With a mind for robotics, manipulation, and strategy, the future-born Nathaniel Richards from Earth-6311 uses his set of skills to time-travel to Ancient Egypt and overthrow society as the Pharaoh Rama-Tut. When time-displaced Super Heroes of Earth’s modern age run him out of town, his taste for conquering grows. He travels towards the future and adopts a new, more threatening guise as the armored Scarlet Centurion.
From the Future
Born in the alternate reality known as Other-Earth (Earth-6311), Nathaniel Richards grows up in a time where the Dark Ages never occurred and technology developed without interruption. This timeline diverges from Earth-616’s “mainstream” reality circa 300 AD and its people make their first moon landing in 900 AD, which becomes the first year of their new calendar.
Despite the peaceful era that follows and produces a lunar colony, a Great War between the colony and Earth destroys the moon and plunges Other-Earth back into barbarism. Earth-616’s modern-era scientist Nathaniel Richards, attempting time travel, reaches Other-Earth and uses his knowledge to help rebuild that world. He marries Cassandra, daughter of the Matriarch of the Eyriennes, the women of the mountaintop city known as the Eyrie, and he becomes known as both the Warlord (erroneously) and the Benefactor. Over the ensuing centuries, Richards and his successors gradually bring about a new age of peace and enlightenment on Other-Earth.
Approximately 1900 years pass and the Benefactor’s descendant and namesake Nathaniel Richards is born into Other-Earth’s quietly utopian year 3000. As a teenage robotics student, this Nathaniel develops a working Growing Man “stimuloid” model when his throat was slit by a bully named Morgan. Hospitalized for a year, he studies cross-dimensional recordings of Earth-616’s modern era’s heroic age, brought to his reality by the Benefactor, and became fascinated by that wilder time period’s men of action. At age 25, longing for excitement, Nathaniel discovers the Benefactor’s citadel and opens a long-sealed chamber containing parts and plans for a time machine.
Nathaniel subsequently encounters alternate-reality incarnations of the Fantastic Four (a Super Hero team founded by the Benefactor’s son Reed Richards, AKA Mister Fantastic, in Earth-616’s modern era), who seek to thwart his future self’s power-mad schemes. Though these incidents fade from his mind thereafter, Nathaniel still longs for a life of adventure unavailable in his own complacent time period, so he spend years rebuilding and redesigning his ancestor’s time machine. Planning to loot various time periods for weaponry and technology while making his base in ancient Egypt, he builds a sphinx-like exterior around his time machine to exploit the ancient Egyptians’ religious beliefs and travels back to Earth-616’s Egypt circa 2950 BC.
Blinded and stranded after his ship malfunctioned and crashed, he nonetheless subjugates the natives using his superior technology. Regaining his sight, he rules as the supposedly divine Pharaoh Rama-Tut for a decade. During this period, he encounters Samira, Mistress of the Nile, who becomes his enemy; Pharaoh Amenhotep, who Rama-Tut imprisons within a pyramid and who eventually becomes a vampiric creature; and time-travelers such as Julius Mullarky, AKA Killpower, and the Genetix team. Circa 2945, Rama-Tut sires an illegitimate son, Ramades, with a slave woman.
Eventually, a struggle with Earth-616’s Fantastic Four, which also involves the young En Sabah Nur, AKA Apocalypse, the moon god Khonshu, and modern-era Earth-616 heroes Dr. Stephen Strange, AKA Doctor Strange, and the Avengers, forces Rama to flee that time period in his now operative time machine.
En route to the future, a “time storm” diverts Rama to the modern era, where he rescues space-lost tyrant Victor von Doom, AKA Doctor Doom, and passes himself off as Doom’s possible future self (though speculation suggests that Doom may be one of Nathaniel’s ancestors). Damaged by the time storm, Rama-Tut’s time machine crashes several years in the future in Egypt, where he clashes with fellow time-traveler Blaquesmith and mutant cyborg Nathan Summers, AKA Cable. He soon returns to the timestream. Inspired by Doom, Nathaniel adopts a new armored guise as the Scarlet Centurion.
Expert Time-Traveler
The Scarlet Centurion ages much more slowly than modern humanity. He is an expert in travel through and manipulation of time, and has mastered various far-future technologies, notably regarding time travel. His time travel mechanisms enable him to travel through time, sometimes taking passengers or cargo with him, and he often remotely beams “chronographic projections” (interactive transtemporal holograms) of himself into other time periods and locations, enabling him to communicate with people there.
The Centurion wears battle armor incorporating various far-future technologies, notably subtle hypnotic devices (including a subliminally mesmerizing aura and voice modulators capable of subliminally influencing his listeners), a mind-influencing device able to implant powerful suggestions in the minds of his foes, sleep-inducing devices able to render his targets unconscious within moments, and weapon systems such as ice generators (able to encase a man in ice within seconds), concussive force blasters (strong enough to stun God of Thunder Thor Odinson, AKA Thor, on their highest setting), hard radiation emitters, magnetic force manipulators and electrical blasters. His armor can also generate a near-impenetrable force field similar to the one employed by his counterpart Kang. He often is seen wielding a halberd weapon, a trident-like two-handed pole that fires destructive energy blasts and doubles as a teleportation device that opens a dimensional porta.
He is a master manipulator, a natural leader, a gifted strategist and a skilled combat veteran with a relentless drive to conquer.
Enemies Across Time
While acting as Ancient Egypt’s ruler Rama-Tut, he becomes nemesis to Samira, Mistress of the Nile and mutant En Sabah Nur, whom he attempts to take under his wing and name as his heir. Nur has other ideas and quickly becomes a thorn in Nathaniel’s side. Then an encounter with Apocalypse, Earth-616’s Fantastic Four, Khonshu, Doctor Strange, and the Avengers leaves Nathaniel in a tough spot, fleeing for his life and leaving this era.
While traversing the timestream in his time machine, he clashes with another time-traveler, Blaquesmith, and the time-traveling cyborg and mutant, Cable.
Few Allies
With conquest at heart, the Scarlet Centurion allies with few in number, including Earth-616’s Doctor Doom, whose visage inspires his own armored suit, and Earth-689’s Avengers. Although, this team’s resulting tyrannical acts are halted by time-displaced Avengers from Earth-616 who defeat them.
Diverging Paths
Secretly sabotaging a time-travel mission undertaken by the heroic Avengers of Earth-616’s modern era, the Centurion diverged an alternate timeline (Earth-689) in which he manipulated its founding Avengers into helping him neutralize most of Earth’s other super heroes and Super Villains—supposedly as a necessary prelude to creating a new utopia, but actually as a means of paving the way for Centurion’s conquest of their world. Through a series of surprise attacks, Earth-689’s Avengers defeated and imprisoned their reality’s versions of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Doctor Strange, the Howling Commandos, Daredevil, and all the rest of their world’s notable heroes, as well as most of their super-criminals. These Avengers then declared a worldwide ban on atomic testing and other forms of scientific experimentation, seeking to prevent the creation of any new super-beings. This tyranny was interrupted by the time-displaced Avengers of Earth-616 (their arrival possibly influenced by the Centurion’s alternate-reality counterpart Immortus), who defeated Earth-689’s Avengers before casting the Centurion himself back into the timestream using Doctor Doom’s time machine. Earth-616’s Avengers returned to their own timeline, where they lost all memory of these events.
His return to the timestream created an alternate Scarlet Centurion where this version conquered Earth-712 and went head-to-head with the Squadron Supreme. Furthermore, a variation of Earth-689’s events occurred in Earth-8110 with that reality’s Scarlet Centurion. But the original Scarlet Centurion thought his guise was a failure and returned to Egypt as Rama-Tut. He eventually became Kang the Conqueror and sired a son, Marcus Kang, who picked up his father’s mantle as the Scarlet Centurion, and helped him in his attempt to conquer Earth-616.
