CAST
Nineteen year-old cynic Jennifer Johnson leads a pretty empty life. She barely attends any of her classes at Acer State University, has few hobbies or marketable skills, and has only a couple of close friends (one of whom she’s hopelessly in love with). But that’s OK. Why is that OK?
Because her life is a lie. Because in reality she is …
Scwonkey E. Dog is a darnian, a dog-faced alien soldier from the planet Gardios and washed-up former “golden child” of the elite interplanetary peacekeeping organization codenamed SC Force. Just on the edge of thirty, he is a hero of the Darkoan War, a crack shot and skilled robot pilot, and is on assignment to wipe out remnants of the Army of the Red Force, the psuedo-theocratic military organization that ruled over his home world two generations ago, hiding out on planet Earth. Unfortunately, his plan to lure them out left him amnesiac for months on end and operating under the belief that he was, in fact, a female human college student. His memory is still a little scattershot, and he still thinks of himself more as the teenage girl he thought he was than as the twenty-nine year-old man he is.
Short-tempered, condescending, egomaniacal, and the best secret weapon the SC Force has on Earth. Zappilous Starr believes he has a grand destiny ahead of him, and he had hoped that hitching his wagon to his old high school and academy friend Scwonkey E. Dog was going to get him there. Unfortunately, when Scwonkey had a very public fall from grace, ZapStar went down with him. Now he toils away in the subterranean depths of the SC Force’s base on Earth, unsure whether to be frustrated that he’s stuck on this backwards little planet or glad to be away from prying eyes, where he can work on his personal projects in peace.
A man with a vice for every occasion, Leonard Rakyl grew up with Scwonkey and Zappy despite being born to enormous wealth. It was his half-breed nature — darnian father, human mother — that landed him as the third leg of the trio of outcasts, but where Scwonkey and Zappy joined the SC Force academy out of high school, Leonard flopped around on his mother’s homeworld, directionless until the death of his parents in a freak accident. He is sole owner of Rakyl Technological Industries, a manufacturer of consumer electronics with offices in New York, Centropolis, and Tokyo on Earth, and Crux Pointe on the planet Gardios. Despite this responsibility, he can usually be found with a drink in his hand, a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket, and a couple of beautiful women by his side. After all, chicks dig the pointy ears. Leonard fancies himself an irresponsible coward, but he’s fiercely loyal to his friends, and his outgoing nature engenders the same loyalty from nearly everyone who knows him.
Even-tempered, beautiful, sharp as a tack, highly responsible — Danielle Ryan is all these things, which is why it’s so confusing for most people to see her spending so much of her time hanging around an irresponsible layabout like Jenn Johnson. What started off as a pet project for Dani, trying to turn the spiky-haired insular girl in the long black jacket into a “good kid,” has blossomed into a teasing “odd couple” friendship. Dani’s old friends, though, blame this friendship for the cracks they see in Dani’s “good, Christian, straight-A student” facade — late night drives turning into parties with complete strangers. Of course, if not for one such party, Jenn wouldn’t know the truth about herself, nor the truth about her feelings for Dani; Jenn’s hopelessly in love with the girl, the poor thing.
Coolly professional, cocky in the face of danger, and terribly clever with machines, Vanessa Lang is Zappilious Starr’s right hand. She also becomes a nervous, gushing fangirl when left in Scwonkey’s presence for too long. Consequently, Zappy tries to keep the two of them running completely separate tasks as much as possible during operations.
Once upon a time, Erik-Rel Zambaghini ruled over the planet Gardios as the War-Lord Red Dog II. Ousted as the result of a guerrilla military campaign by his own puppet aristocracy, his forces fled across the cosmos to safehouses, space stations, and the occasional world still beneath the heel of the Army and/or Order of the Red Force. As the fledgling SC Force drove his remaining legions underground, Zambaghini himself fled to Earth, where he’d left a significant cache of weapons and supplies in a complex built beneath the city of Centropolis. Decades of waiting and preparing, however, have left him in a terribly weakened state; drained of the powers that let him rule Gardios for centuries, his age is now catching up with him, and as his meticulously crafted plans reach their endgame, he finds himself faced with a half-breed son with little patience for the long game.
Heir to a lost throne, the half-breed son of War-Lord Erik-Rel Zambaghini is an overeager pup, full of bravado and tired of hiding beneath the city of Centropolis. Rigel despises his father, and the feeling is mutual; while Rigel believes his father is a dying old man who will see his organization finally crumble to dust around him unless drastic measures are taken, the Red Dog sees his son as a completely reckless twit who will, if he’s not careful, finish the job on his own. Unfortunately for young Rigel, his track record seems to bear this out; unfortunately for the Red Dog, however, Rigel is the only heir to the throne, sired during the Red Dog’s decades of planning the rebirth of the Red Force on Earth. And since the Red Dog has far fewer days ahead than behind, Rigel may well soon be the NEW Red Dog …
