Kaza (Reality Z-25 31-H)
In Reality Z-25 31-H, Kaza was originally a billionaire playboy named Kyle Elsworth III with the superhero alter-ego known of the Black Owl, before becoming a jungle-hero in the Naked Jungle of Buranda and the husband of Gwenna. The two acted as the protectors of the Jungle and were acquainted with Jenny Everywhere and Jenny Anywhere.
Description
Physical appearance
A tall, well muscled man in his thirties with black hair, Kaza did most of his adventuring wearing nothing but a knife strapped to his bicep. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress, Whatever Happened to Jenny Everywhere?!) He had green eyes. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress)
Personality
Kaza was an adventurous, heroic figure, always willing to rush ahead and risk his life for others, sometimes to the point of recklessness, (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress, Ruthless Ro-Man)
Powers & abilities
His years in the jungle made Kaza both a gifted athlete and a formidable fighter, able to swing from tree to tree with ease. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) He carried a small knife. (COMIC: Whatever Happened to Jenny Everywhere?!) Though not carrying one, he was able to handle a gun if necessary. (COMIC: Nula! Naked and Alone!)
Biography
2000s
Kaza was already “Jungle Lord” around 2000, when the Serpent Cult rained terror on the Naked Jungle and its surroundings. He was the one to eventually link the deaths and disappearances to the elusive Cult, and with his help, the Cult was defeated and the Serpent Priest disappeared. During this adventure, however, Kaza never realised that the Serpent Priest was more than a successful charlatan, nor that the Serpent Lord was a real — though not supernatural — creature. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress)
By a “few years” (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man) before 2010, (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) Kaza had been joined in the jungle by Gwenna, who rejected her former city life to be with him, a sacrifice he did not fully understand at the time, having little insight into her earlier life. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man) In fact, in doing so, she had broken off her engagement with her fiancé Dirk, in actuality a venal individual who only had eyes for her father's company and the wealth it could bring him. A short time after she began to live as Kaza's wife, Davis and Dirk arrived and tried to force her to leave him and go through with the marriage to Dirk, but this evidently did not come to pass. (COMIC: Jungle Romance)
Because the invasion force happened to have landed in the Naked Jungle, which they knew better than anyone, the two participated in the effort to fight off Ro-Man's attempted invasion of the planet, alongside such superheroes as Dynamo, Samson, Flame Girl, Blue Beetle and Zanzibar the Magician. He personally killed one of the invaders, Rel-Mor, who was none other than Ro-Man's “life-mate”. Ultimately, however, it was Stardust the Super-Wizard's intervention which was instrumental in turning the battle around and repelling the invaders. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man)
Against the Serpent Cult
In 2010, when Kaza and Gwenna received an email from the Commissioner warning them that the Serpent Cult had been revived by the Serpent Priest's daughter Nerlana, Kaza headed directly to the Temple of the Serpent God, while Gwenna rode Zeb to the kraal near Buranda Pass to meet up with the Commissioner. At the Temple, he was ambushed by Nerlana herself, who displayed the power of her father's magical tiara to him by telepathically commanding a large number of snakes to bind and trap Kaza. She then announced to the Natari that she and her rebuilt Cult would make Kaza the first sacrifice to their god that very night.
Meanwhile, however, Gwenna foiled the assassin whom Nerlana had sent to the kraal to kill the Commissioner. The captured cultist let slip that Kaza was headed into a trap at the Temple, and the three drove in the Commissioner's car to the Natari village, where Gwenna, reunited with her friend Gana, they learned that the Serpent Cult had already announced to the villagers that they would sacrifice Kaza to the Serpent Lord that very evening. Recruiting Gana's finest warriors, they surrounded the Temple, but the situation ended up being resolved with minimal bloodshed when the Serpent Lord was revealed to be a very real, but non-supernatural, giant snake whom Wimberly shot at reflexively, breaking Nerlana's telepathic control on it and causing it to eat her instead of Kaza. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress)
Return of Ro-Man
Some time later, Kaza and Gwenna were invited by the Commissioner and Wimberly to the Adventurers Club for what was supposed to be a quiet night — dressing up for the occasion. There, they ran into old friends of Gwenna's, Fred “Junior” Hancock and Deena; the three had been inseparable friends throughout their high school years in Pinedale, but drifted apart after Fred proposed to Deena, dashing Gwenna's own romantic hopes regarding Fred. Kaza was somewhat distraught with these living reminders of Gwenna's prior life, beginning to worry that he had torn her away from her rightful home by getting her to live in the Naked Jungle with him.
These ruminations were cut short when the Club was attacked by Ro-Man, who had returned to Earth in a one-person craft, intending to take revenge on Kaza for his earlier defeat. Mistaking Deena for Gwenna, he kidnapped her after briefly knocking out Kaza. After waking, Kaza insisted on following him at once while Gwenna was left to try and contact their more powerful allies from the League of Champions and the like. Kaza found what seemed to be a helmet-less Ro-Man, only to realise that the real Ro-Man was an energy-being who possessed living hosts: the gorilla-man now before him was merely his last host Hezton, now free as Ro-Man had transferred himself into Deena's body, still under the impression that she was Kaza's mate and intending to take a particularly cruel revenge on him by killing him with his lover's own hands. However, he had failed to account for Deena's lack of physical strength compared to Gwenna, who soon caught up to the group alongside Fred and the superhero Dynamo, who had answered the call.
After trouncing the possessed Deena, Gwenna goaded Ro-Man into living her body; as they'd planned, Dynamo then used his own energy powers to disrupt Ro-Man's gaseous form before he could possess Gwenna, trapping him inside his own discarded helmet. In the aftermath, Gwenna assured Kaza that despite the dangers, she wouldn't trade her adventurous life for the world, and seeing how ordinary Deena had turned out had only reinforced that view. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man)
Revenge of the Skull
Some time later, Catherine Maxwell, alias Nula, sent word that she was returning to the Naked Jungle. The Commissioner welcomed her at the air strip with Wimberly, and Kaza and Gwenna also made a surprise appearance, amused to meet their predecessor as hero of the Burandan jungle and to learn about the Commissioner's adventurous past. Everyone went back to Kaza and Gwenna's treehouse for tea, where Nula revealed that she had come to Buranda to return Solomon's Diamond to the Koranzi, and not simply to see old friends again. The following night, the village was set aflame by three airships commanded by terrorist the Skull; Kaza and Gwenna, who had been having a hard time going to sleep due to Kaza's anxieties about the Diamond, which he had felt possessed some supernatural power, went out on their balcony as they heard the airships flying over, but were then held at gunpoint by the Skull himself. He took them prisoners, claiming that they would bear witness to his “great triumph”. (COMIC: The Danger, the Diamond, and the Dowager) While he had Kaza placed in the hold of the tank he was using to travel through the jungle, he took Gwenna in his cabin with him, allowing him to gloat to her at length about his plan. He revealed to her that the Diamond was actually the Philosopher's Stone, the key to wondrous powers of immortality and the creation of gold; after awakening its power, he hoped to use it to allow his cult to take over the world and effect the white-supremacist “social reordering” of which he dreamed.
However, soon after he finished explaining all this, also letting slip that his current hideout was the “old Kaitaran Temple”, Kaza managed to get the drop on his guards and knock them out. Hearing the commotion, Gwenna took the Skull by surprise with a kick to the jaw and knocked him out. As the tank veered out of control and into a tree, the jungle-dwellers hopped to safety and made their own way to the Temple, where the Skull's agents Professor Morag and Mitchell had just taken their prisoners who had survived the fire, including Nula, Smedley, Wimberley and Kiana. (COMIC: Nula! Naked and Alone!)
Later events
At some point after leaving the Odds, Jenny Everywhere visited the Naked Jungle and met Kaza and Gwenna. She somehow managed to install a flat-screen TV in their jungle home. (COMIC: Whatever Happened to Jenny Everywhere?!)
External links
- Who's Who: Kaza profile on the comic's website (NSFW)
- Kaza RPG stat card on DeviantArt (NSFW)
- Kaza on the ComicFury Wiki
| Incarnations of Kaza |
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| Reality Z-25 31-H • Fear in the Jungle |
