To be true, it all began as a coincidence of interests. I’m interested in Mangas and anime, I’m interested in videogames, I’m deeply fascinated by the cryptical figures of werebeasts in general and, last but not least, I’ve 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 can’t seem to work, but, let me explain: you must know that I’m not really a big fan of Capcom and the Street Fighter series, let’s 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 (let’s 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 don’t like, and I thought she didn’t 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 can’t 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 couldn’t 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 don’t 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 hadn’t 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 didn’t 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).

At this point, Cammy had a life, she just needed to live it, and I was willing to tell the story while she kept filling the details grabbing pieces from the stories, mangas, animes and video games I read, watched or played; one of her distinctive marks was the difference between her cheerful way of life with which she concealed her deep sadness and sense of distance from the normal world that grips the hearts of so many soldiers when they get back to a normal life (as seen in "Rambo", which I have seen once or twice, or the Anime Area 88, which I watched over and over so many times): she was blowing up the world to forget that it was the only thing she was taught and able to do. Since such sadness should have obiouvsly resulted in a closed character, unable to tell other the story of such sadness, it came natural to me that there should have been someone at her side to share such feelings and, seen the not so subliminal suggestions Capcom and the SF Fans made, Chun-Li was the most obiouvs choice. And so, another Character was born, willing to fill out her story with details similar to those Cammy had been telling me for all that time.

For a long time I just kept figuring out brief actions or scenes with the two protagonists, and I went on adding details from external sources to round out all the particulars like the fighting style, the "special moves" (essential for a video game fan as I was by that time), the weapons, and it was in this phase that the biggest change came to evolve the world of Scarlet Cobras (which, at that point, was simply the world of Cammy and Chun-Li). At some point in my video gaming experience I stumbled over a game I found really stimulating: it was Bloody Roar, a 3D fighting game involving character which could morph into werebeasts. I was so deeply fascinated that I couldn’t resist the idea of adding such flavor to the two characters even if it really didn’t make any sense; since till that moment Cammy and Chun-Li were super fighters, but totally human and there was no trace of such supernatural beasts at all in their world, I just decided to give it a kick-in-the-ass-style background adjustment and changed the whole root of the story trying to blend the Military-Human world with a werebeast oriented one. Despite the grim faces you have probably made, I was successful. Realizing that the story I had already written was too fragile to receive such a crossbreeding, I just went back to the details never told of the "Before", while leaving the changes so obscure that they did not affect the development of the subsequent (and already written) story. A great part was also played by the plot of Bloody Roar itself, which I never fully understood, since it was written in Japanese, but, from the long hours of game-play, I could understand that a megacorporation was in some way linked to the Zooanthropes and their destiny. I did not want to copy Bloody Roar, but such an idea seemed intriguing, so I included it in my plans; at this point, the games were done: soon all the details came to my mind by themselves, bringing with them the stories of the Scarlet Cobras Squad, the Ogami Crusade, and the involvement of Tyron, and the story of the slavery of the Zooanthropes. Once that was done, new details were calling to be revealed, like who were the other members, and so, I started the work all over again, adding characters from other anime, videogames or everything that appealed me (and in this way Marvel, Gado, Angel and Lulu were born). At this point, the story was "The world of Cammy & Chun-Li" no more, but instead there was a great conflict and a great drama that had many protagonists and much need for stories to be told and for plays to be staged, with many valiant characters ready for the undertaking. That was a great change, for, at that point, I hadn’t anymore a handful of characters with some pretty superpowers, but a complete new world filled with people who, of course, still had their "superpowers", but they had more than that, they had a life, feelings, and a place in a Story, with all of its details and different possibilities. That was something I was really willing to tell, more than that, I was willing to share that story with others… But how? I asked myself. And here begins the story of this crazy plan.