My real name is Xavier Mulane. I was born in 1864 in New Orleans, the youngest of 3 children, I have 2 older sisters. My father, Patrick Mulane is a gifted inventor and machinist of Irish descent. He married Evangeline Laveau, a direct descendant of Marie Laveau (who is known as the voodoo Queen of New Orleans).

Growing up, I had inherited my father’s inventiveness and creative intuition, but was also heavily influenced by the spiritual and magical arts from my mother’s heritage. When I wasn’t tinkering with my father in his workshop I would spend long hours with my mother studying the arcane voodoo arts. Both my parents insisted I get a well-rounded education, I learned to read and write and would read any book I could get my hands on.

My father’s creative genius became well known in the Southern USA and was headhunted by Thomas Edison to come work in his laboratory. We moved to New Jersey in 1880 and my father was a key inventor and contributor to many of the inventions which came out of Edison’s laboratory. I helped my father in the lab and had a knack for making intuitive connections with the physical world and abstract concepts like electricity, time manipulation, and gravitational energies. I made friends with Nikola Tesla, who also worked at Thomas Edison’s laboratory in 1884, but Tesla soon became jealous of my inventive abilities and intuition, and we became bitter rivals.

At age 20 I became the youngest inventor in Edison’s lab. It was my work on developing time manipulation devices that caught Mr. Edison’s attention, and he actively funded my development. In 1890 I had invented a crude but functional time travel apparatus. It could only send a small 5’ cube area backward or forward in time for about 24 hours.

I would demonstrate how a chronology timepiece would disappear and reappear with the time altered. However, the process drew a huge amount of energy and was expensive to operate. Nonetheless, a military general saw the huge potential of this invention and forced me to demonstrate it with a live subject. The mayor of New Jersey, Thomas Beveridge, had a bold and particularly stupid and cruel son who volunteered to be projected ahead in time and fitted himself into the apparatus.

I very reluctantly and with dire warnings activated the machine – the young man did indeed travel forwards in time, but he traveled over 60 years! He returned to our timeline in the lab as an ancient man of over 80 years, hunched, wrinkled, and barely alive. Unbeknownst to me, Nikola Tesla had a spy in the employment at Edison’s lab and had been monitoring my development of the time travel device. The day before the demonstration Tesla had broken into the lab and with his advanced knowledge of electronics and physics, he sabotaged my apparatus!

The mayor immediately ordered me arrested. I evaded capture and fled back to New Orleans as a fugitive. Thomas Edison dismantled my machine and buried the research as he thought it was too dangerous to taunt the universe with time manipulation.

I spent several years in hiding in New Orleans, continuing to study the mystic voodoo arts, and changed my name to ‘Raven Alexium’ (anagram of Xavier Mulane), the raven being my spiritual animal connection.

In 1895 I was attacked one night on the piers in New Orleans by a group of drunken French aristocratic youth, in the struggle I struck one of the thugs who fell off the pier and drowned. I was captured and arrested for murder. The trial judge was a good friend of the mayor of New Jersey and recognized me. He felt it would raise too many questions to have me publicly hung so instead ordered me to life imprisonment on a chain gang in Georgia. There I worked many days of back-breaking work building roadways under the watchful eye of cruel guards.

With the help of fellow inmates from New Orleans and my knowledge of science and magic a group of us were able to break away and fled as wanted criminals. My colleagues chose to return to New Orleans, but I had heard of a place called “Hole-in-the-Wall” a remote pass in the Big Horn Mountains of Johnson County in Wyoming. I felt I could team up with a group of fellow fugitives and seek a means to raise some capital and fund my own research lab, or travel to England or Europe to work with other esteemed inventors who would judge me on my merits and not my misfortunes.