Federal Bureau of Super-powered Affairs
***CLASSIFIED***
Known Origins of Dr. Vahzilok
Driven by a darkly twisted combination of grief and desire, Dr. Vahzilok’s motives were born from a psyche-shattering personal tragedy. Once a prominent doctor, Demetrios Vasilikos joined his father’s medical practice healing heroes from around the world. Working together, father and son were the most sought after, trusted doctors in Paragon City.
This happy partnership was sundered when Demetrios’s father caught a deadly alien infection while treating a hero named Commander Comet. Demetrios became obsessed with finding a cure for his ailing father. Sadly, after a harrowing, pain-wracked month, the elderly doctor died.
However, while desperately seeking a cure for his father, Demetrios delved into some of the highly experimental science and technology being developed by those on the fringe of medicine. After seeing these potentially dangerous advances, he became convinced that with more time he could have saved his father. Beyond his own selfish need to heal his father, he also felt certain that he could in fact save thousands, maybe millions of lives by curing every type of deadly disease that currently plagues the earth.
Despite these seemingly altruistic goals, his inability to save his father’s life snapped some small, vital piece of Demetrios’s psyche. No longer concerned with the wellbeing of his patients, he experienced a newfound freedom to pursue unethical and increasingly disturbing research. His need to examine new medical technologies drove Demetrios to perform grotesque medical experiments. These studies soon convinced him that the key was to find a way to perfect transplant surgery. The more of the old body that could be cut away and replaced with new flesh, the better.
This led down a sinister experimental path as he discovered new ways to animate and preserve flesh and organs. His brilliant mind further incorporated advances in engineering and computer science into his work, creating artificial systems to function with the transplanted body parts. It was not long before Demetrios had created his first Cadaver, a nearly brainless stitched together body of a dog that could move under its own power with the help of motors and simple machinery implanted in its body.
Although the work was already questionable, soon after creating this Cadaver dog, Demetrios went beyond the pale, killing a live person to further his research. At this point, his already unstable mind split completely and thus, Dr. Vahzilok was born. Within his fractured psyche, the desire to cure the world of disease was distorted. Believing his goal more important than the lives of those he sacrifices, Vahzilok the zombie master now has no qualms about killing innocents for his imagined “greater good.”
Still a true scientist, the doctor documents his horrifying experiments in great detail, sharing his research on underground web sites. Although reviled by the medical community, many twisted minds have begun building upon Vahzilok’s research, imitating his work by creating their own zombie hordes. Some of his more prodigious protégées have even gone public with their work, such as the infamous Facemaker who currently operates out of the Rogue Isles.
Now Vahzilok’s minions and imitators scour the city for bodies, blood, and organs, anything to aid this once great doctor whom is now driven by one nefarious and gruesome desire – the desire to master death itself.