Vandal Savage

In the days of prehistory, 50,000 BC, Savage was a caveman named Vandar Adg, leader of the Cro-Magnon Blood Tribe. He was bathed in the radiation of a mysterious meteorite, which gave him incredible intellect and immortality. An observer from the Bear Tribe would later approach that same meteorite and become Savage's eternal nemesis, the Immortal Man, possessing the power to resurrect as a new person every time he is killed. There is evidence to suggest that Savage was the first cannibal on record.

Savage's first mark in the history came when he and a select group of people successfully undermined and destroyed the lost city of Atlantis. That group of people became known as the Illuminati, with Savage serving as its leader.

He has ruled and brought to ruin whole civilizations under hundreds of names: Khafre, Cheops, Alexander the Great, participated in the murder of Julius Caesar, advised the actions of Genghis Khan, Blackbeard, and Vlad the Impaler, to name a few. He also terrorized Victorian era London as Jack the Ripper. He realized that his prominence could cause him to be killed accidentally, so he decided to work behind the scenes. He has also worked as close friends and advisers to the likes of Erik the Red, William the Conqueror (whom he advised to invade England under the name Sir Von Savage), Napoleon Bonaparte (whom he served as Marshal Savage), Otto von Bismarck (whom he helped to invade France as Baron Von Savage), and many others.

He also led the Spanish Armada in its attempted invasion of England (suggesting he may have been Alonso Pérez de Guzmán). He was the court physician in France and even used the royal family for syphilis experiments.

 Several centuries ago he met the man who had taken the name of "Ra's al Ghul", the "Demon's Head"and took him under his tutelage to sharpen his skills. It was through hearing Savage's twisted tails of the horrors and brutality of mankind over the centuries,  coupled with the entering the modern age and industrialisation beginning to cover much of the Earth, Ra's grew to despise the humans who he believed were destroying the world's natural beauty, thus setting him on a path of eco-terrorism. Also during this time, Ra's, his uncle, and the boy who freed him from the sultan are all using the Lazarus Pits to prolong their lives until an incident in London. Ra's catches the boy writing his own memoirs in their original language, of which Ra's has forbidden all records. During a battle, Ra's kills the boy and flees to a Lazarus Pit, which he uses. When he returns to their home in London, his uncle has vanished with the remnants of their historical records.

For more information on the demon's head, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%27s_al_Ghul#Origin

In 1865 Vandal had a chance encounter with The Wolverine And The Sabertooth of Canada and took an interest in their development. He journeyed alongside the pair for about ten years for the enjoyment of the companionship of fellow immortals before taking his leave to check on a certain project he'd been developing.

That project? The HYDRA Cult. Founded in ancient times during the Kree's initial occupation of Earth, led by Vandal Savage and Hive of the Inhumans. In an effort to drive the Kree from Earth, they led a massive Inhuman army against them in a long war. After defeating them and driving them from Earth, Vandal, Hive and their followers took off to other parts of the world in an effort to conquer all; however, a group of Inhumans and ordinary humans, afraid of HYDRA and seeking to defeat them, banish Hive to the alien planet Maveth through the use of the Monolith, a Kree "weapon" that could transport people to Maveth. Hive stayed there for thousands of years, living off the bodies of HYDRA sacrifices that sought to bring him to Earth so he could rule, but as the years went by, most of HYDRA split off from this "religious side". Gideon Malick and his family, however, stuck by it. The remnants of the cult were lead into a new order by Vandal as he set the seeds and organized events through history, culminating in the event of 1914.
 
On 28 June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Countess Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia. It was the couple’s fourteenth wedding anniversary. They were utterly devoted; indeed it sometimes seemed Sophie was Ferdinand’s only friend. Politically liberal and personally difficult, Ferdinand had married against the wishes of his uncle, Austria’s emperor Franz Joseph. As a result, his children were removed from any right to succession, but he was still next in line to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

An empire it surely was, even if its welter of nationalities were only tenuously welded together. Ferdinand was an Austrian, skeptical of Hungarians, married to a Czech, and inclined to be indulgent with Croats and Serbs. His reputation for liberalism—in what was a tolerant, cosmopolitan, fatalistic, conservative-reactionary empire, which regarded itself, in the famous Viennese phrase, as being in a situation that was hopeless but not serious—came largely from his support for expanding the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a tripartite monarchy that would have given greater autonomy to the Slavs.

It was not a popular position. Austrian hardliners saw no reason for change, Hungarians feared it would lessen their influence, and Slavic nationalists did not want their people reconciled to Austrian rule; they wanted violence, bloodshed, and nationalist revolution. On 28 June 1914, one of their number—Gavrilo Princip, a tubercular student, an atheist in a famously Catholic if multireligious empire, and a member of the Black Hand, a Serbian terrorist movement—committed the murders that eventually created an independent Yugoslavia, all at the cost of a cataclysmic world war.
 What started World War 1 began with one death. It ended with 17 million more dead.

A human meat grinder, with millions of men and boys suffering horrific deaths from the latest military technology as their patriotism, dreams of heroism in war and, for many, their lives, were shattered.
 
During the events of the war, Vandal would bring together two powerful people who came close to being ruin to the entire world: Dr. Isabel "Doctor Poison" Maru, and General Erich Ludendorff.

 If Savage's plan had worked, the actions of Doctor Poison and General Erich would have likely resulted a neverending war and the near annihilation of mankind, with HYDRA waiting in the shadows to grab everyone and take over.

 But.

Good Ol' Steve Trevor just haaaaaad to crash land on a certain island and recruit a certain somebody who fucked over his entire plan.

Contrary to her original belief however, Ares himself was not responsible for the war, not entirely, it empowered him, but he was an outside observer.

 And since he had the golden lasso around him anyway, he decides he might as well warn her of Vandal Savage, since she IS technically family, Savage, to Diana, being a monster that she'd only heard stories of from her mother back on Themyscira. 

 Ares assured her that all of the stories she'd heard were true and that it was a human who'd caused all of this. An immortal one, but a human nonetheless. Not the Gods. He then left her to ponder that thought.

Following the crashing of the plane and the diffusion of the poison by Doctor Poison and Steve Trevor, Diana spent months searching for them and any sign of Vandal Savage before she finally found Steve recovering in a hospital bed. He told her he didn't remember much after the crashing and he didn't know what had happened to Isabel, but he reasoned that if she could survive something like that, then it stood to reason that she could as well.

It wasn't until she returned to Theymiscira that she discovered that Isabel was being kept imprisoned by the Amazons after she washed up and confessed to her crimes and they'd been waiting for Diana before they sentenced her.

The two caught up and came to an understanding. Isabel decided to stay on the island, far away from man's wars, away from anybody who could use her knowledge of chemistry, and hopefully learn the arts of Amazonian Medicine from them. She also told Diana anything she knew about Vandal Savage. She initially didn't believe the legends of him being an all powerful immortal, but after seeing everything Diana could do, she was forced to reconsider her preconceptions of what was possible.

After a long discussion with her mother, Isabel was freed and accepted into the Amazon sisterhood, so long as she remained on the island and dedicated her life to atonement. She happily agreed.

Meanwhile, Savage's backup plan was already getting started.

The peace settlement of World War I led to World War II because of the perception that the conditions for peace unfairly punished the people of Germany, thus fostering a national mood ripe for Nazi exploitation. Following World War I, Germany was forced to accept sole blame for the war and pay exorbitant reparations.

The terms of the Versailles peace treaty were thought by many—and not just in Germany—to be unduly harsh and punitive. The treaty attributed sole blame to Germany for starting the war, it imposed crippling reparations which could never realistically be repaid, and it severely restricted the size of the German armed forces. All of these measures combined created enormous resentment in Germany. Germans of all political persuasions felt humiliated and unjustly treated by the victorious.

Savage sat back and let this simmer for awhile before pushing a puppet figurehead into power: Adolf Hitler.

Along with starting the Thule Society,  HYDRA eventually revealed itself to the world once more within the special weapons division of the Nazi Sturmabteilung. Led by Ernst Kaufmann, the division was charged with developing advanced weapons for the German Army. In June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, Kaufmann was killed by the SS officer Johann Schmidt. Schmidt and his men eliminated Kaufmann's entire unit, except one man, Doctor Arnim Zola. Schmidt took over Kaufmann's weapons program and formed his own SS research division, naming it HYDRA. The new unit was formed with the 'official approval' of the Nazi Führer, Adolf Hitler.

HYDRA was named after the mythological creature and used its original phrase: "cut off one head, two more will take its place". It was soon charged with science experiments and deep investigation of the occult. Due to contributions from Arnim Zola, HYDRA developed several extremely advanced weapons. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, the leaders of the Third Reich decided to support the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco. HYDRA was among the German units sent by Adolf Hitler to assist the Nationalists on the battlefield.

In April 1937, HYDRA's tanks and soldiers equipped with powerful exo-skeleton battle suits destroyed the city of Guernica. At the time, it was believed the German air force, the Luftwaffe, was responsible for the destruction of the city. However, the footage of the slaughter was smuggled out of Germany by the British agent Margaret Carter and handed over to the US military in January 1940.

 His plan this time around, centuries in the making, is much more grander in scale.

The Gegengeist Gruppe and Millennium will bring forth a massive army of supernatural artifacts, vampires, zombies and monsters to swarm the battlefields (With the plan for Jurgen Wolf to become nigh-invincible through the Beliar Artifacts), while Sebastian Shaw wins over villainous mutants to their cause to aid the war effort, and HYDRA will lead the charge with the advanced weapons developed by reverse engineering The Tesseract, all of this, will be combined with the power Savage has gained from The Khushu Idol, Savage plans to absorb power from the colossal amount of death the war will cause, enough to ascend to the power of Godhood, while using his hellish army to wipe out the Allies and cow the rest of the world into obedience, allowing him to not only rule this world, but, if his theories of the cube prove true, he will even be able to invade other realms, potentially increasing his power indefinitely.

An immortal, vile monster of limitless ambition and aspirations for Godhood, Vandal Savage is truly the worst of humanity taken human form.

POWERS

SUPERIOR PHYSICAL CONDITION: Due to centuries of training and physical conditioning, Vandal is glaringly, obviously and super/unnaturally superior over normal humans thanks to pushing his capabilities far beyond the natural level; making him immensely stronger, faster, durable and smarter than what normal members of humanity can achieve by any method of training and remains that way with little or no maintenance.

SUPER REGENERATION: Vandal Savage has the ability to regenerate any sort of injuries on his body, such as missing limbs, at incredible speeds. Any damage perfectly heals, even mental or genetic. His blood can also be used to heal and temporarily physically enhance people.This power has completely stopped his aging, his telomeres simply restore to their optimal lengths, youthful prime, and never shortens.

IMMORTALITY: Vandal Savage has an infinite life span, as he can never die, never age, and can shrug off virtually any kind of physical damage.

OCCULT KNOWLEDGE: Savage had knowledge of magic and mysticism, allowing him to perform various occult rituals such as prolonging the lives of his followers, raising the dead and casting spells along with where to locate and utilize arcane artifacts and the powers bestowed upon him by The Idol.

MASTER COMBATANT: Vandal Savage is a master of all forms of combat that have been invented up until the current era.