Capeworld Comics

Pele

The Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, destruction, creation, anger, lightning, the dead, and dance. When she first emanated from the astral unconscious to Hawaii in the 1930’s, Pele feared how people would treat her knowing her reputation of violence and rage. Mystic Kuaihelani, home of the gods, did not want her because they feared her power. How would mortals receive her? In fear of the answer, she hid herself away in Kilauea volcano. But since she repelled an invasion by Imperial Japan in the 1940’s by wounding their sun goddess Amaterasu she has been by far the most popular superbeing in the Hawaiian islands. She maintained her popularity throughout the decades with warm visitations upon the populace and tabloid scandals. She loved humanity because they loved her and traveled among them disguised. Wherever she dropped  her disguise, all around her celebrated like it was Christmas morning. She contributed to the culture of Hawaii with lava festivals at Killuhua, fire gardens with flowers of spun volcanic glass, and the halau Pele, the most prestigious and demanding hula school in the world. But Pele was also a party girl, a “super-celebrity,” and her public brawls and sexual encounters brought shame to herself and her state. A second encounter with Amaterasu in 1967 drove Pele to critical self-reflection and she decided that she needed a family–daughters specifically. With daughters, with kamalani, she hoped to be able to see aspects of herself missed by her introspection. She hoped that motherhood would force her to temper her wild lifestyle. She hoped they would have love for their sisters and mother unlike what Pele knew growing up.

Ahi

The first of the kamalani, daughter of Pele and Vulcan, created when the fires of Pele and Vulcan merged and created the spark of a wholly new kind of flame that had the dancing plumes of her mother and cold glow of her father. This spark was hammered into shape on Vulcan’s forge while Pele breathed life into her soul. Ahi was born fully formed just as Athena was when she sprang from the head of Zeus. As her parents argued over her, she understood every word. She could not temper her fire or change her shape like her mother. She was too bright to look at and too hot to touch. Pele wanted to change Ahi. Vulcan thought she was perfect. The confused child ran and hid herself deep in the Earth. Pele chased after her and cursed Vulcan for shrugging and saying Ahi had to find the courage to be apart from humanity. Of all the kamalani, Ahi grew up closest to Pele due to her need for Pele’s guidance in controlling her fire and Vulcan’s cold indifference to her welfare. 

But this closeness would eventually sour into animosity. Ahi inherited Pele’s need for attention and socialization, but unlike Pele who could walk easily among people, even changing her shape to that of a human if she wanted, Ahi struggled not to blind or burn them. Ahi blamed Pele. She shouldn’t have had her with a man like Vulcan. She shouldn’t have had her in order to satisfy a need for a family. She should have had Ahi for the sake of Ahi–but she didn’t. And what better proof of Pele’s selfish neglect was there than Pele creating her fully formed and not as an infant. Pele didn’t want to go through the trouble of raising a baby. She wanted someone that could instantly talk to and gratify her emotional demands. But what really angered Ahi about her mother was that even though she socialized with an ease and grace Ahi would do anything for, Pele squandered her gifts on frivolous interactions. She spent her time brawling and flirting–nothing meaningful. Ahi vowed to not waste her own social skills. She became a diplomat, poet, and  negotiator. And when Pele had more daughters, Ahi recruited them as a team to show that she could be something her mother never was–a responsible leader.

Kai

The second of the kamalani, spawned when Pele syncretized with the Inuit goddess of deep water and monsters, Sedna. Sedna, like Pele, was exiled as a child from the home of the gods because her powers were feared. The two goddesses saw their childhood torment reflected in the memories of the other and were shocked to numbness by their collective anguish. When Pele separated from Sedna, she flew into space to weep and unburden her heart. Her tears flowed together and formed an egg much like the egg from which her beloved sister Hi’iaka hatched. Pele was shocked to find that she had created life. She wasn’t ready to try being a mother again so soon after Ahi. She worried and fretted over the tear-egg day and night and when it hatched into a baby made entirely out of water she continued to pour worry over the child. But Pele’s smothering worry along with Kai inheriting her mother’s wanderlust and adventurousness led the water-child to slip her mother’s watch–something that was easy to do with her mother’s attention constantly distracted by fire gardens and hula instruction. Kai preferred the oceans to her mother. Her mother was a small, fussy thing that was hardly ever calm around her. But the oceans were endless. And if one part scared or frustrated her, in an instant she would be at another part that was calm and quiet.

Kai roamed the world causing mischief from the subterranean Nepots Ocean to Pax, the kingdom of ghosts underneath the Atlantic. Her mother exhausted herself keeping after her and her older sister Ahi often had to step in as a second mother. Ahi and Kai did not get along. Having been created grown-up, Ahi hated Kai’s childishness as much as she envied it. They sometimes fought and created clouds of steam that cooled as their anger did and rained down on their sorrowful forms holding each other and apologizing.

Now a grown-up herself, maturity has tempered Kai’s mischief. She continues to restlessly roam the world but performs random acts of kindness more than mischief–though she still does mischief, and rather likes it. She still bickers with Ahi who thinks her little sister needs to settle down and take on some responsibility, and sometimes they fight, but they don’t fight near as viciously as they did when they were children. After years of learning how the other thinks, the sisters have developed  a mutual respect for one another. They know that Pele isn’t the easiest mother to have and that their eccentricities, aggravating as they might be, developed as responses to their mother.

Kai may find Ahi a buzzkill from time to time, but she respects her as leader of the kamalani and is more than willing to follow her command. Whatever Ahi needs her to be, she can become. She may be bad at being one constant thing, but she’s pretty good at being several flowing things.

Lepo

The third and youngest of the kamalani, born from the union of Pele and the Egyptian god of earth and the underworld Geb. Pele took Geb as a husband hoping that the elder god could tame her passions and bring some stability to her life. But the only one that could tame Pele was Pele, and she found herself not up to the task. The two amicably separated on good terms but not before they created a daughter. Geb took a garden of flowers collected from chthonic realms, white asphodelus from the bowers of Persephone and red water lilies from the Eternal Nile, and rolled it into a doll. Pele breathed the breath of her father Kanehoalani into the doll just as she had for Ahi and Lepo was born. Pele and Geb shared custody of their child. She lived springs and summers with her mother at Kilauea and autumns and winters with her father in the Eternal Nile. Lepo was a quiet, introverted child who found her mother’s vivaciousness intimidating and her father’s calmness welcoming. Though she loved both her parents, she preferred being with her father and learned from him how to be a chthonic deity. She learned how to talk to ghosts, understand ghosts, and control ghosts if need be. As she got older, she added to his instruction by learning from the many chthonic gods of Egypt–Osiris and Anubis and others. Many assumed Lepo would grow up to become one more deity of the Egyptian afterlife, but she must have inherited some of Pele’s creativity and independence because she decided to create an earthbound “half-life” modeled on the House of Ghosts and Palace of Spirits in New Orleans and the ghost kingdom Pax beneath the Atlantic ocean. 

Lepo created a placid world of caves and tunnels on the barren and uninhabited Kahoolawe island. These tunnels were lit by suns created from the fires of her mother and sister. Their light fed plants that flowered into painterly fields and shimmered on gentle streams that rippled in the cool breeze. Lepo inherited a love of humanity from her mother and learned to love ghosts from her father. In Kahoolawe, where the dead could walk with the living through colorful gardens by melodious streams, Lepo combined the influences of her parents into something uniquely hers.

As a kamalani, Lepo often plays peacemaker between Kai and Ahi. Kai finds Lepo boring and Ahi finds Lepo a shut-in confined to Kahoolawe, but they both find her a rock upon which to unburden their minds. Lepo always listens and tries to be as objective as possible in her advice. She likes to listen to people be they ghost or humans or goddesses and help them with their problems–and her sisters often have many problems. But Lepo has a problem all her own that she doesn’t like to talk about, not even with her sisters. Lepo has inherited the infamous temper of her mother. It is an open secret among those close to the kamalani, but most of Earth erroneously assumes that Ahi inherited Pele’s temper due to her constant bickering with her mother and Kai. But Lepo has the temper, and in her it takes the form of a quiet, cold fury that could very well be more dangerous than her mother’s. But Lepo sublimates her rage in her work. In helping others with their problems, her own problem seems small by comparison.