would make a startling discovery.
They found the place where Eri descended from the sky, sent by Chukwu. It wasn’t what they imagined it would be, because beneath the place were ruins and broken pieces of some unknowable technology. While they processed the find of his father’s career, agents of the Damascus Company found their site and attempted to take it from them. Henry’s father, Chidi was killed during their attempt, but Henry hid deeper in the ruins. Deep in the ruins he found a sealed hatchway. When he laid his hands on the hatch, it opened and the last thing he remembered seeing was a darkness engulf him.
He awoke standing in the ruins, his father’s body at his feet, but the agents of Damascus had been defeated. He felt like he wasn’t in his own body, and it took him a little bit to figure out why. The light in front of his face faded and he realized he was wearing a suit of armor. He’d read the works of Heinlein and pieced together that this was a suit of powered armor.
Henry buried his father and attended the University of Lagos, choosing to study Mechanical Engineering. The suit’s advanced capabilities gave him a leg up on his classmates, and he graduated in two years before finishing a master’s degree in a year and a half. The Damascus Company, seemingly unaware of his past experience with them, recruited him out of college.
He reluctantly took the job and moved to Port Fontaine. He settled into a quiet neighborhood in Franklin and went to work in the advanced mechanics and exploration division of Damascus. There he made a number of startling discoveries. The foremost of these discoveries were that the Damascus Company had at least a partially functional version of a suit like his. All of their advanced weapons, electronics, and equipment they had developed after World War II was developed based off of this partially functional suit.
Alan Damascus, his immediate supervisor, was expanding mining operations in Africa to meet the demands for his Mark VI suit prototypes. The legal claims to the area these operations were questionable at best, and they threatened tribal homelands that had been sovereign for decades and were recognized by the Nigerian government.
Henry brought his concerns to his boss and was given two choices. He could either shut up and keep working, or he could quit. He resigned immediately, and tried to work with the system to protect the tribal homelands. When no one was willing to do anything, he put the suit back on and went to work in Africa.
In about a year’s time, Henry’s efforts had stymied the advance of the Damascus sub contractors who had moved in to claim the land for its mineral rights and made it far too expensive for them to continue operating in Nigeria. He returned home with the thanks of the elders, and tried to go back to work for another tech firm to find that Damascus had blacklisted him. Further, they were suing him in Federal Court to get him to “return” the piece of tech he had obviously built using their stolen lab space and equipment.
The case did not go well for Damascus, as Henry told the story of how he had found the suit and the circumstances of how he brought it into his possession. He also told a jury about how agents working for Damascus had killed his father in cold blood. Left with a terrible black eye on their public image, Alice Damascus ordered the attorneys to drop the suit immediately. Further she ordered an independent audit of the Damascus operations and asked Henry to oversee it.
Henry cleaned up a lot of Damascus’s shadier business, and this public attention and his reputation for integrity brought his attention to Web. Dracula had started floating the idea of adding to the roster of the team, and Eri (what Henry had been calling himself after the expedition to Africa), would be a welcome addition to the questionable morals on the team (namely Dracula and Fury).
Eri has only made a few enemies in his time, but they have deep pockets and a long reach. His auditing of the Damascus Company grey and black divisions put a lot of designers and developers working on hinky projects out on their asses. Alan Damascus (operating under the moniker Gallant) has been his longest, deepest enemy, and is constantly looking for ways to stick it to Eri.
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