The Deep Ones (Los Profundos) are an adventuring band of Antiterra, active mainly in 1888–1889 A.D.A. Spanish anarchists at the start, they were named after descending through an undersea tunnel to the realm of Cakravartin in Atlantis. Their gesta closed on 21 December 1889 and continued as the Regulators.
| Type | Group (adventuring band) |
| World | Antiterra |
| Members | Lotario, Henry, Mat, Maleika, Dr. Zoulu, Seth, Labrador, Arcadia; later Benetton |
| Successor | The Regulators |
| Houses of the Cycle | ⛓ House of the Band · ☷ House of the Descent · ☯ House of the Twin Cosmos · ⟳ House of the Rotating Office |
| Spanish entry | Los Profundos |
Setting
In 1888 Antiterra has electricity but does not use it: Tesla discovered too much, and civilized governments banned it because it pierces a golden curtain in the north that separates the ordered world from the chaos of Tartars and demons. Industrial cities use alchemy: nebolas instead of grenades, magnetism instead of telephony.
History
- Spain: near Madrid, at dusk, they attacked the cart of Miguelito and were left lying on the ground. They recovered and waited in Cádiz for a ship, with a pirate plan.
- Crossing: a bewitched captain and the explorer from Gotland. On the deck of La Londra their first foes were green-skinned frog-men the world called “deep ones”.
- Atlantis: in the Sargasso Sea, an island on no map held a princess, a satyr guardian and stone dogs in a grotto. An undersea passage led down to Cakravartin, lord of the Cosmic Wheel and king of Upper and Lower Atlantis, a bodhi who floats on his throne. He healed them and sent them back up: “You can be the arrow. I give you the direction.” There they were named. Exile followed.
- Sea arc: adventures on the high seas, the freeing of Seth from his undersea prison, the Gallia Narbonensis episode (a coast with Scylla, a woman among wolves) and the Pillars of Hercules.
- America: the Platforms, Gabriel and the dragons; the Chihuahua Desert, where Erzebeth killed the priest; the Patriarch of Glastumville; the death of Stormy before Oximec; a new companion and a geopolitical shift; Baton Rouge and its mysterious deaths; New Orleans and the abandonment of the mission; the Stone Cup and the devils.
Before being named they called themselves “the Scorpions” or “partners in despair”, “because we can’t be trusted”.
Members
- Lotario of Gotland: red-haired, green-eyed, about nine hundred years old; a sailor and trickster, rough and piratical. Two hundred years earlier (time in Antiterra is not linear) the same soul, as Oratiol of Les Libertateurs, narrated a revolution and won the Host Poker beneath the Bastille. Lotario is an anagram of Oratiol and reappears as Tailoor in The Word Breakers. He turned the anarchists into knights of the Atlantean king.
- Maleika began as Erzebeth, witch of the early band, until Erzebeth was trapped as guardian of the Platform of Taurus and the role continued under another name. Maleika turns into a turtle to speak with Seth, the god imprisoned at the bottom of the sea.
- Zoro, in fact Dr. Zoulu, is thirty-one in 1889, while his one-year-old self exists somewhere in the United States. General Tasker H. Bliss sent him from 1919 with a briefcase and a film reel of secret content.
- El Fabuloso, a Jewish gnome traveling inside his golem Boro, carries a geas and will betray sooner or later.
- Benetton, a paladin, writes letters to his chestnut mare.
Aftermath
The Stone of the Apocalypse circulates among infernal factions; Barbatos acts; Lord Gaul holds France under indirect rule with a Baatezu legion; the Universal Exposition of 1900 will open portals to Sigil in Paris. In 1901 Terra, the twin planet of which Antiterra is the reflection, explodes, leaving five months; the band of dissolution is visible from the lighthouse of Alexandria. The world’s guardians gather at a carnival in Venice, with Lucifer organizing the politics. GRDT (Graz’zt) plans to use the twelve children he fathered with Maleika as twelve zodiacal platforms.
Later references
The archive of the New World (1987) calls Aries “the temple where the Deep Ones once fought the Mexican mercenaries”. Other notes call them “the regulators, sorry, the deep ones… resentful anarchists who went to Atlantis and came back” and “the deep barroregulators”: the Deep Ones and the Regulators are one continuity.
See also
- The Regulators
- Cakravartin
- Esoteric Order of Dagon — a 1966 South Atlantic batrachian brotherhood that reuses the name, not the same group.