The Sanguine Sands of Spanish Mars

Dramatis Personae

Manuel Macías y Casado, Governor General of Spanish Mars

Juan Fernandez O’Malley, Sky Captain

Julio Cervera Baviera, Colonel and Engineer

Matias Pérez, Ethernaut

Matias Pérez was the first Spaniard to independently land on the Red Planet on Easter Sunday 1877. He was the son of the famed Cuban balloonist who disappeared in the 1850s and had his father's zeal for the skies.. Pérez landed near the Martian city of Valx and established cordial relations with the local Martian rulers.  He returned to Spain to a hero’s welcome and the adoration of the masses. The next year he returned with a larger aether vessel and helped established a trading post. Since then Matias has been to Venus and Mercury but his love of Mars has always brought him back.

Manuel Iradier, Explorer

Manuel Iradier is Spain’s preeminent explorer on Mars and knows the lands around Villa Real and beyond like no other. He had studied philosophy and literature but his fascination with Henry Morton Stanley turned his passion to exploration. Before Mars he had maped and travelled in West Africa writing extensively on his travels but unfortunately his accompanying wife had died of fever and the loss soured his love for the Dark Continent. He joined Matias Pérez’s 1878 second voyage to Mars and has since never returned to Earth. Manuel established residence in Valx and immersed himself in the local culture and even, over time became fluent in the notoriously difficult Memnite language. From Valx he travelled out to explore the Memnonia lowlands and the Electris Mountains.  He has lived as one with the Lowland Hill Martians of the Eastern Basin and travelled through the Thaumasian Steppe. Since the establishment of Villa Real he has advised the new Spanish authorities and has shared all his geographical discoveries with them. In 1889 Manuel is in his mid-thirties with a thick black beard, deep brown eyes and weathered complexion. He wears practical clothes or Martian robes and carries an Orbea Nº7 Revolver in a holster on his belt.

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