A native son of Victoria County, Adrian Vega was born to Victor and Irene Ackerman Vega in the beautiful spring of 1848. At the age of twelve, his father moved to an up and coming mining boomtown by the name of Blackthorn, where Adrian spent the remainder of his adolescence and youth. While his father had been a miner, his mother was a school teacher and Adrian became a voracious reader quite early on in life, reading any book he came across.

When he came of age and finished his schooling, he followed in his father's footsteps as a miner - but his head was full of ideas about the world outside of the small mining town he had come to think of as home. Though he was fond of it, he also wanted to get out of town and see the world. At the age of 22, he simply up and left Blackthorn to travel, eventually settling in New Orleans three hard years later. There, he became rather more proficient as a gambler than he already was and honed the fine art of gunplay, working in a show as a trick shooter for a short time. He corresponded with his family and sent home money when he could, until he got a letter from Gabby Clark informing him of their untimely demise from an illness that did for a few. While he occasionally reminisced about home and family, Blackthorn was out of sight and out of mind for the next few years, until old man Clark wrote him again and he decided it was about time to pack up and make a trip back to what he thought of as his hometown.