Anyway, Here’s what I REMEMBER about his mention in Crusade. (what I actually WROTE could be different; it’s been a while):

In one flashback story, Donovan and Sebastian are in an old theater doing their thing, fighting something that I can’t remember. I do remember Donovan deflecting bullets with a sword, which is totally badass and probably impossible, but I don’t care. ANYWAY, at the end of that story Donovan decides that the whole thing was a trap. The phage was the one who set that trap. Also… perhaps in that same story, perhaps in another one… there were some flashbacks. One involved Donovan’s mentor being “removed” similar to the way Coventry and Payne tried to remove Donovan from Jason Brooks. It was removed by the Phage. Also, there was another flashback (or premonition, I can’t remember which) in which someone confronts a man in a hallway or alley. The man escapes by “unzipping” himself and reassembling himself somewhere else. That man is the Phage. If I didn’t write that last one in the final version of the story, it may have been edited out later.

The Pedophage character predates Crusade by several years, and dates from the early December days. K’Sano evolved from the Pedophage idea, but is sufficiently different that I can’t really call them the same character. I was going to put him in Crusade eventually but, like K’Sano, the Crusade version would probably have been quite different from the original idea of a child-eating cross between Hannibal Lecter and The Thing (from the movie, not the comics). In Crusade he would have sported a hefty amount of magical power (as does K’Sano.) The original idea is closer to what you see in this story fragment… less powerful, but much more disturbing. BTW, in the original concept for this guy, he is thousands of years old, dating at least from ancient egypt.

I’ve been to Mississippi and New Orleans each of the last two years as part of a mission team doing rebuilding. Those experiences help me relate to this story. I can see how this kind of thing could happen.

Now I have to find the time to go back through Crusade (again!) and see if I can find where this character is at in that story. In a way he kind of reminds me of Royce. Nah, if I go read it again I’ll just want more and you’ve already said that you aren’t getting back to it.