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Carmen Sandiego

Carmen Sandiego is a fictional character featured in a long-running series of Americann educational software and television shows originally focusing on teaching geography and history (the series later branched out into other subjects). The character later appeared in a series of books and on many licensed products.

Table of contents
1 Character Biography
2 ACME
3 V.I.L.E.
4 V.I.L.E. hideouts

Character Biography

Carmen was orphaned at an early age and was sent to live at GoldenGate Girls' School in San Francisco, California. This orphanage was the only home she had until Chief at the ACME Detective Agency gave her a home there.

At ACME Sandiego was a success and rose through ACME's ranks faster than any agent in ACME history. There are three people known who were once her partner; Suhara, Jules Argent and Chase Devineaux. Argent was just a rookie when Sandiego became her partner. They solved many cases together and Argent came to respect Sandiego greatly. Argent still calls Carmen Sandiego "the best partner I ever had."

One of the last cases Carmen Sandiego and Chase Devineaux worked together was the case of the Prometheus Rock. The Rock was a meteor that was discovered by an ancient civilization, which tapped into its awesome powers. Its name seems to be a reference to Prometheus, the Titan patron of human civilization in Greek mythology. When it was stolen, Sandiego and Devineaux were dispatched to Athens, Greece. They were able to find the thieves responsible, but not able to locate the whereabouts of the rock.

Solving mysteries was getting too easy for Carmen, so she decided to give herself greater intellectual challenges by outsmarting ACME. Since Devineaux had been working so closely with her, she had to go undercover and he stopped working with ACME and started working on his own.

After leaving ACME, Carmen founded V.I.L.E. and since she has a soft spot for people who are less capable than herself, she stocked the ranks of her organization with some of the most incompetent villains in the world.

Once V.I.L.E. was founded it soon became common to hear that a world landmark had been stolen. Her thefts wern't limited to the Earth, either. She has been know to steal things from outer space, such as Saturn's rings. However, Carmen wanted more. So she broke in ACME headquarter and stole the Cronoskimmer, the only time travel devise on the planet. The name Cronoskimmer comes from the Greek word Chronos, which means time and in Greek mythology is also the name of its personification.

She dropped villains off at different time periods so they could steal something from the past as part of "Project History Sweep." Carmen's ultimate plan of "Project History Sweep" was to steal her own dossier from ACME headquarters, believing she would be able to erase her "embarrassing" ACME history.

Carmen failed, but she wasn't finished with time travel, she stole a Russian project that involved time travel and built her own time machine. Though agents Zack and Ivy managed to thwart her plans to change the history of colonial America, she eventually set up a facility where she could send one of her villains back in time, with the push of button.

To counteract this, ACME built a giant Cronoskimmer, and sent the squadron leader as well as three time pilots back in time to stop Carmen's plans.

Another plan of Carmen's was to steal language. She would do this with new invention called the Bable-On Machine which was stored in the Tower of Bable. Its name is a pun on that of the legendary Tower of Babel. "Bable-On" is a play on Babylon, Iraq which is usually identified with Babel. Chase Devineaux came out of his undercover job to help ACME on this case, but Carmen managed to capture all but one of ACME's 13 agents. Agent 13 somehow practically single-handedly stopped her and destoyed the Bable-On Machine.

She built a new machine, the Quantum Crystalizer, which could shrink anything into tiny crystals. Agent 13, apparently promoted to Agent 9, helpped Devineaux on this case as well, to recover 12 stolen landmarks. It was soon discovered, with further investigation, that the Prometheus Rock was being used to power the machine, the same which had disappeared all those years before. A "Power Drain" began sucking all the electrical power from the world, and even ACME shut down. Somehow Agent 9 and Chase Devineaux managed to destroy the machine.

Carmen latter decided that since "knowledge is power" she would steal knowledge. To accomplish this task she built Knowledge Robots or KnowBots to steal knowledge. ACME sent groups of agents out to fight these KnowBots, and try to get passwords to break to their hide-outs.

When Carmen isn't wearing one of her numerous disguises, she can be identified by her long brown hair, and will be wearing a red trench coat and fedora.

ACME

The ACME Detective Agency is dedicated to stopping the efforts of V.I.L.E. and keeping order in the world.

Carmen Sandiego was once an agent of the ACME Detective Agency, until she quit to pursue greater intellectual challenges. Lynne Thigpen played the Chief of ACME on the PBS Carmen Sandiego series and some of the computer products. ACME headquarters is located in San Francisco.

In the computer games, the user is always an agent of ACME, and is promoted thoughout the game.

ACME agents include:

V.I.L.E.

The Villains International League of Evil or V.I.L.E. is dedicated to causing as much chaos around the world as possible in order for Carmen to show off her intellectual abilities.

V.I.L.E. is clearly a very large organization. Well over 150 members of V.I.L.E. have been recorded. V.I.L.E. also has bases around the world (see V.I.L.E. Hideouts) and operates entirely underground due to its sinister intentions.

V.I.L.E villians include:

V.I.L.E. hideouts

See also: List of Carmen Sandiego products