IST 2020 - Ideas?

[classicdrogn]

Goddammit guys, now I've got a few hundred bucks worth of GURPs books (that I know I will never use to actually play and would have a bit of a job to even read, interesting though they are) on my want list. Thanks bunches

[M Fnord]

Sorry. (Not at all sorry).

Meanwhile, I fell down something of a hole this weekend and created this. Enjoy?
(cw: American politics, though hopefully nothing too terrible)
https://i.imgur.com/PN6frrt.png

[Mamorien]

Sorry. (Not at all sorry).

Meanwhile, I fell down something of a hole this weekend and created this. Enjoy?
(cw: American politics, though hopefully nothing too terrible)
https://i.imgur.com/PN6frrt.png

I'm enjoying. In the "About the Author" note to the original IST book, Bob said it was "his attempt to reconcile the real world with what he thinks it should be", and I'm seeing something a lot like that here.

[classicdrogn]

Sorry. (Not at all sorry).

Meanwhile, I fell down something of a hole this weekend and created this. Enjoy?
(cw: American politics, though hopefully nothing too terrible)
https://i.imgur.com/PN6frrt.png

EH, I'm not really mad (just in case it wasn't clear) - the nice thing about 4th edition is that pretty much everything is available in PDF format, which I can at least open in Firefox and get the text reader to stumble through if I highlight the text first. Quite a bit spottier on the wilder fringes of 3e/3eR, but at least it's something.

I can't comment much on your image for similar reasons, though just from the rainbow of parties shown in the House and the Senate I can only say if only we had that kind of spread for real, to force a more consensus based approach instead of two nearly all-or-nothing opposed blocs with just a few nominal independents in Congress passing wind to the contrary.

(Also, why does this thread only show up in the "most recent post" preview on the main forum page but not in the subforum? Is it supposed to be invitation only or something?)

edit: Oh, duh, because it's in a sub-subforum. Derp.

[M Fnord]

Progress is glacial and the scope has creeped, but submitted for general comment here's the first complete chapter of the IST2020 update/reboot project:

---

Good Morning, Campers!
Dateline: New York City NY, United States, 20 December 2023, 2:30 am
Marc Warner sailed up along the East River at a comfortable 200 feet above the waterline, enjoying the feel as the City’s lights rolled past. Winter patrols were something of a pain in the ass – it was always without fail too damn cold, especially if you got off the street and into the air – but things hadn’t been too crazy tonight. The winter holidays were generally quieter, and while New Years would be its own circus that was still a few days in the future.

As Marc banked east over Roosevelt Island and into Astoria, he ruefully reflected that less crazy was probably better for him than not. The hero business took a toll, and Captain Future wasn’t a young man anymore. Once upon a time he’d been a young punk chasing all the other punks out of East Flushing, but that was a long time ago. He’d come up in the world – top hero in the Five Boroughs, respected internationally, even a standing invite to join the IST – but the aches and pains he felt every time he got out of bed reminded Marc that the human body has its limits. Maybe it was time to rest, to hand the defense of New York over to some new blood and spend his time building all the little gizmos he never seemed to have time to finish.

But not just yet. Captain Future dropped down to fifty feet (staying out of LaGuardia’s approach lanes) and started scanning the streets for signs of trouble. Retirement was going to happen, but for now the patrol was still on and the City never truly stopped moving, even in the dead of winter. As he thought it, a twitch of movement caught his eye. Marc pivoted and spotted a knot of people moving as one in the general direction of the Xavier Academy on 76th. Cutting main power and going to silent suspensors, Marc drifted closer to see what was up. It could’ve been just a gaggle of drunks trying to get home, or maybe some homeless folk looking for a spot to get out of the cold.

The group was moving in far too quiet and measured a way to be drunks, and even in the sputtering streetlights they weren’t dressed like people with nowhere else to go. As Marc got close enough his goggles’ HUD started picking up the signature symbols and tattoos of the True Humans, the long-standing bigoted thorn in his (and everybody else’s) side. Marc wasn’t metahuman himself, and he’d heard all the rhetoric from their “respectable” anti-meta mouthpieces on the news, but it was like his father always said: the Klan is the Klan is the Klan, and a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi. Marc never asked his pops about what he’d gotten up to in the Sixties – and Walt Warner never told – but once Marc got into the hero business he understood his father better than he ever expected to.

So, here he was, flying overhead of a bunch of bigoted clowns loitering around a school for meta kids in the middle of the damn night in December. There was only one way this was headed, and there was only one way that Captain Future could respond: he touched his backup alert beacon, lit his thrusters to their full attention-keeping power and swooped down on the True Human goons like a peregrine falcon hitting a pigeon.

The goons scattered in his passage, leaping and tumbling out of the way of Marc and his jetpack exhaust as he came to a perfect stop between them and their target. “School’s not in yet, boys!” Captain Future boomed cheerfully, inbuilt speakers in his costume waking the entire block. “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to come back later. Or never; never is good too.”

---

Today is Wednesday, the third of January in the year 2024, and it’s shaping up to be an extremely lovely day here on Earth-1. The average global temperature is a comfortable 14 degrees Celsius, and the weather everywhere is remarkably nice for this time of year. Even the North Atlantic is fairly calm. Some storms are expected to build up as the day progresses, but it’s nothing that demands attention from the International Weather Organization. Admittedly, since the most recent climate summit the IWO’s been taking a lighter hand than they used to back in the Nineties, so unless a cyclone develops and is aiming to hit somewhere heavily populated they’re not likely to step in anywhere.

As of this morning there are 8,091,734,930 humans, 253,129 exosolar aliens, 72,178 parachronic travelers (31,154 of those nonhuman), 1,279 digital intelligences and 14,231 artificial humanoids currently living on and around this little rock here in the scenic outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy. The newest arrival to our fair globe was just born in a regional medical center in the Jarkarta suburbs but don’t worry – he’s not the only one showing up today!

It’s a quiet winter morning in New York City, once and future headquarters of the United Nations and de facto world capital. There’s a bit of snow on the ground and the ever-present hum of the City That Never Sleeps wraps itself around the UN complex. The morning traffic rolls down First Avenue to the crunch of rubber on asphalt and the almost inaudible whirring of electric motors. Across the street from the modernist glass box of the UN building is the sleek chrome tower containing the headquarters of the greatest force for heroism on Earth-1 – the International Super Teams. If one looked up at just the right moment they might catch a glimpse of the world’s finest heroes coming and going through the upper-level entrances, or see one of the IST’s famous Quinjets taking off from the roof.

Elsewhere within the city: The overnight shift of the Five Boroughs Brigade swaps places with the morning patrol, to grab some food and then get some sleep. In Harlem, a man with elastic powers and enhanced strength puts on a hardhat as he slips into a construction site – the City is always building something and being able to lift heavy equipment three stories in one oversized hand is a valuable talent in his field of work. A school group enters the American Museum, the slightly harried teacher admonishing her students to not fly inside the building, no matter how big the main hall was. A pair of cat-faced tourists from another star eagerly set up a tent out in front of the Majestic, intent on being the first in line for that night’s showing of Phantom of the Opera and confusing the hell out of the beat cop who thought to roust them for vagrancy. Near the top of the World Trade Center, the richest man on Earth-1 reads financial reports and ponders what villainy he can transfer money to without being caught. And deep underneath the city, at the center of a web of century-old pneumatic tubes, the latest person to wear the Shadow’s cloak contemplates the evil within the hearts of men.

Just another ordinary day on Earth-1.

Superhumans Walk The Earth!
Dateline: Bloomington IL, United States, 2 July 2023, 11:20 am
The story started the way the way you might expect a story like this to start: with a small brown-and-white cat clinging to a branch way up near the top of a very tall tree.

“Patches! Come down!” the cat’s personal human called. Patches – that being the cat currently stuck in a tree – mewed somewhat pitifully as it regarded the amount of clear air between it and the ground. The cat’s human was a boy named Micah, not quite nine years old, and he was torn with indecision. Clearly Patches wasn’t interested in getting down for himself, and while Micah might be able to climb up and retrieve his cat it was still a long ways up and Micah wasn’t confident in his ability to get back down, either.

Patches mewed again, and Micah’s indecision turned frantic. Just as he was steeling himself up to start climbing or go call the fire department or do something, a reddish shape like a giant bird that was also a person dropped out of the sky and came to a halt at the top of the tree. Hands reached out and plucked the only somewhat unwilling Patches from his perch, then gently person and cat floated down to the ground right next to Micah.

“Delivery for one little boy!” the person said cheerfully, holding Patches out at respectable distance. Micah immediately snatched the cat from the hero and pulled him in close, lest he accidentally escape again.

“Thank you, Local Hero!” Micah cried. Local Hero was the biggest superhero in the general Bloomington area. Most other heroes tended to wander off to the big city, but Local Hero was a homebody who thought his town needed a hero more than Chicago or Indianapolis needed another warm body. His classic red outfit, black domino mask and “headline cape” – a cape printed with any number of “LOCAL HERO DOES THING” headlines from newspapers all around the country – made him popular with both the people of Bloomington (who thought him just nice to have around) and the Internet (who made him the greatest meme of the 2020s).

“No need to thank me,” Local Hero said with a shrug. “I was in the neighborhood and saw the trouble. Glad I was able to help.” The hero looked back at the tree. “Must’ve been some bird he was chasing to get so far up.”

Micah shifted, increasing his grip on Patches to the cat’s mild complaint. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Not your fault, son,” Local Hero said, only for Micah to shift once again. “I mean, you didn’t scare him up the tree by throwing rocks or something, right?”

“No!” Micah yelled. He’d never do anything like that! “But, but...” Micah held out Patches in his arms and concentrated. Ever so slowly, the little cat began to float above his hands. For what it’s worth, Patches seemed to be completely unconcerned with his sudden weightlessness, stretching out luxuriously as he spun round the long axis.

Local Hero looked duly impressed. “Well now that’s a thing,” he said.

“Patches likes to fly a little,” Micah said. “Sometimes I take him flying when the weather’s nice.”

“And he got in the tree...?”

“I lifted him up really high this time, and I couldn’t reach all the way. Like standing on tiptoes. He got into the tree and I couldn’t lift him away.”

“I see.” Local Hero crouched down next to Micah. “Are your parents home?” he asked, face very serious. Micah gulped.

“W-well, my dads are home but they’re at work too,” he hedged. “Am I in trouble?”

The hero shook his head. “No kid, you’re not in trouble,” he said. “But I think that you and I ought to have a talk with your dads about some stuff. Like maybe finding a place where you and Patches can learn to fly better.”

Later, Micah and his fathers spent a lot of time talking to Local Hero about superpowers and where to train them, concluding with Local Hero giving Micah a special card for the Xavier school in Springfield where he could sign up for summer lessons in telekinetic training. And also a special card to get Patches a collar with a drone chip, so he didn’t “run afoul of FAA regulations” whatever that meant.

---

Of the 8.09 billion people currently shaking the earth this morning, approximately one in every ten thousand is an active carrier of the metagene, an interesting bit of DNA that – if expressed properly – carries the potential to develop superpowers. These powers can range between the trivial and the godlike; it’s just as possible for somebody to have a constant extrasensory perception of where they left their keys as it is to get the power to juggle skyscrapers. Of this pool of potentials around 700,000 people worldwide have “activated” their powers and become metahumans. Compared to the greater breadth of human experience this is still just a drop in the bucket, and (to be fair) the majority of metahumans are still in the range of key-locating as opposed to ultimate powerhouses. But the ones on the higher end, or the ones who’ve learned to leverage relatively weaker powers, are more than enough to make things interesting.

When metahumans started coming out of the woodwork in the late Twenties society seized on pulp narratives to try and make sense out of the new strangeness. Pulp fiction – first novels, then comics – spoke of a world defined by bright, shining heroes and dastardly villains, archetypes that the newly empowered found compelling in a world that seemed to be more and more like fiction with each passing day. In previous generations metahumans might’ve been seen as gods or mythic figures. In the fast-paced world of the Twenties and Thirties the metahuman instead became superheroes and supervillains.

By the end of World War II supers stopped being curiosities and by the Sixties they were an accepted part of the human condition. Nowadays every city above a certain size will have at least one person in a colorful costume wandering around using their powers to be helpful, and there will be at least one person in a costume running around robbing liquor stores. Sometimes they fight. For a while, especially after the war showed how dangerous properly-trained metahumans could be on the battlefield, supers were thought of as strategic assets on the same level as nuclear weapons. The Cold War posturing between the United States and the Soviet Union, using both their nuclear and metahuman arsenals, brought the world to the brink of annihilation several times during the Seventies.

In response, the world stood up and said no.

The New World Order
Dateline: Herat, Afghanistan, 7 October 2023, 3:15 pm
Sideslip swallowed nervously and adjusted their gauntlets. The relief mission to Herat had been going well enough at first. They’d been on plenty of relief and rescue operations throughout all of Central Asia ever since joining up with IST Islamabad, and while the quake had been bad it wasn’t an utter nightmare. Sideslip and the rest of Islamabad’s alpha squad had been on the Quinjet before the aftershocks had faded and met all three teams from IST Kabul who were already on the ground. More teams were coming in from Iran and the Sovereign Union, each heading up a longer column of unpowered relief workers and medical teams to help with the absolute wreck the city had become. Loss of life had been high, unacceptably high by Slipstream’s standards, but as more heroes showed up the situation looked like it was going to be properly under control by sundown.

And then the call came in, hot and frantic all the way from Kabul: Blue Demon sighted, en route to Herat.

Veterans liked to remind newcomers to IST that the only thing they really needed to fear was fear itself, or the Blue Demon, whichever came first. The monster had been a thorn in everyone’s side from the first time it appeared almost forty years prior. It would show up, wreak havoc and then depart if nobody stopped it. The Demon was different from your run of the mill supervillain. It was supposedly different from your run of the mill demon, even. They said it couldn’t be killed or banished. That no matter what anybody did, it would return, like it was stuck here, and that seemed to make it even angrier.

Now it was coming to Herat, to stoke more fear and despair in a city that already had more than enough.

Priorities shifted. The Kabul team and the city authorities started moving people out of the Demon’s expected landing zone as quickly as they could. Islamabad’s gamma squad accelerated search and rescue in the area – everybody who was trapped in the combat zone needed to get out now. The Tehran and Almaty teams broke off from their relief columns and raced ahead, hoping to get there before anything got worse. Calls were made to Command in America, who then made calls to Seoul, where the IST’s elite demon hunter squadron was stationed. Teleporters were awakened, dosed liberally with coffee and told the situation.

And Sideslip, along with the rest of their team, stood by and waited for the Demon to show itself. In fifteen years in IST, six of them as a field commander, they’d never seen the Demon up close and personal. It had an impressive body count behind it – well over three dozen heroes to its name.

The Herat street, already well-damaged from the quake, vanished in a mighty crashing sound and an explosion of dust as the Blue Demon made it’s arrival. IST Islamabad’s alpha and beta squads flinched at the burst of noise.

Sideslip’s eyes narrowed.

The Demon might be unkillable.

But unkillable didn’t mean unstoppable.

A bellow came from in front of them, and the dust cloud was dismissed by the beat of a monstrous wing. The Blue Demon stepped forth in all its terrible glory. Cobalt-blue skin rippled as it stalked forward, horns the color of bleached bone catching the afternoon light. It paused, regarding the IST strike force before dropping into a combat stance, wings flaring wide.

Sideslip clenched their hands so hard they could hear the metal and polykev groan in protest. This was it; at the minimum they needed to keep between the demon and the civilians still trying to evacuate behind them. With luck, they could kite the monster out of the city and pin it long enough for the demon hunters to show up and do... whatever it was they were meant to do with the (literally) damned thing. Sideslip honestly didn’t know or care if the hunters were going to kill, banish or capture it. All they really cared about was getting the monster outside Herat where it couldn’t hurt anybody.

The Blue Demon roared in challenge. Sideslip braced to launch themselves, and offered a challenge back.

“IST ISLAMABAD! TAKE IT DOWN!”

---

The United Nations was founded in the wake of World War II much in the same way that the League of Nations had been founded in the wake of the first world war. Nobody really wanted to go through that ever again, and so the nations of the world banded together in peace and harmony under the auspices of the UN.

That was what it was like on paper, anyway. The reality was something else entirely. The UN spent most of its first forty years as an organization that was at best a pawn of the Cold War superpowers, saddled with the responsibility of maintaining world peace while not really having the budget or even the authority to do much in that regard. All authorization for actual peacekeeping came from the UN Security Council, whose permanent members could veto anything they didn’t like, and were perfectly happy to exercise that veto whenever the interests of peace conflicted with their own interests. Despite this the UN muddled through as best it could, accomplishing some impressive feats via the soft power of the Economic and Social Council and it’s vast armada of international organizations dedicated to health, literacy and the environment.

In another timeline the United Nations might’ve continued to muddle on, an entity constrained by the limits imposed on it at birth and unable to accomplish nearly as much as it wanted – as it needed to. But on Earth-1 as the Cold War started to warm up and the threat of yet another world war loomed on the horizon, something inside the UN snapped. An unlikely coalition of diplomats, politicians, superheroes and others started talking, then they started working together. It wasn’t an easy process by any means, but by the Eighties they were ready.

2024 marks the 42nd anniversary of the 1982 Edicts, the landmark declaration by the UN that the people of the world, backed by some of the greatest heroes of the age, would no longer allow the great powers the right to blow the planet to hell for their own gratification. In a statement broadcast around the world the UN General Assembly decreed that hoarding nuclear weapons and stuffing armies full of metahumans was no longer allowed for any nation, and that to enforce this edict they unveiled the most ambitious super project in human history: the International Super Teams. Peacekeepers with capes and the authority to go into any UN member state to stop the worst of the worst.

To call this a seismic realignment of the status quo is an understatement. The governments of the world were more than a little shocked that the UN would go this far; they were even more surprised when the Security Council, for reasons never fully explained, went along with it. For a second it looked like the Edicts might break the UN, until the General Assembly showed the carrot that went along with the stick: scientists working under their auspices had developed a working utility-grade fusion reactor, and these reactors would be installed in every UN member country – so long as they accepted the Edicts.

The International Super Teams had a rough start, facing its first major crisis almost immediately in the Angola War against an expansionist South Africa. It would face more trials to come in the Four-Hour War, the Rwanda Crisis which would rewrite the rules on how UN peacekeeping worked, the Amerexit Crisis, the Millennial Crisis and more, all of which shaped how the UN faced the 21st century.

An Unlikely Crossroads
Dateline: Olympus Station, Earth Orbit, 16 August 2023 7:15 am
As a young girl Linda Ravenhair had loved the stars. Even beyond growing up watching Galaxy Quest like every other kid in the Seventies Linda had a fondness for space and astronomy that felt more like a calling. When her metagene activated and she gained the power to actually go to space on her own? Amazing. That it was the first space-capable superpower on record? Even better. As The Astronaut, Linda expected to go on to have a career full of really amazing exploits.

This wasn’t exactly where she expected to be for her final posting... but it had its own entertainment value.

“Superior madam I must protest!” The little reptile guy said in a voice that belied his stature. “My cargo has been verified as perfectly safe by the Imperial Shipping Board! For you to forbid me to offload here even just to transship is a significant breach of protocol.”

Not an entirely untrue statement, and yet... “Regardless sir,” Linda replied evenly. “Your own manifest says that you’re moving thirty thousand head of Tau Ceti beffel. Perhaps you were unaware, but beffel are considered a grade-1 invasive species by the UN Environmental Program.”

“I am aware, superior madam,” the Halessi ground out, eyestalks drooping forward in a fashion Linda had come to describe as ‘extremely annoyed but trying not to start an international incident.’ “However, almost all of the beffel aboard my ship are in cryogenic stasis!”

“Almost, Mr. Wallafess,” Linda said. “There are the matter of almost a dozen other beffel outside the tubes.”

“Personal pets!” Which was a big load of codswallop, as Linda’s grandma was fond of saying. According to her sources, beffel made for okay pets – on the ground. Not the confines of a starship. So Wallafess was moving unfrozen beffel around, probably to one or more of the restaurants on-station, and didn’t want to deal with the extra EIS paperwork. Which, well, fine; Linda could sympathize. But sympathy only went so far and the higher-ups at UNOOSA and UNEP were crystal clear: beffel were not to land on Earth in any sort of breeding condition.

“Can you provide documentation that they’ve been sterilized?”

Wallafess huffed. “I can, but I see no need-”

Linda cut the aggravated merchant off at the knees. “You, Mr. Wallafess, are not the person who has to deal with an infestation of fast-breeding alien livestock suddenly trying to muscle out native livestock and the wildlife when they manage to get down to the surface.” 2010 had not been an especially fun year for anybody on either side of Olympus. “If you have the documentation, then my office requires copies of it, as well as tracking chip frequencies for all of your ‘pets’ before we allow you to move cargo.”

The Halessi’s eyestalks flattened out and went side-to-side, before returning to their neutral position. “Very well, superior madam,” he sighed. “It shall be done, if only so I don’t have to come back to this dirtball any time in the near future.”

The Astronaut flashed the disgruntled alien the PR smile she used back in the old days. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

---

While Earth-1 started failing upwards in the direction of a world government, little did they know that they were being watched by intelligences not terribly different from their own, who sought to reach out.

In 1987 the world woke up to the news of one of the least-dignified examples of First Contact in galactic history, when a spacecraft of distinctly nonhuman origin splashed down in the River Thames just outside the village of Sonning Eye. Aboard that ship was an explorer-ambassador from the nearby Federated Kingdoms of Myrr, who greeted the people who helped extract him from his ship in Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and English. The ambassador was a Meeranar, a species of lightly psychic felinoids from nearby Epsilon Eridani who are junkies for novelty and adventure and just really think humans are kind of neat. Within a week of him and his ship being pulled from the Thames, the ambassador was in front of the General Assembly proposing a diplomatic and trade agreement between Earth and Myrr. By the end of the year the UN had a preliminary agreement drafted. By the end of 1987 the ambassador’s ship had been resupplied and he was off to his homeworld. By the end of 1988 he was back, in a much larger ship containing a full embassy staff and the first symbolic interstellar trade goods.

In 1990 the tourists started arriving.

The Federated Kingdoms were no more connected to the pulse of galactic society than Earth – the first contact in Sonning Eye was just as much a first for the Meeranon as it was for humanity – but something about two civilizations making peaceful contact was like a dam breaking in Earth’s general neighborhood. In 1986 humanity thought they might be alone in the cosmos; in 1996 not only did they have a remarkably stable diplomatic agreement with the Meeranon, but several other species were now making regular stops in the skies over Earth. The reptilian Halessi made contact with Myrr first but have since expanded their not-quite-colonialist ambitions to Earth, while the deeply strange and yet affable colony creatures known as the Blorg have set up limited refueling operations around Venus.

Word of Earth-1 continues to spread through the Galaxy: Meeranon traders have ventured further than any human to date, and they’ve brought back trading ships from the enigmatic humanoids of the Kyz, who themselves tell of a large Galactic Confederation that exists an almost impossibly far distance away from Earth. No great dangers have emerged from the void to threaten the world – but everybody figures that it’s only a matter of time before somebody decides to try their luck with the species of the local neighborhood.

The Multiverse Is Calling
Dateline: Holy City of Chead, Earth-F049, 11 November 2023 9:05 am (adjusted)
Haru huddled in the gilded chair, trying very hard to cry. Six weeks ago she’d been just another middle-school student in Tokyo going about a regular, boring life. And then the magic circle opened up under her feet just before homeroom began and deposited her here, in the central city of the Empire of Chead, alongside four others from her class.

The people of Chead called them saints, said that their goddess had delivered her and the others to protect the empire from monsters and the Demon King’s invasion. Tetsuhara had been overjoyed at the thought of being a hero and threw herself into the training and the work, becoming the Empire’s favorite by the end of the week. But Tetsuhara was so caught up in her new chuuni world that she refused to look at anything that wasn’t monsters or magic or swords.

Haru wasn’t the smartest girl in her class, but she wasn’t stupid. She saw the strange, plastic looks the Cheadians gave her and the other saints when they thought she wasn’t looking. She’d heard all the mutterings about being “barbarians” who the Emperor summoned. She’d endured all the quiet bullying the maids put her and everyone who wasn’t Tetsuhara through. And she’d seen the smile Prince Rodney gave her, the one he thought was charming but reminded her of the sort of smile a bad guy might have on the news.

Whatever the Empire wanted from their “saints” wasn’t a good thing. At least, it wasn’t good for Haru and the others. And so, in a room that had more opulent furnishings than anything she’d ever experienced back home but felt more and more like a prison cell with each passing moment, Haru Watanabe sat, arms wrapped around her legs, telling herself that she had to be strong.

Suddenly there was a commotion on the other side of the door. Haru heard maids screaming and knights shouting, the sound of armor clanking and lots of expensive pottery smashing. She pulled further into herself, expecting the worst. The Cheadians had enemies, and none of them were likely to be very kind to their saints. The huge double doors flew open, a squeak escaping Haru’s lips as the source of the mayhem outside strode in.

It wasn’t a huge knight or some kind of assassin, nor was it a Cheadian with their almost uncanny good looks. The attacker was a woman, tall and pale with short, curly black hair, and she was dressed more like a delinquent than a knight, in leather pants and jacket and a bright blue t-shirt. Haru sat there frozen as the woman came into the room on long legs.

“Watanabe Haruka?” the woman said. Haru started. Plenty of others had said her name before but there was something about the way this woman said it that Haru couldn’t place until she repeated “Are you Watanabe Haruka-san?” It was then Haru realized it: this woman had said something in Japanese, not the Cheadian language that she understood through (she assumed) some kind of magic.

Still frozen, Haru could only make the slightest of nods. The woman’s expression softened a touch as she knelt by the chair, reaching out to touch Haru on the shoulder.

“I’m Telcontar,” she said. “I’ve come to get you home, Haruka-chan. Your family is very worried about you.” The mention of her family made Haru’s heart twist, but then she remembered the color of Telcontar’s shirt, and where she’d seen the symbol printed on the front before.

“IST,” she whispered, the tears finally starting to well up in earnest. Telcontar smiled and nodded, and in a moment Haru was wrapped around the hero’s torso, sobbing into her shoulder while the older woman patted her gently.

“Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Telcontar murmured, “I’m here, you’re safe now. How long?”

“S-six weeks,” Haru choked out. “H-how-?” Had she been gone for just as long back home? Had her mother, father and older brother been afraid for her that long? The thought was almost as awful as the thought of never seeing them again had been.

“Not quite a day and a half back home,” Telcontar assured her. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you. It’s been hard, but it’s almost over now.” More shouting and the sound of a lot of people in heavy armor running very quickly filled the hall. “In fact, I think we’ll move the timetable up a little. Can you stand up for me, Haruka-chan?” Haru reluctantly detached herself from her savior, who immediately rummaged around in her jacket, producing a notepad and a ball-point pen. The hero scribbled something on the pad, tore off the sheet and handed it to her.

“As soon as you get home, give that to Dankaiser, okay?” the hero said. Haru nodded dazedly. (Dankaiser? The number-one hero in Japan was looking for a little nobody like her?) Telcontar muttered something in a language Haru didn’t understand. All of a sudden she felt lighter, almost like the circle that had kidnapped her from school.

The hero winked. “All you need to do now is say, ‘there’s no place like home.’”

Haru said it and the world erupted in rainbow light. The last thing she saw of Chead was the look of shock on Prince Rodney’s face as he burst into the room at the head of a squad of knights.

(Tomorrow, Haru would learn that Telcontar would send the others back one by one over the rest of that day, culminating with her escorting a disheveled and disgruntled Tetsuhara back home.)

---

The sharp-eyed reader might’ve noticed that Earth is often styled as “Earth-1” over and over in the text. Thereby hangs a tale.

The multiverse was a theoretical thing in quantum physics for a very long time until the Nineties when otherwise-routine experiments in metahuman power relations proved that the theory was correct – sort of, kind of, it’s complicated – but alternate versions of Earth were in fact accessible with the right technology and/or metahuman power. Then the Millennium Crisis happened and people, well, they didn’t forget but they were way too distracted to publish anything for a few years. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s that the first papers on multiverse transit hit the field and the Parachronic Revolution began in earnest.

Naturally, the UN tried to get on top of this as quickly as they could, establishing the UN Interworld Office and the International Parachronic Laboratory in order to try and coordinate parachronic research as best they could. This didn’t work out quite as well as the UN hoped; the potential economic benefits of accessing the entire multiverse were too tempting, especially for nations that were more than a little cool on the UN experiment at the time. During this time UNIO successfully made contact with two specific alternates: Earth-2 where pulp heroes and the League of Nations staggered on into the Eighties, and Earth-3 where a weird-science-tinged Vietnam War sparked a global communist revolution and an American civil war that saw the Midwest go the way of Atlantis. The three quasi-world governments circled each other cautiously for a while, but realizing that they had more in common than not (particularly the whole “would rather live peacefully than get shot at” thing) they agreed to regular travel and trade between them. This tripartite influx of new ideas would lead to some surprising effects on Earth-1, like the division of the old Soviet Union into the reformist Sovereign Union and the Earth-3 influenced United Socialist Republics.

The multiversal “gold rush” saw a lot of new developments hit Earth-1 in the early 21st century: new technologies, new culture, an influx of resources and even possible solutions to present problems. But an entirely new frontier of the Universe also meant new problems and foes. Not only did Earth-1 have to deal with the ever-present threat of supervillains using parachronic technology to go a-viking on unsuspecting timelines, but not everybody traveling across the multiverse were nice people. In particular the paranoid neoliberals of the Infinity Unlimited corporation aren’t fond of anybody playing around in “their” sandbox, and have been a constant thorn in UNIO’s side since first contact in the 2010s. Villains from other Earths have shown up from time to time, usually just on raids though a few have tried to take root. The late 2010s saw a rash of kidnapping incidents across East Asia as a number of “fantasy kingdoms” were in the habit of stealing Japanese, Chinese and Korean students for a host of confusing reasons. And then there’s the Time Nazis: timelines where the Nazis win are tragically common but only one, the Weltreich, has an actually stable Nazi regime dominating the world. These jokers aren’t very numerous, but their occult wizardry makes them slippery opponents to UNIO/IST operatives.

The less said about the Domination of the Draka, the better. Only that IST spanked them so hard in 2020 that they likely won’t try for another go for at least another century.

How We Got Here
Dateline: Fort Collins, CO, United States, 16 January 2024, 10:30 am
“Alright, if everybody’s seated...” The professor trailed off, scanning the classroom. The first class of the spring semester was always tricky, especially given that the holidays had just ended. “First of all, welcome back and I hope everybody had an entertaining, if not necessarily productive, winter break.” That got a few weak chuckles from the students; not the best opening ever perhaps but for before lunch on the first day of classes not terrible. “For those of you who’re new, first of all please make sure you’re not in the wrong class, second welcome to Metahuman History 101. I’m Dr. Celine, whom some of you will probably come to loathe over the next few years because you were foolish enough to want to major in this.

“So, what is metahuman history? If you remember your high school classes you’ve probably got a general idea of the Shadow, Doc Savage, the war, maybe a bunch of stuff about the history of the Justice League and that’s about it, right? If your high school had really high standards they might teach a little about the Metalithic as part of the general history course, and maybe you get something in there about the civil rights movement and POWER because boomers never pass up an opportunity to self-aggrandize.” That got a stronger laugh from the students. “And that’s fair, to an extent. High schools have to teach a lot of stuff to their students, and history is very large. It’s easy for things to get passed over or given a superficial treatment because we’ve got to get you from Sumer to the UN by the end of the semester.

“In this class however we’ll be doing a much more in-depth overview than you might’ve gotten elsewhere. Our focus is on metahumanity and how metahumans effected history. This can be big flashy events that everybody’s heard of, like if Bob Kennedy hadn’t had a metahuman bodyguard he might not have lived to be President in 1980. Or it can be something a bit more subtle but no less profound in its effects, like the history of the Roland Power Cell.” The professor paused, then lifted a small battery pack off his desk. “Most of you have seen one, or one of the eight million derivatives that’re floating around these days. You have them in your phones, your tablets, laptops, even thirty percent of your cars likely run on a Roland cell. What you might not know is that these little batteries are one of the first successful technologies derived from the study of metahumanity, and without them history would be a whole lot different.

“We’re not going to get to everything in this course. Even if you’re pursuing a degree in metahuman history, you won’t get to everything because it’s history, and even relatively recent history is a very large topic. That said, if you’ve received your syllabus in your email – and if you haven’t please come up after class so we can get that sorted out – I’ve included a list of further reading, as well as some podcasts and YouTube videos that are well-sourced and will be able to help with additional context to the things we’re discussing in class. I’m not so cruel as to demand you listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts for class credit, but if you find the subject interesting beyond ‘will I pass the course’ I highly recommend taking a look.

“Now, with that in mind, let’s wind our way back all the way to the very beginning and get started, shall we?”

---

As the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close Earth-1 stands on the edge of multiple epoch-making events all at once. It’s simultaneously become part of a modest interstellar trading network and the hub of a multiversal diplomatic system that – in time – will change the nature of interuniversal politics. It’s not united under a world government no matter what the lunatic fringe might suggest, but the fractious nature of human politics has moved with torturous slowness in the direction of greater unity. The damage done by generations of rushing towards industrialization is being pushed back and repaired millimeter by millimeter. Humans live on the Moon, in any of several dozen large orbital habitats and a few souls are now permanent residents of another star. Earth-1 has its supervillains, but it also has heroes willing to put themselves between the people and harm, whether that comes from the ray guns of Dr. Insano or the bombs and missiles of a government out to destroy the weak for their own ends.

It’s a different world from the one where you, the reader of this document, live in. The advent of superpowers has changed things in ways that are big and obvious the way you’d expect superpowers to change things, but also in ways that are a bit... let’s say “off-kilter” from what you might expect. For example: Much like in your world Earth-1’s America had a bit of a stir about Dungeons & Dragons being dangerous for kids, but instead of being a moment of weird mass panic spun out of nothing by bored suburbanites like you remember, on Earth-1 some bright young teenager figured out how to make Magic Missile work from first principles and accidentally blew up his parents’ garage with it. (The garage was a total loss, and D&D got some side-eye on the next edition, but the teenager would go on from there to win the Nobel in 1995 for his work unifying magic and physics.)

Though despite all the differences, it’s still recognizable. For all the superpowers, humans are still human. They’re born, they grow up, laugh, cry, have loved ones and do all the things ordinary people do all across the multiverse. They go to work, even if some of them do that by donning a cape and mask, they go to school, live and die just like everybody else. People read books and go to the movies, listen to music, play videogames and spend too much time on social media the same way that you do.

The path to get to this point wasn’t an easy one. Nor was it short. It didn’t start in 1982 when the world said no, nor did it start with the founding of the UN in 1945, with the first true superheroes of the Thirties, or even the first demonstration of powers in the Twenties. The path to Earth-1 being what it is begins long, long ago, far back in the misty depths of human evolution before the emergence of Homo sapiens as the dominant intelligent species on Earth. It’s a path that travels the length of human history, from ancient kingdoms where gods and monsters still walked the earth and myths were reality all the way to the dawn of modern civilization, and it intertwines with every facet of humanity along the way. Explaining it all would the work of multiple lifetimes, and even then some things would remain unknown or inexplicable. This document can never be anything but an abridged version of the whole. But even an abridged version of the tale has merit.

So let me tell you a story...

SIDEBOX: “The World Outside Your Window”
Superheroes and comic book settings exist in tension with the so-called real world. On the one hand, the goal of a superhero setting has traditionally been to be as close to the real world as possible in order to make it easier for readers to imagine themselves in that world. That Superman or Spider-Man could sail past the window at any moment. On the other hand, the sheer amount of weirdness that piles up in superhero media, powers and supervillains and gods and aliens and big world-threatening crossover events happening at least once a year, would have a very visible effect on civilization.

Most superhero media ignores it; the world is just a backdrop for the action soap opera stories being told. Some works, particularly Alan Moore’s Miracleman and the Trinity Continuum TTRPG, lean into the transformative effects of superpowers on humanity much harder, resulting in a hard shift from superhero media to science fiction, fantasy or (in Moore’s case especially) mythology. Essentially, this is the butterfly effect in action: low-butterfly media more closely resembles the real world and thus is more relatable for the citizens of Current Year, while high-butterfly media often gets more experimental and alien.

Where then do we stand?

GURPS IST, the work that this is a fanfic/reboot/reimagining of, is low-butterfly to the point where most major historical events happened the same way regardless. This honestly strains credibility in a whole bunch of areas, but a) it is on-brand for GURPS timelines in general and b) it makes the world more easily recognizable as the “world outside your window” for a reader/gamer in 1991-93 when the core GURPS IST books were all published. Truth, Justice and the UN Way has a higher number of butterflies but it’s still pretty low-butterfly overall – I’m not pulling a Miracleman. The world is different from the real world – it’s pretty different from the world of GURPS IST in a lot of ways – but because I want it to still be at least somewhat recognizable people from the real world will show up, sometimes as expected and sometimes not (I’m a cheap mark for the “Nixon the car salesman” trope, forgive me) and the material culture won’t be excessively alien to the reader.

This isn’t the world outside your window. Not quite. But maybe it’s the world outside your window if you throw a few Instagram filters on before you look out.

SIDEBOX: A Lot Of History
Back when Truth, Justice and the UN Way was “just” meant to be a simple update to the GURPS IST setting for the 21st century, it was a pretty big topic. The decision to start revising things just made it worse. This is – to be frank – a full century in the history of the entire world, and in our history it was one of the more eventful centuries to boot. Adding metahuman and supernatural weirdness to the mix is only going to make things more complex.

Getting too granular on this project is a rabbit hole that I will likely never escape. So in the hopes of eventually finding my way back out of Narnia before somebody has to send the isekai rescue squad after me I’m trying to provide expectations here. I make no pretensions on depth on every possible subject; this will be largely a general overview of world history with an emphasis on how the existence of metahumans affects the flow of events. If a topic grabs my attention and demands a more in-depth look, that material will be added to the back of the book as an additional essay. This is a very make-it-up-as-I-go-along sort of project, so I can’t say with 100% certainty what will be available here. But I’m pretty confident the journey will be interesting!

SIDEBOX: On Gaming Material
GURPS IST was a sourcebook for GURPS 3rd Edition, so in addition to providing details on the world of the International Super Teams it had a fair amount of what we’d call “crunch.” That is, specific skills, advantages, disadvantages, templates and pre-generated NPC characters that could be used by a GM to mount an IST campaign.

I went back and forth on this a couple times, but have (at least for this iteration) decided against providing a large amount of specific GURPS game material in Truth, Justice and the UN Way. My reasoning is as such: GURPS IST is a third edition book, so everything in it would need to be updated to the current fourth edition to be playable. This has been already been done in the fourth edition version of GURPS Supers, and redoing that work is pushing the plagiarism line in a way that even I, the fanfiction writer, feel uncomfortable with.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that I eventually provide character sheets for some of the supers mentioned in this book, but for the most part Truth, Justice and the UN Way will remain a mostly fluff-based entity. On the bright side, this means it’s system-neutral, so if you want to run an IST campaign in Fate, Trinity, 5e (why?) or the niche system of your choice, you have my blessing to go ham.

SIDEBOX: On Sources
While there’s a lot of additional material presented in Truth, Justice and the UN Way, as well as a lot of “clever” references, in-jokes and other such nonsense, the primary source material remains GURPS IST and its subordinate books Supertemps, Super Scum, Supers Adventures and IST Kingston.

In addition, I’m using two specific extracanonical sources: IST In The 1990s was an article creator Bob Schroeck wrote with an eye towards getting it published in Pyramid Magazine somewhere around the year 2000ish, but was turned down by SJG editorial. He later posted it to his infodump of IST material on his personal site (see Publication History in the Introduction for links). Likewise, in 2014ish Bob began drafting an outline for a 25th anniversary edition of GURPS IST, reworked for the fourth edition and updating the setting to the then-current year of 2016. To this end he enlisted the aid of the members of his private message board (of which I am one) to help with brainstorming ideas. This also was turned down by SJG.

Material from IST In The 1990s and the outline of IST 25th Anniversary is being used in the creation of this document, though not necessarily in the same way as presented in either of those works. Like the original source material, stuff can and will be messed with as needed based on the criteria set by the Introduction. Caveat lector.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, nice. That was a great lunchtime read, Mal. The only criticism I have after a single readthrough would be that you have a few instances of "it's" where you mean "its". Everything else -- <chef's kiss>.

[M Fnord]

And now for your reading enjoyment(?) here's the completed second chapter, wherein we begin to diverge heavily from the original text:

---

On the Origin of Superpowers
Dateline: What Would Become Africa, A Very Long Time Ago
The homeship drifted over the plain, the curved metal hull reflecting the dun and green of this life-choked world. In the ship’s shadow the creatures that made up the bulk of the planet’s large lifeforms milled nervously. The ship and its occupants meant these beasts no harm, but the methods by which it kept itself aloft had a subliminal effect that unnerved those with senses in the right spectrum, and when one animal is afraid all others in the vicinity follow suit.

The ship’s master stood upon the command dais, looking out at the far horizon. It was not the first time he had seen this world; as a novitiate he had been here, almost a third of a galactic year ago, to look over the beasts of that epoch and judge if they were worthy of seeding. Some small part of him lamented the loss of those creatures – they were magnificent specimens in their own way, strong and capable. But they were so terribly limited, and simulations indicated that they would not evolve into something capable of the seed-gift before the planet left the star’s habitable zone. So as his master commanded, they altered the world’s balance and departed to wait and see what grew from the ash left behind.

A pity, but it was not theirs to be sentimental. If the great work was to continue then there would be sacrifices.

The master watched the horizon without using eyes, for his helm of office had no slits. He had no need of such things; his highly-evolved and modified brain read the imprints of the ether as easily as a lesser being used light and sound. It was his ultimate badge of office, the sign that he too had been judged worthy. Worthy of commanding a homeship, worthy of commanding the great work. And a sign that, in time, he would join Those Who Had Gone Before in sublime repose in the roots of the universe.

But there would be time for rest later. For now, there was the great work, the seeding, the final redoubt against the icy touch of Entropy.

The master caught the faint pinpricks of thought from their chosen on this world. The alterations had proven fruitful with this young species. Still in need of careful shaping of course, but their potential was quite high. One of several promising seedlings bunched up close together, huddled in the remnants of an old nebula. The master’s thoughts turned towards those others as he idly mused on what might happen should the seedlings meet in a few degrees of revolution. Would they meet as friend or enemy? Both had happened in the long history of the great work.

Behind him, another mindfire approached with deferential caution. In his psionic senses the master saw a novitiate, not unlike what he had been so long ago, a callow youth still chained to their birth senses, and one who bowed deeply when they realized the master had noticed their approach.

What have you to report, novitiate? The master’s thought-voice echoed within the youngster’s skull.

“The seeding is almost complete, lord,” the novitiate said. “The last necessary subjects have been captured and the infusion begun. Another five to ten solar cycles and we will be done.”

We will be done with this world, novitiate, the master chided his subordinate gently. Once the seeding is complete here we move onto the next world. The great work is never done, and will never be done until we join Those Who Have Gone Before.

---

The question of the century has been “where do metahumans come from?” and the equally compelling companion question, “why is this happening?” Scientists of Earth-1 have been poking at metahumans for research – sometimes voluntarily, sometimes... less so – for multiple generations now and so far nobody has anything resembling a good consensus on the topic. The most anybody can say for certain is that it’s “a mutation” but that’s not very helpful. Why do these genes give people the ability to fly or to read minds instead of becoming cancerous, or just being useless filler? By rights this shouldn’t be happening at all, and yet it is.

The largest leap science has made in regards to metahuman research happened in the 2010s after the Parachronic Revolution opened up access to the multiverse. Comparing genome maps from worldlines that were less... let’s go with exciting than Earth-1 proved that even among unpowered members of the population there were some major differences between the two timelines. It was enough to make the suspicion of tampering – the idea that somebody deliberately introduced the metagene into the species – less like a deranged conspiracy theory and more like something that might’ve actually happened.

But that just begs the question: who’s responsible? If the metagene was an introduced agent, then somebody had to do the introducing. When the first known metahumans started popping up in the Twenties the science of genetics didn’t really exist – it was still thirty years away from the isolation of DNA, and at the time most of the science around heritable traits was still rooted in Mendel or wrapped up in the reprehensible pseudoscience of eugenics. And so far as anybody on Earth-1 knew the local galactic neighborhood doesn’t trade in the kind of biotechnology that would make the eruption of metahumanity possible. Or at least, not as quickly and painlessly as it happened; the right kind of retrovirus could be dumped on a planet by any of the local powers but the process of inserting the metagene would’ve caused an immediate, major and obvious global medical crisis. At this point honest speculation hits a brick wall and peters out or wanders back into conspiratorial thinking.

Which is where the subject currently stands on Earth-1: they’re pretty sure somebody tampered with the human genome at some point but who, when, how and why remain mysteries unlikely to be solved. However, we have a unique vantage point that allows us to look beyond what even the supers of Earth-1 can see. Allow me to take you all the way back to the absolute very beginning of everything, the point where things really get started for metahumanity.

The Seeders
“And because, in all the Galaxy, they found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere.”
—Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

Everything begins with the Seeders. This particular group of enigmatic godlike aliens have been banging around the Milky Way for at least the last hundred million years or so, and their fingerprints can be found on a plurality of the sophont species that currently exist in the Galaxy as of today.

Why? Well, the Seeders have a particular idea on the meaning and value of sentience, intelligence and sapience and they want to spread that idea around as much of the Galaxy as they can. So they’ve spent millions of years – an amount of time that’s really hard for anybody to wrap their head around – rigging the game of evolution in their favor, deliberately poking worlds so that the blind process will do what they want it to do, and consistently.

Hubristic perhaps. But they’re enigmatic godlike aliens, so you’ve got to expect that sort of thing from them.

Anyway, the Seeders have visited Earth twice. Their first visit was at the end of the Cretaceous era, and this survey of our little world didn’t end with much in the way of genetic engineering. Still, the biosphere had some promise to it so the Seeders marked it down as something for a future followup mission. That followup happened roughly 500,000 years before the current year, during the great flowering of hominids. At the time the smartest primate on the planet happened to be Homo heidelbergensis, and they and their cousins already had command of fire and (possibly) language without Seeder intervention. As our distant ancestors passed the Seeders’ judgment, or at least weren’t so lacking as to convince them to shake the cosmic Etch-A-Sketch and start again, they dug in and started meddling. Engaging in large-scale genetic engineering on the hominid population, the Seeders boosted their predisposition towards intelligence, as well as increasing overall mental flexibility.

And then, presumably because the Seeders wanted something that could theoretically protect their investment, they inserted the potential for a species-wide paranormal ability in alongside the changes meant for intelligence. This is the metagene, the source of most power manifestations on Earth-1. How the metagene works continues to remain elusive – human (and other) science still isn’t quite up to Seeder levels – but it seems to have some weird interactions with quantum mechanics and zero-point energy fields in order to do pretty much anything.

The Seeders planned for the metagene to express itself within a relatively narrow band across the entire species. Once the gene was “activated” environmental pressure would rapidly cause one ability to become dominant, whether that was strength, speed, telepathy, elemental manipulation, etc. Essentially, in the same way that humans have evolved to have two arms, legs and eyes and all look broadly similar, if things had gone according to plan humans would’ve all had the same basic superpower within a set of standard deviations.

SIDEBOX: The Seeders In Today’s Galaxy
For the larger galactic community (which Earth-1 is, so far, only lightly connected to) the Seeders are somewhere between ancient myth and truth. No individual or nation has ever met a Seeder – or at least nobody’s ever met one and recognized them as Seeders. Whatever civilization the Seeders have or had is long gone, vanished into the depths of time even as the Seeders are very good at cleaning up after themselves.

The one thing that makes the Seeders more than a story found in spacer’s bars across the Galaxy is the work they left behind. Seeder genetic engineering is distinctive, and once species start swapping blood samples and genome maps around in the interests of scientific exchange, it becomes obvious that the same somebodies were mucking around in their DNA-analogues. After the traditional shock, confusion, paranoia etc. are over and done with, this has spurred occasional searches for the Seeders, which eventually turn up nothing and calm down as the average life of the Galaxy continues on.

As for the Seeders themselves? Well, the Galaxy is vast, and even at its peaks galactic civilization never covers more than 10% of the sheer amount of everything that’s out there. The Seeders continue their work in the quiet parts of the Galaxy untroubled by their seedlings, carefully tending the next generation of sophont life.

SIDEBOX: Metahominids
The sharp-eyed reader might’ve noticed that Homo heidelbergensis is the common ancestor of all of the best-known hominids of the Pleistocene and Holocene. Not just Homo sapiens but also Neanderthals and Denisovians derived from H. heidelbergensis, which means that they too had the Seeder metagene.

DNA testing on Neanderthal and Denisovian fossils done in 2003 confirmed that the trace metagene was present in these individuals just as it was in the modern human population. As of yet no remains have been uncovered with active metagenes. Not that this stopped notorious villain and fan of questionable bioethics Dr. Lazarus from cloning a group of Neanderthals and granting them powers via a synthetic metagene activator. The Neander Liberation Army served as the “good” doctor’s henchmen for several years before having a change of heart, turning on Lazarus and retiring to a quiet life in the Albertan Rockies.

Lords and Ladies (and Other Such Folk)
The Seeders might’ve been the first ones to meddle with human evolution, but they were by no means the only ones. Buckle up, because we’re about to get mythical.

So, first off: the supernatural is real. On Earth-1, anyway – in the universe where you’re reading this the jury might still be out but all the signs point to “no.” But that’s a side issue. We’re not worried about podunk universes like that, this story is about Earth-1.

Anyway, without dumping a truckload of technobabble on your head here’s how this works: just by virtue of its existence life (or anything complex enough to fake being alive) creates or collects (nobody’s quite sure which) mana. This poorly-treated Polynesian word has entered the global lexicon as a catch-all for magical energy, and the rules are fairly simple: the more life, especially the more complex the life, the more mana surrounds it. This creates a large, free-floating haze of ambient magic that surrounds any given life-bearing world at any given time, which we call the manasphere. So far as Earth-1’s scientists can determine, even the boring parallel Earths that don’t have superheroes and magic and alien tourists taking selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower have a manasphere, even if it’s barely detectable. Manaspheres are generally considered to be a natural byproduct of having a sufficiently complex ecosystem on a world. Comparisons to a certain movie series are not unwarranted but there are some pretty stark differences – no midichlorians for one – and it’s not a compare-and-contrast that we’re going to get into.

So magic becomes a thing when there’s enough life on a world in general; once you start having life that can think for itself things get even more interesting. Psionic fields are a form of esoteric energy that is generated once you have enough neurons or neuron-analogues slapped together in one space. The more complex the neural net, the stronger the field. And as you might imagine early hominids were already pretty smart before the Seeders arrived. After the Seeder meddling, their presence in the psionic landscape only got stronger and stronger as evolution worked its magic. This drew the attention of the ultraterrestrials.

What is an ultraterrestrial? Well, it’s a relatively new term for classifying a lot of old spooky paranormal phenomena. Professor Kenneth Hite, head of the University of Chicago’s department of Weird Shit studies (not its real name but it really ought to be) defines an ultraterrestrial as a being with paranormal powers but isn’t native to our plane of existence. It started as a descriptor for certain kinds of faerie creatures, but over the course of the 21st century it’s become a catch-all term for most types of supernatural being with power, agency and sapience. Angels, devils, fae and the like reside within the category Ultraterrestrialis.

Having defined them in the modern day we return to the ancient past, somewhere around a hundred thousand years before the present (give or take a generation or so). At this point modern humans exist and have developed enough of a complex collective mindscape that the ultraterrestrials take notice and start manifesting on Earth-1. Some of these early visitors end up defined by the collective subconscious and become the first known gods. The oldest of these entities still interacting with humanity are the Tiger and Dog gods, who date to somewhere within this period, a result of early human migrations and canine domestication.

Other ultraterrestrials interacted with early humans in an entirely different way (I don’t think I need to draw you a picture) and in the process introduced the next wildcard into the human genome. You see, the manasphere envelops any ecosystem worth its weight in biological mass, but magic tends to be outside the reach of most things unless the manasphere is exceptionally – even dangerously – strong. It’s not something that life on Earth-1 ever evolved to use the same way it uses light and sound. The ultraterrestrials, seeing this, introduced the magegift to early humans, giving them direct access to the manasphere, ultraterrestrial realms and other related cosmic forces.

While the metagene was given to all of Homo heidelbergensis in one go, the magegift was bestowed in a (somewhat) more selective fashion. Ultraterrestrials who distributed the magegift were more interested in aesthetic preferences, personal loyalty or even just entertainment value when it came to handing out goodies. As a result the magegift ended up in a much smaller pool of recipients, but in the fullness of time one person’s genes can spread to an awfully large number of people. Within a few dozen generations a weakened, recessive version of the magegift became another part of humanity’s inheritance. Which may have been the plan all along; it’s hard to tell with ultraterrestrials.

SIDEBOX: Ultraterrestrial Realms
While they’re not native to Earth-1, ultraterrestrials aren’t aliens in the classical sense. They don’t come from some distant star or galaxy, they’re from entirely different planes of existence.

The most common explanation of the ultraterrestrial realm is “alternate dimension” but that’s underselling things to an extent. Ultras don’t come from worldlines where X, Y or Z did or didn’t happen, or even from some of the more outre high-magic worlds Earth-1 is aware of; from a parachronic-technobabble perspective the ultraterrestrial realm exists either on top of or in between the worldlines that make up the known multiverse.

The ultraterrestial realm isn’t – or at least it doesn’t seem to be – a singular place. Instead, it’s divided into a truly ridiculous number of subrealms, each with their own distinct geography, ecosystem, populations and traditions. Divine and infernal realms seem to exist in equal measure, as well as any number of “fairy kingdoms” that may or may not form a continuous labyrinth of their own. The most recent and well-known addition to the realm is Jianghu, the ultraterrestrial copy of China the xianxia retreated to after the Cultivator Wars of the late 2000s.

Very few explorers have traveled the ultraterrestrial realm, and ultras are notorious for being evasive on the subject, so it’s difficult to get a good idea on what’s actually out there. One can presume that pretty much anything can be, much like the multiverse it encompasses.

SIDEBOX: Ultraterrestrials and Religion
The existence of ultraterrestrials has caused a bit of controversy among some scholars, as one might expect. The idea that enigmatic beings have been actively messing with humanity since before civilization began isn’t one that a lot of people are comfortable with. This is not an unreasonable stance. What worries people more than anything else is where ultraterrestrials fit into the greater landscape of human religion. After all, if you have an ultraterrestrial wandering around claiming to have been the inspiration for any number of folk spirits, what happens if they start bragging about being an actual god?

So far, this hasn’t happened yet, at least to major world religions. No ultra has come forward claiming to be, just as an example, Vishnu. There have been a few claims to being lower-order members of divine hierarchies, angels, demons and other such beings. A handful of ultras have claimed to be part of largely-extinct pantheons (the Olympian, Norse, Egyptian and Sumerian pantheons so far) or claim to be descendants or “fragments” of these gods sustained by modern worship, but generously these are difficult claims to take seriously. Not impossible, just difficult.

Why no ultra has even tried to claim to be a major modern deity remains confusing; the scholarly debate is whether or not there are real gods – or at least stronger ultras than the ones currently visiting – out there enforcing a divine IP claim on anybody using their names. Most religious authorities have (quite logically) decided that they don’t want to deal with this mess and have refused to make any statements on how ultraterrestrials may have affected the development of their faiths. The ultras are equally reticent to talk about the matter for their own reasons.

Atheists – particularly the more obnoxious breed that tends to cluster on social media – have a tendency to pull the ultraterrestrial card during arguments, and be unreasonably smug about it until fists start flying. But that’s a story for another time, and perhaps another storyteller.

Not According To Keikaku
The Seeders were godlike aliens with all the powers and expectations thereof. The ultraterrestrials are as powerful as they can be capricious. But it’s important to always remember that the Universe does not fucking care about powers and expectations and it can’t be brought to heel no matter how hard you jerk on the chain. The Seeders spent generations wandering around the Galaxy rigging the game in their favor so evolution would do what they wanted it to do, and in the case of Earth it didn’t. All the power in the world doesn’t include omniscience.

A series of unplanned and unexpected environmental changes – climate shifts, volcanic eruptions, solar flares, random gamma-ray bursts, etc. – hit Earth within a few thousand years of the Seeders’ departure. The sum of these changes caused the metagene to fail to express in the way the Seeders wanted it to. Instead of developing a single superpower across the entire species, the power gene simply went dormant, quietly lurking within the genome until the right combination of environmental effects forced an activation.

History Happens
Dateline: The Hills of Anatolia, 1180 BCE
Along the long road to Neša walked a woman and an ass. The woman was tall and auburn-haired with a countenance that was set into a grim determination. Her clothes were haphazard – a gown of finely-woven threads covered by a rough woolen cloak of Achaean make and soldier’s sandals that seemed a touch too large for her feet. A belt beneath the cloak supported a short, heavy sword. In her left hand the woman held a spear, using it as a walking stick. The ass was just as hastily outfitted, an assembly of water skins and rough bags of dried meats lashed to its back.

Both ass and woman plodded along the road. Behind them a thin wavering column of gray smoke rose into the sky, a grim sacrifice to Hera and Athena. Neither looked back; the ass only cared for the next stop when it would be able to graze for its supper, and the woman had no further interest in the smoke. She had seen that smoke in her dreams for years; had she been able to stop it she would’ve, but there was no force quite so implacable as the Fates.

And so she trudged on towards Neša and the Hatti. There would be something there for her – what, she wasn’t sure. But it would be better than what awaited her had she stayed in lost Ilion. The last inn on the road was many leagues behind her now, and the thick scrabbling pines and brush of the interior began to loom. She wasn’t making a great deal of noise – encumbered as she was, noise was inevitable but she remembered half-learned lessons from her elder brother in the ways of woodcraft – but even the faintest noise of sandal on dirt would be an alarm to that which might be lurking in the woods. Her ears pricked and her mind stood on guard, that uncanny sense that had guided her dreams since youth focused on the here and now.

She slowed to a stop, the disgruntled ass halting behind her, as her other sense saw the encounter unfold in the moment before it happened: an attack would happen here. Choices would have to be made. For all that the woman had left her family line to burn, for all that in many ways she longed to rejoin them, she was resolved not to die here.

As she stopped, three men came out of the brush to one side of the road. They were rough men with spears and bows, clad in the sort of garments that spoke of long days in the countryside far from the great cities. Only the leader wore armor, and that being a simple leather helm with bronze plates sewed to it. Clearly they were not the king of Hatti’s men, though she knew they would try and pass themselves off as such.

“Hail, traveler,” the leader proclaimed. “Odd to see someone on the road alone in these days.”

“No doubt,” she said in a clipped tone.

The leader gestured towards the thin smoke behind her; she didn’t turn to look. “From Ilion?”

“I am.”

“Guess the siege didn’t go well, then.”

The reply was forced from he throat. “It did not.”

“Well then,” the bandit leader grinned savagely. “If the Achaeans have taken their claims, then we might as well take our pick of the dross.” He drew a long knife from his waist and advanced. The woman lowered her spear and pointed it directly at the bandits.

“I wouldn’t,” she warned. “Retreat into the forest. If you do you’ll live to steal sheep and prey on wanderers another day. If not, then you’ll be howling in the Underworld.”

“So brave,” the bandit sneered.

“My death is not for men like you.” So saying the woman twisted, letting the bandit and his knife pass as he charged. She stooped and picked two small stones from the ground, the motion letting the bandit’s riposte again bite on nothing but air. Turning the stoop into a roll, she tumbled away from the bandits, came to her feet and flung both stones. One hit one of the bandit’s comrades square in the face, causing him to cry out as the stone shattered his nose. He dropped to his knees squalling in pain. The other stone bounced off the ass’ hindquarters hard enough to make the animal lash out in surprise. The ass kicked mightily, catching the third bandit square in his unprotected throat; the man flew backwards, crashing to the dirt unmoving.

The leader gaped, staring at the broken ruins of his band. “What sorcery did you do, woman?” he demanded.

She simply regarded him with the same grim look. “I told you before,” she said, twirling her spear and ramming it into his heart. “My death is not for you.” The leader crashed to the ground stone dead. The last man, still stunned and blinded by pain, was simple enough for her to finish off once the only actual fighter was done.

Cassandra of Ilion, last of the house of Priam, sighed mightily as she cleaned her spear, took up her ass’ lead and resumed the slow march to Neša.

---

For all that the immediate effects of the Seeders’ meddling slumbered for tens of thousands of years, they were really only the beginning. The High Strangeness had taken notice of Earth-1, and while the ultraterrestrials weren’t as comprehensive in their meddling as the Seeders their unique and more personal brand of chaos had more tangible effects on civilization in the distant past. This timeframe, which overlaps the late Stone, Bronze and early Iron Ages, has been called the Metalithic by modern historians, though the general public has a lot of other names for it.

In pop history the Metalithic is known as, variously, the Atlantean Age, the Hyborean Age, the Numenorean Age, the Three Sovereigns Period, the Great Wakanda Era and many, many more. In the popular imagination – as well as down in the depths where the cranks are hiding – the Metalithic is perceived as the ultimate in sword-and-sandal fantasy worlds. In the lost pages of history lost barbarian kings ruled lost cities and battled against sorcerers and their forbidden cults, gods and monsters lurked behind literally every corner and every shadow, and everybody wore combinations of robes, furs or very little.

The reality is not that. It brings me no joy to say this but no matter what conspiracy TikTok likes to say Xena: Warrior Princess is lying to you. Sorry. Much like the modern age of superheroes the Metalithic period of history was still dreadfully mundane for the vast majority of humans living at any given moment during it. Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t different from the long middle passage between the end of the Metalithic and the beginning of the heroic era; it just wasn’t the kind of absolute uncut peplum nonsense pop culture likes to make it out as.

SIDEBOX: “I have no memory of this place…”
Those familiar with GURPS IST reading this (all six of you) are probably wondering what the hell is going on here because, well, almost none of what we’re covering in the remainder of this chapter – and the bulk of the following chapter – is in the original text. Which, yeah, that’s a fair cop. The era of the Metalithic and the age of early superheroes that we’ll cover in Chapter Three is the central divergence between Truth, Justice and the UN Way and the “canonical” GURPS IST.

Why? Thereby hangs a tale but I shall be brief. The superhero comic is shockingly good at assimilating things from other genres; no matter if it’s science fiction, fantasy, horror or whatever, if you can stick a cape on it it can be in a supers story. We live in a world where Frankenstein’s Monster has been a moderately popular superhero who gets his own limited-run comics. Conan the Barbarian has been an important part of the Marvel chronology now for longer than he wasn’t. Almost every supers setting deals with Atlantis and ancient heroes. And so on.

So that’s why the Metalithic is here; it’s thematically on-brand for there to have been an ancient period of High Weirdness that was lost to time only to emerge now and then as plot fodder. Would this throw all kinds of gigantic butterflies into human history that would make the 21st century completely unrecognizable to modern readers? Possibly, yeah. Am I going to go there? Christ no! I already set my lines back in Chapter One.

Fantasy Kingdoms
The presence of the supernatural is the defining characteristic of the Metalithic; without that it would “just” be the period where humans started seriously working agriculture, cities and metal. Not that big of a deal in the greater scheme of things. The majority of human cultures had intermittent contact with ultraterrestrials during this time, and even the ones who didn’t had at least heard stories from wandering traders. There weren’t enough ultras on Earth-1 for there to be a faerie or household god for every single house, but the traditions to honor them spread faster than the actual visitors just in case.

Where ultras went, the magegift sauntered through at a more sedate pace. The understanding of magic and what moderns would call the beginnings of science happened more or less at the same time, and often involved the same people. Most of the laws of magic that would later inform the sorcerers of the heroic age were developed during the Metalithic. These laws were empirical in nature, do x and y will result, and for the most part were unconcerned with the underlying mechanics.

Direct magic users (i.e. those with the magegift) were uncommon during the Metalithic; modern estimates put their numbers at about half per capita as metahumans in the 21st century. Those with the ability were often snapped up by existing power structures, often religious but just as often secular, in order to help secure their power. This established a pattern of behavior that wasn’t broken until the Eighties – assuming it actually did break then. Court wizards (for lack of a better term) then went on to influence many of the major civilizations of their era.

Egypt
Of course we have to start things off with Egypt. How could we not? It’s one of the most ridiculously successful civilizations in human history; the chances of Egypt not being a player in the Metalithic are so low as to be absurd.

Let’s start things off with the obvious one, because it’s the first thing everybody thinks of when they consider Egypt: all the great architectural works done over the thousands of years of Egyptian civilization, the Pyramids, the temples, the cities, all that stuff, were constructed using entirely mundane means. No magic, no metahuman power, no aliens, no superscience unless you count “better than average Bronze Age math” as superscience. All done by normal people being clever.

(To be fair, the Sphinx on Earth-1 is older than the one in the world you’re reading this now; it was a sacred site for a precursor culture that later Egyptians co-opted because it was a big statue overlooking the Nile. Later, egotistical pharaohs would have the head recarved several times over the centuries, which is why it’s so small compared to the rest of the body. It also may or may not have a significant mystical presence that acts like a lighthouse for every mage in Egypt.)

So, if the architecture isn’t Metalithic, then what in Egypt is? Why, the language of course! Egypt is one of the first literate cultures we know of, it remained literate through the majority of its history and the Egyptians just loved to write stuff down on every conceivable surface. The supernatural was confined (as much as it could be) to the priesthood, and while not every bit of Kemetic lore survived the centuries enough did that it would be a major part of the revival of magic in the heroic age.

Minoan Crete
You might be reading this and wondering where Atlantis is. Sadly, Atlantis is no less fictional on Earth-1 than it is in our world. It was never a real thing: Atlantis was a rhetorical device created by Plato in order to explain both how his preferred system of government should work and also how Athens should, like, totally emulate Sparta more if they wanted to succeed.

That being said, on Earth-1 Plato wasn’t making the story up from whole cloth. Elements of the Atlantis story in Critias resemble the visible remains of Metalithic Crete. During the later Metalithic period Crete had hegemony over the northeastern Mediterranean, in a very similar fashion as how Classical Greece would rule over the same general area centuries later. Thaumic archaeology – which doesn’t sound like a real thing but it is on Earth-1 – has determined that the Cretans were backed up by magic to some degree, likely weather spells for influencing the wind (an important thing for an empire based on sailing ships). They were likely also blessed with access to a confluence of leylines underneath the island of Santorini which helped empower their rituals.

Minoan rule over the Aegean wasn’t terribly different from how later Greeks controlled the region: it was mostly economic hegemony over isolated islands and city-states, with the occasional smiting of the reluctant with storms and/or lightning. They were known in Egypt mostly as traders, moving goods between Europe and Africa.

The Minoan empire didn’t fall overnight, but the destruction of the Santorini ley nexus in the 1600s BCE caused significant damage to the mundane and magical infrastructure the empire relied on to stay relevant. Crete would continue onwards for several more centuries but the period following the loss of the Santorini nexus saw their thalassocracy retreat and be replaced by Mycenaean influences all the way until the Bronze Age collapse.

Shang China
The Shang dynasty probably isn’t the first Metalithic civilization in the Yellow River basin, but it’s the first one that left enough stuff behind to determine that it was Metalithic in nature.

Much like Egypt, the Shang were the origin point for most of China’s magical traditions. It is believed – if not confirmed, or possibly even provable – that Shang magic evolved from earlier forms of animism and shamanism that were developed by early Metalithic Chinese tribes living around the Yellow River. These are probably the origins of the semi-mythical Xia dynasty and the great sage-kings that predated the Shang. They get the credit for most of the discoveries however, because the Shang were a literate culture and were willing to write things down. Sadly, much of the original Shang writing was lost to time and environment so a lot of this is speculative, but successor dynasties retained quite a bit of Shang ritual over the years.

The surviving Shang magic can be divided into two main branches: animism and divination. Shang animist magic is not terribly dissimilar from rituals and spells developed by other fae-touched civilizations elsewhere in the world; at heart it’s a series of ritual offerings and flattery meant to win over or appease various nature spirits and gods. These rites are at the heart of Shang religion and would serve as the foundation for the more familiar forms of Chinese religion and magic that would develop in the Zhou dynasties and into the imperial era. Divination magic is at the heart of the most famous Shang archaeological finds, the oracle bones. Shang diviners were – or at least seemed to be – important parts of the Shang political system, as the nobles of Shang wanted to know the future, leading to the Shang employing diviners as court wizards outside the traditional religious role.

The Shang collapsed after a series of disastrous wars with their successors the Western Zhou, around the same time that the Metalithic was in the process of ending. In order to maintain legitimacy the Zhou adopted much of the Shang mystical tradition even as it slowly stopped working, and as a result the Shang never truly left China.

Wakanda
The African Great Lakes were home to one of the brightest stars of the Metalithic in the greater Wakandan Empire. During the late Bronze Age Wakanda held dominion over the African Great Lakes, mostly through their mastery of technomagic. Wakandan magical artifacts were, at the peak of their power, some of the best ever developed during the Metalithic. While not quite up to the pop culture standard of effectively-science-fiction, the technomagic developed by Wakanda was much more widely distributed than most other Metalithic cultures, with some devices being almost common goods within the Wakandan metropole.

Wakanda is mentioned briefly in Egyptian chronicles of the late Middle Kingdom period as one of many civilizations “beyond Punt and the cataracts” which which they had dealings. Wakandan goods were found as offerings in Egyptian tombs dating to around this period, and some fragmentary evidence found in Wakanda itself suggests that the nation sent either traders or envoys across the entire continent. Wakandan culture spread faster than the nation, reaching the southern and western coasts, where certain parts of ancient Wakandan religion would be incorporated into the local mythography.

The end of the Metalithic would hit Wakanda extremely hard, as the technomagic culture they developed essentially ran out of power by the 600s BCE. Wakandan rule over the lakes collapsed quickly, often in civil wars, and devolved into a network of petty kingdoms. Memories of Wakanda’s zenith would propel several attempts at rebuilding the empire over the next several thousand years, as well as propelling Wakandan nationalism and the Wakandan Federation movement of the modern day.

Strange Visitors
The Seeders left Earth-1 around 500,000 years before the present day. That’s a very long time and while the Galaxy is very large it’s not so large that nobody bothered to swing by the place in all that intervening time.

Deep and intense archaeological surveys done in the wake of First Contact went over quite a bit of the planet with a fine-toothed comb on the suggestion that there might’ve been extraterrestrials on Earth in the centuries prior. A few things were found, which led to Erich von Daniken being unacceptably smug for several years until the full context of the finds was understood.

It turned out that somewhere around a dozen separate alien landings were made, mostly in fairly remote places like the central plateaus of Asia, and they were almost all by different groups over a period of around 6,000 years give or take. The sites were identified mainly by the trash they left behind: like our ancient ancestors the aliens tended to bury their garbage, which was identified as containing traces of plastics and weird alien alloys. For all intents and purposes it appears that Earth-1 was occasionally visited by extraterrestrials who stopped briefly on the surface, possibly as a rest or maintenance stop on a longer voyage, or as the ET equivalent of hiking into isolated mountains to “get away from it all” for a few weeks.

Daniken deflated considerably after that, and nobody except his cultists was particularly torn up about it. (Look, this is a universe where Graham Hancock is – somehow – more right than wrong about prehistory. Just give me this one, okay?)

Despite Daniken’s continued and persistent cries otherwise, no credible evidence of extraterrestrial meddling with Metalithic civilizations has ever been uncovered. Some ultraterrestrials have claimed responsibility for this, citing that they “called dibs” and were willing to make it a fight, thus scaring off any nearby alien empires. Like just about every other ultraterrestrial claim this is at best dubious but it makes just enough sense that it can’t be discounted. The nearest major interstellar nation to Earth is relatively young and has no good information on anything happening in this region of space prior to around the 1000s CE.

SIDEBOX: The Caspian Wreck
In the early Seventies Soviet researchers on a deep-water survey of the Caspian Sea stumbled over a large metallic object roughly 300 meters deep. Believing at first that this was part of a discarded American rocket, the USSR quickly classified the operation and, using an oil drilling platform as cover, raised the object in 1972.

What they thought was American turned out to be a fragment from a large spacecraft of unknown origin that had landed in the Caspian Sea somewhere between 2-4000 BCE. The object had clearly been part of a larger structure at some point, and had not only entered the atmosphere at great speed but also hit the water considerably faster than terminal velocity. What remained after impact and several thousand years at the bottom of the world’s largest lake was a partially-melted, partially-crushed and corroded lump of metal that all anybody could say was “yep, that’s not one of ours and it’s not the other guys’ either.” The most Soviet superscientists could get out of it was some interesting metallurgy that went into several projects including Lunagrad’s radiation shielding and the Rocket Red power armor.

Thirty years later after the Soviet realignment research on the Caspian wreck was made public in the West. This allowed scientists to roughly track the object’s entry path (by searching for traces of the object’s unique alloys) from roughly over Lebanon, crossing west-by-northwest to the Caspian Sea.

Where the wreck came from, why it burned up over Earth and what it was doing here in the first place remain unknown.

Historical Metas
The metagene was dormant through much of human history, but dormant doesn’t mean not there. Random mutations, combinations of alleles and the right environmental trigger would create an active metahuman once or twice every four to six generations. Or at least that’s what the math done by modern metagenetics researchers suggests; the activation rate was probably higher, though not by a whole lot.

But that’s the math; actual proof is harder to come by. No matter how much Ancient Supers wants to pin all of history’s most memorable places, people and events on metahumans, it’s no better researched than Ancient Aliens is on our world. (And yes, that one guy with the hair’s still on the show and he still has the hair.) Textual evidence of metahumans is difficult to parse; history in the modern sense is a much more recent invention than a lot of people think, and tales of outlandish things happening Over There have always been popular. There’s a lot of stuff in the ancient historical record that’s at best highly exaggerated but was written down anyway because the job was to write down everything. On top of this the passage of time may cause a thing to become mythologized in a way that’s true enough but not actually true.

This makes attempts to draw truth from myth fraught. Every demigod and folk hero in the books has been claimed as metahuman at one point or another. Many of these claims are floated by people with a vested interest in saying that so-and-so was a metahuman because it strengthens their own credibility – or discredits others. A Protestant microsect (which shall not be named here; we all know who we are) spent a lot of their time in the late 20th century yelling at passers-by that every saint in the book was a “godless meta.” In retaliation (or maybe because it was the decade of edge) a gaggle of Internet atheists fired back that Christ was himself just a metahuman. And that’s just one, low-harm example of the kind of nonsense circling the historical metahuman question.

The historical record may be fraught, the archaeological record is less so. In the 1990s a dig in the Sahel region, around the ancient shores of Lake Mega-Chad, uncovered the first confirmed remains of an ancient metahuman.

The Sahel Man, as this individual is known, lived in the area about 7,000 years before the present day, when the lake was considerably larger and the regional climate much wetter. According to the metagene analysis his powers were likely a form of enhanced senses or extra-sensory perception. Based on the site, the Sahel Man wasn’t a lone hunter but a member of his community, and likely a respected one given the quality of grave goods found with him. The Sahel Man died in his late 40s, probably of an illness or lingering injuries.

To date the Sahel Man is the only verified metahuman to have lived between the emergence of Homo sapiens and 1924, though there are easily half a dozen candidates from across the world where testing has proved inconclusive.

SIDEBOX: The Ancients
There are stories (there are always stories) and rumors (there are always rumors) about metahumans with some sort of longevity power quietly moving through history. Depending on the story these are people whose metagene unlocked in the luckiest (unluckiest?) way possible and managed to survive into the modern day, or they might be superscientists who tried their hand at time travel and, after spectacular failure, had to take the long road home. Regardless, these so-called ancients walked the earth for generations, never drawing attention to themselves, staying under the radar until the age of heroes began in earnest.

How true are these stories? That’s a great question! Nobody knows. Starting in the 1930s the occasional metahuman has popped up claiming to be immortal or just absurdly long-lived, but for the most part these people have been con artists, or people wrapped up in in their own personal narratives, either case having easily traceable histories that can debunk the claims. The claim of immortality in itself is difficult to falsify: even in the 21st century the state of the art in science and magic can’t determine what (if anything) makes for “immortality.” And providing historical specifics doesn’t necessarily help either, because how do you prove that’s real? Documentary evidence only goes so far back and is extremely fragmentary, and archaeological evidence can point in a direction but it’s never 100% conclusive.

Of the so-called Ancients who’ve popped up over the years, most have passed on (thus disproving the claim) or have dropped out of sight (leaving things a bit more ambiguous). There are a few metahumans from the early Pulp Age who show signs that they might be immortal – in particular the fact that they’re still around, active and don’t seem to have aged in the century since the First Activation – but they haven’t claimed to have walked the streets of Ur or anything.

Of course, nobody’s ever asked them if they had...

The Magic Goes Away
The Metalithic was defined by its access to the manasphere. And like everything else on Earth, the manasphere operates in cycles. There’s an upcycle where mana levels are comparatively strong, a downcycle where they’re comparatively weak, and the world switches between the two extremes on a geological timeframe. The last upcycle began around ten thousand years before the present and reached its peak in the general vicinity of 4000 BCE. Not coincidentally, this is where archaeologists peg the beginning of the Metalithic as we (mostly) know it. This period of high mana allowed for the Metalithic cultures to develop specifically as Metalithic and not simply mundane technological societies.

The upcycle began to decline around 2000 BCE, and declined sharply in the 11th century BCE. This may or may not have been connected to the climate shifts that brought about the late Bronze Age collapse in Europe in the same time frame; it remains a matter of some debate for archaeologists. No matter what (if any) connection between the two events, it becomes clear that the Metalithic was in a rapid decline from the 11th century onwards. Major Metalithic cultures begin to retract, their rituals began to lose power and the ultraterrestrials and divine entities they communicated with also stopped offering boons. By the 7th century BCE the great Metalithic societies were in terminal decline. Some would maintain mundane greatness – Egypt’s New Kingdom would see their rule extended to its historical maximum well after the end of the Metalithic – but the majority of magic-based cultures fell apart into infighting or simply dissolved as the power deserted them.

The end of the Metalithic as a global presence came in the 6th century BCE. A handful of survivors would persist on marginal sites of power, some retaining their ancient traditions via obscurity well into the historical period. Likewise, some artifacts would retain potency, and a few ultraterrestrials would remain on the material plane – by choice or otherwise – through the coming downcycle. These were the exceptions however; for the rest of the world the age of magic had effectively stopped.

A Long Quiet
Events from this point onward follow the run of history as we know it in our world. The great empires of Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas all rise and fall as we might expect them to, religions are founded, philosophies expounded, innovations made, wars fought, and people live and die in a very normal fashion. The uncanny doesn’t leave Earth-1; the marks it made during the Metalithic run deep, and while they’re buried sometimes they’re uncovered. Its presence from the 500s BCE onward is much more muted compared to where it was in the Metalithic. The metagene’s continued dormancy and the low mana mean that any sort of report of the strange becomes a thing heard from a village a month’s travel away, who heard it from a peddler who visited a village six months away. Tales of angels, devils, faeries and household gods became just that – tales. The days of ultras popping into a place to spark fear, worship or just have a drink were long gone.

And so history continued to roll along, with the metagene and other uncanny forces sleeping quietly as humans used their Seeder-enhanced intelligence to figure out the world and bend it to their will. The 20th century began with a particularly nasty war between imperial powers, and in the aftermath of that war the would would change again, in ways that were possibly even more profound than the Metalithic.

The 1924 Event
“Northern Lights Seen As Far South As Tallahassee; Astronomers Baffled”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 13, 1924

Before 1924 metahumans were at best stories. The metagene was dormant; there’s no real evidence that anybody had activated their metagene at any point in the last two centuries. (Though to be fair that’s a difficult thing to say with certainty.) Fictional examples of superhumans existed across every form of media possible, just as they had for most of the history of media. But they weren’t real.

Until.

In the spring of 1924 something happened. The entire planet was bathed in a wave of cosmic energy that came from... somewhere. The exact point of origin is unknown; the only reason anybody knows it happened at all is due to the intense aurora that the energy wave – or a reaction byproduct – caused for several nights in the middle of May. The source point was likely obscured by the shifting lights of the aurora, assuming it was ever visible at all, and a century later trying to find the origin point is akin to searching for a needle in a skyscraper-sized pile of other needles.

Anyway, the origin point doesn’t matter much outside of academic discussions. The point is that the wave of vast and mighty energies washed over the whole world. Most of it (presumably) is stopped by the magnetosphere and the atmosphere, the same way that most potentially harmful radiation from space gets stopped. Another percentage is blocked by things like water and walls and human skin, again like how it happens all the time.

But enough gets through. Enough manages to sink into the DNA of millions of humans and energize the dormant metagene. Not everybody and not all at once, at best one in a million people have this happen to them that May. But that’s enough to get things started.

SIDEBOX: But What Was It, Really?
Radiation normally doesn’t give people superpowers. Even on Earth-1 if somebody gets irradiated they’re far more likely to get cancer ten or twenty years down the line, or die of radiation poisoning if the dose is high enough, than get powers. There are years and years of people being accidentally or deliberately exposed to high-energy radiation on record, and the rate of metagene activation and expression was barely above the activation rates of non-irradiated people. While some would walk away from the experience as active metahumans, the majority either suffered radiation poisoning and died within days, or walked away with nothing but a cancer diagnosis fifteen years later. Even many of those who did get powers from their exposure died from cancer before their time because while the metagene is powerful, it’s not a panacea.

This long and tragic record of fucking around and finding out allowed scientists and insurance actuaries to determine that the radiation threshold for metagene activation was actually very high. In fact it was so high that had the 1924 Event been a simple shower of alpha, beta or gamma radiation it would’ve been extremely noticeable – because somewhere around 15% of the entire population would’ve died from radiation poisoning, to say nothing about what that would’ve done to the ecosystem. Obviously this didn’t happen, so whatever caused the Event wasn’t the sort of radiation you normally get when splitting atoms.

But there are other forms of radiation: quantum energy released by vacuum collapse events, psi energy, debris from a higher dimension or ultraterrestrial realm colliding with the material universe, a stray blast of pure magic... a lot of theories have been floated over the years as to what the Event was composed of. It’s all unfalsafiable speculation, the sort of thing that scientists will argue over when having a few drinks at conferences. But the argument hasn’t gone away for one simple reason: if it happened before, it’s entirely possible that it can happen again. Or that another Event is currently riding its light-cone towards Earth, unknown until the aurora flares and things get even weirder.

The Best Laid Schemes
And now, a (mercifully) brief digression on Seeder metagenetics:

The Seeder metagene was designed to take advantage of selection pressure in a fairly small starting population, then evolve from there. The population in question wasn’t necessarily pre-sophont (though they tended to be) but they were definitely meant to be pre-civilization. Civilization, you see, has its own environmental pressures that can make the future of evolution hinky. And yes, that’s a technical term. The metagene was meant to adapt to its final form over two hundred generations in a population of not-even-paleolithic plains apes that was maybe a million strong. It was not, under any circumstances, meant to just switch on out of nowhere in a population of around two billion civilized and (at least roughly) industrialized plains apes.

Furthermore, in the hundreds of centuries since the Seeder intervention the dormant metagene was doing what all genes do: recombine. Without the obvious tells of a power expression and the necessary utility the selection pressure the Seeders intended to use to determine humanity’s One True Power™ never materialized. Lacking that pressure, the metagene just shuffled randomly over and over again, combined and recombined over generations as effectively just another parcel of junk DNA in a genome full of it. Ultraterrestrial interventions and the introduction of the magegift to the mess that was the human genetic legacy synergized in really weird ways with the metagene. The Seeders were – for whatever reason – not magically inclined, but once the magegift got into the system it combined frighteningly well with the metagene, adding entire libraries of potential tricks.

(This may have been intentional on the part of whichever being decided giving humans the magegift was a good idea. Which suggests things. Things that most people are happy enough to leave well alone, and who am I to go against the crowd on this? Moving on.)

And so we come back to the Event, and one absolutely bonkers conclusion: the metagene activates more or less completely random powers. The carefully planned, anticipated evolutionary paths set up by the Seeders were out the window generations ago, and by 1924 they were sailing past Alpha Centauri at high velocity. Instead of a single species-wide power or a discrete cluster of specific powers, the metagene started expressing any number of unusual and unexpected abilities. Worse yet, while powers could be similar at the broad strokes sometimes the underlying mechanisms were very different. For example, a flight power might be a powerful form of self-telekinesis, or it could be riding a natural antigravity projection, or it could be some kind of magical power because the metahuman in question had a pixie interbreed with their ancestors fifty generations ago.

This was a remarkable set of circumstances that is extremely rare in the Galaxy at large, possibly wholly unique among all the Seeder-experiment species that exist out there. And all of this is happening in a tumultuous moment in history in an industrialized, global society.

But wait, there’s more!

Doors Open Both Ways
We’ve talked a bit about the manadynamic cycle earlier in this document (see The Magic Goes Away for more on that) and how Earth-1 entered a magical ice age somewhere around the middle of the Iron Age that persisted through to the modern day and likely would’ve continued for another ten thousand years.

Except of course for the storm of uncanny force that swept over the planet in 1924. Whatever the Event really was, it pumped a little bit of energy into Earth-1’s dormant magical ecosystem. Not a lot of energy compared to what was possible, but like the metagene activation it was enough. Enough power to kickstart the manasphere, creating a feedback loop that slowly but steadily increased the ambient level of arcane force available on Earth. Places of power that had been quiet for thousands of years started to wake up, and books of magic that had once been nothing more than overly complex religious rituals started producing actual, repeatable results. The latter would catch a lot of people off-guard in the years to come, but we’ll get there in due time.

All of this was a pretty big deal, or it would become a big deal as things developed, but the biggest deal was this: for the first time in a very long time the pathways forged between Earth-1 and the ultraterrestrial realms that had linked themselves to the world like remoras were opening. Not to their fullest extent – yet – but the paths were largely unobstructed and easy enough to travel for ultraterrestrials. Earth was no longer the domain of the determined (or terminally bored) ultras willing to take the risk of being stranded indefinitely in the material planes.

The world had changed a fair bit since the last time ultras had made an appearance in force, and many were curious about what was new with this gang of jumped-up monkeys. So, whether on their own initiative or via being called by the curious with their new powers, the ultras began crossing over to see what all the fuss was about. Their comings and goings from Earth-1 added that much more magical energy to the ecosystem, causing the manasphere loop to accelerate.

(Yeah, yeah, it’s magical climate change. Subtle analogy is subtle.)

The Hall Is Rented, The Orchestra Engaged
On the surface, 1924 was just another year, really. It had its moments: it was the year the first Winter Olympics took place, the first time the President of the United States addressed the nation via this hot new gadget called radio, the year the House of Osman lost their last scraps of power over the Ottoman Empire and the year Hitler went to jail for nine months for trying to overthrow the government. It’s the year the California grizzly bear went extinct and the year the worst tornadoes in European history wrecked Hungary. It’s the year George Mallory, the man who famously said “because it’s there” when asked why climb tall mountains, met his destiny on the slopes of Everest. Things happened in 1924, but for the most part they were all mundane things. The sort of things that happen to any number of barely-civilized species out there in the Galaxy.

Ironically enough, 1924 was the year Edwin Hubble determined that M31 in Andromeda wasn’t just another nebula, but an entire galaxy like ours and that the Universe was filled with them. Hubble’s announcement threw a lot of people for a loop, because all of a sudden the Universe got that much bigger. We’d gone from just the one world to dozens (if you count the asteroids) and from one sun to millions. And now even the great galaxy we’d thought contained all of creation was only one of who knew how many. It’s an interesting coincidence that this shift in cosmic perspective would happen the same year as the Event that would, in time, shift all other perspectives.

Hubble, like many other astronomers, watched the lights dancing in the sky in May 1924 with fascination and confusion. They were beautiful, if unprecedented: the storms were just lights so far as they could tell, with none of the geomagnetic disruptions that marked other great auroral displays like the Carrington Event of 1859. The energy that caused them wasn’t anything the science of 1924 could detect – it might not have been detectable by the science of a hundred years later – but detected or not, it still left a mark on the planet.

And within the next two years the aftereffect of the 1924 Event would be felt all around the world.

[classicdrogn]

{mumbles generic positive noises]

Not much I can say except that it's a success at being as friendly as noe can expect for text-to-speech, possibly excepting explicit notation of when something in a sidebar begins or ends. That's usually clear enough from the brevity, the shift in tone from academic to more informal, and being set off by section headings, though. That's not to say that literal (Sidebar) and (Sidebar ends) tags wouldn't be appreciated, but without being able to set them as visually invisible text they might be too intrusive.

[Bob Schroeck]

I can't help but marvel, every time I see a new excerpt from this project, just how well you're expressing the soul of the ideas I had, driving the IST world, and just how much better you're doing it than I did.

[M Fnord]

I can't help but marvel, every time I see a new excerpt from this project, just how well you're expressing the soul of the ideas I had, driving the IST world, and just how much better you're doing it than I did.

Oh don't say that, praise is the bane of productivity. Also it helps that I'm not under a short deadline to produce 128pp Or Else.

[M Fnord]

Yeah, I don't even know. This one came in on a hurricane & told me to write it, so I did. Have fun with that.

---

REPORT

on

WORLDLINE DESIGNATION “KRYPTON”

prepared for

THE UNITED NATIONS INTERWORLD COUNCIL

by

INFINITY UNLIMITED, INC.

Date of Report: 18 August 2047

---


Timeline Name: Krypton
Catalog Number: E8D41F6A
Quantum Band: 3
Parallel Type: Close / Mythic / Weird
Technology Level: Advanced, Para-Scientific (Homeline+)
Mana Level: Medium (0.600 Bonewits)
Current Year: 2024 (-23 Homeline)
Primary Divergence Point: Unknown, presumably prehistoric.
Secondary Divergence Point(s): 1926, the appearance of superpowers.
Major World Powers: United Nations (hegemonic IGO), United States of America, People’s Republic of China, European Union, Sovereign Union, Republic of India, Japan, Republic of Korea (South), Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Centrum Zone: Inaccessible
Infinity World Classification: Z1 (DO NOT APPROACH)

Executive Summary
The Quantum 3 world of Krypton is an emerging power on the parachronic stage. Initially viewed as a curiosity by Infinity researchers, the worldline independently developed parachronics within the last two decades and has since been steadily moving outwards, intersecting with Infinity operations in the 2030s.

Krypton is of special note in that it is the – to date – only parallel where comic book-style paranormal powers are known to have independently evolved in the local humans. These powers are considerable, and Krypton manages them via the use of a UN-controlled paramilitary force known as the International Super Teams (IST). IST is also in charge of providing security response for Kryptonian operations offworld.

Initial contact between Krypton and Infinity was challenging, but irregular diplomatic relations was established following the conclusion of initial reconnaissance operations. Krypton is believed to be developing a larger network of open diplomatic contacts in the Infinite Worlds, which suggests that the Kryptonians are becoming more active in the parachronic realm after a period of relative isolationism. Recent actions by suspected Kryptonian proxies suggest that they have an interest in joining the Great Game, either as a diplomatic facilitator or as a third party in their own right.

As UNIC is currently debating the merits of extending formal diplomatic relations to Krypton, the Board of Directors has commissioned this report to provide background information as well as provide the current Board position on further contact.

Background
Note: Infinity maintains a full archive of available data on Krypton at ARCHIVE:Contact//Q3//W//E8D41F6A for those who desire more information.

Krypton is one of several dozen “mythic” parallels known to Infinity. It was first discovered by automated conveyor probe in 2016 (local year 1993). Krypton’s central point of interest pre-contact was that it was the first “super” world encountered by Infinity; it was a worldline where a population of humans (or humanlike persons) with paranormal powers lived, and these individuals filled the roles of “superhero” and “supervillain” along similar lines as Homeline comic books. The exact origin of these powers is apparently genetic in nature – Contact Division has acquired literature regarding a “metagene” responsible, though how and why remains unclear – and the Primary Divergence Point (PDP) between Krypton and Homeline appears to be around 1925 with the first appearance of paranormal individuals called “metahumans.”

What we know of Kryptonian metahumans suggests that a wide variety of powers are possible, and that these powers are often grouped into broad categories or “families” like flight, speed, durability, strength, energy manipulation, etc. According to testimony from Contact Division agents Krypton is also magically active: the exact mana level is unknown at this time, but based on anecdote Paralabs estimates the worldline is around .600 on the Bonewits scale, slightly less active globally than the Merlin parallels.

Despite these extreme variances in local reality, Kryptonian history is a remarkably close parallel with Homeline’s. While the appearance of superheroes caused some changes to events such as World War II, the existence of metahumans on both sides of the conflict caused their efforts to largely cancel each other out. Things begin to shift in the post-war period as metahumans begin to appear in increasing numbers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, causing variances in global culture and politics. The most significant difference was the use of metahuman soldiers alongside nuclear weapons as a deterrent, a policy that led to a very nerve-wracking 1970s. The Cold War stalemate on Krypton was ultimately broken by the UNO, who announced a plan to break up metahuman armies once and for all by incorporating them into an international peacekeeping force known as the International Super Teams.

When Infinity initially discovered Krypton in 2016, the IST was approximately a decade old and had just completed its first major military action against a hostile nation-state. The “Four-Hour War” could be considered a parallel to the Iraq-Kuwait War on Homeline – both involved the same belligerents and happened at roughly the same place on the calendar – but while the Homeline war is famous for being one of the last pre-parachronic major conflicts, the war on Krypton was an impressive display of what a large group of coordinated metahumans were capable of with minimal casualties on both sides. At the time UNIC floated a proposal to initiate contact with Krypton based on initial reports; this was rejected on the grounds that contact was considered too risky to Homeline and the Secret at the time. Per standard procedure, Infinity placed Krypton on the official do-not-approach list with a classification rating of Z4.

Infinity launched three followup reconnaissance missions to Krypton between 2016 and 2019 to gain further intelligence on the metahuman phenomenon. None of these missions went smoothly; while the Secret was maintained by all Patrol personnel, interactions with local heroes and villains forced Contact Division agents to abandon some lines of inquiry. The 2019 mission, where the entire Contact team was almost captured by IST in their duties as security for the UNO fusion reactor in Ile-de-France, forcing a complete mission abort, was the last straw for Patrol leadership. After the team’s debriefing, Patrol reclassified the world as Z1 and barred all access to Krypton in 2020.

For all documents relating to the 2019 abort, refer to ARCHIVE:IncidentLog//20200428//Q3//E8D41F6A.

Post-2020 Krypton slides out of focus for Infinity, as the company had more pressing matters to deal with at the time. Paralabs maintained a scientific interest in metahuman biology and their parachronic effects but no action was taken on Krypton directly. A request was made in 2034 to send a research team to observe a potential reality quake on Krypton. Due to the inherent difficulties of infiltrating a world closed for a full decade, the request was denied.

According to accounts from post-contact sources, Krypton discovered parachronics in 2027, though the actual hypothesis had been floating around the scientific community since the (local) 1990s. It is important to note that, according to the Kryptonians, this was not a breach of the Secret by Infinity: Krypton’s discovery of parachronics came about while researching the mechanics of a native metahuman’s power. It was not via locating and reverse-engineering any parachronic hardware accidentally left behind by Infinity’s reconnaissance teams. Once the technology had been invented, Krypton’s UNO placed it under the control of the United Nations Interworld Office (UNIWO), a group similar to UNIC but with much stricter controls on parachronic operators – and without a middleman like Infinity Unlimited.

Krypton spent the time between 2027 and 2036 in similar fashion as Infinity spent its formative years of 1999-2008: general scouting, locating barren or empty worlds for resource utilization, etc. One difference between Krypton and Homeline is while the latter prioritized maintaining the Secret when dealing with inhabited worldlines, Krypton prioritized open contact when possible. The first two worlds Krypton made contact with, Earth-2 and Earth-3
[*], were contacted within the first half-decade of Krypton’s debut on the multiversal stage.

[*]Naturally, Krypton doesn’t use Homeline naming conventions. Instead it prefers a strictly numerical progression with Krypton as “Earth-1” and proceeding more or less in the order of encounter/contact. By Kryptonian conventions, Homeline is known as Earth-271
[*].

The first outtime encounter between Infinity and Krypton occurred in 2036, when an Intervention Service team crossed paths with UNIWO ecological researchers on Echo 15000-Minus. Further incidents involving unknown non-Homeline parties intersecting with Patrol operations continued across 2036, until Infinity finally traced the unknowns back to Krypton in 2037. Desiring a more complete understanding of what Krypton knew about parachronics and their full capabilities, Patrol Command and the Board of Directors authorized Operation CALM ASCENT in early 2038.

Operation CALM ASCENT
For a full accounting of Operation CALM ASCENT refer to ARCHIVE:OperationsLog//20380109//E8D41F6A.

Operation CALM ASCENT was designed as a standard Intervention Service infiltration and recovery mission targeting human assets believed to have information on Kryptonian parachronics. The Patrol team members were all veterans of previous infiltration and recovery missions with a 99% success record previous to this operation.

The operation took place 09 January 2038 on the Quantum 7 worldline Bonaparte-2. While Krypton was considered as a target for obvious reasons, Patrol discarded it as the primary objective due to the potential for logistical difficulties. It was decided that recovering assets from a Kryptonian team offworld would be easier to mask as poor luck on that team’s end rather than potentially hostile action. Bonaparte-2 was selected as UNIWO personnel were known to be on-site and it was to the best of Patrol’s understanding the furthest Kryptonian team away from their homeline, which would theoretically slow the response.

Initial operations went smoothly: the team was isolated from their conveyor, subdued and returned to the Patrol staging ground in Brussels with minimal difficulty. Key components were recovered from the Kryptonian conveyor before the vehicle was destroyed to prevent contamination. Patrol personnel and recovered assets were transferred from Bonaparte-2 to Hideaway for initial debriefing.

Asset debriefing proved less useful than initially expected. The assets were uncooperative, though this had been anticipated by Patrol. More difficult was the general lack of parachronics knowledge amongst the assets. The majority of the assets had basic parachronic theory at some point in their education, but the bulk of their understanding was either practical or sufficiently obscure that Patrol was unable to make much sense of it. After debrief, the assets were transferred to Coventry for long-term holding and CALM ASCENT was officially closed.

On 1 April 2038 an unprecedented event happened on Coventry, in direct response to Operation CALM ASCENT. A nexus portal opened in the central plaza of Coventry’s primary housing facility, disgorging several dozen costumed individuals bearing the symbol of Krypton’s IST. They secured the facility and proceeded to raid it of as many human assets as they could over the course of 90 minutes. This included the UNIWO assets seized in CALM ASSENT as well as several dozen other critical parachronic assets. By the time IST troops had withdrawn from Coventry roughly 1,000 assets had escaped custody.

On 28 July 2038 a Kryptonian agent approached the White Star Trading office on Britannica-6 to deliver a communique from the UNO to Infinity Unlimited requesting an apology for the abduction of their assets as well as instructions on setting up a line of communications between Infinity and Krypton.

Parachronics
Whatever Krypton is using as the basis for their parachronics, it is definitely not identical to Homeline technology. Conveyor assets captured during CALM ASCENT and analyzed by Paralabs indicated that their baseline technology – and thus baseline parachronic theory – is compatible with the van Zandt model and Homeline’s general understanding of how the multiverse works.

That IST successfully located Coventry and then staged a successful assault and facility breach on the one worldline Infinity presumed was completely secure says that, at the very least, the Kryptonians have uncovered a loophole in the 8-axis model that the last half century of parachronic researchers on Homeline (or Centrum for that matter) failed to spot.

As transfer of parachronic theory has not happened between Krypton and Homeline as of this report’s date, it is difficult to provide hard information or conclusions on how Krypton does it. Based on statements made by IST agents during encounters as well as observation of UNIWO operations done by Scout and Intelligence agents there are a few data points that can be established:

1. Krypton’s parachronic model accounts for more than the 8- or 9-axis models in use by Paralabs. Without a full accounting of theory this is difficult to prove but at least some moves by Krypton only make sense on a 12 or more-axis model of the multiverse.
   
2. Williams-Khor is more accepted as fact by Kryptonian researchers. Speculative, but borne out by statements from IST agents encountered in any of the mythic parallels.
   
3. There is at least some use of artificial nexus portals. This is limited to a small number of worlds, usually uninhabited ones or within the close diplomatic radius established by Krypton. Mentions of a “Grand Central” suggest some kind of primary hub facility.
   
4. The use of magic in parachronics is not uncommon. While not used for industrial-scale work, magic users are part of Krypton’s parachronic economy.
   
5. Some crosstime travel goes through “the ultraterrestrial realm.” What this is unknown; attempts to get more information out of the Kryptonians only served to confuse the Patrol agents.
   
6. Not all crosstime travel is instant. Several IST agents have spoken about voyages taking periods of hours to weeks to get between worldlines. This flies in the face of most of what we know about parachronics.
   
7. Projectors are under much tighter control than conveyors. Given the materiel cost of projectors on Homeline, this isn’t surprising and might be the strongest commonality between the two programs.
   
8. Conveyor UI technology is considerably more streamlined than Homeline. This might be simply a stylistic or fashion difference between the two worldlines, but Kryptonian UIs tend to be simpler and more user-friendly than comparative systems from Homeline.
   

The use of artificial nexuses is interesting, and in line with current Board projections on setting up portals between Homeline and its Quantum 5 holdings. (See ARCHIVE:Infinity//Project2050.)

Outworld Operations
Kryptonian parachronic movements are difficult to track due to their nonstandard models. Despite this Infinity is aware of multiple UNIWO operations on uninhabited Quantum 3 and Quantum 4 worlds that parallel Homeline resource extraction and disposal operations. Approximately 17 different uninhabited worlds are currently “marked” by Krypton for their use; the majority are barely habitable planets populated only by cyanobacteria. One was previously known to Infinity as Laurentia-6, a snowball Earth that Krypton has decided to use for both climate remediation and experimentation. There are also several humanless worlds that are immediately pre-Holocene under Kryptonian control, though exactly what their use is is currently unknown.

Krypton is currently part of a tripartite agreement between itself and the intergovernmental organizations of two other worldlines, designated “Earth-2” and “Earth-3” by UNIWO:

• Earth-2 (provisional designation Krypton-2) is vaguely similar to Krypton in that it has a population of superhumans, but is overall somewhat more dysfunctional. The PDP seems to be the survival of the League of Nations in the 1930s, and the current year is approximately 1983.
  
• Earth-3 (provisional designation Lenin-10) is a world where Marxist protests in Paris in 1968 sparked a global communist revolutionary war. The war was not quite apocalyptic but Advanced / Para-Scientific superweapons were used, in particular one was used to literally sink the American Midwest during the collapse of American authority. The war concluded in 1976, and the current year is approximately 2001.
  

UNIWO is also known to maintain a series of “consulates” on multiple worldlines. These consulates are essentially what they appear to be, small diplomatic stations representing Krypton’s UNO and its interests in the worldline. As might be expected, UNIWO prefers to seek out major intergovernmental organizations to interact with whenever possible, but is willing to engage with one or more Great Powers should no suitable international forum exist.

Between 2038 and 2046 Patrol agents have encountered UNIWO consulates across several worldlines under Infinity jurisdiction. This has caused some minor incidents when agents unaware of Krypton attempt to apprehend UNIWO personnel for violations of the Secret; thankfully these have been settled with minimal damage to all parties. Some of the worlds known to Infinity that have Kryptonian consulates on them are:

• Bonaparte-6: UNIWO contact here seems to be more about making up for an incursion by Kryptonian supervillains; current operations involve widespread diplomatic pushes to build a native UNO-style organization.
  
• Britannica-6: A more recent Kryptonian contact, the “Otherearth embassy” in London has been under scrutiny for a scandal involving Queen Charlotte’s youngest daughter.
  
• Gaia-3: One of several R2 climate collapse worlds under surveilance by Infinity, UNIWO’s primary mission here seems to be supporting the local EarthWatch association’s efforts to rebuild the ecosystem.
  
• Gernsback: While contact between Krypton’s UNO and Gernsback’s League of Nations has been established, the more liberal social bent of Krypton seems to cause a great deal of friction in the more conservative Gernsbacker culture.
  
• Merlin: It’s not entirely clear if Krypton initiated this contact (see ARCHIVE:IncidentLog//20150621//8A5C2F9E for a similar situation regarding Homeline) but so far the two UNs have managed to maintain some degree of friendly relations over the last three years.
  

Based on these observations, it is apparent that Krypton is seeking out worldlines that have some kind of established international frameworks along with nonstandard (or perhaps more accurately, more-standard-to-Krypton) physics and paranormal phenomenon. Whether or not this is deliberate policy or some kind of collective unconscious move on Krypton’s part (see Parachronics section on Williams-Khor above) is unknown.

Krypton is known to recruit personnel from other worlds. The process is likely more streamlined and official than Infinity’s, given Krypton’s tendencies towards open contact with other worldlines, but it probably falls under the same umbrella of “headhunting talented outworlders who stumble into an operation.” Patrol agents have in fact met at least one IST agent from an “Earth-921” that may or may not exist on a completely different parachronic axis.

Commercial parachronic operations on Krypton are funneled directly through UNIWO as a matter of course. To date Infinity has not encountered any Kryptonian crosstime operations working outside of UNIWO, as might be expected with Homeline. Conflicting reports suggest this may be a recent phenomenon caused by an ongoing crackdown on “wildcat” crosstime operators, due to a possible incursion event in 2043.

Reich-5 is aware of Krypton’s existence, and vice versa. Neither of them are especially happy about it. IST has dealt with several attempts by Armenen Order forces to attack Krypton and its outlying installations. According to reports, while the attacks are a problem Krypton’s primary concern is similar in nature to Homeline’s when it comes to Reich-5: ensuring that more advanced technology doesn’t fall into the hands of Time Nazis. There seem to be enough metahumans with white supremacist or supremacist-adjacent views that could potentially be force multipliers for Reich-5, so preventing these individuals and groups from accessing it is a priority for UNIWO/IST.

Infinity’s window into the Cabal’s workings is opaque at the best of times, and that has not changed here. Infinity is aware that the Cabal knows of Krypton and is at least attempting to place agents on the worldline. Conflicting intelligence suggests that one or more Cabal lodges are in conflict with a native Kryptonian group called the Black Moon Society.

Centrum has been aware of Krypton since at least 2020, but they only seem to have taken notice in the last few years. Centrum activity on Gernsback in particular has spiked since UNIWO opened their consulate in Geneva; it’s believed by deep-cover agents that Krypton has managed to disrupt or at least inconvenience several Centrum annexation and assimilation plans by approaching Gernsback publicly. What kind of retaliation Centrum will make in this situation is unknown, but the Patrol and the Board are in agreement that there will be a retaliation.

Incident Reports
Since the conclusion of Operation CALM ASCENT, Infinity and other Homeline agents have crossed paths with IST operatives multiple times. The following is a summarized listing of the more notable encounters; for a full list please consult ARCHIVE:IncidentLog//A3F7B2C9.

• Incident #20370804//A3F7B2C9: IST agents provide aid to a White Star Trading office on Hellas-4 under assault by a Kryptonian criminal known as “the White Wizard.”
  
• Incident #20380401//A3F7B2C9: Intervention Service team apprehends smugglers out of Yrth, setting off a localized banestorm that drops all parties on Krypton’s Senegal. IST agents return Infinity personnel to the nearest Quantum 3 Patrol facility.
  
• Incident #20390507//A3F7B2C9: IST agents arrive on Johnson’s Rome searching for individuals of interest related to a sentient-trafficking case on Krypton. Patrol assists in the search; the persons were not located.
  
• Incident #20400621//A3F7B2C9: Reality Liberation Front terrorists attempt to flee Infinity custody and claim asylum at the UNIWO consulate on Gernsback. The suspects were apprehended before they could reach the consulate but not before UNIWO personnel saw the capture.
  
• Incident #20410318//A3F7B2C9: A trio of Kryptonians appear on Gothic-2 and actively interfere with Justice Division investigations. The agents are not UNIWO/IST personnel, and are driven off with moderate casualties. Requests for information to the Otherearth Embassy on Britannica-6 do not provide anything actionable.
  
• Incident #20420917//A3F7B2C9: Survey Division team operating on the fantasy parallel Bridgerton-3 encountered elements of IST’s “isekai rescue force” responding to a “hero summoning” (a banestorm attack targeted against Krypton’s South Korea). The Patrol team and IST agents cooperated in the rescue of outtime civilians and parted amicably.
  
• Incident #20431231//A3F7B2C9: Intelligence Division agent-on-station on Britannica-6 was confronted by an IST agent who handed him a large data packet regarding a previously-unknown hostile parachronic group called the “Domination of the Draka” and requested this information be relayed to Homeline immediately.
  

Positives and Negatives
In terms of Homeline foreign policy, IST represents a paradox. There are arguments for establishing stronger diplomatic ties between the two worldlines, especially compared to other known Peer powers in the known multiverse. However, there are distinct risks to those ties that potentially put not just Homeline but Infinity operations in general under threat.

The general benefits of establishing diplomatic ties are as follows:

1. Krypton is broadly similar to Homeline politically. Both Homeline and Krypton style themselves as guided by liberal ideals. This is in stark contrast to the other major Peer or potential Peer worlds that we know of, almost all of whom are (at minimum) distinctly illiberal and the majority of whom are authoritarian, tyrannical or just plain fascist. Being able to cooperate with a liberal world in parachronics would be at the very least a morale-booster within Homeline governments.
   
2. Krypton’s foreign policy is largely peace-oriented. As might be expected from a worldline with a strong UNO, Krypton’s outtime foreign policy is oriented towards establishing peaceful diplomatic relationships with other worlds whenever possible. Again, this makes Krypton stand out against other Peers in the local multiverse.
   
3. Access to Kryptonian technology. Kryptonian science and technology is roughly on par with what Homeline has access to currently, and the majority of these advances were developed natively. Much of this will be usable on Homeline, and a free trade agreement between Krypton and Homeline would be potentially very lucrative for both worlds.
   
4. Access to the Kryptonian diplomatic/trade network. Krypton has spent the last several years building up their own contacts in the wider multiverse. This is a network that we currently have no inroads into due to concerns over the Secret, but again a trade agreement between our worlds would give Homeline trading companies access to resources we currently don’t even have on the map.
   

While these are on the face of it compelling reasons to pursue stronger ties between Krypton and Homeline, the potential pitfalls and drawbacks must also be addressed:

1. Krypton is more invested in parachronic regulation. This seems like a bit of a stretch given Infinity Unlimited’s de-facto monopoly over Homeline parachronics, but it is a matter of record that the company was given very wide leeway in the construction and operation of parachronic conveyors and projectors in the 1998 charter. On Krypton, UNIWO holds parachronic licensees and operators to a much tighter regulatory standard, which we presume is due to UNIWO existing in harness with the similarly-strict licensing of IST agents and nuclear fusion reactors.
   
2. Kryptonian parachronics are sufficiently different from Homeline’s. As noted in the Parachronics section above, while what we know of Krypton’s parachronics line up with van Zandt’s work for the most part, there is enough there that doesn’t to give Paralabs researchers pause. The differences suggest that Krypton has access to a much larger expanse of the multiverse than Infinity, which does not put us at an even playing field.
   
3. Kryptonian parachronics are potentially infectious. This is speculative, based on comments made by an IST agent involved in incident #20420917//A3F7B2C9. In summary, they claimed the energy used by metahumans exists in parallel or perpendicular to the accessible 8-axis multiverse, and that parachronic operations allow that energy to “leak” into worldlines over time. The potential for Kryptonian “energies” flooding into Homeline – or worse, into hostile Peer worldlines like Reich-5 or Centrum – raises some large red flags.
   
4. Krypton places low value on the Secret. While Krypton’s UNO doesn’t hand out parachronics to anybody on an worldline they contact, their operatives aren’t shy about announcing their origin from alternate Earths in the event they decide to make formal contact. This is an ideologically challenging stance for Infinity Unlimited employees, and one that has made the current informal diplomatic contact between Homeline and Krypton unnecessarily fraught.
   
5. Krypton does not think highly of Infinity Unlimited. Operation CALM ASCENT casts a surprisingly long shadow over Krypton-Homeline relations. While IST agents and members of the Patrol have collaborated in the past, and are capable of amicable relationships on a personal level, the overall attitude of IST as an institution towards Infinity as an institution has been far cooler. Infinity’s asset recovery mission, as well as the Coventry facility, conjure unwelcome images in Kryptonian heads. Other Infinity-condoned operations like Johnson’s Rome are equally distasteful to Kryptonians.
   

Conclusions
It is the unanimous opinion of the Board that Homeline and Krypton must come to some form of agreement between them. While Krypton’s actions in the greater multiverse are by Infinity Unlimited’s standards grossly irresponsible and potentially dangerous, they are not something we can deny. IST operations have increased by 7% in the last year; it is clear that Krypton is flexing its muscles in a way that is far beyond a simple exchange of ambassadors and potential trade deals. The Board believes that this represents a threat to Homeline’s security.

Members of UNIC may seem confused by this conclusion. In many ways, Krypton in 2047 seems like a godsend compared to other Peer powers in the greater multiverse. It is a worldline very similar to Homeline, not unified but largely liberal in constitution, and one favoring good relationships with the neighbors over paranoia. Krypton has put more honest effort into establishing diplomatic relations in their almost twenty years of parachronic exploration than Homeline has in almost half a century. While the events of CALM ASCENT were not the best way to start relations, things have been relatively calm in the decade since.

The Board understands this position, and it also understands that Infinity’s position may not be the preferred choice of some UNIC councilors. However, make no mistake, we are looking at a potential escalation of the Infinite Cold War due to the actions of IST across the multiverse. IST as an institution is powerful and idealistic – always a dangerous combination. They don’t understand or reject the realist analysis used by Infinity to maintain parity against Centrum and other Peer and Threat powers. Furthermore, the Board believes that any establishment of ties with Krypton may signal to that UNO a willingness to bring Homeline institutions under the aegis of their preexisting diplomatic network. This would be an unconscionable violation of Homeliner sovereignty, and the Board rejects any diplomatic outcome that may result in such.

That said, the Board also believes that containment in the way Infinity would prefer is not truly possible. While Homeline maintains a three decade lead on parachronic technology on Krypton, that worldline’s willingness to cooperate with other worldlines gives them a much more robust logistical network than Homeline. Our parachronic military capacity is roughly par, meaning that even in the event that multiversal war broke out we would not necessarily be capable of destroying Krypton in the field. Victory would belong to whoever’s logistics and political system broke last, and that is not something the Board can guarantee would be Homeline.

The Board’s current position on Krypton and the International Super Teams is that diplomatic communications must be expanded upon, if only to serve as a method for impressing on Krypton the true dangers of the multiverse. Given the overall risk to the Secret involved, this is not a solution the Board likes, but it is perhaps the only solution that would not prove ruinous to Infinity Unlimited.

<sig>
Brian J. Mason,
for the Board of Directors

[M Fnord]

I'm not gonna lie gang, this one fought me. Like, "this is the thing that's kept me hung up for almost two years" fought me. This chapter is a clear example of overambition: I had drafts that were 30k words or more and still didn't cover everything I wanted to cover! This complete-enough version clocks in at just under 16k - I was hoping for <10k but at this point I'm pretty much at the point where I start losing actually important information.

But anyway, for your reading pleasure please enjoy chapter three, "The Pulp Age."

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A Very Delicate Time
Danger Ace’s lips spread in a broad grin as the twin Allison engines howled, mighty forces shoving the fearless barnstormer back into his seat as the Fury swooped down on the fearsome black Titan hanging low over the canyon. The engine’s cry was almost drowned out by the thunder of guns as .25 caliber fire lashed out, striking the enormous Zeppelin’s ebon hide like a cobra.


The bullets splashed against the armored gasbag like leaden raindrops, bouncing off the surface and falling harmlessly to the riverbed far, far below. The Fury’s radio crackled. “You’ll have to do better than that, Herr Ace,” cackled Baron Zorbo, amusement and irritation mingled in his worlds. “The Black Zeppelin is not my finest creation for nothing, after all!”

Despite the failure of his guns, the grin never left Danger Ace. “Aw c’mon Baron, I’m just getting warmed up!” he riposted. “Whatever you’re planning to do with the dam, you’re not gonna get away with it?”

“’Whatever I’m planning to do with it?’” The Baron echoed, surprised. “I had thought I made my intentions quite clear in my letter to Herr Chandler’s paper. Have you not read it, Herr Ace?” The Black Zeppelin’s own guns returned fire, filling the skies around the Fury with fire, lead and steel. Danger Ace’s lightning reflexes pulled the Fury into a tight turn away from the behemoth, the engines screaming hard as he pushed American engineering to its absolute limits.

“They don’t get the Times in Las Vegas, sadly,” the ace pilot remarked as he dodged death all around him. His voice was cool, almost calculating despite the mayhem bare feet from him.

“Ah, ich verstehe, a coincidence of destiny then,” the mad Baron mused. “Very well, since you were unaware Herr Ace, allow me to enlighten you. I intend, as I informed Herr Chandler, to destroy this thing, to tear it down as thoroughly as the Romans did Carthage. And if I must kill you to accomplish this, then I regret the necessity.” The Black Zeppelin’s fire increased, forcing Danger Ace out of an attack run and down, down into the canyon itself. The Fury dropped to almost to the level of the river before pulling up sharply against the mighty curved expanse of concrete. Her propellers came within a thousandth of an inch from touching the manmade stone, a moment that would have spelled utter doom for the intrepid Danger Ace, before the aeroplane cleared the top of the dam and began to climb back towards the Black Zeppelin.

“Yeah, and that’s what I don’t get,” Danger Ace replied as the Fury wheeled around. If the madman wanted to talk, who was he to tell him to shut up? “You’ve made millions robbing places all over the world and you could make millions more if you sold your airship designs, but you’re out here in the middle of nowhere menacing Hoover Dam. What’s so special about this big lump of concrete, huh?”

“Fool!” the Baron roared, now plainly furious. “A lump of concrete, pah! You ignorant American pig! You’ve no idea the indignity that your engineers have wrought! This dam will disrupt the balance of Nature across this entire region! Plants, beasts, even men will have their existences ended or thrown into turmoil! I have made my calculations: by century’s end the mighty Colorado River will be drained into oblivion by this dam and whatever such works men like you seek to throw in its path! A river that has been here since before the dawn of Man will cease to run, its life and the life it nourishes snuffed out, and for what? That Herr Chandler and all the other vapid jackals in Los Angeles can have more light-bulbs?

“I will not stand for this, Herr Ace,” the Baron continued, his tirade sliding into the silky Hunnic cadence the barnstormer remembered from his days in the War. “So long as I have the power to stand athwart, to prevent men from ruining the Earth for their own convenience, I shall do so. God has given me my genius for this reason. Now, Danger Ace! Pay witness to the triumph of Nature over the folly of Man! Betätigen Sie die Blitzkanone!”

The Black Zeppelin pivoted, an ungainly thing moving with shocking grace as arcs of electrical current and St. Elmo’s fire raced up and down the gasbag. The arcs clustered at the airship’s massive nose, then a moment’s pause before the arcs lashed out in a stream of blue-white fury! An artificial thunderbolt as wide as the Fury struck the dam’s pale concrete, marring the surface with a dish of black vitrified glass!

“A good start,” the mad Baron said. “But Rome was neither built nor burnt in a day. Prepare the charging batteries! We fire again!”

“Oh no you don’t!” cried Danger Ace. The Fury’s guns spoke once more, pelting the flying battleship’s black hide with more bullets as faint specks appeared on the horizon. The fearless barnstormer sighed in relief; reinforcements in the form of his famous Flying Circus had finally arrived from Los Angeles.

---

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
— Slavoj Žižek (attributed to Antonio Gramsci)

History remembers the years 1925-46 as the Pulp Age, an almost mythical era where the world plunged headfirst into the downright weird, where the superhero and supervillain were willed into existence by the breathless articles of yellow journalists and pulp magazines were more accurate descriptions of reality than academic texts.

To be fair it’s not the worst way to think of the time. A simplification sure, but not an inaccurate one. The Pulp Age not only stems from the 1924 Event but also from the zeitgeist of the time in which the Event happened. The decade (plus or minus a few months) between the end of World War I and the beginning of the 1930s is often thought of as a moment of calm in a tumultuous century but that’s a surface reading of how things were. The war in Europe had irrevocably changed the balance of power: even a relatively limited conflict (like the ones that closed out the 19th century) would’ve shaken things up, but World War I was not limited by anything other than economic realities. The largest war in continental Europe in a full century, between industrialized peers, had financially and demographically wrecked almost all of the imperial states – the so-called Great Powers who divided the world between them. In order to try and recoup their losses, the European powers squeezed their colonies that much harder, and the colonies felt empowered to push back. Independence movements had always been a thing in the world, especially outside Europe, but now they were popping up faster and were much harder to put down than they had been in the past.

Meanwhile, as Europe tried to rebuild their mauled infrastructure the focus of world power shifted elsewhere. The United States, whose population and industry hadn’t taken any serious hits during the war and whose empire was largely untouched by the aftereffects, was well on its way to becoming the 400kg gorilla in world affairs. Much of the Western economy through the Twenties was backed by American money and American industry, and this maintained about a decade’s worth of prosperity.

In 1924 the world looks relatively stable, but this is for the most part an illusion. If you happen to be the right class, ethnicity and gender then things are looking up for you – certainly they’re looking better than they did ten years earlier. If you’re not the right one of those things then your situation is much more complicated, generally wobbling between “fraught” and “extremely fraught.” The old imperial order that kept things operational since the Concert of Vienna hasn’t collapsed yet – the pedestal is cracked but not crumbling, and everybody with eyes knows its time is coming soon – but the order that will replace it hasn’t truly made itself known. As the empires wobble on their thrones social movements fair and foul are blossoming in the cracks, competing to be the ones who survive the fall.

In retrospect this might be one of the best possible moments for the emergence of metahumanity. It was certainly better overall for the Pulp Age to start before the next big war and not in the middle of it. This period of time isn’t just jazz, flappers and Art Deco – it’s what those things represent: new behaviors, new ideas and new philosophies of looking at the world. The first phase of the Pulp Age was a tense time for all that we remember it as one of excess and leisure; the world was changing and anything seemed possible.

This is the world that the energy wave hit in 1924. While the Event had no immediate effect beyond confusing astronomers and inspiring some interesting art (Salvador Dali’s The Sky Torn Open being one of the most evocative and prophetic images of the moment) the memory would linger on in public consciousness. The metagene had been unlocked but full activation would take time, though not as much as one might think. Vague reports of uncanny events start trickling into the press by Christmas, unexplained and difficult-to-explain things in brief articles sandwiched between advertisements because the editor had space to fill.

Not the most auspicious of beginnings perhaps. But still a beginning.

Historians love to give stretches of time fancy names and then break those periods up into smaller units with their own fancy names. The urge for ever more granular classification is something that has vexed the community for the entire existence of history as a discipline. It’s not something that will go away either, because there’s just too much stuff for the human mind to encompass when you’re talking about the concept of history.

With that in mind, the Pulp Age can be broken down into distinct sub-eras. These then can be broken down into smaller periods of time, regional classifications and so on, but for the sake of our collective sanity we’ll leave that level of granularity to specialists and just stick to documenting two specific time periods.

The Early Pulp Age (1925-31) is the beginning of the story, and is also the least-documented part of it: the early Pulp Age covers the first few years after the 1924 Event and while some historical events are pretty well-known from this time, much of what happened happened away from the eyes of people interested in writing it all down. Still, this is the first point where metahumans are not only known to exist but also are out and about doing things with their powers. As such, while the first supers wouldn’t actually show up until the very end of the period, it’s still a very important time for the development of metahumanity.

The High Pulp Age (1931-39) is what everybody thinks about when they hear the words “pulp age.” Not only do the majority of the best-remembered names of the time begin here, this is the era that’s most heavily mythologized by future media. Hollywood in particular will glamorize the supers of the High Pulp Age to the moon and back over the following decades. As an example, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 classic The Century Club was one of the single greatest Pulp Age melodramas and set the tone for nostalgic Pulp Age pictures for the remainder of the 20th century. Aside from this glorification, the High Pulp Age is important because it’s here where the early roots of what would be known as super culture are developed and set down.

Most historians consider 1939 – the formal beginning of World War II – to be the end of the Pulp Age. In truth history rarely has that kind of sharp dividing line. While the war would bring a lot of changes both to supers and the world around them (which we will look at in the next chapter) much of this was an extrapolation of trends already in play in the late Thirties. The war served as a transition phase between the Pulp Age and the incoming Super Age of the Fifties, Sixties and beyond.

SIDEBOX: Sliding Timelines
As already noted in Chapter Two, the Pulp Age is (honestly the bigger) part of the major divergence between this project and the original GURPS IST. In the original text while the 1924 Event happens on schedule metahumans and their associated cultural baggage don’t appear at all until 1941, when the “(s)tresses of military training reveal the first metahumans.” (IST94)

So there’s a couple of things here. First of all, the Event is explicitly stated to have unlocked the potential for metahuman activation (IST94), but there aren’t any for almost two decades afterwards. This always struck me as a bit weird because even if the vast majority of newly-empowered metahumans maintain a low profile statistically speaking there’s going to be enough supers willing to make a splash that it should’ve happened at least once or twice between 1924 and 1941. And it’s not like the era is bereft of fictional role models for metahumans to emulate.

Second, well… if we’re going to blame military training for revealing metahumans we need to address why it takes until 1941 for this to happen. No matter how you slice the chronology that’s several years and a lot of violence into World War II for everybody... except the United States. Now, I get it: GURPS IST is a book about a very American genre written by an American author for an audience that was primarily American. It makes sense in context to make those choices. That said, this is a very Amerocentric view of what’s called out as global events (both the activation wave and the war) and part of the revision process here is to step back from this kind of viewpoint as much as I can. (I don’t promise perfection as I also am Yankee scum writing without a net, but I promise to put my best effort forward.)

And so, in order to square the circle we get the Pulp Age. The timeline has been shunted backwards into the gap between the Event and the war to allow super culture some time to ripen before all hell breaks loose, and it has a more global reach. Not only is there ample precedent for this, it’s also pretty fun.

Ashcan Edition
Starting in 1925 and running into 1927 is the period modern historians call the First Activation. Like the name suggests, this is where the first people with superpowers switched on by the 1924 Event realized that something had happened, and started messing around with their new abilities. During the First Activation about one in a million people had their metagenes activated, and not quite one in ten million had already unlocked their powers.

Estimating the total number of active metahumans is difficult because there wasn’t much in terms of global censuses or population estimates in general until much later. Based on later data collected by statisticians we can estimate that there were somewhere between two and two and a half billion people on Earth-1 between 1924 and 1939. The Event primed the human metagene and, starting in 1925, roughly one in ten million had powers. This gives us a rolling total of between 200 and 250 people with superpowers through most of the Pulp Age.

It’s also in this time that reports of paranormal events start to increase. At the time reports of ghosts, spirits etc. were dismissed as the same sort of spiritualist nonsense that filled the pages of tabloid papers before the war. Much of it remained fakery: the war had caused a general increase in morbid sentiment and while spiritualists weren’t as common as they had been before the turn of the century there were still plenty of spirit mediums and soothsayers around to be ruthlessly debunked by skeptics. However, there remained a small but growing number of cases that couldn’t be debunked by normal means. By the end of the Twenties there was a general consensus that something was going on, even if it wouldn’t be figured out what for another generation and a half.

The original metahumans of the First Activation are – and remain – largely anonymous. A few would go on to be famous for demonstrating superpowers in public, and a handful of supers would claim to have realized their potential around the time of the Event, but so far as history can tell the majority of the First Activation’s metahumans kept their powers to themselves and laid as low as they could. These early methumans were completely ordinary people with lives and problems of their own. Some might have found a use for their power in daily life but as often as not a power could be as much as hassle as it was a boon. Some actively denied the power out of fear it might’ve been a sign of madness, or from a general fear of being shunned by friends, family and community for “unnatural behavior.” On occasion, the descendants of these first metas have reported finding out that their parents or grandparents were metahuman solely from reading diaries or letters well after their passing.

We can safely say these people didn’t have any grand notions, but then we could say the same thing about every metahuman generation that came afterwards. While most of the people involved in the First Activation would spend their time quietly coming to terms with newfound power, others would burst onto the stage quite in a flash of color.

SIDEBOX: The “First Metahuman”
Ichiro Watanabe (1903-75) was an unassuming young man from Nagoya, Japan who worked as a fishmonger and had a “little trick.” Ichiro’s trick was telekinesis – he could move, if a bit clumsily, about as much as he could carry normally up to about two meters’ radius from where he was standing using only the power of his mind. When and where Ichiro activated his power is unknown, though presumably it was somewhere in Nagoya where nobody noticed it. He used his little trick to make life hauling fish easier until one day in summer 1926 when the market’s manager caught him putting ten kilos of frozen salmon on a high shelf without using his hands. Fearing for his employment Ichiro tried to bluff his way out of the situation, but instead of firing him his boss called the Nagoya Shimbun and overnight he became a sensation.

Watanabe’s telekinesis was the first public demonstration of paranormal powers without any kind of trickery or fakery involved. Scientists and skeptics, first from Japan and then the rest of the world, descended on Nagoya in order to figure out his mysterious power. Among the people attracted to Watanabe was master illusionist and arch-skeptic Harry Houdini, who arrived in Japan to great fanfare and examined the telekinetic in front of scientists and Pathé News movie cameras. (This diversion would incidentally mean Houdini misses a scheduled show in Montreal, and thereby survives another 25 years.) Houdini’s frustrated exclamation of “I don’t know how he does it!” would become the headline for hundreds of papers across the globe as news spread.

The “first metahuman” spent the rest of the Twenties being poked and prodded by scientists who were just as frustrated as Houdini. Eventually, as more (and more interesting) metahumans appeared Ichiro left the universities and returned to his job as a fishmonger, sometimes juggling fish with his mind to entertain customers and tourists. Ichiro Watanabe would survive several close calls with the Kempetai, the Imperial Japanese Army and the US Army Air Force during World War II and spend his life afterwards in relative obscurity, passing in his sleep in 1975. His granddaughter Kanae, also known as the heroine Mirrorwoman, became an IST regional commander.

Initial Print Run
Who was the first superhero?

Historians are reasonably sure the first person to don a mask and costume in real life started not long after the 1924 Event, but evidence is difficult to come by. These protosuperheroes came and went without attracting much attention from the outside world. It’s only through the efforts of researchers working half a century or more later going through hundreds of thousands of police reports and newspaper archives from around the world that these individuals are even theoretically traceable. Patterns of criminals apprehended, beaten or (in some cases) killed by persons unknown emerge from available data circa 1924-27; some of this is noise generated by corrupt or lax law enforcement but even accounting for that there does seem to be something in the data suggesting patterns. Sadly, the pattern is all anybody has regarding these mysterious supers. Who they were, whether or not they were metahumans and why they never reappeared once the age of heroism began are unknown and will likely remain so unless somebody develops a time machine.

The best known answer to the question “who is the first superhero” is, of course, New York City’s own Shadow. In many ways the archetype of the mystery man, the Shadow first appeared in the public record in the summer of 1927 after a series of high-profile attacks on Mafia operations in the city that never sleeps. His affably sinister air in his communiques with the press – often relayed by sidekick/aide/impromptu press agent Maxwell Grant – as well as his distinctive black outfit with the red scarf covering his lower face, made him an instant media darling. The fact that he ripped apart the mob and the mob couldn’t touch him made the Shadow into something much more than some punk vigilante with an ax to grind.

It made him an instant legend, and in the wake of one legend others are sure to follow.

Within six months of the Shadow’s first public appearance several dozen more people with similar fashion sense and vaguely ominous names popped up across the United States and Europe. By 1929 there were Shadow clones in just about every high-crime urban area on Earth. Many of these early imitators didn’t last very long. Some made an initial splash then vanished back into the cities from which they came, having accomplished whatever personal mission they set out on. Some were caught by the authorities like Cincinatti’s Prowler, who ended up in prison on aggravated battery charges. And some bit off more than they could chew and ended up dead like the Indianapolis Spider.

A Very Mundane Beginning
The early Pulp Age was the domain of the super normal. The term came into broad use in the Fifties, describing supers who didn’t have superpowers per se but didn’t let that stop them. Super normals remain a large percentage of the super community even into the modern era, but it was in the Pulp Age that they were most dominant.

“True” metahumans were relatively rare, and their powers weren’t (on balance) up to the same levels as they would be in later generations. Why this was true is still debated among metabiologists, but it’s generally accepted that no matter the reason the metagene went through a “ramp up” period of about 1-2 generations after the Event. The majority of recorded powers in the Pulp Age tended to be mental or sensory in nature: surface telepathy and basic telekinesis were moderately common, as was enhanced sight, hearing and smell. Outliers in this group included the first examples of the brick and atlas archetypes with increased strength and durability.

The handful of active, public metas in the Pulp Age spurred interest in how they gained powers in the first place. Scientists of less-than-stellar moral character found that some metahumans’ powers activated if subjected to physical or mental stress. This “spontaneous mutation” gave rise to the modern term mutate for a meta whose powers activated due to outside factors, as opposed to the mutant who is either born with live powers or gains them through physical maturation. It would also lead to a great mess of trouble at the end of the Pulp Age as these amoral scientists gained the attention of the powerful... but we’ll get to that soon enough. (See sidebar Making Metas the Unethical Way.)

Of interest before we move on are the edge cases. A theory posed by noted author and historian Philip J. Farmer in the late Sixties suggested that many of the super normals of the Pulp Age were in fact mutates of one stripe or another. Many of Farmer’s suspected mutates attributed their nigh-otherworldly physical and mental skills to the use of training regimens that were often intense, extreme and psychologically damaging to the user, the sort of thing that can – at least in theory – bring latent powers to the fore. While Farmer’s theory is a minority opinion among metahistorians and usually relegated to hack media like Ancient Supers and conspiracy Vine, it’s not impossible that there’s some truth to it.

Early Supervillainy
The development of modern supervillainy lagged behind the superhero. For the early Pulp Age the majority of villains were pretty much the same cast of mundane criminals that had existed for most of civilized history. Organized crime groups were in the middle of a boom period thanks to the implementation of Prohibition in the United States, which meant they were the ones most often targeted by the first mystery men. Being put on the back foot by strange people in masquerade costumes didn’t sit well with these established outfits, so they went looking for an effective counter.

The first supervillains who acted the part were, in essence, mercenaries. Their job was to kite the mystery men while otherwise-ordinary mobsters got on with their jobs (i.e. crime) in the background. Some infamous villains like Mentalo the Mind-Taker made their initial marks as hired guns for the Chicago Mob. It was dangerous work, particularly when the local mystery man carried guns, but a successful diversion was worth quite a lot of money. Hiring super muscle became a staple of the criminal underworld and persists to the modern era; third-party entities like the Hotel Continental started offering supermerc services as early as 1930.

The earliest known independent supervillain was the Red Hood, who may or may not have started as a Mob enforcer on the east coast before branching out and establishing one of the longest-lived criminal operations in the United States, outlasting almost every Mob outfit that existed when they began doing their thing. The Hood’s career was an anomaly for longevity, but it set the tone for independent villains for most of the 20th century: flamboyant gimmick, a reasonable number of subordinates and the necessary skills and chutzpah to commit over-the-top criminal acts.

SIDEBOX: Mystery Men and Paragons
Supers come in all sorts of archetypes, but the first two were codified at the beginning of the Pulp Age and these archetypes have survived all the way into the modern era. These are the mystery men and the paragons.

“Mystery man” started as a generic description for all supers regardless of what they did or were capable of, as almost all of them were men and most of them wore some kind of mask, scarf or other concealment that prevented them from being seen. In short, they were mysterious men, which shortened into mystery man before the Pulp Age had barely gotten started. As the years rolled on, the generic term started to become more specific, thanks in large part to the Shadow and his clone army. By the mid-Thirties the definition of mystery man had changed from “every super” to a specific kind of super, one who stuck to the shadows and whose approach to battling Evil tended to involve a lot more bloodshed than others. The non-generic mystery man became somebody in dark clothing, wrapped in shadows with a menacing aspect and usually armed with large guns to put holes in bad guys.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was the paragon. While no less mysterious than the mystery men – very few supers of any sort made their identity public at the time – paragons were a far more approachable type of super. The classical paragon persona hasn’t changed a whole lot in almost a century: the morally-upright, virtuous hero who tells children to be good, helps little old ladies cross the street and gets cats out of trees, etc. Paragons tend towards bright colors, or at least less intimidating costumes, and were willing to engage with the public beyond being weird cryptids.

The super population of the Pulp Age tilted towards the mystery man for the majority of it, though by the beginning of World War II the number of paragons had increased and would ultimately outnumber the mystery men by the Sixties.

SIDEBOX: Avalon Rising
The Event didn’t just unlock long-forgotten genetic potential within humanity, it also altered Earth-1’s metaphysical environment by cracking open doors between the ordinary material plane and more exciting places. The first successful spell likely happened sometime around the autumnal equinox of 1936, and once it happened there was another, and then another, and so on.

Most magical explorations in the Pulp Age were done by the same people who’d been exploring magic (with or without the k) since before the turn of the century. These groups, mostly secret societies of European extraction and Victorian origin, used a mishmash of their own jargon mixed with appropriated Indian, Chinese and Tibetan religious ritual to develop the first “modern” magical systems. Very few of these groups were interested in sharing, and feuds were common through most of the Twenties as initiates happily stabbed each other in the back over scraps of knowledge.

Mystic supers started appearing near the end of the early Pulp Age. Initially mystics were often confused with mentalists as magic and psychic powers weren’t that easy to distinguish at the time – even the mentalists and mystics had trouble with it! The first super to back up their claims of magical origin was the “philosopher hero” Paracelsus, a gentleman from New England who wasn’t quite a sorcerer supreme, but was the first person to publish any sort of public treatise on the nature of magic. The Modern Laws of Magick (1932) is pretty rough by modern standards but is still regarded as a major step forward in the understanding of magic as a force of nature.

The mystics tended to end up in a niche ecosystem of their own. Many started out as crimefighters or criminals, but the increasing complexity of the supernatural world very quickly detached them from more mundane situations. Most of the public mystics were little more than dabblers in the supernatural arts – the true Ascended Masters were more likely to vanish from the material plane altogether and only returned if a serious threat was posed to the plane’s structural integrity.

Inflection Point
The mystery men of the Twenties were – if we’re going to be honest – a fad. For certain people, more often than not young men with comfortable lifestyles and a lot of boredom, putting on a costume and engaging in some reckless vigilante action was the next hot thing to do when goldfish swallowing was passe. While some of the early mystery men were in it for the long haul, most weren’t. They were shooting stars that flared briefly before fading away.

And no fad lasts forever; despite the obsessive attention given to various mystery men by news media over the late Twenties, the initial rush of Shadow imitators began to tail off in the last years of that decade. By 1929 the rate of new supers appearing had gone to effectively zero. Many of the earliest generation of supers were also starting to pack it in after only a few short years; life as a super is demanding even in the 21st century, a century earlier it was even worse. The ones who remained were the most obsessive about it, the ones who saw this as a sacred calling and were willing to keep pushing for the rest of their lives, if need be.

What the world would’ve looked like had the mystery men fad drained away completely is unknown. Some things likely wouldn’t have changed – metagene activations were still happening, so people with powers would continue to appear, and it’s highly probable that many things that happened towards the end of the Thirties would still happen. The super culture might be shaped differently without the initial efforts and examples found in this transition period, which in turn would cause their own changes to broader history. In a world where the Pulp Age peters out by 1930, would the material conditions exist to create the International Super Teams in the Eighties?

Regardless, this didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen for reasons largely unrelated to the metagene or supers as a whole. While the Shadow and his ilk began to occupy their ecological niches in cities around the world, history continued to chug along. A complete record of what happened in 1929 is outside the scope of this document so in the interests of brevity we’ll summarize: World War I had exhausted and damaged most of the European industrial economies, who had most of the world’s money at that time. Europe turned to the United States, largely untouched and sitting on most of the rest of the world’s money, to provide the capital necessary to rebuild and revitalize the continent. The US happily provided that capital – making an absolute killing in the process – and this was the main driver that allowed the Twenties to Roar. Unfortunately it was also a major contributor to overheating the American economy, and in October 1929 the US stock market took a massive dive. This caused panic to spread throughout the rest of the American economy and the whole thing turned blue and fell over. And because large sections of the world economy relied on America not doing that, much of the industrialized world followed suit. The dominoes fell one by one and all of a sudden there was a massive economic crisis everywhere.

At the beginning of this chapter we noted that the Twenties weren’t nearly as peaceful and idyllic as many wanted to remember them. The Great Depression is where that undercurrent of instability begins to break through for people who had been otherwise insulated from reality, and subtext becomes text. The economic crisis led to a sharp increase in things like unemployment and wage reductions, which in turn led to an increase in the number of desperate people out there trying to keep things going for themselves.

As the truism goes, desperate people do desperate things. Crime, particularly in the United States, reached an apex in the early Thirties largely due to the twin effects of the Depression and the continuing of Prohibition. While the latter would be buried with a stake through its heart by 1934, things would not materially improve until the end of the decade. At the same time, there was a marked increase in interest in alternatives to the current system. Many people who weren’t at the top of the pyramid wondered why they were shouldering all that weight; this led to economic and political ideas that might have otherwise petered out in more stable times gaining new interest and popularity.

The increase in instability in the early Thirties brought with it a desire for things to just settle down for a moment. Revolutionary and reactionary movements would ride this desire as far as they could – in the Thirties it was largely reactionaries that profited, sadly. So too did the super culture. While the situation never reached true anarchy in the majority of the world, it was clear that the entrenched structures of law and order were unable to keep up with the instability, and into this stepped the super.

The people needed heroes; the people wanted symbols. And supers were there to be those symbols.

Available at Every Newsstand
By 1931, supers had stopped being just another weird fad of the Roaring Twenties. While they hadn’t reached the level of cultural penetration they would after World War II, by the Thirties it was clear that that was not just going to go away on its own.

The number of active supers didn’t immediately increase by much – again, this would only happen after the war – but it did stabilize. As supers dropped out of the life for whatever reason, new ones would appear to take their place. A mystery man in the industrial belt would vanish, only for another mystery man to show up a few months later. A mystic might disappear into the Outer Planes on a journey of self-discovery and their apprentice would take up their duties until the master returned. The sum total of supers on Earth-1 didn’t increase by much; estimates made using statistical analysis and endless newspaper archive searches indicate that there were around 400 or so active supers at the peak of the Pulp Age, and around 10% of those were active metahumans.

Statistically this wasn’t even a blip, even back in the Thirties when the population was a quarter of what it is today. But in a broader perspective, this not-even-a-blip was prominent enough to embed itself in global culture fairly quickly. On top of that, this small collection of a few hundred individuals were enough to start building their own culture.

Most of what we consider part of the modern super culture was codified during the Pulp Age, and most of it during the window between 1931 and 1935. The basic staples have roots going back in fiction, philosophy and reality for centuries but the cohesive whole that moderns would recognize as “the super culture” is largely assembled in the Thirties. The basic unwritten cultural rules regarding costumes, secret identities, sidekicks and/or henchmen and the basic rules of engagement between superhero and supervillain make their presence felt by 1932 and are effectively feature-complete by 1937.

(A full explanation of super super culture isn’t outside the scope of this document, but it is a pretty involved topic that would take up far too much space in this chapter. For a fuller explanation of the super culture please consult the supplementary essay Super Culture and You included in the back of this book, thank you.)

Going Public
Early Pulp Age supers were reclusive. Early mystery men might’ve been in the papers, but they weren’t known for sticking around to talk to civilians or give interviews to the press. This was for any number of reasons: it helped protect their civilian identities, it allowed them to take on more than one civilian identity, it enhanced their mystique, and so on. This made for excellent headlines in the Twenties but by the Thirties things had changed. Mysterious vigilantes were still popular – especially when they went out and tormented the seemingly endless number of evildoers now roaming the streets – but the malaise of the time demanded a different response. Something more public-facing. The people didn’t just want men cloaked in shadows; they wanted somebody who could talk to them, be reassuring in the face of calamity.

They wanted paragons, and the super culture would provide.

There had been a few attempts at public-facing supers in the early years, in particular the short, odd career of Nighthawk, but these supers tended to be flash-in-the-pan efforts. The motion-picture industry in Hollywood was notorious for dressing up actors in outfits that looked sort of like what a real super might wear, then parading them around Los Angeles as “actual” mystery men. But these had started to tail off alongside the initial mystery man fad. It wasn’t until 1933 and the public debut of Doc Savage that the first true paragons stepped into the limelight.

Savage is a fascinating character in his own right and books have been written about his life and times. He was in many ways the archetypal paragon: a handsome, well-built man (and one of the few supers of the time to go completely unmasked) who commanded attention just by physical presence alone, and whose public interactions tended to be somewhat aloof and done with a formality bordering on stiffness. Savage’s public affect would eventually be absorbed into super culture as the generic paragon template, a thing that would be copied, lampooned and rebuilt from the ground up multiple times between the Thirties and the 21st century.

While Savage was a bit unusual in the way he came off at times, the fact that he engaged with the public and the press to positive result opened the floodgates for paragons of all sorts to start appearing. This included heroes like the Torch, a man with an astonishing career ahead of him but started as an earnest man in red and yellow helping people in Chicago, and the American Crusader who did similar things on the west coast. These in turn inspired more paragons to engage with the people, causing a feedback loop that continues to persist into the modern era.

For Every Fine Cat, a Fine Rat
In an increasingly superpowered world, instability often means supervillains. At the beginning of the Pulp Age the modern villain didn’t quite exist; while there were people in costumes engaging in crime, these were mostly the subordinates (hired or otherwise) of established groups. An important step in the evolution of the modern supervillain to be sure, but not completely there yet. “True” independent villains like the Red Hood were few and far between before the Depression, to the speed with which some of the more colorful supervillains of the Thirties appeared it is likely that they had been lying in wait for at least a few years, emerging when the situation finally became chaotic enough to support them.

It’s hard to pin down the exact moment when the calculus changed, but the general metahistorical consensus points to the Chicago Coup of 1932 at the turning point. The Coup happened in the wake of Al Capone’s conviction and imprisonment on tax charges in 1931; the Chicago Outfit was left in mild turmoil, and in that moment the supermerc Blackstar decided to make his move, taking control of a healthy splinter of the gang and successfully defending “his” gang from Mob retaliation. This event showed that while the established institutions of crime were large and strong, they were vulnerable to subversion and disruption from within. Supervillains attempting to usurp control of organized crime would be a recurring pattern well into the Sixties, with mixed results.

The Thirties also saw the rise of solo artists using exceptional abilities or gadgets to commit villainy. One of the most famous examples was Lord Redthorn’s Ride, where the eponymous villain did a marathon smash-and-grab robbery spree down the entire length of Philadelphia’s Jewelry Row in 1931, done up in a scarlet version of 18th century highwayman’s clothes and riding a clockwork horse. Redthorn’s extremely public actions – unlike a lot of villains prior to this, Redthorn acted in broad daylight in a part of the city that had tourists and cameras in it – was a definite indication that this new phase of the Pulp Age wouldn’t be like the one that preceded it.

While most villains of the Pulp Age were largely criminals in it for material gain, there were others who had broader philosophical or ideological goals in mind. Some were like the Canadian villain Doctor Lucifer, who believed that there was a natural balance that needed to be maintained between good and evil, and so he became the Adversary to counterbalance the rising heroes. Others had more concrete ideological goals in mind, like Baron Zorbo and his environmentalism, or John Sunlight and his desire for world peace (under his hand as “enlightened” World Tyrant). While exceedingly few in number – estimates of ideological villains in the Pulp Age rarely stray into the high double digits – they would be the best remembered villains of the time both for their goals and for their flamboyance.

SIDEBOX: “They should make comic books about you.”
Popular culture was more heavily affected by the emergence of supers than almost anything else in modern civilization. The “return” of these near-mythic figures to reality had a deep-seated appeal to almost everyone.

Some of the first pop culture institutions to climb aboard the supers train were – to little surprise – comics. The comic book was very young during the Pulp Age, emerging as a commercial art form first as newspaper exclusives starting in the late 19th century and then as separate magazines in the late Twenties. This relative newness probably inspired publishers to take a gamble on documenting the annals of this new phenomenon of mystery men and metahumans when other media were skeptical.

Comics would separate into two distinct branches at this point. The first branch would focus on strictly fictional supers, characters invented by writers and who belonged to the publisher. These fictional supertales would go on to see reasonable success over the years as characters like the Blue Bat and Tom Strange became household icons and inspirations for generations of supers yet to come. The other branch would instead focus on the adventures of real-life supers. At first these adventures were heavily fictionalized if not outright made up in the same way dime novels conjured “true tales” about Western icons like Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson and Wild Bill Hickok; given that few had access to the supers in question, and they were unlikely to compromise their identities to sue for defamation, this was a valid play well into the Thirties.

In 1935 the American Crusader made a formal deal with Fawcett Comics: in return for two percent of the gross profit brought in by their American Comics Cavalcade magazine (half to the hero and half to a charitable organization of his choice) the Crusader would allow Fawcett writers access to his case notes. Not unfettered access, as names of victims and the like were scrubbed from, but more than enough to provide extra realism. Being able to say their comics were “from the real casefiles of the American Crusader!” and a pre-approved statement printed in the front of every magazine caused Fawcett Comics sales to skyrocket, and would eventually lead to the company becoming one of the 21st century’s largest multimedia juggernauts.

SIDEBOX: The Honor Guard Story (Part I)
The story of the world’s finest superteam begins with a man of great wealth, great philosophies and even greater guilt. James “Bunny” Ross was the heir of a fortune built on exploitation, and he made it his life’s mission to see every last penny of that fortune go to the people who’d created it. By 1933 he’d divested the majority of his family money but still had a considerable chunk of cash and real estate he wanted to get rid of. At the same time, Ross saw the emerging super phenomenon and wondered how it might be put towards a more equitable world.

In 1934 Ross contacted four promising heroes, The Torch, Agent X, Johnny Lightning and Miss Miracle, and gave them the pitch: while they were all at the upper tier of heroics at the time, by combining their talents and resources (along with financial backing from Ross) they could create something far greater and far more useful to the common man than the quasi-clubs that already existed. Honor Guard would be the first “modern” superteam in terms of both how it operated and its general role as facilitator and force multiplier for supers.

Ross also had an ulterior motive: for all his wealth Bunny Ross was a committed socialist, and he was of the opinion that using superheroes to build socialism – or at least build a positive public image for socialism – was a reasonable use of his remaining fortune. In this he would be somewhat disappointed; while Honor Guard’s heroes weren’t unsympathetic to his views (that will come up the next time we pick up this story) they tended to see the team as less political an institution than Bunny did. In particular the Torch saw the purpose of Honor Guard as “to hold back the night” so people with more skills than punching, gadgets or mysticism could do the gritty work of social reform. Over the years this would cause friction between Honor Guard’s leadership and technical owner Ross, but never quite to the point where things ruptured.

Honor Guard was officially founded in the spring of 1935. Ross donated several properties for the team’s use, in particular a pair of five-story tenements at the corner of First Avenue and 46th Street in New York City would become the primary team headquarters for most of its existence. The first few years were somewhat ad hoc, as nobody involved in the team’s founding had any practical idea of how to organize Honor Guard so it could accomplish its objectives. Scheduling meetings also proved difficult given that of the original members only Agent X was local to New York. That said, the team muddled through these early difficulties, winning a significant victory against the Masters of Evil during their aborted strike on Liberty Island in 1936. This victory brought the team to national attention, as well as the attention of other heroes; Honor Guard’s first non-founding members were Polychrome and Captain Midnight, who joined in 1937.

From 1935 to 1952 Honor Guard would slowly build a reputation as one of the heavy hitters in the heroic scene, one that was willing to go wherever they were asked to go and protect everybody they could if it was within their power to do so.

Worldwide Sensations: Supers Beyond the West
The focus has been largely on America through the first part of this document, mainly because America served as the focal point for the emergence of the modern super, both as a cultural force and a tangible thing. But it needs to be remembered that even though America is the fountainhead from which much of this madness springs, supers weren’t a strictly regional phenomenon.

The metagene cares not for ethnicity, religion, economic class, gender identity or sexual preference. If you’re a human being (or have sufficient amounts of human DNA in you) then the metagene is your inheritance. The 1924 Event definitely didn’t care about about geography: the shower of cosmic energy that started this whole thing didn’t simply hit one city, one country, one continent or even one hemisphere, it was a worldwide phenomenon. In this vein it behooves us to take a look outside the West, even if only for a few moments, so we can see what’s going on out there.

When the Shadow and his fellow mystery men start making their presence known to the greater world, people all over the world start getting ideas. The mystery man motif was popular in urban communities, and it didn’t matter if the community was Salt Lake City or Mumbai. Even the Shadow’s name was reused by supers in cities far from New York. (This makes the Shadow’s history even more confusing to the historian, almost to the point where you’d think the original Shadow planned it.)

Even in the Thirties, the world was a big place with a lot of people in it. And as the breathless stories of superheroes and supervillains duking it out in the streets of American cities spread the world took notice. Other heroic traditions – some of which had even made their way into Western-style pulp magazines – found purchase within this fledgling community and influence the nature of supers going forward around the world. Many of the things that happened through the Pulp Age have repercussions that go all the way down the line to the 21st century, and this will be on the test. So with that in mind, here’s a brief look at some of the more interesting things pulled into the light around the world during the Pulp Age.

SIDEBOX: A Caveat
While Truth, Justice and the UN Way is not as shackled to the tyranny of word count and page count as its predecessor, trying to cover the entire world in any sort of comprehensive fashion isn’t really in the cards. Part of me would absolutely love to, but the necessary time to research and synthesize a complete world report for the Pulp Age would take forever and this chapter is already taking long enough to write. So please bear in mind that this is a broad overview of parts of the world which interact with the new world of the super in interesting ways, and not a flat declaration that this was all that was happening in this part of the world at this time.

China: Wandering Heroes
In eastern Asia most of the super action is in China, which was in something of a state during the Pulp Age. The general disorder of the Republic of China during these years (they don’t call it the “warlord era” for nothing) was a fertile breeding ground for supers of all sorts. Like everything else in China in the Twenties and Thirties, supers were divided by the concept of Westernization, sometimes framed as “modernization.” In the major urban centers on the coast where the Republic was strongest, or in the remaining colonial enclaves like Macao and Hong Kong, Chinese supers were far more likely to emulate Western mystery men. Nanjing’s original mystery man hero Yǐngzi was a Shadow rip off all the way down to the name, and there were plenty of other mystery men like him.

Meanwhile, out in the parts of China where the Republic’s authority was thin at best, emerging supers didn’t bother with the mystery man template and became xia. Xia, also known as wuxia, nuxia, youxia, jianxia and so on, is (in brief) a folklore and literary archetype reaching back as far as the 5th century BCE. Essentially, they’re nomadic heroes with a strict code of chivalry (reminiscent of knights-errant in the Western literary tradition) that requires them to fight for justice and righteousness. Where the more Western-style supers defended the major cities as best they could, out in the countryside where the Republic gave way to warlords xia were the primary defenders of the Chinese people, bands of wandering heroes protecting entire regions from the armies that set themselves up outside of the Kuomintang’s reach. This particular of their formation – along with the literary antecedents that both super-normal and metahuman xia happily adopted – meant that the xia had a much more contentious relationship with authority than many Westers supers.

Vigilantism has always been a thing within super culture worldwide. It wasn’t until much later in the century that any sort of formal recognition of supers was put into law anywhere, so for the first two generations most supers operated outside the law or (at best) in some sort of jury-rigged ad hoc relationship with whoever was running the local police force. For the xia, vigilantism was practically hardwired into their way of life. In the stories xia were more often than not in rebellion against a corrupt authority – and as life in China got progressively worse over the course of the Pulp Age, reality started reflecting art more and more. Xia harassed the warlords, the colonial powers, the Kuomintang and anybody else who tried to squeeze the countryside for their own gain.

This would gain the xia a great deal of goodwill from the people of China, but it also assured that as China changed in the years ahead the tension between the wandering defenders of justice and the established powers of the nation wouldn’t ever truly go away.

India: Independence Blues
Journeying to the west (I’m not apologizing) we depart China and land in India. During the Pulp Age, India remains a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of British Empire LLC, but keen observers will note that this is not going to last a whole lot much longer. Nationalist sentiment had been on the rise in India since the beginning of the century, and as the Event danced through the skies in India in 1924 things were starting to come to a head.

Much like everywhere else in the world, supers started coming out of the woodwork in the late Twenties and early Thirties. Again, like much of the rest of the world, these early supers tended to be patterned on Western mystery man archetypes. Unlike a lot of the world though, Indian supers were almost immediately absorbed into the political realm. The Green Serpent, one of the first publicly known mystery men in India, surprised the entire country in 1931 when he went to the papers to endorse the Indian National Congress and complete independence from Britain. For the Western press that picked up the story (which wasn’t many of them, and the story was kept as quiet as possible in the United Kingdom for obvious reasons) this was a very surprising move. While there were ideologically-inclined supers in the West, they were definitely not in the majority; almost all the supers who made headlines did so through largely apolitical actions. Seeing somebody like the Serpent, whose brief career to date made him almost as well known in India as Gandhi, publicly support the independence movement was unheard of.

As the struggle for independence heated up, the nascent Indian super community started to sort itself basically along those lines. Outside of interactions with the standard street crime that most Pulp Age supers concerned themselves with the lines weren’t necessarily superhero and supervillain, they were defined by where any individual super stood on the independence question, which made things especially blurry in the Indian super community. As an example, there were multiple instances of Indian gadgeteers claiming some variation of “Captain Nemo” or “Prince Dakkar” as noms du guerre through the Thirties and harassing colonial shipping in and out of the major ports. These supers were thought of by the West as pirates and supervillains, but they were – and remain – folk heroes to many Indians for their actions.

The central division of pro- vs. anti-Raj was highlighted in one of the first great superfeuds. The Green Serpent’s nemesis throughout the Raj’s final years was the Arrow, an Anglo-Indian mystery man who was considered a hero by the community he served, but whose pro-Imperial stance set him against the Serpent time and again. The most dramatic clash between the two mystery men happened during a protest in Bengaluru in 1934; the Serpent was there to guard the protesters, while the Arrow was with the Army detachment sent to disperse the crowd. This was one of the first super-on-super clashes caught on film, and was a somewhat hair-raising sample of what the world was coming to.

Division within the super culture would be the name of the game as the independence movement gained strength and the colonial experiment ground slowly towards its inevitable conclusion. Not just on the question of independence but also – and more importantly – within the independence movement itself. Like their mundane counterparts while everybody agreed on the one big thing there were dozens of factions with moving parts hidden inside the big tent, and these all attracted supers as the years wore on. This internal fractiousness would define the Indian super community for much of the 20th century.

Africa: Cauldron of Empire
As noted above, the Pulp Age was a colonialist age and this was most apparent in Africa. The division of the continent between the European powers in the 19th century set the stage for those same great powers trying to kill each other on their home soil in the 20th. For the entirety of the Pulp Age Africa was almost entirely under the control of foreign powers, either directly or via client kingdoms. Colonial status bred nationalist sentiment, particularly in the western part of the continent which was itself linked to broader pan-Africanist movements that existed in the greater African diaspora.

African nationalism in the Pulp Age was very closely tied to the concept of westernization: there was a generalized belief (certainly one endorsed by the colonizers) that Western cultural norms were somehow superior to everything else, and that European domination of the planet was proof of that claim. Therefore, in order for Africa to successfully throw off her colonizers – or even just get a certain level of respect and autonomy from the European powers – Africans must adopt Western modes of thought and, effectively, beat the colonizers at their own game. (This entire concept is, shall we say, somewhat questionable. But it is important to remember that it was considered a valid line of thought in this time and place.)

The fact that most African westernizers were in fact nationalists – and therefore not acceptable to the colonial powers – was a significant pressure on the emergence of super culture in Africa. Initially supers were no less popular in Africa than they were anywhere else, but as all the main templates came from the West, and were often imported via black nationalist movements in the Americas, this gave African supers enough of an anti-colonialist tinge to alarm local governments. In an age where the identities of mysterious crimefighters was romanticized almost to a fault in the West and East, in Africa colonial authorities were far more enthusiastic about tracking down, unmasking and imprisoning supers than almost anywhere else on the planet. A few supers would slip manage to slip the nets – Lagos’ original Black Bat stayed out of British hands from his debut in 1935 all the way to Nigerian independence in 1960 – but this enthusiasm for arresting supers for “disturbing the general order” would last through to the end of World War II.

The mystery man archetype wouldn’t completely disappear from Africa – it remained moderately popular in the north, particularly in places like Egypt where anti-super standards were relatively relaxed. Included in this is the small (at the time) subequatorial British holding of Bangalla where the mystery-man-slash-local-folktale The Phantom operated more or less in the open and more or less unmolested from 1937 onwards. There were also a handful of white African supers operating, mostly in South Africa (naturally) who managed to work unmolested due to racism. Still, it never achieved the same level of penetration pre-decolonization as it did in other places, and was supplanted by other archetypes in the post-war period.

The association of super with nationalism, and therefore anti-colonialism even more so than it was in India (where the supers were more uniformly divided across ideological lines) added a unique political tint to African super culture. Donning a mask and going out to fight crime, even if it was just to kick out a gang of thugs who’d set up shop in the neighborhood, was treated as a potentially revolutionary threat by colonial authorities. And the supers responded in kind: between the appearance of the first African mystery men in the Thirties and the decolonization movement of the Fifties and Sixties, Africa had the largest concentration of “supervillains” of anywhere on Earth-1, and the vast majority of the people named as supervillains were local protectors or Robin Hood types whose greatest villainy was making colonial governments look stupid.

Outside of the colonial struggle, Pulp Age Africa had continuing issues with super-tourism. Quite a few adventurers drawn to the “mystery of the Dark Continent” after reading a bit too much Haggard and Burroughs spent the Pulp Age looking for the mysterious ruins of long-lost scions of Greece, Rome, Israel or Atlantis they were sure existed somewhere in the great jungles. At the same time, less romantic but no less obnoxious adventurers went into the lightly-policed parts of the continent looking for a few thousand acres they could rule over as god-kings in between crime sprees in more “civilized” parts. This would draw in outside heroes (and sometimes local ones) at which point there would be an extended fight scene well away from the cities and the papers, wreaking havoc on the environment as well as any unlucky villages that happened to be nearby. This sort of nonsense was endemic in Pulp Age Africa, and fundamentally wouldn’t stop until well after decolonization started.

South America: Green Mysteries
South America was one of the calmer places in the world during the Pulp Age. Which isn’t to say it was actually calm – wars were fought on the continent during the Thirties – but compared to the turmoil found in Asia or Africa in the same timeframe things were far less crazy. This relative level of tranquility combined with a high degree of westernization led to South American supers being not extremely different from their North American counterparts. This would eventually change as pride in indigenous cultures became more of a thing in the Sixties and Seventies, but during the Pulp Age the main difference between a mystery man in Cuzco and a mystery man in Seattle is that the one in Cuzco spoke Spanish as his native language.

If anything, Pulp Age South America was famous as a super-tourism destination. There were some foreign supers who had – usually somewhat shady – connections to the area; Doc Savage’s connections to the gold mines of Hidalgo being one of the better-known ones of these. But there was also the fact that the continent’s interior was very sparsely settled and very densely overgrown, this made it mysterious to outsiders, mystery begets imagination and so on and so forth. Much like the tales of the “Dark Continent” inspired by European visits to the African interior in the previous century, South America had its share of adventurers looking for fabled lost cities founded by mysterious elder civilizations where everything was clad in gold and the arcane secrets of ages past could be found for the taking. The Lost City of Z, the latest in a long line of El Dorado myths, was the particular target of British expeditions throughout the Pulp Age that turned up less than nothing.

Admittedly, it didn’t stop the tourism because there were in fact weird things happening in South America at the time. The 1910-11 Maple White Land expedition against all odds actually did find something strange on top of a Brazilian tepui, and managed to make more than one trip to the plateau before it went away in the late Twenties. (See sidebar “Lost Worlds” for more on the nature of Maple White Land and other similar places.) Having found something like that once, the Pulp Age saw an explosion of superscientists, adventurers and eccentrics diving head-first into the Mato Grosso trying to find the next Maple White Land. Sometimes this was just for pure scientific discovery, sometimes it was intended for exploitation and sometimes it was solely for bragging rights; the “lost city quests” were a land of contrasts.

These adventurers tended to draw others in their wake, again much like in Africa. Several supervillains established lairs in the Andes and the more remote places of South America; the small island nation of Corto Maltese started offering its services as a hideout far from the eyes of Western heroes as early as 1938. This inevitably pulled heroes towards the continent, and fights would ensue in the jungles, the distant plains and around the mighty peaks. That this didn’t have a significant deleterious effect on the population has more to do with remoteness than anything else.

SIDEBOX: “Lost Worlds”
Pulp fiction is rife with the concept of the lost world, a place that had been settled, civilized and then forgotten by the world, existing in its own little bubble until some intrepid (and invariably Western) explorer puts together the clues and finds it deep in the jungle or tucked away in an inaccessible mountain valley. Often in the stories these places have artifacts of great power hidden away in their temples, or have science advanced beyond the modern age. They also usually have plenty of gold, jewels and beautiful people to tempt adventurers into leaving the modern world behind.

On Earth-1 the lost world isn’t unknown, but the reality is often less exciting. The remote reaches of various continents do in fact contain cities lost to time and undisturbed by outsiders for generations, and some of these places have histories stretching back to the great kingdoms of the Metalithic (see last chapter for all of that). However, they aren’t refuges of superscience or sorcery; in most cases these “lost cities” are villages built on top of ancient structures that used to be great cities until a shift in the climate or the manasphere caused everybody save the most stubborn to move away. (Think “Macchu Picchu” instead of “The Lost City of Opak-Re.”) Many of these places remained isolated until the late colonial period, and from an anthropological and historical view they’re invaluable... but they’re not what the novels promised.

Which is not to say that there aren’t places like that on Earth-1! The world has long had a deep connection to the strange and while the Metalithic is long gone traces of that strangeness continued to persist for generations. Perhaps the most famous of these was Maple White Land in Brazil, a tepui that contained a strange mishmash of prehistoric creatures, discovered in 1910 by Professor George Challenger. Maple White Land was not an evolutionary island as Challenger had thought; research done in the 21st century concluded that the plateau wasn’t necessarily even a plateau at all, but an extrusion of an ultraterrestrial or interdimensional realm that had gotten stuck to the top of that specific tepui.

Some of these intermittent realms had human populations, often originating from Earth-1. Of particular note is the kingdom of Shambhala, a place famous via its connection to Tibetan Buddhism and one that was “rediscovered” more and more often through the Pulp Age.

West Asia: Sacred Battleground
The ancient crossroads of three continents and ten thousand years of civilization, West Asia was in kind of a weird place during the Pulp Age. The Ottoman Empire had lost its former holdings outside of Asia Minor itself (modern-day Turkiye) and their rule had been replaced by a patchwork of Western colonial administrations and technically-independent-but-we-all-know-the-score countries. Very few people who lived in West Asia were happy about this arrangement, so much like in India and Africa there were nationalist movements filled with justifiably angry people scattered all the way from the Indus to the Mediterranean. The discovery of vast reserves of petroleum in the region, combined with industrial civilization’s increasing dependence on oil as a resource, only made the situation that much more precarious and stupid.

It’s into this world that the super blunders starting in the late Twenties. While elements of an independent Arab/Muslim super culture do begin in the Pulp Age this was largely a North African invention centered around Cairo. Contrary to some reports at the time (and if we’re going to be honest continuing well into the century) Islam had no prescription against metahumans or the use of superpowers. They were weird, sure, but so long as they were used in righteous cause the ulama weren’t really all that worried about that when they had various kings and sultans to try and keep in line as the Hashemites, Saudis, Pahlavis and various others all brawled for hegemony over the region.

This particular tussle, much like colonial struggles elsewhere in the world, affected the development of supers in West Asia. In general where things were relatively stable independent mystery men could be found; supers openly worked in Damascus and Baghdad through the Pulp Age. Where the situation on the ground was less stable (i.e. most of the region) the supers tended to be more underground; there are tantalizingly brief reports of a costumed avenger or avengers working out of Mecca and Medina in the late Twenties, but these reports also suggest that the supers in question were seen as agents or relics of the recently-deposed Hashemite kings of Hejaz. That would explain why these defenders of the faithful vanish from the record so quickly.

And then there’s the Levant, which is its own absolute mess but at least through most of the Pulp Age was a mundane mess. While the golden age of blowing shit up to get the British out of Mandatory Palestine was well under way by the Thirties, nobody in the Mandate either had or seemed inclined to use supers in their various colonialist or anti-colonialist activities. Which is not to say there were no supers in the area, because there totally were, but for the most part they were itinerants only passing through or staying for short periods while on adventures.

Now Is the Time of Monsters: The End of the Pulp Age
In popular culture the Pulp Age came to an end in the fall of 1939, when German and Soviet forces rolled over the Polish border and World War II officially began. The truth of this is... mixed.

As we touched on briefly at the beginning of this chapter, history rarely has a sharp line that divides one era from another. Even when there is catastrophe, there is fuzziness: things start before the history books say they should, other things linger past their official ending date, etc. While the beginning of the war represents a dividing line, it’s also the culmination of historical forces that started at the end of the previous war, which in turn were the result of historical forces working through the whole of the long 19th century, and so on. These things don’t work on human timescales, and they don’t easily lend themselves to being put into neat boxes.

But history is a narrative first and foremost, and it makes narrative sense to draw these lines. Even though most of the general concepts of the Pulp Age would continue through the coming war, and indeed many of its characters would survive the conflict into the century ahead, 1939 is a good enough place to draw the line and say that this marks the end of an age. In the final years of the Pulp Age we can see the shape of things to come; what follows the storm will be different from what came before, though not in unexpected ways.

Militarizing the Super
It began with small things. That’s how it usually does.

The powers that be weren’t immediately happy with the concept of the superhero for a lot of reasons, but most of those reasons could be boiled down into one overriding thought: supers made them look foolish. For the majority of the Twenties and Thirties any active super was technically a vigilante openly flouting the law and authority. This – understandably – didn’t make anybody in authority very happy. The general response of authorities to this brave new phenomenon was to treat them as criminals just as bad as the people they were going after. “Arrest them all, God or the judge will acquit his own” was the philosophy of the time, and many would-be mystery men ended up imprisoned because they thought the cops would be more grateful than they actually were.

This changed a little in the back half of the Thirties, and it was Doc Savage’s fault. Doc was the most publicly straitlaced super in the entire country, certainly one of its most popular heroes, so it made perfect sense that he sought out and was given special Federal law enforcement powers by the Department of Justice in 1935. The deputizing of Doc Savage was half sincere (on Doc’s part) and two-thirds cynical stunt (on J. Edgar Hoover’s part) but it was also a tipping point. For the first time the powers that be looked at the emerging super community and saw something that could be useful. At first this was confined to major cities, places that already had a super or three operating in the area, and limited to cutting deals not terribly similar to the one the Feds cut with Doc. Arrest authority, limited immunity to charges for things happening in pursuit; this was all flimsy as hell, nowhere near the level of protection given to incompetent deputy sheriffs, and one good legal case would send the entire edifice crashing down. But this was still just enough to keep things going.

The Mystery Corps
The big thing about Doc becoming a deputy agent was that Doc was public. The whole dog and pony show had been recorded for the media, and they made a great deal of noise about it all. Which was the point after all; the government wanted the world to know that (sometimes) Doc Savage was their man.

But Doc wasn’t the only one. By the mid-Thirties governments around the world were comfortable with the idea that supers were more useful inside the tent than outside it... but they might be even more useful if that relationship wasn’t known.

As the world got darker, governments started looking for people capable of working in the shadows and the mystery men were right there. Connections were made, deals were cut. The general public didn’t know (and would remain unaware for decades) that supers lhad been quietly sworn into government service. The brand new “Mystery Corps” wasn’t a superteam in the traditional sense: there were no group meetings, no coordination, no headquarters. But it was the first glimpse of something new, a new way to approach the problems faced by the people who ran the world.

For the most part the members of the Mystery Corps kept up their usual rounds as supers, remaining elusive to the press and antagonistic to the cops on the streets. Despite this, the majority of the cases they worked were on behalf of federal law enforcement or (increasingly) intelligence agencies.

Intelligence agencies – usually military intelligence, as civilian-guided agencies didn’t take off until the war was in full swing – were the first government offices to reap the full benefits of having supers on call. Mystery men made for excellent spies; they were remarkably good at keeping cover, capable of learning all sorts of secrets and also could extract themselves with minimal trouble when the job was done. In many ways the Mystery Corps and others like them were continuing to play the super game but this proved to be beneficial. No one government had a monopoly on hiring mystery men after all and fighting fire with fire is a time-honored tradition. As soon as the Mystery Corps started operating in 1937 others around the world began their own versions. Third parties, usually mercenary supervillains of one stripe or another like the Hotel Continental, also started offering their services as the world grew increasingly dark.

These quiet wars between mystery men would end up shaping the world of espionage in unexpected ways, especially as the battles slid in directions that nobody would’ve expected when all this started. (For an example, refer to sidebar The Archaeology Wars.) But all of this was ongoing under the surface; while mystery men warred against each other in covert battlefields the rest of the Pulp Age seemingly went on without notice.

“You’re here to sing and dance!”
The first supers that we can consider truly military and not covert agents hired or deputized by the government were enlisted as symbols. Every military ever has known the value of symbols, from Roman aquilae to battle flags to Lord Kitchner’s magnificent mustache bristling as it demands that you, yes you join the British Army. A symbol that can not just stand there and exist but also bench-press a car, defy bullets, read minds or cold-cock a charging elephant is perhaps even more valuable.

It was the Soviet Union that first put together a team of military supers for propaganda purposes. The USSR hadn’t been any more immune to the Event and the rise of supers than any other part of the planet, and while the number of visible mystery men was understandably quite low, people with powers were happening there as well. Ever since her first appearance in 1930 the Red Guardian, the Union’s first superhero, had argued time and again that these “New Soviet men” needed to be gathered, studied and above all else given guidance, so they could aid the revolutionary vanguard in developing communism. Due to the passion of her arguments, Red Guardian spent a fair amount of time on the periphery of Soviet power, but likely due to a combination of her powers and her bulletproof popularity with the people she never appeared on any purge list.

In the end, presumably because he’d finally gotten fed up with Red Guardian but didn’t feel secure enough to shoot her or send her into exile or a gulag, Stalin gave in and allowed the Red Army to form the Revolutionary Heroes Brigade (Geroiceskaja Revoljucionnaia Brigada or GRB) in 1933. The GRB was not large by any stretch – only four metahumans and another six super normals were part of it at its founding – but it was the first government-operated superteam in history. It was also, strictly speaking, only a propaganda outfit. The GRB had a modest budget for metahuman research purposes, and a dedicated filmography team to record things, but they were not under any circumstances allowed to interfere with the workings of Soviet justice. “You exist to remind the world that the Soviet is no less civilized than they are,” Stalin is reported to have said to Red Guardian when laying out the GRB’s formation. “Look good for the cameras, and stay out of the people’s way.”

The reveal of the GRB would result in a few things happening outside the Soviet Union, like Doc Savage becoming a part-time government agent or the induction of popular supers like the Torch of Liberty into the military as spokesmen, but while flashy these propaganda efforts weren’t very large or well-supported. Even the GRB, which in 1934 was one of the largest superteams on Earth-1, was considered an afterthought by the Soviet government. The Mystery Corps and similar projects worldwide proved to be somewhat useful, but the full potential of what metahumans could do as tactical or strategic assets had yet to be seen.

Dawn of the Super-Soldier
The fascist nations were – as they often were for many vile and authoritarian things – the vanguard for creating purely military super units. The Japanese military government had been quietly keeping an eye out for more Japanese citizens with paranormal powers in the vein of Ichiro Watanabe’s ever since the First Activation, and when the Nazis came to power in the Thirties they also were on the lookout for metahumans and super normals who were (or could be made) politically reliable. By 1935 both regimes had acquired a small collection of metahumans (about five each) with designs towards crafting support units around this inner core of superpower.

In 1936 the Axis governments unveiled their new toys. Germany went first, taking advantage of the Olympic Games in Berlin to show off the Ubermenschen for the first time. In a quick followup (not wanting to be completely overshadowed), Mussolini traveled to Berlin accompanied by his Praetorian Guard, leading to a historic moment where the leaders of both superteams stared each other down as Hitler and Mussolini smiled for the cameras.

The propaganda value in these teams was obvious and immediate; while the rest of the world had more supers per capita, the Axis had their supers locked down and loyal. Which was true enough, at least at the time. Still, there was a key difference between the two fascist teams that wasn’t immediately recognized. Mussolini’s Praetorians were strictly about propaganda and personal protection; they existed to look good for cameras and defend the dictator from assassins. In this they weren’t all that different from the GRB and other propaganda efforts.

The Ubermenschen on the other hand were a paramilitary unit. Once the initial core metahumans had been located, their existence was handed over to Heinrich Himmer, commander of the SS, consistently one of the top five people in the Nazi regime, occultist nutjob and a man whose tentacles seem to be everywhere in the late Pulp Age. The whole idea of people with strange and uncanny powers was like catnip to a man like Himmler, and once his power was secure he put a lot of energy into cultivating metahumans whenever he possibly could. Giving them the same military training as regular SS units transformed the Ubermenschen into something new and terrible.

Intelligence analysts outside the Axis sphere saw the potential for what the Ubermenschen could do given superpowers and military training, and flags were raised. The seeds for what would become the Los Angeles Project in the US were planted almost as soon as the first newsreels of Axis supers posing for Olympic cameras hit the coastline. But operations like the Los Angeles Project were slow to take off: it was still 1936, and while Hitler was a worrying prospect the world (or at least the bits the great powers cared about) was still largely at peace. While the new Axis superteams were intimidating they were (so far as anybody knew) still mostly for propaganda purposes. No one had any real idea of what they were capable of in actual combat; it was still possible that they might prove to be duds.

SIDEBOX: Making Metas The Unethical Way
As governments became invested in the idea of having their own metahumans, there was a deep and abiding interest in figuring out how to make metas from scratch. Initial scientific studies indicated that some sort of catalyst was required, but what that catalyst was seemed to vary from meta to meta. The closest anybody got to a unified activation scheme in the Pulp Age was a vague theory of “hormones” being responsible, though how and why this worked was anybody’s guess.

This hypothesis resulted in the infamous “training camps” developed by the fascist nations, which would later be co-opted by the Soviets and the West during the war, designed to churn out as many metahumans as possible by exposing “likely candidates” to extreme physical stress until they either broke or gained powers. This would be the norm for activation attempts in Germany and the Soviet Union; when the US got their hands on the program they “civilized” it by resorting to direct injections of synthetic hormones to unhealthy levels.

To be as clear as possible, this was a horrible method for creating new metahumans. Not only was it a scheme designed for packaged and concentrated cruelty, it didn’t even work most of the time. Some metahumans would be created through the stress method but by and large this was because the training camps cycled large numbers of people through them constantly, ensuring that you’d get one activation per x number of people. Many of the “trainees” were left mentally or physically shattered, rendering them useless for actual duty on top of that.

And of course, let’s not forget that in many cases these camps had “test subjects” for their methods who went in and never came out again.

Perhaps the most infamous moment for these training camps came in 1938, when a pair of German communists infiltrated the Ubermenschen’s main testing and recruitment site outside Ingolstadt. The duo successfully came out the other side of the training with superpowers, which they then used to demolish the site and escape to the Soviet Union. The reports and records the pair brought with them were used to establish GRB training centers during the runup to the war.

SIDEBOX: The Archaeology Wars
The covert super conflicts of the late Pulp Age, when they weren’t just espionage with masks and capes, often circled around things of power. Usually these things were very old and had some religious significance, based on what the (largely Western) magical community of the time believed. To make a very long and confusing story short, artifacts of historical or legendary note, particularly those known in Jewish or Christian folklore, were thought to be extremely powerful and imbued with the might of capital-G God. This set off multiple waves of adventurers scouring West Asia and North Africa looking for these artifacts, drawing all sorts of rivals, opportunists etc. in their wake and making life difficult for the people who actually lived there.

This all reached a fever pitch in the mid-Thirties after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Heinrich Himmler used his newfound power in government to send large teams of heavily-armed graverobbers into West Asia to find objects of supreme power like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Eye of Ra and other such sundries. This in turn aroused the interest of parties in America and Britain, many of whom didn’t believe in this guff but had a vested interest in the Nazis not getting lucky. Neither country sent the kind of quasi-armies Himmler liked to throw around, instead sending mystery men or solo adventurers off to disrupt Nazi efforts, if not actually find and retrieve the objects first.

The Archaeology Wars ran from 1935 all the way up into the first years of World War II, when Himmler’s attention was forcibly pulled back to the war effort and his “archaeologists” were sent to invade Poland and/or France, depending. How much was actually found or recovered during the conflict is unknown, but former American adventurer Dr. Henry Jones Jr. liked to boast that “there was nothing Hitler found that I couldn’t take away.”

Stop The Presses
While the German and Italian super-soldiers posed for the cameras in Berlin, Japan’s metahuman soldiers were busy. The Japanese super-soldiers were funneled into a brand-new specialist unit of the army dubbed Unit 81, nominally attached to the Kemeptai but in essence its own command. Like other government-branded supers Unit 81 had their propaganda value and initially were seen as ceremonial guards for ministers and high-ranking military commanders (often both, given the nature of the Japanese government at the time). However, the supers of Unit 81 had undergone the absolute best training that Japan could provide; in terms of actual skill the six supers of Unit 81 were better-off than any of the Ubermenschen, much less the Praetorians.

The Japanese government, recognizing that propaganda can be found in other ways than just having supers demonstrate their powers, and unwilling to have wasted all that training, assigned Unit 81 a new task. In the fall of 1937 the unit was given orders with great pomp and circumstance: they were to travel to China and reinforce the Central China Area Army as it advanced on the Republic’s capital city Nanjing.

The full tale of the Nanjing Massacre is far, far beyond the scope of this document to relate. Other scholars have done a much more thorough and damning job of describing what happened over the four months the Japanese army spent destroying the city and its people. For our story, the important part is that Unit 81 participated in the massacre. The overall effect of the IJA’s superteam wasn’t very large, a ladleful in a swimming pool of nightmares, but it was visible. Which was the point of the exercise: like we said above, propaganda can be found in other ways. Unit 81’s run through Nanjing was probably the best-documented part of the entire campaign, and the choicest excerpts of Japanese super-soldiers tearing through KMT soldiers and Nanjing’s local supers were widely distributed in order to remind people of the might of the Japanese Empire.

Not wanting to be left out, the Nazis would deploy the Ubermenschen as a proper military unit for the first time in 1938. The German super-soldiers were some of the first to enter Austria after the coup. While there was no fighting – the seizure of power was fast enough and the idea of German unification popular enough to prevent real resistance – the sight of the Ubermenschen in their stylized uniforms marching alongside the Wehrmacht through the streets of Vienna was a much more intimidating sight than their previous propaganda appearances. Later in the year they would make an appearance in the annexation of Ruritania and the Sudetenland.

The Ubermenschen’s actions during the Ruritania crisis are more important overall to the way events developed, if we’re going to be honest. Their presence during the Anschluss was more menacing than they had been two years prior, but still fell more or less into the same propaganda role as had their appearance at the Berlin Games and in newsreels afterwards. In Ruritania they were allowed to fight. Or “fight,” as the case may be. The Ubermenschen were given the opportunity to threaten a few Ruritanian border forts and this resulted in some very impressive property damage and terrified opposition soldiers. Which again, was the point: German newsreels made a lot of hay out of shots of Ubermenschen raining lightning down on (empty) Ruritanian bunkers and tossing armored cars around like balls in the context of a military operation.

Footage of the Ubermenschen in Ruritania and Unit 81 in China got the attention of, well, everybody. Metahumans, while rarer than hen’s teeth, had proven themselves to be terrifying combat units. Facing the prospect of a new arms race, governments began to quietly build up their own metahuman screening and training regimens. President Roosevelt authorized the Army to start headhunting volunteers for metahuman activation experiments (see sidebox Making Metas The Unethical Way) in the fall of 1938. Similar crash programs were put into place in the UK and France. While the famous programs like the Los Angeles Project wouldn’t begin until the war was well and truly on, these early projects illustrate exactly how seriously the world was taking the potential threat of super-soldiers.

The Chimes At Midnight
By 1939 many of the superscientists who had made the 1934 World’s Fair a strange marvel of unlimited progress had seemingly faded into the background. Some had gone to ground entirely, and others had been quietly recruited by serious men in dark suits to begin work on things their governments would need when “events in Europe” took a turn for the worst. No small number of mystery men also seemingly vanished from public eye by 1939; the Lobster, one of the original mystery men on the East Coast, dropped completely off the grid by 1937 and it wasn’t until 2001 that his remains were found in a shattered Austrian castle. The European mystic community found itself sharply divided between those who wanted to involve themselves in the mounting troubles and those who wanted to remain hermits, and those who wanted to involve themselves were divided between which faction they wished to support.

The world remained more colorful than the one that existed before the Event, but those colors were cast in a darker, more sinister hue than they had been at the beginning of the Pulp Age. When Nazi forces entered Prague in the spring of 1939, with the Ubermenschen at the front of the formation, everybody knew the war was just about at hand. It was only a question of when.

On the first day of September, 1939, the Wehrmacht crossed the border into Poland. Two weeks later the Red Army joined in from the east.

What happened next was history, and death.

[Bob Schroeck]

As always, wow. Love all the obscure and obvious references, including the ones that are inverted or funhouse-mirrors.

GURPS IST is a book about a very American genre written by an American author for an audience that was primarily American.

Guilty as charged. Also, it was my first book, I was young (and had a naive approach to world-building), and I hadn't yet learned to look and think deeper and wider. (Ironically, I learned that -- or at least started to -- with Drunkard's Walk, when I decided I wanted to depict a more realistic version of Warriors World.)

[M Fnord]

Guilty as charged.  Also, it was my first book, I was young (and had a naive approach to world-building), and I hadn't yet learned to look and think deeper and wider.  (Ironically, I learned that -- or at least started to -- with Drunkard's Walk, when I decided I wanted to depict a more realistic version of Warriors World.)

tbh I kind of wish I was taking the more naive route, or just doing a straight copy of the OG worldbuilding for these chapters 'cos it would've been a lot faster. 

Ah well. At least next chapter I can steal a little more thoroughly from the original book - plus GURPS Weird War II which I serendipitously own a copy of - since it's basically The War, which might be the most over-researched thing in modern history so I don't feel a need to stop and talk about shit like I did for the Twenties and Thirties. Fun times!

(Since it hasn't come up yet, here's the rough chapter breakdown as it stands:
1 - Setting introduction
2 - Prehistory to 1924
3 - 1924-39
4 - 1939-45
5 - 1946-1972
6 - 1972-1989
7 - 1989-2005
8 - 2005-2023
9 - 2024 and outro

App. A - Timeline
App. B - Glossary
App. C - Characters
App. D - Annotations

Essay 1 - Super Culture
Essay 2 - IST 101
[more essays as they come up]
)