The El Dora Five

"You'll need another ten years before you become a /true/ super robot pilot!"

Sixty years ago, the El Dora Five swept onto the scene as instant heroes and celebrities. They were superheroes; a team of five brave men who battled villainy and monsters in their mobile suit, El Dorado. They were the first of their kind, and so was El Dorado the first combining super robot; they spearheaded an occupation that is today practiced by countless young men and women. But at the time, they were a flash in the pan. After only a few years, the novelty of a team of vigilantes in a combat robot whose signature trait was that it was designed to come apart wore off, and The El Dora Five faded into obscurity. But they never gave up the fight; they retired only twenty years ago, when their fifth member, Chizuru, died of breast cancer. Now the four remaining members - Nero, Jose, Barrio, and Carlos - have succumbed to their age. Now depressed and alcoholic, they spend their remaining days in Chizuru's Pink Amigo, a bar once owned by their fifth member, drinking heavily and disrupting the other patrons. Most people don't even believe they were ever heroes... and it's not hard to see why.

Background Information
Around NCA 56, a team of modern explorers led by Japanese-Mexican explorer, scientist, and overall renaissance man Dr. Go Stevens departed on a journey in search of El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold. Although it had been sought many times before, it had never been found... but there had not been a serious expedition in hundreds of years, and technology had come a long, long way. They found the city in less than a week.

At the center of the sprawling city of gold and riches, they found an enormous statue, the titular Golden Man of the city. It was so enormous, and so ancient, that Dr. Stevens could scarcely believe it truly existed. Apparently wrought from solid gold, the statue had an enormous green gem set into its chest. Unwilling to attempt to move such an enormous statue, even with the aid of modern techniology, the team spent almost a year studying the city and the enormous statue.

Eventually, they discovered the secret to its construction; it was not, in fact, one continuous piece, but rather almost thirty pieces that hitched together using amazingly engineered hinges and bolts. More importantly, they discovered that the stone in its chest was apparently of an extraterrestrial nature; what they had originally thought was an enormous emerald was, in fact, no jewel known to man.

In NCA 57, the team was ready to begin transporting the statue, thanks to careful examination and the study of how it came apart and was rebuilt. To their surprise, they found that when they removed pieces from the statue, they ceased to be gold and became simple stone. Careful reexamination proved that what they had thought was gold wasn't at all; merely stone with the color and luster of gold.

The phenomenon continued as the statue was disassembled, and for several days no cause could be found. Finally, in a fit of inspired curiosity, Dr. Stevens pried the enormous gem from the statue's chest. Instantly, the entire statue faded to the dull gray of stone... as did the entire city.

Suddenly far more interested in the stone than in the lost city of El Dorado, Dr. Stevens and his team returned to their laboratory in Mexico City. Despite another two years of study and research, they were unable to glean much information from the stone... save for one enormous detail. Apparently, the stone could resonate with the spirit of a human being to generate power. As Minovsky physics had not yet been pioneered, this was basically ridiculously awesome. Unbeknownst to them, what they had found was a 'B-Btone', an extraterrestrial gem that mankind would not be formally introduced to for around sixty years.

After a few weeks of indecision, it became clear to Dr. Stevens how to best utilize this unique power-generation method; he would build it into a robot. for use in the upcoming first Gundam Fight. This quickly proved unrealistic. Although the stone could translate the human spirit into power, their methods of harnessing that power were imperfect. One pilot simply couldn't produce enough power to power the mobile suit alone, and Dr. Stevens doubted even a hundred pilots could.

Even though its usage in the Gundam Fight was clearly not going to happen, Dr. Stevens refused to give up. Over the months, Stevens experimented with different combinations of power sources and different numbers of pilots; his creation changed size and shape many times. Finally, in mid-NCA 60, he settled on the basic specifications; a humanoid robot roughly one hundred feet tall, with space in the torso for five pilots.

A prototype was built, and almost instantly, a new problem was encountered. Even the undecorated, unarmed, unfinished prototype was too big, slow, and bulky to effectively transport itself anywhere with anything resembling speed. Frustrated, Dr. Stevens wrestled with the prospect of abandoning the project for almost two months. He had already sunk millions of his own dollars into the project, and the idea of having to abandon it sickened him.

Finally, it came to him; much like the Golden Man in El Dorado, he would not create one work. He would create five; five that would combine, to become more than the sum of their parts.

This was the genesis not only of what would become the super robot El Dorado, but of the very concept of the combining mobile suit. Thanks to excessive amounts of money and elbow grease, the robot was constructed almost at the same time that the Gundam Fight began. The commencement of the Fight reminded Dr. Stevens of one minor problem; his mobile suit wasn't qualified to compete in the Fight, and he had no one to pilot it and nothing to do with it.

The latter, at least, was not difficult to circumvent. An idealist (and manchild), Dr. Stevens had always fantasized about a group of what amounted to superheroes, fighting evil and injustice in a giant robot. Fantasied fed, no doubt, by the animus of his childhood.

The former was more complicated. Dr. Stevens extended an offer to many runners-up of the Gundam Fight, to come and join the team he was forming, but found much to his dismay that all of them asked for truly exorbitant concessions and payments; Phia Philadel, Gundam Fighter for Neo-America, in particular, gladly accepeted the offer but would accept no less than leadership status, a yearly salary of over twenty million dollars, and, much to Dr. Stevens's confusion, 'five points off the back end.'

Undaunted, Dr. Stevens did what Philadel's own ancestors did centuries before; he hired Mexicans, because they were cheaper.

Within four days, Dr. Stevens had assembled a team of Central American Gundam Fighters. Neo-Mexico's Nero, Neo-Guatemala's Jose, Neo-El Salvador's Barrio, and Neo-Costa Rica's Carlos. They were willing to work for, essentially, a pittance... fitting, as of all of them, only Nero and Jose had even made it into the Finals of the fight, and them just barely.

He had also been in talks with Neo-Nicaragua's Enrique... but, when Dr. Stevens had all of the prospects flown out to his lab, Enrique never arrived. The reason why was apparent almost immediately. His daughter, Chizuru, burst into the meeting between the four prospective pilots and Dr. Stevens and demanded to be the fifth pilot. Although Dr. Stevens declined, the four men - who were instantly smitten with Chizuru - all eagerly urged him to allow her to do as she wishes. Barrio, in particular, gave a moving speech in favor of it.

Eventually, Dr. Stevens caved. The fifth of the five Amigos - the vehicles that combined to form the super robot, El Dorado - was repainted pink, just for Chizuru. Uniforms were made, and the majority of Dr. Stevens's lab was transformed into a base for the group, who - again at Chizuru's insistence - were dubbed the El Dora Five, a pun rooted in the specifics of Chizuru's first language, Japanese. To this day, no one but Carlos actually gets the joke.

What followed was almost forty years of fighting evil and injustice. In their heyday, the El Dora Five were the golden boys of the Earth Sphere. But things quickly began to wane. Eventually, many more conservative members of government began to disapprove of what was, essentially, a team of vigilantes. Scientists and robot nerds alike insisted that 'combining' was a mere novelty, a fad, and would soon fade.

They were, in a sense, right. Although the El Dora Five were the cocks of the walk for almost five years after their inception, the novelty and glamor gradually faded, and the public began to, essentially, ignore them. This was frustrating to the Five, to say the least... especially to Nero, whom it infuriated to no end. Despite their lack of appreciation, however, the Five continued protecting the Earth thanklessly.

The four men practically abandoned their lives to do it... but Chizuru didn't. Although all four men were in love with her, and Nero and Jose all but openly contested for her affection, Chizuru eventually fell in love with Guy, an assistant of her father, the late Dr. Stevens. They married and had a daughter, Rosa. Even more than that, she opened a restaurant in the small town where their base was located, named after her fifth of El Dorado; Chizuru's Pink Amigo. In NCA 97, her daughter had a daughter of her own, whom she named Yukiko.

Despite Chizuru having a family, the five continued to protect the Earth dutifully until NCA 103. Chizuru, now a grandmother, almost sixty years old, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Horrified, the Five put their operations on hold so that she could be treated.

Two and a half years later, Chizuru lost the fight with the cancer and died at the age of 61, terribly young for this day and age. She had been the heart of the Five, and just as importantly, her Pink Amigo mounted the G-Stone, and was necessary for the true power of El Dorado to be unleashed. Devastated, the El Dora Five fell apart. Officially declaring their retirement, the four remaining members collapsed into depression.

The previously eternally young men, all now around sixty years old, had their ages catch up to them almost at once. Carlos, who had been battling unnatural fatigue, devolved into a full-on sleeping disorder. Although he quickly came to term with Chizuru's death, and the group's retirement, the damage was done; he now spends anywhere from 18 to 20 hours a day sleeping, and has been on more than one occasion declared dead or comatose only to wake up minutes later.

Barrio, always too smart for his own good, lapsed into nihilism and bitterness. More than that, he let himself go physically. Even at sixty, he was a huge brick of muscle. Over the years that followed Chizuru's death, he lost almost eighty pounds; now he's a bag of sagging, withered skin, who spends more time with his nose in a book than interacting with anyone.

Jose, always cool-headed and detached, found his temper becoming shorter and shorter. Unable to blame anyone for Chizuru's death, he found himself irrationally blaming his three remaining comrades, and just as often himself. Suddenly, he wasn't willing to put up with Nero's bullshit; what had always been subdued sessions of sass and passive-aggressiveness between the two - at least from his side - became fistfights and shouting matches.

Nero took it the worst. Although in their despair all of the men turned to the comfort of alcohol, Nero lapsed almost instantly into full-blown alcoholism. By the time Barrio and Jose were starting to get tipsy, Nero was already three sheets to the wind. Loud and boorish, Nero became even moreso under the constant influence of alcohol, bragging loudly about the accomplishments of the group's past.

So it has continued for almost twenty years. The four remaining members don't work. They don't do anything except drink at Chizuru's Pink Amigo, where they're never asked to pay and never asked to leave, despite being loud and disruptive. Recently, Yukiko has begun working there as the proprieter; Rosa, her mother, was killed during the One Year War, leaving her to be raised by family friends. She likes 'the old timers', as she calls the El Dora Five.

She's pretty much the only one.

Personality Traits
Coming soon~

Talents & Abilities
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Logs
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