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.
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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.
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.
Mr. Fnord on FFN and Mal3 on AO3 • Conceptual Neighborhood - yet another damned sci-fi blog • The Westerosi (ASoIaF) • The Westerosi II: Subprime Directives: Extradimensional horrors threaten the Seven Kingdoms, and Captain Hasegawa of the Starfleet Rangers has to stop them. If she accidentally conquers Westeros in the process... oops? • Fenspace (shared world)
"It is your job to personify the tyranny of the majority. You must brutally, ruthlessly oppress and persecute the fuck out of the poor misunderstood disruptive creep minority so that the privileged nerd funhaver status quo can be maintained. It's a thankless job, but somebody's got to do it. Fun Über Alles, all hail the Fun Tyrant, without him our campaign is lost." --SA user Angry Diplomat, on the GM's role.
"It is your job to personify the tyranny of the majority. You must brutally, ruthlessly oppress and persecute the fuck out of the poor misunderstood disruptive creep minority so that the privileged nerd funhaver status quo can be maintained. It's a thankless job, but somebody's got to do it. Fun Über Alles, all hail the Fun Tyrant, without him our campaign is lost." --SA user Angry Diplomat, on the GM's role.