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Is [[The Hero]] of your [[Fantasy]] tale [[Really 700 Years Old]] or your [[Big Bad]] is a [[Time Abyss]]? Perhaps [[Mr. Exposition]] gained most of his knowledge by being [[Older Than They Look]]? They are? Great. Now, how best to go about showing the audience that they are?
* '''Incriminating Evidence.''' Bob has maintained a series of identities down the ages, all with the same face and eventually, someone finds photos and / or paintings of him from hundreds of years ago. '''Or:''' Alice has a company of which she is CEO. And someone finds the documentation that shows she's been CEO since the company was originally founded. During the Renaissance.
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{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Code Geass]]'': C.C. states that she knew [[Benjamin Franklin]]. The date in the show is in an alternate New Tens.
* ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'': [[Really 700 Years Old|Resident immortal Evangeline]] recalls
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== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[Bram Stoker's
* ''[[Cocoon]]'': The aliens in ''Cocoon'' make casual mention that they built a base on Earth before. It was Atlantis. Their leader also makes passing comment about his own extreme age:
{{quote|''"Every ten or eleven thousand years or so, I make a terrible mistake."''|'''Walter''' ''Cocoon''}}
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** The werewolf doctor in Underworld has a family tree showing the dates for the Corvinus family dating back to the 5th century AD with Marcus Corvinus.
** And then there's Alexander, who reveals himself to have been the father of the original Marcus Corvinus; still alive after approximately 1600 years.
* ''[[X-Men:
== [[Literature]] ==
* [[Iain Banks]]' [[The Culture]] novels have a number of entities that need some exposition of their long, long lives. Most of the Minds are effectively immortal and many of them have been around for hundreds and occasionally thousands of years.
** ''[[The Culture/The Player of Games|The Culture]]'': Chamlis Amalk-Ney, the aging drone who's one of Gurgeh's close friends on Chiark Orbital, is at least four thousand years old by
* ''[[Discworld]]'': Many of the golems evoke this trope via their ancient scripts and long memories. Anghammarad is a particularly extreme example, on account of being at least 20,000 years old and remembering states and languages that no living creature on the Disc does.
** The Count de Magpyr (the old, traditional one, not the trendy new one) recognises the names of several of the peasants in the mob at his castle and makes mention of remembering their grandparents.
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* ''[[Last Legionary]]'': In ''Galactic Warlord'', Talis patiently explains to Kiell that the alien Glr is not an "it" but a she, and that the Ehrlil are very long-lived, the scientist who first encountered her was his father. Flr herself chips in that she's four hundred, and still considered a wayward youth by her people.
* [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s ''The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward'' has characters who speak with a distinctly 17th century cant and write their Latin in the mode of the 9th century A.D.
* [[John Masefield]]'s ''[[The Box of Delights]]'' had Ramon Lully, aka Cole Hawlings, 14th century philosopher posing as a 1930s children's entertainer. His reveal comes courtesy of the [[Big Bad]], Abner Brown, who's been in pursuit of him for some time and shows his henchmen a book with pictures of Lully when he was alive which look remarkably like Hawlings.
* [[Kim Newman]]'s ''[[Dark Future (novel)|Dark Future]]'' novel ''Demon Download'' has a scene in which the resident [[Big Bad]] and [[Time Abyss]] Elder Nguyen Seth is revealed to Vatican agents as having been around for quite some time via a set of photos running from 1974 to 1868 and an etching of Vlad The Impaler's execution.
** ''[[Drachenfels]]'' has this a couple of times, between Genevieve and the eponymous villain. Drachenfels himself has his immense age pointed early on; the adventurers reminding themselves that he was around when Sigmar Heldenhammer was still alive, a least two thousand years ago and coming across the remains of his infamous [[And I Must Scream|Poison Feast]] in which an ancestor of Oswald's was a victim.
* [[Robert Rankin]]'s ''Armageddon Trilogy'' features a version of [[Elvis Presley]] who evaded his own death and is [[Sharing a Body|bonded to a genetically-engineered sprout]] with
* [[J. R. R.
* In
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
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* "Dr. Curtis Knox" in ''[[Smallville]]'' is never implicitly referred to as Vandal Savage, but that's pretty much who he is. A Civil-War era photo of a bearded Knox which Lex shows Clark confirms he's immortal, or at least older than he looks. He also tells Chloe that he was once Jack the Ripper himself.
* ''[[Star Trek]]''
** In the ''[[Star Trek: The
** In "Time's Arrow", a two-part episode of ''[[Star Trek: The
** In an episode of ''[[Star Trek:
* In the ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'' episode "Something Wicked", Sam discovers the identity of the witch they are looking for, because he finds a news article with a picture of the witch as a doctor back in the 1890's.
* ''[[Torchwood]]'''s Captain Jack Harkness shows his age every way possible. There's his Army greatcoat, his Webley revolver, a [[Photo Montage]] of him through the ages in one episode, him remembering meeting fairies in 1909 and being the British contact for the 456. Not being a native of the 19th century, he speaks normally, though.
* ''[[True Blood]]'' has done this a few times. Bill gets given a Civil War era photo of himself, Russell and Talbot have centuries old paintings and tapestries decorating their home, Russell has his collection of trinkets and trophies from down the ages and Maryann not only has her ancient statue but speaks Ancient Greek.
* In the original ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' episode ''Long Live Walter Jameson'' the titular character is a history prof. who knows his stuff, who has a retiring colleague who comments on his appearance, and who is seen in a Civil War picture.
* In ''[[The X-Files]]'' episode "Squeeze", Mulder is shown a photograph of the suspect in his current case from 1963 who hasn't aged at all since then. Mulder also looks up the suspect's original birth certificate, showing he was born in 1903.
* In ''[[The Dresden Files (TV series)|The Dresden Files]]'', while looking through an abandoned building, the vampire Bianca refers to it as a hideout. Harry repeats the word, and jokes that Bianca sounds like a 30s gangster's mall. She responds she ''was'' a 30s gangster's mall, and adds she's led a long and interesting life.
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== [[Mythology]] ==
* The Wandering Jew, whose origin is traced to a section of the [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%2016:28&version=KJV Gospel of Matthew] and is, according to various tales down the years from approximately the
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Fallout 1]]'': Harold, a ghoul-esque mutant you can meet in The Hub, was five years old when the Great War began, and emerged from Vault 29 in 2090. The Vault Dweller encounters him in Oldtown in 2162. He'll tell you a little about his life in Vault 29 and what he remembers of the beginning of the war if you ask.
* ''[[Fallout 2]]'': Harold can be encountered once again by the Chosen One. Along with much of the ghoul population of Necropolis, he's settled in an abandoned nuclear power plant and formed a small town named Gecko.
* ''[[Fallout 3]]'': Many of the ghouls you can encounter in Underworld lived through the war and can tell what, frequently little, they can remember of the time before. Carol, the ghoul running the bar and eatery there was born in 2051, twenty-six years prior to the Great War.
** Some of his dialogue and unused security logs in the terminals imply that Fawkes was alive during the initial FEV experiments conducted in Vault 87 prior to the war.
** Harold makes his third and final appearance (to date) in ''Fallout 3''. A further fifteen years down the line from the last time a player could meet him in
* ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'': Mr. House, once you finally get to meet him, reveals himself to be quite a bit older than you might have been expecting. He's got quite the collection of pre-war artifacts, and he's more than happy to pay you to increase them, too. {{spoiler|He's also reduced to living in a life support system and communicating entirely through electronic screens and his robot minions, but given that he was born 260 years ago, that's not bad going.}}
* Sovereign, Harbinger and the other Reapers of the ''[[Mass Effect]]'' series make a lot of noise about how they were here ''long'' before humans and that they'll be here ''long'' after they've devoured them all.
** Conversations during ''[[Mass Effect (video game)|Mass Effect 1]]'' with Liara reveal that she herself is 106 and that the asari live for a great deal longer than that - she's considered to be little more than a child by many of her species' elders.
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