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Gadg8eer
K.i.D Player 10
It's not an in-universe thing, think "persona" as in "my OC persona" and not something specific. If a character is a persona, listed below, they share a lot of traits with the player who created them and controlling their actions without permission is NOT ALLOWED.
LordMoldoma's Persona GMPCs
Carrol Dreemurr a.k.a "Barabajagal"
Alice Daisymellow
Dimit Killjoy a.k.a "Palladium Chariot"
Gadg8eer's Important NPCs
Gula a.k.a "Naphilutrine"
"Ursus Megas"
Ziggy Hawks a.k.a "Ziggy Hawks, Evil Boy Genius"
Ashley Chandler a.k.a "Ashen Witch"
Gadg8eer's Persona GMPC
Oliver Kind a.k.a "Gadg8eer"
LordMoldoma's Persona GMPCs
Carrol Dreemurr a.k.a "Barabajagal"
Alice Daisymellow
Dimit Killjoy a.k.a "Palladium Chariot"
Gadg8eer's Important NPCs
Gula a.k.a "Naphilutrine"
"Ursus Megas"
Ziggy Hawks a.k.a "Ziggy Hawks, Evil Boy Genius"
Ashley Chandler a.k.a "Ashen Witch"
Gadg8eer's Persona GMPC
Oliver Kind a.k.a "Gadg8eer"
I spent several days fleshing out the setting to an insane degree, and MisterEightySix has spent another several days editing it. The setting now has an extensive history going back to the 19th century (earlier if you count proto-superheroes, Geniuses, various magic users and mythological entities), but - other than a few token NPC superheroes and supervillains - I've left out actual characters so that you (yes, YOU!) can populate it with characters that have backstories going back as far back as you want. Just keep in mind that this setting's immortality-induced "comic book aging" only goes back to the 1800s unless your character is a demigod or vampire or something. (Information on Ambrose, the substance that causes this phenomenon, can be found in the lore thread in the description of the Brass Age, as well as in the profiles of Dr. Eternity and Desmond Bates listed below.)
Creating Characters
First, a word of warning: Superheroes have always been political in one way or another depending on the era, so it's okay for your characters to have political opinions and even political motivations, but if in-character banter turns into player-on-player bickering, you're going too far and I'll be leaving the response to that disruptive behavior up to the moderators. My personal views (and the views of my co-GM) lie in the middle of a lot of extremes, with some degree of liberal bias, but... let's just say there's a reason the list of antagonists in this RP includes both white supremacists like Mr. Whittier or the Preacher and misandrist self-proclaimed "feminists" like Lioness or Ashen Witch.
Aside from Laika (the Soviet space dog, who is sort of a legacy character from an earlier incarnation of Metapowers), all characters in the setting must be fictional. That means nobody can use a real historical figure (though obscure historical figures can be given lazy name changes like "Henry Dreyfuss" --> "Dreyfus Henryson"), and nobody is allowed to use a fictional character that they don't own the copyright to. While you can create characters based on people you know IRL (including self-inserts), it's probably a bad idea to have your characters live where you currently live, and giving them the names of the real people they're based on is also not allowed.
On the other hand, all locations must use real names - no Gotham City or Angel Grove here. The only exceptions are supervillain fortresses (which only exist in the NCCU), major sports arenas (which don't exist in the NCCU for various reasons), and facilities built for metapowers (which only exist in the NCCU and are usually located where major sports arenas would be).
If your character has connections to one or more corporations, please use a fictional name for the corporation.
On the other hand, if they are connected to a government agency, you are free to choose any real life government agency (provided that the historical timing is correct) as well as the US Navy Anomaly Detainment Corps, the Cosmic Code Authority (if they were active prior to 2011, since the International Cosmic Code Agreement was invalidated in 2011) and any fictional government agency you choose to create.
Charities are also allowed to be real or fake at your discretion, though please use real charities with a proven good reputation when opting for the former - such as the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or Child's Play - and have said charities do what they do best to assist the public with no further commentary. Fictional charities/"charities" should be used if corruption in said group is the focus, such as something based on PETA or the "Christian Children's Fund".
Religious groups can be real if they are treated fairly (using real life events from a given religious group as a negative trait of that religion is okay, making up events from scratch is not), and/or if the "religion" in question is actually a means of getting people to "donate" all their money to a charlatan - such as televangelists, megachurches, or cults like Scientology. In the case of that last one, it's both a grift to get people to donate and has dark secrets/corruption worthy of making them a complicating factor for the world and for the protagonists; feel free to use it as part of a character's backstory (say, they got away from the cult at some point but it's still a complication in their lives) or create an equally horrible and thinly-veiled fictional counterpart as an outright villainous organization.
On the other hand, if they are connected to a government agency, you are free to choose any real life government agency (provided that the historical timing is correct) as well as the US Navy Anomaly Detainment Corps, the Cosmic Code Authority (if they were active prior to 2011, since the International Cosmic Code Agreement was invalidated in 2011) and any fictional government agency you choose to create.
Charities are also allowed to be real or fake at your discretion, though please use real charities with a proven good reputation when opting for the former - such as the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or Child's Play - and have said charities do what they do best to assist the public with no further commentary. Fictional charities/"charities" should be used if corruption in said group is the focus, such as something based on PETA or the "Christian Children's Fund".
Religious groups can be real if they are treated fairly (using real life events from a given religious group as a negative trait of that religion is okay, making up events from scratch is not), and/or if the "religion" in question is actually a means of getting people to "donate" all their money to a charlatan - such as televangelists, megachurches, or cults like Scientology. In the case of that last one, it's both a grift to get people to donate and has dark secrets/corruption worthy of making them a complicating factor for the world and for the protagonists; feel free to use it as part of a character's backstory (say, they got away from the cult at some point but it's still a complication in their lives) or create an equally horrible and thinly-veiled fictional counterpart as an outright villainous organization.
Here's what you need to know to create a contemporary rookie superhero/supervillain without reading the full history of the NCCU (Timeline One):
1. Superheroes and military forces can travel long distances very quickly by using computers and the internet (or rather, Cyberspace and the Metaverse) as teleporters. This is to give the RP a global scale.
2. Space colonies on the Moon, Venus and Mars have existed since the 1970s. However, the world lost contact with them in December of 2008 when global financial collapse and the subsequent in-universe "Great Regression" made the world's governments completely unable to provide them with any funding or resources. The colonies are considered lost for now, but the truth is less grim and a lot more entertaining. You'll have to wait and see.
3. Spectator sports are treated very differently. See "Sports and Supers" in the lore thread if you intend to mention them.
4. Gods are known to exist, so the word atheist instead means people who don't believe in afterlives or astral planes.
5. The world runs on "Comic Book Time", where characters don't age to keep the stories modern. The existence of Ambrose and other methods of gaining immortality (both biological and absolute) mean that this also includes characters who otherwise have no powers.
6. The RP always takes place in the current year, even when that doesn't sync with the characters' perceived passage of time, and yes, even when some of the characters have traveled to a different time period. Technology and world events may progress faster in the story as a result.
7. You are required to read "Current Events of the NCCU: 2019-2022" (posted in the interest check thread as well as in the lore thread), which describes the present day in the setting, but don't worry, it's short.
8. Player characters who become superheroes/supervillains must have a reasonable "power level"; see levels 0 through 4 of the TV Tropes Super Weight scale, and also make sure to read how the Super Weight scale works because there's a reason "Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?" is a thing.
Keep in mind that, although people in the setting have died in the past, and though there have been some very dark time periods based on either real life events or trends in fiction at the time (including the Ages of Comic Books in particular), the setting is supposed to be optimistic from the start of the RP onwards. Not every battle has to have a happy ending, but there should be no meaningless death of innocents (especially kids - I am very firm on this - the first post of the RP notwithstanding!) and any Big Damn Crisis War Crossover Events should end with the world being saved (and not just as a Pyrrhic victory). Obviously, as one of the GMs, I play a big part in enforcing that, but please don't try to defy the intended tone to the point that a retcon has to be made. To be fair, multiple afterlives (called astral planes) exist as the homes of the departed, at least one for each continent and one for the oceans, but these are undetectable by scientific instruments (including those made by Geniuses, with the sole exception of a few long since scrapped devices the Preacher made) and thus considered myth by most modern humans.
Characters with tragic backstories are allowed, but characters whose personality or actions can be summed up as "edgy for the sake of edgy" are not allowed, and will result in you being kicked out. That means things like:
-Teleporting behind other people's characters to kill them before they get an opportunity to respond,
-Redirecting a space laser from a big city to their own hometown because "nobody there loved me",
-Sacrificing innocent people to save their love interest without even considering trying to find another way, or
-Otherwise doing something to another person's character or a non-powered NPC which is blatantly unfair, permanently debilitating, and/or needlessly cruel.
Aside from that, all you need is their hero name, their real name (optional if you can give a reasonable explanation), an image or physical description of their secret identity, an image or physical description of their hero identity, and their backstory from shortly before they got their metapower(s) to the present day (and feel free to be as brief and/or mysterious, or as detailed, as you want). In addition, while you can't use a copyrighted character you don't own, you can create a character that is clearly based on your favorite fictional character or whatever character or historical figure has caught your imagination. As long as the resulting character complies with everything above, go wild!
If you need help thinking of a character concept that isn't just your favorite hero under another name, try inverting the details of some of that character's key traits or backstory events. See the list of "Characters Mentioned in the History of the NCCU" for examples.
Last thing: You can create up to two main characters (two heroes, or a hero and sidekick, or anything you can think of), three secondary characters (friends, their boss, a love interest... or two... ...etc.), and as many members of your main characters' Rogues Gallery (list of arch-nemeses and arch-rivals) as you can think of. However, both main characters must have backstories, and you can only control one member of their combined Rogues Galleries per story arc.
A 19th Century English tinker who was struck by lightning while trying to fix the town clock. The lightning, surprisingly, didn't kill him, and in fact made him the first Genius of the Brass Age.
He technically is from an alternate timeline, but from his perspective, it'd be more accurate to say that it's everyone else who's from an alternate timeline. In 1809 of Timeline Zero, he built a suit of powered armor that doubled as a sealed environmental suit and as a time machine. To test the device, he made a maiden voyage 100 years into the future, the year 1909.
What he found was tragic. In 1906 of Timeline Zero, an asteroid made up of huge amounts of various substances - all of which are highly toxic to life on Earth - collided with the Earth. The result was a complete sterilization of the planet, with the corpses of everyone and everything that died being only slightly decomposed at most - the vast majority of lost souls were untouched by microbes, scavengers and arthropods (all three of which were themselves among the dead). While crops were inedible due to contamination, they simply appeared dehydrated. The unblemished remains of marine life had created a layer of bodies on the surface of coastal waters.
Unable to save anyone or anything, Dr. Clockwork gathered newspaper articles, small technological devices, and a few cultural artifacts such as sheets of music. Then he intensely studied any piece of technology he didn't recognize and recorded his new knowledge into a journal, before returning to the year 1809. Little did he know that the timeline had already diverged due to his return.
Once he'd destroyed the time machine, he set about reproducing the technology he found, and began the Brass Age of Metapowers.
Dr. Clockwork's real name has been lost to time (actually it's Quentin Thorpe, but you don't know that), but a memorial to him in London says he died in 1887. Due to nobody remembering how or when the memorial was erected, and that nobody's ever seen him in the astral planes, it's quite possible that he lives to this very day.
He technically is from an alternate timeline, but from his perspective, it'd be more accurate to say that it's everyone else who's from an alternate timeline. In 1809 of Timeline Zero, he built a suit of powered armor that doubled as a sealed environmental suit and as a time machine. To test the device, he made a maiden voyage 100 years into the future, the year 1909.
What he found was tragic. In 1906 of Timeline Zero, an asteroid made up of huge amounts of various substances - all of which are highly toxic to life on Earth - collided with the Earth. The result was a complete sterilization of the planet, with the corpses of everyone and everything that died being only slightly decomposed at most - the vast majority of lost souls were untouched by microbes, scavengers and arthropods (all three of which were themselves among the dead). While crops were inedible due to contamination, they simply appeared dehydrated. The unblemished remains of marine life had created a layer of bodies on the surface of coastal waters.
Unable to save anyone or anything, Dr. Clockwork gathered newspaper articles, small technological devices, and a few cultural artifacts such as sheets of music. Then he intensely studied any piece of technology he didn't recognize and recorded his new knowledge into a journal, before returning to the year 1809. Little did he know that the timeline had already diverged due to his return.
Once he'd destroyed the time machine, he set about reproducing the technology he found, and began the Brass Age of Metapowers.
Dr. Clockwork's real name has been lost to time (actually it's Quentin Thorpe, but you don't know that), but a memorial to him in London says he died in 1887. Due to nobody remembering how or when the memorial was erected, and that nobody's ever seen him in the astral planes, it's quite possible that he lives to this very day.
Geisha is a mysterious woman in a porcelain mask and a kimono. Assumed to be a Japanese citizen from birth, the origins of the person behind the mask have never been discovered. A wild rumor is that she was awakened from a magical coma by a Samurai who found an ancient temple built by the Empire of Atlantis.
She is considered the first Superhero, as well as the one who defined the phrase "early superheroes used supervillain tactics"; Many heroes and benevolent Geniuses before the Cosmic Code had minions, secret bases, non-lethal superweapons and complicated gambits as their primary tools of influence, rather than a set of physical powers that could be used to personally prevent natural disasters or restrain/beat up supervillains. In fact, during the Brass and Golden Ages, metapowers with godlike or demigod-like abilities were called "freakshows" and considered potentially dangerous.
Her story begins in 1930, when she first appeared after convincing the villainous (but never lethal) master thief The Flying Fox to become a more Robin Hood-esque person. A few months later, the Japanese military defeated the invading Kaiju known as the Ravenous Oni. Specifically, Geisha is a very powerful Empath who was able to gain the trust of, and successfully coordinate, the troops sent to defeat the creature after said troops initially failed on their own.
Once the Empire of Japan entered WWII, she became heavily involved in the Japanese government and military... and the American government and military simultaneously, with neither side of the conflict finding out until she made them aware.
She warned the Emperor about the foolishness of attacking America just before the Pearl Harbor raid, but was ignored. It was then that she became a little more hands-on. She sent ninjas to warn and save the lives of two American soldiers named Jack and Pete, who would go on to be recruited by the NSA due to Geisha's uncharacteristic "interest" in them (she also sent them numerous communications).
Once the war was about to end and Project Trinity had been tested, she revealed a lot of her secret knowledge of both sides and convinced Japan and America to agree on a special meeting. Hiroshima was evacuated, and several members of the Military Council as well as Geisha herself observed from a safe distance as the city was destroyed by the first and only atomic bombing in world history. She told her countrymen that the Americans had one more bomb as well as the capacity to make more. Japan surrendered soon after, and were pleasantly surprised at how merciful the peace agreement was.
Geisha is still alive today, mostly involved in keeping Japan and Korea (the nation was unified in the 90s, long story) safe from the increasingly powerful Chinese government.
Her motivations have been speculated on for decades, often mistaken for sociopathic puppetmastery, but in truth it's rather simple. She's an Empath. Aside from knowing how to be charismatic (or less charitably, manipulative), she feels the emotions of everyone directly around her and by extention the people they have strong relationships with. This sense of emotions isn't simply dismissed by her mind, she truly wants to ensure everyone around her is spared from unnecessary pain, both for their sake and for her own. For if the world were to experience a truly great loss, she would be the first to grieve and the one to grieve most heavily.
She is considered the first Superhero, as well as the one who defined the phrase "early superheroes used supervillain tactics"; Many heroes and benevolent Geniuses before the Cosmic Code had minions, secret bases, non-lethal superweapons and complicated gambits as their primary tools of influence, rather than a set of physical powers that could be used to personally prevent natural disasters or restrain/beat up supervillains. In fact, during the Brass and Golden Ages, metapowers with godlike or demigod-like abilities were called "freakshows" and considered potentially dangerous.
Her story begins in 1930, when she first appeared after convincing the villainous (but never lethal) master thief The Flying Fox to become a more Robin Hood-esque person. A few months later, the Japanese military defeated the invading Kaiju known as the Ravenous Oni. Specifically, Geisha is a very powerful Empath who was able to gain the trust of, and successfully coordinate, the troops sent to defeat the creature after said troops initially failed on their own.
Once the Empire of Japan entered WWII, she became heavily involved in the Japanese government and military... and the American government and military simultaneously, with neither side of the conflict finding out until she made them aware.
She warned the Emperor about the foolishness of attacking America just before the Pearl Harbor raid, but was ignored. It was then that she became a little more hands-on. She sent ninjas to warn and save the lives of two American soldiers named Jack and Pete, who would go on to be recruited by the NSA due to Geisha's uncharacteristic "interest" in them (she also sent them numerous communications).
Once the war was about to end and Project Trinity had been tested, she revealed a lot of her secret knowledge of both sides and convinced Japan and America to agree on a special meeting. Hiroshima was evacuated, and several members of the Military Council as well as Geisha herself observed from a safe distance as the city was destroyed by the first and only atomic bombing in world history. She told her countrymen that the Americans had one more bomb as well as the capacity to make more. Japan surrendered soon after, and were pleasantly surprised at how merciful the peace agreement was.
Geisha is still alive today, mostly involved in keeping Japan and Korea (the nation was unified in the 90s, long story) safe from the increasingly powerful Chinese government.
Her motivations have been speculated on for decades, often mistaken for sociopathic puppetmastery, but in truth it's rather simple. She's an Empath. Aside from knowing how to be charismatic (or less charitably, manipulative), she feels the emotions of everyone directly around her and by extention the people they have strong relationships with. This sense of emotions isn't simply dismissed by her mind, she truly wants to ensure everyone around her is spared from unnecessary pain, both for their sake and for her own. For if the world were to experience a truly great loss, she would be the first to grieve and the one to grieve most heavily.
Hades, Prince of the Underworld, is the Greek God who governs death and everything associated with it. He's also an adorable and cheerful little scamp who named his giant three-headed puppy "Spot" and has his minions build a theme park for the souls of the innocent and virtuous. His reputation hasn't been treated with respect, by the other Greek Gods, by the Roman people, by Christianity, and especially not by the modern world, but surprisingly he takes it all in stride.
Hades gets annoyed at being called "Pluto", but the worst he'll do is send your soul to "the Cornfield" for a day. The Cornfield, like the Underworld, is actually an astral realm, supposedly once ruled by the Aztec Goddess Chicomecōātl (who may have been Persephone in disguise, or her Aztec "countergod"), and is better known as Tlaltícpac due to being considered a part of the Earth. As an Earthlike realm with plenty of edible corn, no real dangers, and a few untouched Aztec farmer's homes scattered around, you should be okay in Tlaltícpac while Hades giggles childishly in your temporary absense.
The one thing he does take seriously, and perhaps the reason he was so feared, is the fate of evil souls. Those wretched entities who were cruel to others and selfish in their goals in life get tossed into the Tartarus, a giant bubbling cauldron filled with a stew consisting of magma and the meat off the bones of the wicked souls who will continuously provide themselves as an ingredient in the stew. Hades claims it was once a pit of primordial darkness where living shackles would bind and torture the evil beings inside, but over time it has changed forms before mysteriously settling on the cauldron and stew during the Middle Ages. The stew in question is used solely to feed Cerberus/Spot, who is a picky eater and basically won't eat anything else. Nobody else - even those that could eat liquid magma like Hermes or Hades can - will touch the stuff, due to its overwhelming aura of disgust that causes reflexive vomiting in anyone foolish enough to raise a spoonful towards their lips.
For a time during the 80s, Hades decided to try his hand at being a superhero. Most supervillains and petty crooks laughed at the concept of a child wearing a wooden crown, a tattered cape and a ragged toga telling them "stop or you'll be sorry!". The laughter quickly ceased when he snapped his fingers, and he and his foes' souls were in the Underworld, the evildoers standing in the palms of his hands at barely inches tall. He gave them an ultimatum, to go back to the mortal world and turn their lives around, or be dog chow for all the terrible things they'd done. To our knowledge, everyone chose the former and stuck with it.
Hades got bored pretty quickly of scaring mortals into being good people ("plus it was kinda mean") and decided to leave that kind of thing up to his older (or at least, older-looking) nephew...
Hades gets annoyed at being called "Pluto", but the worst he'll do is send your soul to "the Cornfield" for a day. The Cornfield, like the Underworld, is actually an astral realm, supposedly once ruled by the Aztec Goddess Chicomecōātl (who may have been Persephone in disguise, or her Aztec "countergod"), and is better known as Tlaltícpac due to being considered a part of the Earth. As an Earthlike realm with plenty of edible corn, no real dangers, and a few untouched Aztec farmer's homes scattered around, you should be okay in Tlaltícpac while Hades giggles childishly in your temporary absense.
The one thing he does take seriously, and perhaps the reason he was so feared, is the fate of evil souls. Those wretched entities who were cruel to others and selfish in their goals in life get tossed into the Tartarus, a giant bubbling cauldron filled with a stew consisting of magma and the meat off the bones of the wicked souls who will continuously provide themselves as an ingredient in the stew. Hades claims it was once a pit of primordial darkness where living shackles would bind and torture the evil beings inside, but over time it has changed forms before mysteriously settling on the cauldron and stew during the Middle Ages. The stew in question is used solely to feed Cerberus/Spot, who is a picky eater and basically won't eat anything else. Nobody else - even those that could eat liquid magma like Hermes or Hades can - will touch the stuff, due to its overwhelming aura of disgust that causes reflexive vomiting in anyone foolish enough to raise a spoonful towards their lips.
For a time during the 80s, Hades decided to try his hand at being a superhero. Most supervillains and petty crooks laughed at the concept of a child wearing a wooden crown, a tattered cape and a ragged toga telling them "stop or you'll be sorry!". The laughter quickly ceased when he snapped his fingers, and he and his foes' souls were in the Underworld, the evildoers standing in the palms of his hands at barely inches tall. He gave them an ultimatum, to go back to the mortal world and turn their lives around, or be dog chow for all the terrible things they'd done. To our knowledge, everyone chose the former and stuck with it.
Hades got bored pretty quickly of scaring mortals into being good people ("plus it was kinda mean") and decided to leave that kind of thing up to his older (or at least, older-looking) nephew...
Hermes, Divine Messenger of Messengers, is the Greek God who governs messages, communications, languages and basically anything that can be used to store or move information. Which, if you really think about it, is basically everything. Including the Metaverse. Especially the Metaverse.
He provided venture capital to MicroDyne, Quill, TanaCorp and Rady, in return for said companies signing a divine contract that says the organizations must become conduits of Hermes' divine power. in addition, many government and international initiatives that led to the present day Metaverse came about when Hermes bribed or blackmailed corrupt officials, that believed something like the Metaverse would prove "bad for business" or "too liberating for the peasants" and intended to obstruct it... until the God forced them to change their plans. Hermes considers the Metaverse one of his greatest creations-by-proxy.
Oddly, he may or may not be behind the New Testament of the Bible, though he has stated publicly that he considers present-day Christianity to be a perversion of the messages found in Holy texts of the Arabian Peninsula.
Similarly, he had a cooperative relationship with Savitr, the Hindu God of "Speed" and one of the many psychopomps who formed a pact with Hades. Hermes and Savitr met each other in the Underworld while escorting virtuous souls. For centuries they were good friends, and in 1905, when both became aware that something dangerous was on the horizon for humanity, Savitr and Hermes were on a tram in Germany, discussing how to prepare the world to be saved or to save itself.
As they were talking, in ancient Hebrew to avoid evesdropping, the Jewish man across the aisle tried to listen in; while unable to fully understand the conversation, he had a burst of inspiration from the words he recognized. The man wrote down his conclusions in a series of math formulas in a notepad, and would later publish them in a scientific journal as "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".
The other kicker was that, whatever happened to Hermes and Savitr shortly after that, it led to Savitr's heroic sacrifice in 1906 to prevent the asteroid which killed the Earth in Timeline Zero from doing the same in Timeline One. Most people had stopped believing in Savitr by that point, and Gods in general were getting rarer every year. Only four people would come to Savitr's burial, Hermes (who grieved for two decades afterwards), Hades (who cried like a kid who had just lost an older brother), Shiva (the Hindu God of Death and Destruction, who of course considered Savitr a colleague, employee and friend), and the Genius who had been on the tram the previous year. The mathematician had already been smart, but it was the discovery of Special Relativity that led Hermes back to him to grant him Genius status, and it just so happened that Savitr - rather than actually being the "God of Speed" - was the personification of what we now consider "the scientific definition of energy" as seen through the eyes of ancient Hindu mythology.
Unlike his younger uncle Hades, who treats the name Pluto like he's being teased, Hermes considers his Roman name (Mercury) a badge of honor. In particular, he keeps one of the New York Central Railroad "Mercury" streamlined trains (which was the work of industrial designer Dreyfus Henryson in the Novel Comics universe) in a pocket universe, viewing the matching steam locomotive, tender and passenger cars as a work of art more worthy of the name than himself (which is saying something because he loves trains in general). He isn't particularly attached to the planet Mercury, but that might be because he tried to convince humans to name the planets after the Egyptian pantheon and still calls the sun Ra the Sky God to this day.
Aside from these hobbies, Hermes is tasked with delivering metapowers to those who reveal world-changing and life-improving discoveries to the general public. This doesn't happen as often as you'd think, thus why he has so many hobbies.
In the present day, Hermes is also known as a superhero, most notably for saving the passengers of one of the hijacked planes on 9/11, and for helping to brace the passengers of a Chinese high speed train just before an earthquake-induced derailment (which prevented the deaths of everyone on board). He currently has a strong relationship with the Shenlong, the dragon-emperors of the Chinese afterlife that represent the ability of humans to alter their landscape dramatically, and is secretly trying to influence the CCP into dismantling the Great Firewall of China.
He provided venture capital to MicroDyne, Quill, TanaCorp and Rady, in return for said companies signing a divine contract that says the organizations must become conduits of Hermes' divine power. in addition, many government and international initiatives that led to the present day Metaverse came about when Hermes bribed or blackmailed corrupt officials, that believed something like the Metaverse would prove "bad for business" or "too liberating for the peasants" and intended to obstruct it... until the God forced them to change their plans. Hermes considers the Metaverse one of his greatest creations-by-proxy.
Oddly, he may or may not be behind the New Testament of the Bible, though he has stated publicly that he considers present-day Christianity to be a perversion of the messages found in Holy texts of the Arabian Peninsula.
Similarly, he had a cooperative relationship with Savitr, the Hindu God of "Speed" and one of the many psychopomps who formed a pact with Hades. Hermes and Savitr met each other in the Underworld while escorting virtuous souls. For centuries they were good friends, and in 1905, when both became aware that something dangerous was on the horizon for humanity, Savitr and Hermes were on a tram in Germany, discussing how to prepare the world to be saved or to save itself.
As they were talking, in ancient Hebrew to avoid evesdropping, the Jewish man across the aisle tried to listen in; while unable to fully understand the conversation, he had a burst of inspiration from the words he recognized. The man wrote down his conclusions in a series of math formulas in a notepad, and would later publish them in a scientific journal as "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".
The other kicker was that, whatever happened to Hermes and Savitr shortly after that, it led to Savitr's heroic sacrifice in 1906 to prevent the asteroid which killed the Earth in Timeline Zero from doing the same in Timeline One. Most people had stopped believing in Savitr by that point, and Gods in general were getting rarer every year. Only four people would come to Savitr's burial, Hermes (who grieved for two decades afterwards), Hades (who cried like a kid who had just lost an older brother), Shiva (the Hindu God of Death and Destruction, who of course considered Savitr a colleague, employee and friend), and the Genius who had been on the tram the previous year. The mathematician had already been smart, but it was the discovery of Special Relativity that led Hermes back to him to grant him Genius status, and it just so happened that Savitr - rather than actually being the "God of Speed" - was the personification of what we now consider "the scientific definition of energy" as seen through the eyes of ancient Hindu mythology.
Unlike his younger uncle Hades, who treats the name Pluto like he's being teased, Hermes considers his Roman name (Mercury) a badge of honor. In particular, he keeps one of the New York Central Railroad "Mercury" streamlined trains (which was the work of industrial designer Dreyfus Henryson in the Novel Comics universe) in a pocket universe, viewing the matching steam locomotive, tender and passenger cars as a work of art more worthy of the name than himself (which is saying something because he loves trains in general). He isn't particularly attached to the planet Mercury, but that might be because he tried to convince humans to name the planets after the Egyptian pantheon and still calls the sun Ra the Sky God to this day.
Aside from these hobbies, Hermes is tasked with delivering metapowers to those who reveal world-changing and life-improving discoveries to the general public. This doesn't happen as often as you'd think, thus why he has so many hobbies.
In the present day, Hermes is also known as a superhero, most notably for saving the passengers of one of the hijacked planes on 9/11, and for helping to brace the passengers of a Chinese high speed train just before an earthquake-induced derailment (which prevented the deaths of everyone on board). He currently has a strong relationship with the Shenlong, the dragon-emperors of the Chinese afterlife that represent the ability of humans to alter their landscape dramatically, and is secretly trying to influence the CCP into dismantling the Great Firewall of China.
The discovery of Ambrose, a sugar that - aside from not needing to be broken down by insulin due to being flushed out of the body after enhancing cellular processes - allows animals to repair the damaged telomeres of their DNA (and thus reverses the primary cause of aging, granting biological immortality) among a few other minor but net positive side effects, was made by Dr. Hoover Wilson in 1888.
Since then, other methods of repairing telomeres have become available, but Ambrosi-Cola served as the immortality elixer of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Its replacement is due to it requiring unending repeat doses to continue being effective. The formula was improved several times, and 2022 Ambrosi lasts 10 years - give or take a few months - compared to the "up to 2 years" (usually less than a year) of the first Ambrosi-Cola recipe.
As for the source of Ambrose, it was discovered when a vampire - Desmond Bates - came to Dr. Wilson hoping to be cured of his condition. Aside from discovering that vampires had to drink human blood due to the inability for their bodies to produce the blood protein known today as PCDH11X, he discovered that the Human Vampirogenic Arcanovirus (HVA) had evolved to cause HVA-positive individuals to produce Ambrose as a method of prolonging the lives of infectees and thus the chance of spreading infection. Being a type of arcane retrovirus, HVA rapidly causes infectees to mutate into their vampiric form, and the change is, so far, irreversible. However, the need to feed on blood can be treated thanks to the creation of genetically-engineered retroviruses, which have the beneficial effect of rewriting a vampire's altered DNA just enough to restore the ability to produce PCDH11X.
In short, he discovered the sources of vampirism and the mechanism that would eventually be used to cure its negative effects. He noted this down twice, went to the local post office and sent one copy of the notes to Cambridge (of which he was a graduate). Seconds after the letter was sent to be sorted, Dr. Wilson was approached by a postman identifying himself as "Hermes".
Hermes said that Dr. Wilson had made such an important discovery that Hoover had just been blessed with the ability to reincarnate if killed, except unlike in religious descriptions of reincarnation, his new body would rise from the old one like a phoenix from the ashes... and also congratulations on curing death. (The more important discovery had, in fact, been the cause of vampirism.) The apocryphal quote "I was wondering when humans would discover how we stay young." has been attributed to that moment.
Dr. Eternity, as he has become known, is currently on his 12th incarnation. He travels the world studying cryptids and other metapowered entities whose origins have been primarily recorded in - and shrouded by - mythology.
Since then, other methods of repairing telomeres have become available, but Ambrosi-Cola served as the immortality elixer of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Its replacement is due to it requiring unending repeat doses to continue being effective. The formula was improved several times, and 2022 Ambrosi lasts 10 years - give or take a few months - compared to the "up to 2 years" (usually less than a year) of the first Ambrosi-Cola recipe.
As for the source of Ambrose, it was discovered when a vampire - Desmond Bates - came to Dr. Wilson hoping to be cured of his condition. Aside from discovering that vampires had to drink human blood due to the inability for their bodies to produce the blood protein known today as PCDH11X, he discovered that the Human Vampirogenic Arcanovirus (HVA) had evolved to cause HVA-positive individuals to produce Ambrose as a method of prolonging the lives of infectees and thus the chance of spreading infection. Being a type of arcane retrovirus, HVA rapidly causes infectees to mutate into their vampiric form, and the change is, so far, irreversible. However, the need to feed on blood can be treated thanks to the creation of genetically-engineered retroviruses, which have the beneficial effect of rewriting a vampire's altered DNA just enough to restore the ability to produce PCDH11X.
In short, he discovered the sources of vampirism and the mechanism that would eventually be used to cure its negative effects. He noted this down twice, went to the local post office and sent one copy of the notes to Cambridge (of which he was a graduate). Seconds after the letter was sent to be sorted, Dr. Wilson was approached by a postman identifying himself as "Hermes".
Hermes said that Dr. Wilson had made such an important discovery that Hoover had just been blessed with the ability to reincarnate if killed, except unlike in religious descriptions of reincarnation, his new body would rise from the old one like a phoenix from the ashes... and also congratulations on curing death. (The more important discovery had, in fact, been the cause of vampirism.) The apocryphal quote "I was wondering when humans would discover how we stay young." has been attributed to that moment.
Dr. Eternity, as he has become known, is currently on his 12th incarnation. He travels the world studying cryptids and other metapowered entities whose origins have been primarily recorded in - and shrouded by - mythology.
An ancient vampire lord who has been around since at least the Islamic Renaissance, Al-Khaled was turned after being fed upon and left for dead by a now long-dead vampire queen of Indian origin. Unlike most vampires, who were inducted to the masquerade shortly after being turned (due to infection by Human Vampirogenic Arcanovirus being essentially a one-in-fifty-thousand chance), the vampire queen was discovered mid-feeding and driven off by Al-Khaled's family.
With no contact with the bad peer influences of the Sanguine Masquerade, Desmond kept his human moral standards as much as the disease would allow. He primarily fed on elderly people (who he explained his situation to, and got consent from, beforehand) to prevent the "curse" from ruining the life of someone with many years ahead of them, and later on chimpanzees (when available).
He teamed up with various vampire hunters throughout history, as well as becoming a mythological figure in his own right (the "demigod of blood lovers"), but was rarely able to settle down due to his condition. One of his most painful memories is when he was chased out of a Slavic village after being discovered, his sadness due to falling deeply in love with a local woman who he would never get the chance to see again.
In the mid-19th Century he moved to London, cultivating a reputation as "Desmond Bates", a mysterious nobleman and "passionate lover", among the aristocracy. He had found that eating rare steak before feeding prevented the "curse" from infecting the "victim"; furthermore, while he didn't reveal that he was a vampire to the one night stands he picked up, he did introduce any willing women to the practice now known as "hickeys" while giving them the time of their lives.
This came to a more truly happy ending when Desmond fell in love with an English noblewoman named Elizabeth. Instead of feeding on her and disappearing in the night like he'd done with so many temporary lovers, he stayed hungry and remained by her side until morning, trying to figure out why he was feeling something he hadn't felt in a very long time. Realizing he could never live with it if he didn't confess his love to her, he explained everything, fully expecting her to be horrified and hate him.
Instead, she confessed it was mutual (plus she may or may not have had a weird blood fetish, but that's an entire other can of worms and doesn't invalidate their romantic relationship) and asked if he could turn her so they could be together forever. Desmond explained that, though he could, it would be a mostly hollow and dangerous existence. After all, he - like all vampires - only came out at sundown and in heavy clothes because the sun blistered his skin, and even with each other to rely on, they would quickly drift away from humanity unless they forced themselves to care about the people around them. Not to mention that he was nomadic by necessity to prevent anyone from realizing he didn't age.
It was then that she surprised him with a second possibility. Elizabeth introduced him to a friend of her father, Dr. Hoover Wilson, a biochemist and borderline Genius who was the cutting edge of his field. With Dr. Wilson's help, Desmond hoped to cure his vampirism.
Though the cause of vampirism was discovered by Dr. Wilson, it would remain untreatable for decades, but unexpectedly, the opposite of Desmond's intent happened. Dr. Wilson also discovered that vampirism and immortality in vampires had separate - though both symptomatic - causes, and isolated the source of immortality. Within years, Ambrose - and later Ambrosi-Cola Immortality Elixir - made Desmond no different than the average human, giving him and his bride a place in society.
Al-Khaled/Desmond Bates is neither a superhero nor a supervillain, preferring a relatively quiet life with his wife in an unknown Swiss mountain chateau, though he is about as famous as figures like Geisha or Strongman due to being the source of human immortality.
With no contact with the bad peer influences of the Sanguine Masquerade, Desmond kept his human moral standards as much as the disease would allow. He primarily fed on elderly people (who he explained his situation to, and got consent from, beforehand) to prevent the "curse" from ruining the life of someone with many years ahead of them, and later on chimpanzees (when available).
He teamed up with various vampire hunters throughout history, as well as becoming a mythological figure in his own right (the "demigod of blood lovers"), but was rarely able to settle down due to his condition. One of his most painful memories is when he was chased out of a Slavic village after being discovered, his sadness due to falling deeply in love with a local woman who he would never get the chance to see again.
In the mid-19th Century he moved to London, cultivating a reputation as "Desmond Bates", a mysterious nobleman and "passionate lover", among the aristocracy. He had found that eating rare steak before feeding prevented the "curse" from infecting the "victim"; furthermore, while he didn't reveal that he was a vampire to the one night stands he picked up, he did introduce any willing women to the practice now known as "hickeys" while giving them the time of their lives.
This came to a more truly happy ending when Desmond fell in love with an English noblewoman named Elizabeth. Instead of feeding on her and disappearing in the night like he'd done with so many temporary lovers, he stayed hungry and remained by her side until morning, trying to figure out why he was feeling something he hadn't felt in a very long time. Realizing he could never live with it if he didn't confess his love to her, he explained everything, fully expecting her to be horrified and hate him.
Instead, she confessed it was mutual (plus she may or may not have had a weird blood fetish, but that's an entire other can of worms and doesn't invalidate their romantic relationship) and asked if he could turn her so they could be together forever. Desmond explained that, though he could, it would be a mostly hollow and dangerous existence. After all, he - like all vampires - only came out at sundown and in heavy clothes because the sun blistered his skin, and even with each other to rely on, they would quickly drift away from humanity unless they forced themselves to care about the people around them. Not to mention that he was nomadic by necessity to prevent anyone from realizing he didn't age.
It was then that she surprised him with a second possibility. Elizabeth introduced him to a friend of her father, Dr. Hoover Wilson, a biochemist and borderline Genius who was the cutting edge of his field. With Dr. Wilson's help, Desmond hoped to cure his vampirism.
Though the cause of vampirism was discovered by Dr. Wilson, it would remain untreatable for decades, but unexpectedly, the opposite of Desmond's intent happened. Dr. Wilson also discovered that vampirism and immortality in vampires had separate - though both symptomatic - causes, and isolated the source of immortality. Within years, Ambrose - and later Ambrosi-Cola Immortality Elixir - made Desmond no different than the average human, giving him and his bride a place in society.
Al-Khaled/Desmond Bates is neither a superhero nor a supervillain, preferring a relatively quiet life with his wife in an unknown Swiss mountain chateau, though he is about as famous as figures like Geisha or Strongman due to being the source of human immortality.
Strongman may or may not be a reincarnation or redemptive second life of the Biblical figure Samson, according to Shiva (Hindu goddess of Destruction and widow of the Hindu God of Rebirth). His verifiable origins start with the Barnaby Family Circus in the early 20th Century, where he was originally an exhibit called "The World's Strongest Boy" due to his seemingly infinite strength. As he aged from his late teens into his adult years, he took on the title "Strongman, the Human Pillar" and grew his original iconic waxed moustache.
The circus was a good influence on him. The ringmaster taught him not to discriminate against the strange or foreign, especially concerning people. The fortune teller taught him that power without responsibility is just bullying and arrogance. The midgets raised him as family, the lion tamer gave him respect and kindness towards animals, the clown troupe taught him how to laugh at himself and his mistakes. The many, many patrons of the circus included a few people who also taught him important life lessons. Even the circus owners, Mr. and Mrs. Barnaby and the other Barnaby brother ("Uncle Barnaby" as Strongman called him), taught Strongman about the difference between benevolent capitalism and predatory capitalism.
The circus disbanded during the Great Depression, as Hollywood movies began to eat into their profit margins. Strongman then went around the country as a hobo, helping the poor and learning about America's many regional cultures. It was during this time period that he initially learned about slavery of African-Americans, which he was disgusted by, but at the time considered himself powerless to stop it.
Mrs. Barnaby told him on her deathbed that - though her and her husband had been unable to raise him - she was proud of who her son had become without her direct influence or the knowledge of who his parents were.
Since then, Strongman has changed his facial hair numerous times, but has remained a paragon of humanity. His biggest success, in his own eyes, was taking down the Ku Klux Klan and providing assistance to African-American and Asian-American communities in 1946...
During the process of dealing a devastating blow to the reputation of the KKK and bigots in general, he revealed that the reason his parents and uncle hid their relation to him for so long was because his paternal grandfather was a famous (then-controversial) freedman and his paternal grandmother was a wealthy white woman in "forbidden" love with the freedman. The Barnaby family's reputation had left them ridiculed if not vilified by society, despite Grandma Barnaby having been born to relative wealth, and forced them to make their living by running the then-failing Texas Travelling Circus left to Grandma Barnaby by her father (an "undignified" source of income in her father's eyes and the sole inheritance she ever received). Strongman's parents didn't wish for him to grow up with the stigma of the family name, but in the end that stigma was left an empty shell after it collided with his stellar reputation to expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of racism.
The circus was a good influence on him. The ringmaster taught him not to discriminate against the strange or foreign, especially concerning people. The fortune teller taught him that power without responsibility is just bullying and arrogance. The midgets raised him as family, the lion tamer gave him respect and kindness towards animals, the clown troupe taught him how to laugh at himself and his mistakes. The many, many patrons of the circus included a few people who also taught him important life lessons. Even the circus owners, Mr. and Mrs. Barnaby and the other Barnaby brother ("Uncle Barnaby" as Strongman called him), taught Strongman about the difference between benevolent capitalism and predatory capitalism.
The circus disbanded during the Great Depression, as Hollywood movies began to eat into their profit margins. Strongman then went around the country as a hobo, helping the poor and learning about America's many regional cultures. It was during this time period that he initially learned about slavery of African-Americans, which he was disgusted by, but at the time considered himself powerless to stop it.
Mrs. Barnaby told him on her deathbed that - though her and her husband had been unable to raise him - she was proud of who her son had become without her direct influence or the knowledge of who his parents were.
Since then, Strongman has changed his facial hair numerous times, but has remained a paragon of humanity. His biggest success, in his own eyes, was taking down the Ku Klux Klan and providing assistance to African-American and Asian-American communities in 1946...
During the process of dealing a devastating blow to the reputation of the KKK and bigots in general, he revealed that the reason his parents and uncle hid their relation to him for so long was because his paternal grandfather was a famous (then-controversial) freedman and his paternal grandmother was a wealthy white woman in "forbidden" love with the freedman. The Barnaby family's reputation had left them ridiculed if not vilified by society, despite Grandma Barnaby having been born to relative wealth, and forced them to make their living by running the then-failing Texas Travelling Circus left to Grandma Barnaby by her father (an "undignified" source of income in her father's eyes and the sole inheritance she ever received). Strongman's parents didn't wish for him to grow up with the stigma of the family name, but in the end that stigma was left an empty shell after it collided with his stellar reputation to expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of racism.
Also known as "Florida Man, the American Dionysus", Bernard was an Irish immigrant who came to the then-tiny city of Miami by trans-Atlantic crossing in the 1920s. He was a teenager at the time, but had been having vivid and surreal dreams for as long as he could remember. Once he became an adult and started drinking, he was grateful he was a happy drunk because he quickly discovered a troubling fact about himself; When less than sober, he gained superpowers that seemed to have very little rhyme or reason.
For example, his secret 'freakshow' powers were revealed to the public while he was impaired; he saw a little girl with her mother, and a tropical storm on the horizon, while walking home from the bar one afternoon. The girl was unexpectedly torn from her mothers arms by a burst of wind, to which Bernard responded by literally shadowboxing the hurricane and punching it into mist from where he stood. He then dived to catch the falling girl, successfully saved her, and promptly passed out as the mother was screaming about "devil worshippers".
He awoke tied to a cross as an angry mod waited to burn him at the stake, the girl's mother apparently convinced he'd only saved her daughter so the girl would owe her soul to the devil. Protected only by the local Judge, who was unsuccessfully trying to convince them that "we don't burn witches in America", Bernard, when questioned, admitted he'd somehow stopped the hurricane and rescued the girl, and that he didn't know how he got his abilities. It was then that another individual approached; John Davis, a well-respected churchgoer who owned Florida's biggest insurance company.
John, a die-hard believer in capitalism and a devout Christian, came to Bernard's defense in a financially-practical and theologically-accurate way. The storm he'd stopped was more than just a storm (the local newspapers had reported on it with days-old information) but a hurricane which his entire company was worried would bankrupt them. Bernard's bizarre actions had not only saved lives, but also hundreds of thousands of dollars in structual damage to buildings and countless jobs. Not to mention, the power to do what Bernard had done was - according to scripture - not something the Lord would ever allow the devil to have access to, so clearly Bernard was blessed by some divine means. The fact that he had used it for good, instead of to become a Communist overlord (which would have been considered the height of evil anywhere in America at the time) proved to the mob that his motives were morally sound.
The crowd, placated, asked why Bernard hadn't defended himself. "I’ve been drinking for years... because I want to forget that I’m a freak and no one will miss me if I die." was the response.
John proposed something to prove to Bernard and the public that that wasn't true. It would be far cheaper to equip "super-heroes" (a term coined by John Davis in-universe) with the tools needed to prevent natural disasters and human conflicts, than to pay out for the damages inflicted by natural disasters, supervillains and even ordinary wars.
The next day, the front page headline in the New York Rag was Florida Man Literally Punches Out Yankee Hurricane! The name stuck. This was how Florida Man began.
While emancipation occurred at the end of the American Civil War, slavery itself in America was not banned until 1942 (yes, even IRL!). Whenever a black person was charged with a crime, they would be forced to work in a chain gang or on a plantation (yes, even before going to court) and the slave owners would often simply ignore the results of their trial entirely, keeping the slave whether they were found guilty (which was often a result of prejudice rather than actual guilt) or proven innocent.
It was in this context that Florida Man's first and most short-lived arch-nemesis appeared. The Black Menace was an African-American man in an outfit resembling a Mexican wrestler's costume, who robbed banks and armored cars using his incredible speed and strength. While he was willing to knock out guards, often giving them concussions, he never purposefully killed anyone for then-unknown reasons (the newspapers portrayed the Black Menace as a brute and his victims surviving due to blind luck).
Florida Man tracked down and caught the Black Menace while he was escaping with millions after one particularly successful bank robbery. Catching the "supervillain" in a warehouse, Florida Man - a typical white American in 1930s Florida - was prepared for a fight to the death with a barbarian. Instead, the Black Menace immediately surrendered, dropped the bags of cash he'd been carrying, and begged "Before you kill me, please promise me one thing. If you're truly a hero, please save my family."
Surprised by the villain's actions, Florida Man hid the Black Menace, within a makeshift fort (the kind kids make out of pillows) made of shipping crates, from the police officers that arrived soon after, claiming that the Black Menace had ditched the cash and given him the slip (the bags of money were so heavy and numerous that Florida Man planned to return them himself, a decision that turned out to save the Black Menace's family). Once the police were gone, the two had a discussion to be on the same page.
The Black Menace was actually Benjamin Smith, a "negro" accused of breaking a "sundown law" (a law against a victimless crime specifically created just to allow police to arrest black people) and put to work on a tobacco plantation while awaiting trial. When the plantation owner, Mr. Whittier, found out that Benjamin had metapowers, Whittier kidnapped the entire Smith Family and threatened to kill them all if Benjamin didn't become the Black Menace and use his powers to make the plantation owner rich.
Realizing who the true villain was, Florida Man agreed to help. Benjamin enacted a gambit that resulted in the Smith family being freed from their kidnapper, and Whittier's plan exposed to the public. However, the story was not picked up by newspapers and Whittier's good reputation seemed it would remain intact.
Then evidence (false evidence, but this was a slave owner) began to appear that Whittier was the Black Menace. Rumors became "facts", and the story emerged that Mr. Whittier had put on blackface and used an experimental serum to gain superpowers, in order to rob banks without getting caught. The very idea that an icon of white supremacy would sink to the depths of a negro just to make himself richer than he already was ruined Whittier's reputation and led to his arrest. The planted evidence was so thorough (and sourced from the real events) that Whittier was convicted and sent to prison, where he was killed by a fellow prisoner with racist beliefs who felt insulted to be in prison with someone as "negro-like" as Whittier.
Florida Man Catches Plantation Owner Using Blackface to Rob Banks! was a famous headline from the era.
The Smith family returned to their normal lives, and Benjamin would later reappear in the 70s as the superhero Black Justice, who focused on saving black lives but also on apprehending black criminals and supervillains. Florida Man only revealed what really happened with the Black Menace in the 2010s, when several incidents occurred of white police officers shooting African-Americans who hadn't committed any crimes (including two infamous cases; one where a 12 year old boy was arrested - despite it being illegal to arrest minors - and beaten, and the other where a young man was suffocated to death when a police officer kneeled on the man's neck - which was filmed live by nearby caucasians who also tried to save the man but were threatened away at gunpoint by two other white police officers).
Florida Man still considers the Black Menace incident a personal turning point. Before then, he was indifferent to African-Americans at best, and believed a few stereotypes at worst. Afterwards, he radically changed his view of people, with the first public sign of this being the famous "all men are created morally equal" speech upon gaining government sponsorship.
After the Pearl Harbor raid, Florida Man was given an official government sponsorship by the US Military, making him the second government-sponsored superhero. He eventually ended the sponsorship in the 80s after the Impeachment of then-President Dick Trader, but still tries to follow American ideals to this day.
For example, his secret 'freakshow' powers were revealed to the public while he was impaired; he saw a little girl with her mother, and a tropical storm on the horizon, while walking home from the bar one afternoon. The girl was unexpectedly torn from her mothers arms by a burst of wind, to which Bernard responded by literally shadowboxing the hurricane and punching it into mist from where he stood. He then dived to catch the falling girl, successfully saved her, and promptly passed out as the mother was screaming about "devil worshippers".
He awoke tied to a cross as an angry mod waited to burn him at the stake, the girl's mother apparently convinced he'd only saved her daughter so the girl would owe her soul to the devil. Protected only by the local Judge, who was unsuccessfully trying to convince them that "we don't burn witches in America", Bernard, when questioned, admitted he'd somehow stopped the hurricane and rescued the girl, and that he didn't know how he got his abilities. It was then that another individual approached; John Davis, a well-respected churchgoer who owned Florida's biggest insurance company.
John, a die-hard believer in capitalism and a devout Christian, came to Bernard's defense in a financially-practical and theologically-accurate way. The storm he'd stopped was more than just a storm (the local newspapers had reported on it with days-old information) but a hurricane which his entire company was worried would bankrupt them. Bernard's bizarre actions had not only saved lives, but also hundreds of thousands of dollars in structual damage to buildings and countless jobs. Not to mention, the power to do what Bernard had done was - according to scripture - not something the Lord would ever allow the devil to have access to, so clearly Bernard was blessed by some divine means. The fact that he had used it for good, instead of to become a Communist overlord (which would have been considered the height of evil anywhere in America at the time) proved to the mob that his motives were morally sound.
The crowd, placated, asked why Bernard hadn't defended himself. "I’ve been drinking for years... because I want to forget that I’m a freak and no one will miss me if I die." was the response.
John proposed something to prove to Bernard and the public that that wasn't true. It would be far cheaper to equip "super-heroes" (a term coined by John Davis in-universe) with the tools needed to prevent natural disasters and human conflicts, than to pay out for the damages inflicted by natural disasters, supervillains and even ordinary wars.
The next day, the front page headline in the New York Rag was Florida Man Literally Punches Out Yankee Hurricane! The name stuck. This was how Florida Man began.
While emancipation occurred at the end of the American Civil War, slavery itself in America was not banned until 1942 (yes, even IRL!). Whenever a black person was charged with a crime, they would be forced to work in a chain gang or on a plantation (yes, even before going to court) and the slave owners would often simply ignore the results of their trial entirely, keeping the slave whether they were found guilty (which was often a result of prejudice rather than actual guilt) or proven innocent.
It was in this context that Florida Man's first and most short-lived arch-nemesis appeared. The Black Menace was an African-American man in an outfit resembling a Mexican wrestler's costume, who robbed banks and armored cars using his incredible speed and strength. While he was willing to knock out guards, often giving them concussions, he never purposefully killed anyone for then-unknown reasons (the newspapers portrayed the Black Menace as a brute and his victims surviving due to blind luck).
Florida Man tracked down and caught the Black Menace while he was escaping with millions after one particularly successful bank robbery. Catching the "supervillain" in a warehouse, Florida Man - a typical white American in 1930s Florida - was prepared for a fight to the death with a barbarian. Instead, the Black Menace immediately surrendered, dropped the bags of cash he'd been carrying, and begged "Before you kill me, please promise me one thing. If you're truly a hero, please save my family."
Surprised by the villain's actions, Florida Man hid the Black Menace, within a makeshift fort (the kind kids make out of pillows) made of shipping crates, from the police officers that arrived soon after, claiming that the Black Menace had ditched the cash and given him the slip (the bags of money were so heavy and numerous that Florida Man planned to return them himself, a decision that turned out to save the Black Menace's family). Once the police were gone, the two had a discussion to be on the same page.
The Black Menace was actually Benjamin Smith, a "negro" accused of breaking a "sundown law" (a law against a victimless crime specifically created just to allow police to arrest black people) and put to work on a tobacco plantation while awaiting trial. When the plantation owner, Mr. Whittier, found out that Benjamin had metapowers, Whittier kidnapped the entire Smith Family and threatened to kill them all if Benjamin didn't become the Black Menace and use his powers to make the plantation owner rich.
Realizing who the true villain was, Florida Man agreed to help. Benjamin enacted a gambit that resulted in the Smith family being freed from their kidnapper, and Whittier's plan exposed to the public. However, the story was not picked up by newspapers and Whittier's good reputation seemed it would remain intact.
Then evidence (false evidence, but this was a slave owner) began to appear that Whittier was the Black Menace. Rumors became "facts", and the story emerged that Mr. Whittier had put on blackface and used an experimental serum to gain superpowers, in order to rob banks without getting caught. The very idea that an icon of white supremacy would sink to the depths of a negro just to make himself richer than he already was ruined Whittier's reputation and led to his arrest. The planted evidence was so thorough (and sourced from the real events) that Whittier was convicted and sent to prison, where he was killed by a fellow prisoner with racist beliefs who felt insulted to be in prison with someone as "negro-like" as Whittier.
Florida Man Catches Plantation Owner Using Blackface to Rob Banks! was a famous headline from the era.
The Smith family returned to their normal lives, and Benjamin would later reappear in the 70s as the superhero Black Justice, who focused on saving black lives but also on apprehending black criminals and supervillains. Florida Man only revealed what really happened with the Black Menace in the 2010s, when several incidents occurred of white police officers shooting African-Americans who hadn't committed any crimes (including two infamous cases; one where a 12 year old boy was arrested - despite it being illegal to arrest minors - and beaten, and the other where a young man was suffocated to death when a police officer kneeled on the man's neck - which was filmed live by nearby caucasians who also tried to save the man but were threatened away at gunpoint by two other white police officers).
Florida Man still considers the Black Menace incident a personal turning point. Before then, he was indifferent to African-Americans at best, and believed a few stereotypes at worst. Afterwards, he radically changed his view of people, with the first public sign of this being the famous "all men are created morally equal" speech upon gaining government sponsorship.
After the Pearl Harbor raid, Florida Man was given an official government sponsorship by the US Military, making him the second government-sponsored superhero. He eventually ended the sponsorship in the 80s after the Impeachment of then-President Dick Trader, but still tries to follow American ideals to this day.
Bedlow's Oyster Island (known from the 1870s until 1956 as Bedloe's Island, and since 1956 as Liberty Island) was an important food source for the Lenape Native Americans. At some point before European contact, they or another Native American people undertook a protective ritual at low tide once a year for a very long time; oral tradition among the Lenape in-universe is that an Elder had a vision where she was told by the spirits of the land and sea that the island would be critical to saving the land in its times of greatest need.
Though these annual rituals stopped before European contact, the powerful magic remained. Even when it was turned into a British Aristocrat's summer residence. Even when it was housing for Tory refugees during the Revolutionary War. Especially when Fort Wood was constructed there from 1806 to 1811.
The protective magics, finding their purpose for the first time in the Fort, began working towards their intended ends. The effect was two-fold; protect all Native Americans from cultural extinction, and keep the land free (regardless of what that land was called or who the majority of residents were).
Fort Wood itself didn't last as long as the magic within it, but it didn't matter. The magics subconsciously convinced allies of America to give the ritual's effects a new host; The Statue of Liberty. Though built out of copper, the Statue's materials were mined from the Earth, and as any arcane scholar or cryptozoologist will tell you, Giants are creatures synonymous with the Earth.
In 1933, a gorilla used for animal research at an Ivy League College was exposed to an experimental shrink ray. The ray had the exact opposite of intended effect; the gorilla grew to an enormous size and began rampaging across New England, apparently looking for something. After arriving at New York despite the military's best efforts, the gorilla started climbing the Empire State Building and swatting at Air Force biplanes flying overhead.
At that moment, the Statue of Liberty itself came to life, its copper and other manmade metal materials turning into flesh and cloth. Libertas, the All-American Giantess, had been born. She waded through the waters of New York Harbor and carefully tiptoed between cars through the streets of Manhattan, and confronted the enormous gorilla. She calmed it down, convinced it to climb off the damaged skyscraper before the building was unrecoverable, and then spoke to it in a language whose identity is unknown to this day.
As it turned out, the gorilla was female and a mother. Her child, who she hadn't realized was still normal-sized, was back at the college unharmed. Distressed by her baby being "missing", she had checked every plausible hiding space - large buildings - for her offspring and eventually spotted New York from the top of a radio tower in Conneticut.
With the huge gorilla at peace, scientists were able to return her to normal size two days later. In the meantime, the gorilla (revealed to be named Candy by her keepers because she liked taffy and chocolate) and Libertas posed for pictures and got to know the locals, who were amazed by the enormous size of both females.
Once the crisis was over, Libertas explained she would return whenever America or its allies needed her, walked back into the water and waded across the New York Harbor to Bedloe's Island, and stood back on the base where she had started. Her flesh and clothes turned back to copper and other metals, and remained so until WWII.
One would expect that anyone inside the statue, which had stairs and elevators and even a balcony on the torch, would have suffered a horrible fate during Libertas' transformation, but once she returned to her pedastol and became a statue again, those who had been inside were found fully intact and no worse for wear. They remembered touring or otherwise inhabiting the Statue of Liberty, and then suddenly being engulfed in soft and comfortable sheets and pillows before becoming impossibly tired and falling asleep. For the period in which they were missing, they claimed to have found themselves aboard a small fleet of Greek sailing vessels around an Oyster flat, in a landscape that would have been famiiar, had not the Manhattan skyline and all signs of European colonization - or indeed even Native American presence - disappeared. (The realm was eventually confirmed as the Emerald Earth, an astral plane that consists of a dreamlike Earth where the works of sentient beings never existed and technology/magic brought in and left by foreign entities disappears when the importers leave.)
Since then, Libertas has only appeared when America - or at least the New York metropolitan area - is in grave danger that she is the best candidate to protect them from.
Though these annual rituals stopped before European contact, the powerful magic remained. Even when it was turned into a British Aristocrat's summer residence. Even when it was housing for Tory refugees during the Revolutionary War. Especially when Fort Wood was constructed there from 1806 to 1811.
The protective magics, finding their purpose for the first time in the Fort, began working towards their intended ends. The effect was two-fold; protect all Native Americans from cultural extinction, and keep the land free (regardless of what that land was called or who the majority of residents were).
Fort Wood itself didn't last as long as the magic within it, but it didn't matter. The magics subconsciously convinced allies of America to give the ritual's effects a new host; The Statue of Liberty. Though built out of copper, the Statue's materials were mined from the Earth, and as any arcane scholar or cryptozoologist will tell you, Giants are creatures synonymous with the Earth.
In 1933, a gorilla used for animal research at an Ivy League College was exposed to an experimental shrink ray. The ray had the exact opposite of intended effect; the gorilla grew to an enormous size and began rampaging across New England, apparently looking for something. After arriving at New York despite the military's best efforts, the gorilla started climbing the Empire State Building and swatting at Air Force biplanes flying overhead.
At that moment, the Statue of Liberty itself came to life, its copper and other manmade metal materials turning into flesh and cloth. Libertas, the All-American Giantess, had been born. She waded through the waters of New York Harbor and carefully tiptoed between cars through the streets of Manhattan, and confronted the enormous gorilla. She calmed it down, convinced it to climb off the damaged skyscraper before the building was unrecoverable, and then spoke to it in a language whose identity is unknown to this day.
As it turned out, the gorilla was female and a mother. Her child, who she hadn't realized was still normal-sized, was back at the college unharmed. Distressed by her baby being "missing", she had checked every plausible hiding space - large buildings - for her offspring and eventually spotted New York from the top of a radio tower in Conneticut.
With the huge gorilla at peace, scientists were able to return her to normal size two days later. In the meantime, the gorilla (revealed to be named Candy by her keepers because she liked taffy and chocolate) and Libertas posed for pictures and got to know the locals, who were amazed by the enormous size of both females.
Once the crisis was over, Libertas explained she would return whenever America or its allies needed her, walked back into the water and waded across the New York Harbor to Bedloe's Island, and stood back on the base where she had started. Her flesh and clothes turned back to copper and other metals, and remained so until WWII.
One would expect that anyone inside the statue, which had stairs and elevators and even a balcony on the torch, would have suffered a horrible fate during Libertas' transformation, but once she returned to her pedastol and became a statue again, those who had been inside were found fully intact and no worse for wear. They remembered touring or otherwise inhabiting the Statue of Liberty, and then suddenly being engulfed in soft and comfortable sheets and pillows before becoming impossibly tired and falling asleep. For the period in which they were missing, they claimed to have found themselves aboard a small fleet of Greek sailing vessels around an Oyster flat, in a landscape that would have been famiiar, had not the Manhattan skyline and all signs of European colonization - or indeed even Native American presence - disappeared. (The realm was eventually confirmed as the Emerald Earth, an astral plane that consists of a dreamlike Earth where the works of sentient beings never existed and technology/magic brought in and left by foreign entities disappears when the importers leave.)
Since then, Libertas has only appeared when America - or at least the New York metropolitan area - is in grave danger that she is the best candidate to protect them from.
The only being to exist in both real life and the NCCU, Laika was a mongrel from the streets of Moscow chosen to be the first animal to be sent into space. In real life, she tragically died from overheating a few hours after takeoff when the capsule's cooling system failed, and her survival was considered all but impossible in the first place (they planned to painlessly euthanize her once all the mission goals had been achieved, as there was no way for her to survive re-entry).
But this is a Silver Age superhero origin story! So, once sent up into space in an unshieled capsule, Laika was exposed to (say it with me!) COSMIC RAYS (yup!) that gave her psionic powers.
She then repaired the cooling system, manipulated the capsule's retrothrusters to cause the capsule to return to "home", and used levitation and telekinesis to survive re-entry and the capsule's plunge into the Moskva river near St. Basil's Cathedral.
A young Russian boy with his mother saw the capsule's arrival, and the appearance of a friendly dog that walked on air and spoke to humans via telepathy. Hello! I am Laika! I brought back your spaceship! her mind projected to everyone nearby.
The boy was the first to ask "Our spaceship?", to which Laika responded by turning to the river and telepathically lifting Sputnik 2 out of the water to gently place it on the ground. She then returned to the ground herself, approached the boy and his mother, and let him pet her while licking his hand and arms. Thank you! You taste like salt licks!
Of course, the USSR were quick to make the telepathic dog, their first superhero, a national hero and source of propaganda. The somewhat Orwellian-sounding name "Best Friend" came from an early propaganda film she starred in. She retained her innocence but quickly realized that the people of the USSR were being duped by a government that was exploiting them, and was a big influence on the bloodless collapse of the USSR.
Currently she is helping to defend Ukraine from Russian invasion, and has starred in several online videos funded by various world governments for the purposes of revealing the truth about the war to the Russian people. The current Premier of Russia, who initiated the war to cement his name in history, has begun a smear campaign calling Laika a traitor to her country for doing this, but this has met with little success, and support for the Russian government's actions is slowly but surely falling. Besides, who could resist that face?
But this is a Silver Age superhero origin story! So, once sent up into space in an unshieled capsule, Laika was exposed to (say it with me!) COSMIC RAYS (yup!) that gave her psionic powers.
She then repaired the cooling system, manipulated the capsule's retrothrusters to cause the capsule to return to "home", and used levitation and telekinesis to survive re-entry and the capsule's plunge into the Moskva river near St. Basil's Cathedral.
A young Russian boy with his mother saw the capsule's arrival, and the appearance of a friendly dog that walked on air and spoke to humans via telepathy. Hello! I am Laika! I brought back your spaceship! her mind projected to everyone nearby.
The boy was the first to ask "Our spaceship?", to which Laika responded by turning to the river and telepathically lifting Sputnik 2 out of the water to gently place it on the ground. She then returned to the ground herself, approached the boy and his mother, and let him pet her while licking his hand and arms. Thank you! You taste like salt licks!
Of course, the USSR were quick to make the telepathic dog, their first superhero, a national hero and source of propaganda. The somewhat Orwellian-sounding name "Best Friend" came from an early propaganda film she starred in. She retained her innocence but quickly realized that the people of the USSR were being duped by a government that was exploiting them, and was a big influence on the bloodless collapse of the USSR.
Currently she is helping to defend Ukraine from Russian invasion, and has starred in several online videos funded by various world governments for the purposes of revealing the truth about the war to the Russian people. The current Premier of Russia, who initiated the war to cement his name in history, has begun a smear campaign calling Laika a traitor to her country for doing this, but this has met with little success, and support for the Russian government's actions is slowly but surely falling. Besides, who could resist that face?
Unlike in real life, where the Three Mile Island incident has caused no incidents of cancer or radiation poisoning among the general public, the in-universe Three Mile Island disaster was severe enough that people living within close range of the plant received various levels of radiation. For most this was treatable, for a few it was fatal... and then there was the Adams.
The Adams were an African-American family living fairly close to the plant. Some of their neighbours received radiation doses bad enough to give them Acute Radiation Syndrome, and by what could have been the worst stroke of bad luck in the entire disaster, the entire Adams family received enough radiation that they should have been the worst-hit cases, even compared to the nuclear plant's workers. Instead, the doctors were baffled that they had somehow shrugged off enough radiation to kill everyone in the area twice over.
The mystery thickened when every member of the Adams household started displaying metapowers of some sort, a mystery that was only solved in the 90s when it was discovered that a rare gene inherited through both parent's African ancestry (a gene that was still uncommon even among African-American and Native African individuals) made their DNA pre-disposed to develop a metapower from high radiation doses while protecting their genes from being damaged by ionizing radiation.
The family's story was picked up by the news, including TIME Magazine which ran a special issue with them on the cover as "The Nuclear Family: An Undeniable Case Against White Supremacy".
The actual individuals who were the members of the Adams household are...
Professor Molecule a.k.a Adam Adams, the father, who ended up with the power to manipulate the structure of molecules in large numbers; he can prevent someone from being poisoned, turn water into air, produce carbon nanotubes, and many other things. As a chemistry teacher at the local high school, his mastery over his ability is incredible.
Greenthumb a.k.a Eve Adams, the mother, who has the power to communicate with plants. As it turns out, large plants - anything as big as small grasses or larger, especially trees - are 100% pseudo-brain, and thus unexpectedly intelligent. She also learned from plants that mycelium (mushrooms) are even more intelligent, possibly rivalling or even exceeding a single human, but for reasons unknown Eve is unable to communicate with fungi.
Firetamer a.k.a Julie Adams, the eldest daughter, who has control over fire. She became a firewoman after graduating high school, and has saved countless lives by using her ability to stamp out fires in residential buildings and workplaces.
Aperture a.k.a Jana Adams, the youngest daughter, who can form a pair of connected portals on walls using an intuitive knowledge of African Shamanistic magic.
Rick Adams, the youngest son, who was on a school field trip during the incident. Despite this, while staying in a shelter with his family shortly after the disaster, he received a letter from a mysterious organization that, according to the letter, was apparently a secret branch of the US Navy and the source of the long time rumors of the "Men in Black". According to the letter, an experiment of unknown nature involving a supernatural artifact had shown that he would be the organization's leader when he grew up, and to prepare himself by applying himself to his school studies, as well as to politics and martial arts.
It took a while, but after ~30 years and the loss of his hair (his father also lost his hair relatively early, before even living near Three Mile Island) and one of his eyes (stabbed while defending his friends during a mugging), Rick did in fact become the leader of an intelligence operation in the US Navy called the Anomaly Detainment Corps, founded in 1947 when the US Air Force's Project Mogul - a series of high-altitude balloons used to detect Soviet nuclear tests - was exposed to the world in the infamous "Roswell UFO crash". The actual nature of the crash was mostly mundane, if cutting-edge for the time, and was given a cover story in the local newspaper in Roswell, of being a "crashed flying saucer", that continues to fuel conspiracy theories to this day. However, there was one problem... The crashed polyethylene balloon's payload, a bunch of sensors in a box, now also contained a mysterious technological artifact of unknown origin. While said entity would eventually be revealed to be a time-displaced consumer quadcopter drone from the mid-2010s (though how it ended up inside a military project from 1947 remains unsolved), many other inexplicable objects appeared over the years, and the ADC would remain dedicated to tracking, understanding and - in worst-case scenarios - containing these artifacts of unknown supernatural or extraterrestrial origin until today.
At present, the ADC is more publicly visible than it was in 1979, and SCONADC Rick Adams is addressed in unclassified documents as Senior Chief Officer of the Navy Anomaly Detainment Corps.
The Adams were an African-American family living fairly close to the plant. Some of their neighbours received radiation doses bad enough to give them Acute Radiation Syndrome, and by what could have been the worst stroke of bad luck in the entire disaster, the entire Adams family received enough radiation that they should have been the worst-hit cases, even compared to the nuclear plant's workers. Instead, the doctors were baffled that they had somehow shrugged off enough radiation to kill everyone in the area twice over.
The mystery thickened when every member of the Adams household started displaying metapowers of some sort, a mystery that was only solved in the 90s when it was discovered that a rare gene inherited through both parent's African ancestry (a gene that was still uncommon even among African-American and Native African individuals) made their DNA pre-disposed to develop a metapower from high radiation doses while protecting their genes from being damaged by ionizing radiation.
The family's story was picked up by the news, including TIME Magazine which ran a special issue with them on the cover as "The Nuclear Family: An Undeniable Case Against White Supremacy".
The actual individuals who were the members of the Adams household are...
Professor Molecule a.k.a Adam Adams, the father, who ended up with the power to manipulate the structure of molecules in large numbers; he can prevent someone from being poisoned, turn water into air, produce carbon nanotubes, and many other things. As a chemistry teacher at the local high school, his mastery over his ability is incredible.
Greenthumb a.k.a Eve Adams, the mother, who has the power to communicate with plants. As it turns out, large plants - anything as big as small grasses or larger, especially trees - are 100% pseudo-brain, and thus unexpectedly intelligent. She also learned from plants that mycelium (mushrooms) are even more intelligent, possibly rivalling or even exceeding a single human, but for reasons unknown Eve is unable to communicate with fungi.
Firetamer a.k.a Julie Adams, the eldest daughter, who has control over fire. She became a firewoman after graduating high school, and has saved countless lives by using her ability to stamp out fires in residential buildings and workplaces.
Aperture a.k.a Jana Adams, the youngest daughter, who can form a pair of connected portals on walls using an intuitive knowledge of African Shamanistic magic.
Rick Adams, the youngest son, who was on a school field trip during the incident. Despite this, while staying in a shelter with his family shortly after the disaster, he received a letter from a mysterious organization that, according to the letter, was apparently a secret branch of the US Navy and the source of the long time rumors of the "Men in Black". According to the letter, an experiment of unknown nature involving a supernatural artifact had shown that he would be the organization's leader when he grew up, and to prepare himself by applying himself to his school studies, as well as to politics and martial arts.
It took a while, but after ~30 years and the loss of his hair (his father also lost his hair relatively early, before even living near Three Mile Island) and one of his eyes (stabbed while defending his friends during a mugging), Rick did in fact become the leader of an intelligence operation in the US Navy called the Anomaly Detainment Corps, founded in 1947 when the US Air Force's Project Mogul - a series of high-altitude balloons used to detect Soviet nuclear tests - was exposed to the world in the infamous "Roswell UFO crash". The actual nature of the crash was mostly mundane, if cutting-edge for the time, and was given a cover story in the local newspaper in Roswell, of being a "crashed flying saucer", that continues to fuel conspiracy theories to this day. However, there was one problem... The crashed polyethylene balloon's payload, a bunch of sensors in a box, now also contained a mysterious technological artifact of unknown origin. While said entity would eventually be revealed to be a time-displaced consumer quadcopter drone from the mid-2010s (though how it ended up inside a military project from 1947 remains unsolved), many other inexplicable objects appeared over the years, and the ADC would remain dedicated to tracking, understanding and - in worst-case scenarios - containing these artifacts of unknown supernatural or extraterrestrial origin until today.
At present, the ADC is more publicly visible than it was in 1979, and SCONADC Rick Adams is addressed in unclassified documents as Senior Chief Officer of the Navy Anomaly Detainment Corps.
Lucas Walker was the bored teenage nephew of an Oklahoma farmer in the 1970s. One night, a glowing space rock landed in one of the farm's fields, and he approached the object to look at it. He poked it with a stick, and the rock suddenly vanished, leaving him wondering if he just imagined it.
He went back to bed, and that night he had a strange dream. In it, he was told by the rock that it was a message sent by the long-dead inhabitants of a barren but mineral-rich moon called Creludar, where a species known as Grundans discovered arcane metallurgy and created advanced technologies. Unfortunately, it was not to last.
Their protector goddess, the Space Genie, suddenly disappeared while flying over Creludar's largest city in what is known as the Flash of Death. Afterward, much of Creludar's technology and magic stopped functioning properly. What little remained of their great achievements was devoured by the planet eater known as The Chrome Googolplex, except the "GeoMail" message that Lucas recieved and its "attachment"; psionic powers called the Mooncast.
Shortly after waking up the next morning, Lucas hears voices downstairs; his aunt and uncle, and several strangers saying threatening things. He sneaks out through the side-window, peers through the kitchen window, and sees some men in black suits demanding to see Lucas. When his aunt and uncle refuse, the men grab them, blindfold them and tie them up before shoving the two into the back of a black sedan and driving away.
However, Lucas' aunt and uncle left a clue: A mysterious address somewhere in Washington, D.C.
Together with his friends - the motorhead Peter Soles, the messy-haired metalhead Charlie "Chewback" Baxter, Lucas' female cousin Lana (who has a twin sister named Lora with a much less adventurous personality), and Peter's van "Aluminum Vulcan" which functions way better than it looks (and has detailing; of a elf babe in a skimpy slave outfit and her orc captor on the left side, and of a halfling character from a fantasy novel holding a sword made of light on the right side) - they travel from Oklahoma to D.C.
At the address, they met Wong Kinobi, a retired Chinese-Japanese-American man. It turns out he knows where the men would have taken her, and the trip is extended, as long as Lucas agrees to one condition. Wong is secretly a retired superhero, but his metapower was only an enhancement to his already prodigious martial arts skills. Once Lucas' aunt and uncle were safe, Wong wanted Lucas to train under him so that the old man could pass on his extensive knowledge and skill, and then - with luck - see Lucas win an illegal metapower fighting tournament held in a supervillain's Himalayan lair once every decade. (But that's a story for another time!)
Long story short, Lucas discovers his father is the director of the CIA and a pseudo-supervillain called Chromelord who travels to planets to set in motion events that will make the Chrome Googolplex aware of an inhabited planet, and gets captured by said father. Then his friends rescue him, and they overhear from a phone conversation between Chromelord and an unknown person that the Chrome Googolplex is on-route to Earth to devour it, and for Chromelord to use his position to prevent Earth from defending itself. Lucas and his friends drive to Florida, steal a space shuttle from Cape Canaveral, enter hyperspace (which is actually less than the speed of light in the NCCU) before the US Military can shoot them down, and send a laser into the Chrome Googolplex's highly-visible but well-defended weak point using the power of the Mooncast. Roll credits.
Other events soon followed; since Chromelord wasn't dead, he decided to become an actual supervillain now that his planet eater master was gone. After capturing Lucas for the CIA, he lets the agency take care of the actual imprisonment and experiment on his son, while also trying to convince Lucas via telepathy to break free using "the Dark Side of the Mooncast" and then to "join me, and together we can rule the solar system".
Fortunately for Lucas and for the length of his backstory, this is when the experiments being done on him and a few other psionics - known as "Project MK Ultra" - were exposed to the public by the science personnel doing the experiments.
In the aftermath, Lucas and his friends went to college and had lives of their own, but are still close friends to this day. Lana became a diplomat and married Peter, while Lana's twin Lora (you forgot, didn't you?) became an actress and married Charlie. Lucas worked for NASA until the loss of contact with all the space colonies in the 2010s; he was on one of the American airship colonies of Venus when the economic crash happened and hasn't been heard from since.
He went back to bed, and that night he had a strange dream. In it, he was told by the rock that it was a message sent by the long-dead inhabitants of a barren but mineral-rich moon called Creludar, where a species known as Grundans discovered arcane metallurgy and created advanced technologies. Unfortunately, it was not to last.
Their protector goddess, the Space Genie, suddenly disappeared while flying over Creludar's largest city in what is known as the Flash of Death. Afterward, much of Creludar's technology and magic stopped functioning properly. What little remained of their great achievements was devoured by the planet eater known as The Chrome Googolplex, except the "GeoMail" message that Lucas recieved and its "attachment"; psionic powers called the Mooncast.
Shortly after waking up the next morning, Lucas hears voices downstairs; his aunt and uncle, and several strangers saying threatening things. He sneaks out through the side-window, peers through the kitchen window, and sees some men in black suits demanding to see Lucas. When his aunt and uncle refuse, the men grab them, blindfold them and tie them up before shoving the two into the back of a black sedan and driving away.
However, Lucas' aunt and uncle left a clue: A mysterious address somewhere in Washington, D.C.
Together with his friends - the motorhead Peter Soles, the messy-haired metalhead Charlie "Chewback" Baxter, Lucas' female cousin Lana (who has a twin sister named Lora with a much less adventurous personality), and Peter's van "Aluminum Vulcan" which functions way better than it looks (and has detailing; of a elf babe in a skimpy slave outfit and her orc captor on the left side, and of a halfling character from a fantasy novel holding a sword made of light on the right side) - they travel from Oklahoma to D.C.
At the address, they met Wong Kinobi, a retired Chinese-Japanese-American man. It turns out he knows where the men would have taken her, and the trip is extended, as long as Lucas agrees to one condition. Wong is secretly a retired superhero, but his metapower was only an enhancement to his already prodigious martial arts skills. Once Lucas' aunt and uncle were safe, Wong wanted Lucas to train under him so that the old man could pass on his extensive knowledge and skill, and then - with luck - see Lucas win an illegal metapower fighting tournament held in a supervillain's Himalayan lair once every decade. (But that's a story for another time!)
Long story short, Lucas discovers his father is the director of the CIA and a pseudo-supervillain called Chromelord who travels to planets to set in motion events that will make the Chrome Googolplex aware of an inhabited planet, and gets captured by said father. Then his friends rescue him, and they overhear from a phone conversation between Chromelord and an unknown person that the Chrome Googolplex is on-route to Earth to devour it, and for Chromelord to use his position to prevent Earth from defending itself. Lucas and his friends drive to Florida, steal a space shuttle from Cape Canaveral, enter hyperspace (which is actually less than the speed of light in the NCCU) before the US Military can shoot them down, and send a laser into the Chrome Googolplex's highly-visible but well-defended weak point using the power of the Mooncast. Roll credits.
Other events soon followed; since Chromelord wasn't dead, he decided to become an actual supervillain now that his planet eater master was gone. After capturing Lucas for the CIA, he lets the agency take care of the actual imprisonment and experiment on his son, while also trying to convince Lucas via telepathy to break free using "the Dark Side of the Mooncast" and then to "join me, and together we can rule the solar system".
Fortunately for Lucas and for the length of his backstory, this is when the experiments being done on him and a few other psionics - known as "Project MK Ultra" - were exposed to the public by the science personnel doing the experiments.
In the aftermath, Lucas and his friends went to college and had lives of their own, but are still close friends to this day. Lana became a diplomat and married Peter, while Lana's twin Lora (you forgot, didn't you?) became an actress and married Charlie. Lucas worked for NASA until the loss of contact with all the space colonies in the 2010s; he was on one of the American airship colonies of Venus when the economic crash happened and hasn't been heard from since.
The Golem was discovered in 1924, at an archaological dig site in Mandatory Palestine, by a British research team. It immediately came to life, still functioning after an unknown but lengthy period of time, and walked a short distance from the dig site before producing a sword made of light and standing guard over the site.
In the ensuing decades, many discoveries were made about it. It wasn't sentient, but it did have the ancient Hebrew word for "protect" eched into a clay tablet that - to modern eyes - was inserted into the back of its head like a video game cartridge. It wielded Angelic weapons - a sword and shield, but also a bow and arrow - that were indestructible and surprisingly powerful. It was carbon-dated to around 2000 years before it was excavated. Finally, its solid granite body regenerates; so fast, in fact, that - even though you can permanently chip pieces off of it easily - for all intents and purposes it is indestructible.
What "protect" would mean seems to be arbitrary. It has protected Jewish artifacts, and was the entity that killed the Nazi supervillain leader known as Der Eisenführer (moments before the Allied forces busted down his office door, no less; what was left of the villain had been literally mashed into a bloody slime by the Golem's stone fists). It also stopped the missile launched by the Lunar Nazis in the 1970s. On the other hand, it has protected all sorts of people and things that are foreign to Israel, including surprising examples like a school of Palestinian children and a German rocket scientist who had worked for the Nazis (said scientist would later go on to assist the American space program, incidentally).
The Golem was given to the Israeli government in 1950, since it was basically impossible to keep it in a museum or research lab once its purpose had been redirected to a new ward, and no other government wanted to take responsibility for tracking the damn thing.
The Golem remains mysterious in many ways to this day, and the fate of Der Eisenführer is still considered a cautionary tale about the Golem. Technically it's a superhero, but those who succeed in their intent to destroy/kill what the Golem is trying to protect quickly find out that it brutally avenges any lost wards, with the original need for such brutality (or even if it was necessary at all) lost to time. Being that it's a mindless magical robot that protects things without the free will to question why it acts, it's not exactly in a position to reveal the answers to our many questions.
In the ensuing decades, many discoveries were made about it. It wasn't sentient, but it did have the ancient Hebrew word for "protect" eched into a clay tablet that - to modern eyes - was inserted into the back of its head like a video game cartridge. It wielded Angelic weapons - a sword and shield, but also a bow and arrow - that were indestructible and surprisingly powerful. It was carbon-dated to around 2000 years before it was excavated. Finally, its solid granite body regenerates; so fast, in fact, that - even though you can permanently chip pieces off of it easily - for all intents and purposes it is indestructible.
What "protect" would mean seems to be arbitrary. It has protected Jewish artifacts, and was the entity that killed the Nazi supervillain leader known as Der Eisenführer (moments before the Allied forces busted down his office door, no less; what was left of the villain had been literally mashed into a bloody slime by the Golem's stone fists). It also stopped the missile launched by the Lunar Nazis in the 1970s. On the other hand, it has protected all sorts of people and things that are foreign to Israel, including surprising examples like a school of Palestinian children and a German rocket scientist who had worked for the Nazis (said scientist would later go on to assist the American space program, incidentally).
The Golem was given to the Israeli government in 1950, since it was basically impossible to keep it in a museum or research lab once its purpose had been redirected to a new ward, and no other government wanted to take responsibility for tracking the damn thing.
The Golem remains mysterious in many ways to this day, and the fate of Der Eisenführer is still considered a cautionary tale about the Golem. Technically it's a superhero, but those who succeed in their intent to destroy/kill what the Golem is trying to protect quickly find out that it brutally avenges any lost wards, with the original need for such brutality (or even if it was necessary at all) lost to time. Being that it's a mindless magical robot that protects things without the free will to question why it acts, it's not exactly in a position to reveal the answers to our many questions.
Discotech was the first sentient, free-willed "robot" - she was actually the first "automaton", a mechanical being with a mind of its own, but that word had been co-opted by the inventors of various true robots to describe their creations back in the Brass Age, leading to both "robot" and "automaton" having muddled definitions. While in actuality she was genderless, her feminine body affirmed the idea that she was a woman, thus the word "Gynoid".
Created by TanaCorp in 1971 as DISCOS-1, she was the reason Japan was the first nation to add free-willed machines to the legal definition of personhood.
After her creator, Dr. Tomoki Tanaka, was killed by a lab assistant he discovered committing corporate espionage, she became a superhero out of a sense of responsibility; the information the lab assistant was stealing was the blueprints of DISCOS-1 herself, and she wondered if he would have lived if she had never been built.
She never gained much attention as the dancing gynoid superheroine Discotech, but she preferred it that way. As far as the world knew, she had been damaged beyond repair by the same lab assistant who killed Dr. Tanaka, thanks to faking her own death with the incomplete and mindless body of her never-finished, identical younger sister DISCOS-2.
In 1981, after saving San Francisco from the rogue "AI Mayor" prototype CITISYS, she was confronted by locals about all the damage that had been done (most people assumed she had been vandalizing CITISYS-enabled infrastructure, rather than saving people from the murderous AI controlling the devices). She explained the situation, and due to CITISYS' erratic behavior since its activation and the fact that the company which created CITISYS was founded by a supposedly reformed evil Genius that few trusted, almost everyone believed her, though it was no less of a Cassandra Truth considering what they originally assumed they had seen.
The exception was a then-teenaged Michael Mitchelson, who was a huge fanboy of the CITISYS concept and didn't want to admit it might have (at best) gone horribly wrong. Unfortunately, Michael had deduced Discotech's true identity because he did a report for his science class about her in middle school. He accused her of being a liar, revealed her identity, said she'd murdered her creator, and to top it all off said that Disco was dead and she was obsolete.
The crowd didn't even have the chance to chastise him before Discotech deleted her own mind; she was lifeless before she even hit the ground.
Michael still regrets his accusations to this day, and despite being acquitted in his trial, he honestly believed he was a murderer for years. In addition, he saw what TanaCorp became after Tomoki Tanaka's son took over...
While Kirito Tanaka had been making unethical business descisions for years when Discotech died, Michael's trial revealed that Discotech kept a paper notebook (in case her internal hard drive brain was ever damaged beyond repair) with multiple mentions of gathering evidence of Kirito's wrongdoings. However, the notebook was found in her hideout, which the San Francisco Police Department were ordered to search two hours before the officers actually arrived; normally a reasonable delay, but in this case the hideout had been ransacked by persons unknown and the evidence Discotech had apparently been collecting was conspicuously absent. With her gone, TanaCorp would become the most feared and ruthless megacorp of the 1980s, something Michael Mitchelson still feels responsible for.
Created by TanaCorp in 1971 as DISCOS-1, she was the reason Japan was the first nation to add free-willed machines to the legal definition of personhood.
After her creator, Dr. Tomoki Tanaka, was killed by a lab assistant he discovered committing corporate espionage, she became a superhero out of a sense of responsibility; the information the lab assistant was stealing was the blueprints of DISCOS-1 herself, and she wondered if he would have lived if she had never been built.
She never gained much attention as the dancing gynoid superheroine Discotech, but she preferred it that way. As far as the world knew, she had been damaged beyond repair by the same lab assistant who killed Dr. Tanaka, thanks to faking her own death with the incomplete and mindless body of her never-finished, identical younger sister DISCOS-2.
In 1981, after saving San Francisco from the rogue "AI Mayor" prototype CITISYS, she was confronted by locals about all the damage that had been done (most people assumed she had been vandalizing CITISYS-enabled infrastructure, rather than saving people from the murderous AI controlling the devices). She explained the situation, and due to CITISYS' erratic behavior since its activation and the fact that the company which created CITISYS was founded by a supposedly reformed evil Genius that few trusted, almost everyone believed her, though it was no less of a Cassandra Truth considering what they originally assumed they had seen.
The exception was a then-teenaged Michael Mitchelson, who was a huge fanboy of the CITISYS concept and didn't want to admit it might have (at best) gone horribly wrong. Unfortunately, Michael had deduced Discotech's true identity because he did a report for his science class about her in middle school. He accused her of being a liar, revealed her identity, said she'd murdered her creator, and to top it all off said that Disco was dead and she was obsolete.
The crowd didn't even have the chance to chastise him before Discotech deleted her own mind; she was lifeless before she even hit the ground.
Michael still regrets his accusations to this day, and despite being acquitted in his trial, he honestly believed he was a murderer for years. In addition, he saw what TanaCorp became after Tomoki Tanaka's son took over...
While Kirito Tanaka had been making unethical business descisions for years when Discotech died, Michael's trial revealed that Discotech kept a paper notebook (in case her internal hard drive brain was ever damaged beyond repair) with multiple mentions of gathering evidence of Kirito's wrongdoings. However, the notebook was found in her hideout, which the San Francisco Police Department were ordered to search two hours before the officers actually arrived; normally a reasonable delay, but in this case the hideout had been ransacked by persons unknown and the evidence Discotech had apparently been collecting was conspicuously absent. With her gone, TanaCorp would become the most feared and ruthless megacorp of the 1980s, something Michael Mitchelson still feels responsible for.
Trucker. Husband. Father. Superhero. Smoker. Jacknife will go down in history as one of the most unexpectedly brilliant superheroes of all time.
Truckers aren't the first people you think of when you think "secret identity", but he managed to make it work. By alternating between hauling high-value cargo and spending a day or two in a specific city between runs, he not only became a superhero when not working but was able to keep being one even after most members of his extensive rogues gallery discovered his real name. After all, you can't kill what you can't find, and with his career lasting from 1972 to 1989, he was a plastic needle in an America-sized haystack.
Due to his transitory, nomadic lifestyle, very little is known about his actual career. That being said, no record exists anywhere in America, Canada or Mexico of Jacknife ever breaking the Cosmic Code, and he registered himself as a superhero in over 3000 municipal and regional law enforcement jurisdictions across North America. (This being before computer databases, it was necessary at the time for superheroes to register with each and every police jurisdiction they would be active in, with Jacknife still holding the world record.)
His actual appearance was fairly standard. Born in Texas, Jack Tucker wore a trucker's cap, flannel shirt, jeans and steel-toes boots while hauling, but wore a cowboy hat, aviator shades, denim jacket, tanned leather pants and cowboy boots as Jacknife, with both identities sporting an iconic horseshoe moustache. Even his powers are often underestimated...
Jack discovered as a teenager that he had the uncanny ability to never miss when throwing knives, and even had the inexplicable capacity to decide exactly how the knife affected its target. He usually disarmed his foes by having the handle of a knife smack their hand. If they were fighting unarmed, the handle would collide with the back of their knee to knock them down. If they were male and either proved to be especially treacherous in combat (one such guy pushed his fellow minion into the line of fire) or had been sexually harassing a woman (or, in a couple cases, a very feminine-looking drag queen; Jacknife didn't discriminate), the handle of one of Jacknife's weapons would hit them in the groin as a clear message.
Jacknife only used lethal force when a foe was being outright cruel, even going so far as to not kill (merely disarm) someone who was threatening to kill an innocent bystander and to turn murderers in to the police rather than invoking the Insufficient Self Defense rule in the Cosmic Code. (The Insufficient Self Defense rule states that if a superhero is no more durable than a non-metapowered human, lethal force by a criminal can be responded to with lethal force by the superhero.) Cruelty that was worthy of being punished with dismemberment or death in his eyes was usually already a war crime, a form of torture, or a crime against humanity in the eyes of the law.
Jack Tucker retired from both his careers in 1989. He lost his wife when he was 23, and while he agreed with the general consensus that everyone was entitled to the option of staying young as long as they wanted, he felt that immortality wasn't the right choice for him personally. As a result of that and his smoking habit, he had aged to the point that he knew he had to retire. He wrote about some of his experiences as a superhero in a newspaper column in the early 90s.
As a lifelong smoker, Jack was not surprised to learn he had lung cancer in the mid-90s. When asked about smoking shortly afterwards by an elementary school class (it was career day), he had some important words for them...
"When I found out I had lung cancer, my only thought was that I was glad I'd been lucky enough to live to 44. I don't even look 44, I look 72. I honestly don't mind dyin' so early if it means I'll see Charlotte again, but then that's my whole problem. Smoking is a crutch for dumb f-cks like me who want the easy way out from facing their problems." he'd said, admitting that he felt weak and stupid (the teacher probably gave him a funny look when he dropped a precision F-strike, but that's beside the point). "Please don't think of me as a superhero. Real superheroes don't choose to keep poisonin' themselves and everyone nearby. Don't be like me, kids. You can be better than that."
Jack Tucker underwent various medical treatments in the late 90s, but to little effect; the cancer spread to multiple organs.
Jack died in 2002 with his parents, daughter and younger sister Jill by his bedside. He was buried alongside his wife Charlotte.
After his death, a completed but unpublished autobiography was discovered among his belongings alongside a letter addressed to Jill stating he wanted her to publish the autobiography once he was gone.
"Knife is a Highway: The Life of Jack Tucker" was the best-selling non-fiction book of 2004 and 2005.
Truckers aren't the first people you think of when you think "secret identity", but he managed to make it work. By alternating between hauling high-value cargo and spending a day or two in a specific city between runs, he not only became a superhero when not working but was able to keep being one even after most members of his extensive rogues gallery discovered his real name. After all, you can't kill what you can't find, and with his career lasting from 1972 to 1989, he was a plastic needle in an America-sized haystack.
Due to his transitory, nomadic lifestyle, very little is known about his actual career. That being said, no record exists anywhere in America, Canada or Mexico of Jacknife ever breaking the Cosmic Code, and he registered himself as a superhero in over 3000 municipal and regional law enforcement jurisdictions across North America. (This being before computer databases, it was necessary at the time for superheroes to register with each and every police jurisdiction they would be active in, with Jacknife still holding the world record.)
His actual appearance was fairly standard. Born in Texas, Jack Tucker wore a trucker's cap, flannel shirt, jeans and steel-toes boots while hauling, but wore a cowboy hat, aviator shades, denim jacket, tanned leather pants and cowboy boots as Jacknife, with both identities sporting an iconic horseshoe moustache. Even his powers are often underestimated...
Jack discovered as a teenager that he had the uncanny ability to never miss when throwing knives, and even had the inexplicable capacity to decide exactly how the knife affected its target. He usually disarmed his foes by having the handle of a knife smack their hand. If they were fighting unarmed, the handle would collide with the back of their knee to knock them down. If they were male and either proved to be especially treacherous in combat (one such guy pushed his fellow minion into the line of fire) or had been sexually harassing a woman (or, in a couple cases, a very feminine-looking drag queen; Jacknife didn't discriminate), the handle of one of Jacknife's weapons would hit them in the groin as a clear message.
Jacknife only used lethal force when a foe was being outright cruel, even going so far as to not kill (merely disarm) someone who was threatening to kill an innocent bystander and to turn murderers in to the police rather than invoking the Insufficient Self Defense rule in the Cosmic Code. (The Insufficient Self Defense rule states that if a superhero is no more durable than a non-metapowered human, lethal force by a criminal can be responded to with lethal force by the superhero.) Cruelty that was worthy of being punished with dismemberment or death in his eyes was usually already a war crime, a form of torture, or a crime against humanity in the eyes of the law.
Jack Tucker retired from both his careers in 1989. He lost his wife when he was 23, and while he agreed with the general consensus that everyone was entitled to the option of staying young as long as they wanted, he felt that immortality wasn't the right choice for him personally. As a result of that and his smoking habit, he had aged to the point that he knew he had to retire. He wrote about some of his experiences as a superhero in a newspaper column in the early 90s.
As a lifelong smoker, Jack was not surprised to learn he had lung cancer in the mid-90s. When asked about smoking shortly afterwards by an elementary school class (it was career day), he had some important words for them...
"When I found out I had lung cancer, my only thought was that I was glad I'd been lucky enough to live to 44. I don't even look 44, I look 72. I honestly don't mind dyin' so early if it means I'll see Charlotte again, but then that's my whole problem. Smoking is a crutch for dumb f-cks like me who want the easy way out from facing their problems." he'd said, admitting that he felt weak and stupid (the teacher probably gave him a funny look when he dropped a precision F-strike, but that's beside the point). "Please don't think of me as a superhero. Real superheroes don't choose to keep poisonin' themselves and everyone nearby. Don't be like me, kids. You can be better than that."
Jack Tucker underwent various medical treatments in the late 90s, but to little effect; the cancer spread to multiple organs.
Jack died in 2002 with his parents, daughter and younger sister Jill by his bedside. He was buried alongside his wife Charlotte.
After his death, a completed but unpublished autobiography was discovered among his belongings alongside a letter addressed to Jill stating he wanted her to publish the autobiography once he was gone.
"Knife is a Highway: The Life of Jack Tucker" was the best-selling non-fiction book of 2004 and 2005.
The Scavenger's real name is still unknown; despite pretending to reveal his name multiple times, it was a different name each time and none of them can be traced to any real person from Timeline One. What is known is that he was a part of a biker gang called Heaven's Demons in post-apocalyptic America in Timeline Two. This can be traced to the Timeline One biker gang of the same name, but the version in Timeline Two adapted to keep order and provide legitimate peace and prosperity in the wake of WWIII, while the Timeline One version remained an organized crime syndicate focused only on making money.
The Scavenger himself was going through the ruins of a military base in the year 2000, two decades after nuclear war tore the world asunder, when he discovered a strange machine created by a pre-war Genius. He accidentally activated it, and suddenly found himself in a suspiciously familiar active military base... in the year 1971.
He escaped from the base - where the military tried but failed to capture him - found a major highway, and hitched a ride to Phoenix, Arizona. (Apparently a case of mistaken identity; he lived in a small town called Phoenix, in Illinois, as a small child just before the bombs dropped.)
After getting a job and settling down, he was able to make sense of the situation and resolved to save the world from destruction, convinced that despite his presence the world still seemed headed for the same disaster. He was also having vivid visions of particular events he came to recognize as critical to the fate of the world, aiding his quest.
While never a registered superhero, the Scavenger's actions and moral code were in line with official superheroes. The mysterious motives behind his actions at the start of each gambit would always be revealed, when the actions succeeded (or failed), as well-intentioned, and the US Military eventually stopped trying to capture him and instead opened a channel of communication to help prevent the end of the world.
The deadline, 1979, came and went, and on New Years 1980 he had one last vision... of the world, untouched by radioactive oblivion, surviving a dangerous event on New Years 2000. After that his visions stopped. He spent a couple months saying goodbye and arranging to save his own world; he revealed that, in his time saving Timeline One, he'd met the Genius who produced the time machine that sent him to Timeline One in the first place. Able to return to Timeline Two with the Genius' help, he also called in a few favors from the US Military and brought Geniuses, scientists and soldiers back with him to restore Timeline Two to more livable conditions.
As of 2022, Timeline Two is well on its way to recovery, thanks in part to the Scavenger's visions returning to warn him of dangers to his home timeline. He still makes occasional visits to Timeline One to meet up with old friends and take down a supervillain or two.
The Scavenger himself was going through the ruins of a military base in the year 2000, two decades after nuclear war tore the world asunder, when he discovered a strange machine created by a pre-war Genius. He accidentally activated it, and suddenly found himself in a suspiciously familiar active military base... in the year 1971.
He escaped from the base - where the military tried but failed to capture him - found a major highway, and hitched a ride to Phoenix, Arizona. (Apparently a case of mistaken identity; he lived in a small town called Phoenix, in Illinois, as a small child just before the bombs dropped.)
After getting a job and settling down, he was able to make sense of the situation and resolved to save the world from destruction, convinced that despite his presence the world still seemed headed for the same disaster. He was also having vivid visions of particular events he came to recognize as critical to the fate of the world, aiding his quest.
While never a registered superhero, the Scavenger's actions and moral code were in line with official superheroes. The mysterious motives behind his actions at the start of each gambit would always be revealed, when the actions succeeded (or failed), as well-intentioned, and the US Military eventually stopped trying to capture him and instead opened a channel of communication to help prevent the end of the world.
The deadline, 1979, came and went, and on New Years 1980 he had one last vision... of the world, untouched by radioactive oblivion, surviving a dangerous event on New Years 2000. After that his visions stopped. He spent a couple months saying goodbye and arranging to save his own world; he revealed that, in his time saving Timeline One, he'd met the Genius who produced the time machine that sent him to Timeline One in the first place. Able to return to Timeline Two with the Genius' help, he also called in a few favors from the US Military and brought Geniuses, scientists and soldiers back with him to restore Timeline Two to more livable conditions.
As of 2022, Timeline Two is well on its way to recovery, thanks in part to the Scavenger's visions returning to warn him of dangers to his home timeline. He still makes occasional visits to Timeline One to meet up with old friends and take down a supervillain or two.
A supervillain who made a show of adhering to his theme - that of an Evangelical preacher - but was far more dangerous than he sounded.
A Norwegian Genius with American citizenship who set about to prove God exists and did find proof (but never shared it), he tried to break into (and was instantly and permanently expelled from) the astral plane and urban theopolis known as New Jerusalem (capital of the Kingdom of Heaven). Realizing that he'd pissed off the Abrahamic God (an entity created when, long ago, all the polytheistic gods did a By Your Powers Combined to save the universe from Eldritch Horrorterrors) and would never have the afterlife he idealized, he swore revenge on the entire Abrahamic divinity - Angels, demons... Yeshua and Satan alike - and set about trying to change the world in such a way that no one would ever get into Heaven again ("...and once no one is going to Heaven... EVERYONE WILL BE!").
He started a TV show in the early 70s on a "spiritually-minded" TV network in the United States (ripping off another such show that was broadcast at the time) where he preached about fire and brimstone and convinced his viewers to "donate" shitloads of money. He then ended the show with one last "call to arms", claiming Jesus spoke to him and said the sinners needed to be purged from the Earth, before saying a crocodile-tear-filled goodbye and disappearing backstage.
In the late 70s, the government of Cameroon sold a significant amount of land to an unnamed caucasian man, who set about building a structure resembling a truly massive cathedral. By 1980, the structure - the (former) supervillain base known as the Altar - had been completed.
Then the Preacher began his evil plan (see the section in the setting's history on the 1980s for the details), knowing full well that Cameroon was not a signatory nation of the Cosmic Code. Without the threat of being attacked by the world's strongest militaries, he was able to create his most terrifying weapon, SIN 1.0...
The Preacher originally designed Synthetic Immunophage Nanites (known at the time as "Bioguard Killer Particulates") in 1910, when he was a teenager hoping to kill the girl who had spurned his advances and her chosen lover. Without equipment to build the tiny machines (equipment that wouldn't even be invented until years later), he filed the designs away and simply poisoned the two with an undetectable toxin he created instead.
He tried to create SIN in the 1950s, but this early version (known as "Original SIN") only infected a few people. The first was an apparently randomly-chosen man in the Belgian Congo whose case was recorded in 1959, targeted while the then-yet-to-be-named supervillain was on vacation (according to him, his family had been relatively wealthy but lost their wealth in the 1960s to his father's gambling addiction). One man in Norway, whose medical case was documented in 1966, was later said by the Preacher (who may have been lying) to have been his ex-brother-in-law, an atheist. (In-universe, atheists are people who don't believe in afterlives or astral planes, rather than not believing in Gods). Another, an American teenager whose condition was also recorded in 1966, appears to have no relation to the Preacher but was confirmed as an infectee by the Preacher's notes; the supervillain took offense to him kissing a Native American girl.
Finally, in 1981, with expensive equipment and after various unethical experiments, the Preacher created SIN 1.0, and spread it to communities in the United States that he considered "ungodly and expendable souls" (the Preacher's vengeance against the Abrahamic divinity was infamously illogically paired with a desire to prove to God that he was "worthy") in an attempt to destabilize the world. Due to the chosen transmission methods, aimed more at only killing those he considered ungodly than spreading efficiently, SIN 1.0 spread slowly enough - and in ways that were easy enough to contain - that it was treatable within two years. Additionally, cybernetics were allowing people to artificially enhance their immune system, making SIN 1.0 obsolete.
In 1985, SIN 2.0 was unleashed upon the world. Able to attack cybernetics, patched against the various SIN treatments that had become available, and able to upgrade SIN 1.0 nanomachinery to the new version, the second wave proved twice as deadly. However, it retained the same methods of transmission and many of those killed were those previously infected by SIN 1.0 (mostly drug users who continued to expose themselves to transmission vectors, rather than those who were infected through intercourse). In addition, the math says that - because SIN 2.0 did not infect 100% of SIN 1.0 survivors - the new version was less widespread than the original among the Preacher's intended targets.
The Preacher didn't realize it, but the world was secretly on to him. His minions included - unknowingly to him - dozens of covert agents, double agents, undercover cops, undercover superheroes, robot body doubles built by TanaCorp, and vampire spies planted by the Sanguine Masquerade ("evil" vampires, while manipulative, consider humans as a combination of an orchard tree and someone you take home from the bar, and didn't want to find out what would happen if a vampire got infected with SIN).
In 1992, after Cameroon finally admitted they f-cked up, the world made a collective assault on the Altar. The Preacher's minions were all dispatched, and the villain himself was captured and put on trial at Nuremburg. In 1998 he was found guilty of basically everything he was charged with, and executed.
As it turns out, his story goes on a little longer than that. The Kingdom of Heaven is the collective government of all astral planes. The Preacher was put on trial by the Supreme Court of Heaven, which judges all souls who believe in the ideals of the Abrahamic faiths. It was from stories of the Preacher's trial that a few key details about the Court and Kingdom are known...
...Yeshua, the ancient prophet and whose teachings Christianity is derived from (and whose Godfather, E'l, is literally the Abrahamic God), is a man with a frizzy beard and dark skin wearing rather shabby-looking clothes, who is currently the God of Heaven and serves as the defense lawyer of every soul brought before the Court. He's kind and compassionate, but too often overlooked by Western Hemisphere Christians as "some random dude" due to not matching the Renaissance renditions of him in European artwork. Aside from that, there's some pretty wild rumors (a few of them true) about the things he got up to before he died! The Preacher didn't even give him the time of day.
...Metatron, a.k.a "If God had a Text-to-Speech device", is a computer and translation engine that allows human souls to understand what E'l is trying to say. It is typically used by Enoch, the court stenographer, to record each and every trial. The Preacher considered the use of the machine an insult to his own intelligence, believing he was "smart enough to understand God's word".
...Ha-Satan, rather than being the "fallen" angel Lucifel as many have mistakenly believed, is the angelic crown prosecutor ("the prosecutor" being the meaning of the words "ha-satan"), who looks like a man in a black suit with a red tie and a goatee. While considered an angel, Ha-Satan is technically the personification of the Wrath that E'l once held; To spare humanity from the terrifying combination of anger and divine power, E'l expelled his own wrathful tendencies by creating Ha-Satan. The result was an entity that, while often angry, instead uses that anger towards discovering and pointing out the malicious actions of every soul brought before the Court, and lets his creator decide from that info whether a soul deserves the regional variant of paradise or suffering. The Preacher went on rants about how ungodly - or conspiratorial - it was to allow "the devil" into such a divine place.
...Lucifel, the camp gay favorite angel of E'l (though most angels actually can't experience libido, including him). He once tried to lead a group of angels to debate with E'l, suspecting the God was in fact a hypocrite; upon E'l explaining himself satisfactorially but with an admission of some existential dread (apparently, being the monotheistic equivalent of Captain Planet to a bunch of globally-dispersed Pantheon-leading "Planeteers" really, really sucks), Lucifel apologized and they agreed to never speak of that day again. Today, "Lucy" prepares every soul that is put on trial in the Court of Heaven for their judgement; his "makeover studio" causes the residual self-image of a person's body to be replaced by the true shape of their soul, revealing their vices (but also their virtues) so that no amount of lying can possibly hide the defendant's sins; they can try to pass it off as a crime of identical magnitude, but they cannot lessen it, cannot divert attention away from it, and can't even make it look worse than it actually is (you'd think no one would be "stupid" enough to make themselves seem worse than they actually are under divine judgement, but self-loathing and misplaced guilt can do a number on a person's self-preservation). The Preacher used a slur against him multiple times.
...also of note, despite not being relevant, is Iblis; not only are Lucifel and Ha-Satan not the same entity as each other, they are definitely not the same as Iblis, the Djinn who tried to replace God/E'l only to become the most infamous inmate of Hel (a prison for gods and other such entities who decide to use their position maliciously) and the one actually being referred to when someone in-universe says "the Devil". Iblis always, always takes the form of whatever his target has always wanted... at a price, of course. The less said about the cruel actions Iblis has enabled during his secret escapes to Earth, the better. The Preacher didn't know it, but Iblis had appeared to him when he was a teenager to offer him a way to murder the hypotenuse of his love triangle.
...last yet anything but least, E'l - the Abrahamic God Himself - has retired from governing the mortal/muggle world but is still the Court's judge. He doesn't speak so much as spout incomprehensively complex mathematical equations which must be translated into the defendant's language by Metatron. Apparently, E'l is the personification of "Omniscience", meaning that he knows... and is... every scientific truth of the Novel Comics Universe. One such truth is simply the nature of a human in a moral vacuum; despite the phrase "deliver us from evil" (which refers to the falsehood that humans start out as sinful and remain so until taught otherwise), humans start out truly neutral, and it is usually the love of a parent (or two) that puts nearly everyone on the side of good to start with. Even those who do not recieve such love naturally yearn for it, and it takes a truly unfortunate situation for any child to never recieve that, so it can be said that while a baby is not good or evil, it does want to become good. The Preacher, like most supervillains and more than one corrupt superhero, became evil because he believed he was inherently always right, something so maliciously false that E'l momentarily considered granting Ha-Satan temporary authority to punish the Preacher as Ha-Satan saw fit.
As you can guess, this is nothing like the Evangelical teachings that the Preacher latched onto in the 1960s, but even if it was, he would have essentially earned the ire of both sides of the war for the Throne of Heaven. With things being the way they are, and the Underworld being the local afterlife for Europe (including Nuremburg), you can tell exactly where the villain went. Cerberus (see Hades above) considers the Preacher's soul the tastiest part of the Tartarus Stew.
A Norwegian Genius with American citizenship who set about to prove God exists and did find proof (but never shared it), he tried to break into (and was instantly and permanently expelled from) the astral plane and urban theopolis known as New Jerusalem (capital of the Kingdom of Heaven). Realizing that he'd pissed off the Abrahamic God (an entity created when, long ago, all the polytheistic gods did a By Your Powers Combined to save the universe from Eldritch Horrorterrors) and would never have the afterlife he idealized, he swore revenge on the entire Abrahamic divinity - Angels, demons... Yeshua and Satan alike - and set about trying to change the world in such a way that no one would ever get into Heaven again ("...and once no one is going to Heaven... EVERYONE WILL BE!").
He started a TV show in the early 70s on a "spiritually-minded" TV network in the United States (ripping off another such show that was broadcast at the time) where he preached about fire and brimstone and convinced his viewers to "donate" shitloads of money. He then ended the show with one last "call to arms", claiming Jesus spoke to him and said the sinners needed to be purged from the Earth, before saying a crocodile-tear-filled goodbye and disappearing backstage.
In the late 70s, the government of Cameroon sold a significant amount of land to an unnamed caucasian man, who set about building a structure resembling a truly massive cathedral. By 1980, the structure - the (former) supervillain base known as the Altar - had been completed.
Then the Preacher began his evil plan (see the section in the setting's history on the 1980s for the details), knowing full well that Cameroon was not a signatory nation of the Cosmic Code. Without the threat of being attacked by the world's strongest militaries, he was able to create his most terrifying weapon, SIN 1.0...
The Preacher originally designed Synthetic Immunophage Nanites (known at the time as "Bioguard Killer Particulates") in 1910, when he was a teenager hoping to kill the girl who had spurned his advances and her chosen lover. Without equipment to build the tiny machines (equipment that wouldn't even be invented until years later), he filed the designs away and simply poisoned the two with an undetectable toxin he created instead.
He tried to create SIN in the 1950s, but this early version (known as "Original SIN") only infected a few people. The first was an apparently randomly-chosen man in the Belgian Congo whose case was recorded in 1959, targeted while the then-yet-to-be-named supervillain was on vacation (according to him, his family had been relatively wealthy but lost their wealth in the 1960s to his father's gambling addiction). One man in Norway, whose medical case was documented in 1966, was later said by the Preacher (who may have been lying) to have been his ex-brother-in-law, an atheist. (In-universe, atheists are people who don't believe in afterlives or astral planes, rather than not believing in Gods). Another, an American teenager whose condition was also recorded in 1966, appears to have no relation to the Preacher but was confirmed as an infectee by the Preacher's notes; the supervillain took offense to him kissing a Native American girl.
Finally, in 1981, with expensive equipment and after various unethical experiments, the Preacher created SIN 1.0, and spread it to communities in the United States that he considered "ungodly and expendable souls" (the Preacher's vengeance against the Abrahamic divinity was infamously illogically paired with a desire to prove to God that he was "worthy") in an attempt to destabilize the world. Due to the chosen transmission methods, aimed more at only killing those he considered ungodly than spreading efficiently, SIN 1.0 spread slowly enough - and in ways that were easy enough to contain - that it was treatable within two years. Additionally, cybernetics were allowing people to artificially enhance their immune system, making SIN 1.0 obsolete.
In 1985, SIN 2.0 was unleashed upon the world. Able to attack cybernetics, patched against the various SIN treatments that had become available, and able to upgrade SIN 1.0 nanomachinery to the new version, the second wave proved twice as deadly. However, it retained the same methods of transmission and many of those killed were those previously infected by SIN 1.0 (mostly drug users who continued to expose themselves to transmission vectors, rather than those who were infected through intercourse). In addition, the math says that - because SIN 2.0 did not infect 100% of SIN 1.0 survivors - the new version was less widespread than the original among the Preacher's intended targets.
The Preacher didn't realize it, but the world was secretly on to him. His minions included - unknowingly to him - dozens of covert agents, double agents, undercover cops, undercover superheroes, robot body doubles built by TanaCorp, and vampire spies planted by the Sanguine Masquerade ("evil" vampires, while manipulative, consider humans as a combination of an orchard tree and someone you take home from the bar, and didn't want to find out what would happen if a vampire got infected with SIN).
In 1992, after Cameroon finally admitted they f-cked up, the world made a collective assault on the Altar. The Preacher's minions were all dispatched, and the villain himself was captured and put on trial at Nuremburg. In 1998 he was found guilty of basically everything he was charged with, and executed.
As it turns out, his story goes on a little longer than that. The Kingdom of Heaven is the collective government of all astral planes. The Preacher was put on trial by the Supreme Court of Heaven, which judges all souls who believe in the ideals of the Abrahamic faiths. It was from stories of the Preacher's trial that a few key details about the Court and Kingdom are known...
...Yeshua, the ancient prophet and whose teachings Christianity is derived from (and whose Godfather, E'l, is literally the Abrahamic God), is a man with a frizzy beard and dark skin wearing rather shabby-looking clothes, who is currently the God of Heaven and serves as the defense lawyer of every soul brought before the Court. He's kind and compassionate, but too often overlooked by Western Hemisphere Christians as "some random dude" due to not matching the Renaissance renditions of him in European artwork. Aside from that, there's some pretty wild rumors (a few of them true) about the things he got up to before he died! The Preacher didn't even give him the time of day.
...Metatron, a.k.a "If God had a Text-to-Speech device", is a computer and translation engine that allows human souls to understand what E'l is trying to say. It is typically used by Enoch, the court stenographer, to record each and every trial. The Preacher considered the use of the machine an insult to his own intelligence, believing he was "smart enough to understand God's word".
...Ha-Satan, rather than being the "fallen" angel Lucifel as many have mistakenly believed, is the angelic crown prosecutor ("the prosecutor" being the meaning of the words "ha-satan"), who looks like a man in a black suit with a red tie and a goatee. While considered an angel, Ha-Satan is technically the personification of the Wrath that E'l once held; To spare humanity from the terrifying combination of anger and divine power, E'l expelled his own wrathful tendencies by creating Ha-Satan. The result was an entity that, while often angry, instead uses that anger towards discovering and pointing out the malicious actions of every soul brought before the Court, and lets his creator decide from that info whether a soul deserves the regional variant of paradise or suffering. The Preacher went on rants about how ungodly - or conspiratorial - it was to allow "the devil" into such a divine place.
...Lucifel, the camp gay favorite angel of E'l (though most angels actually can't experience libido, including him). He once tried to lead a group of angels to debate with E'l, suspecting the God was in fact a hypocrite; upon E'l explaining himself satisfactorially but with an admission of some existential dread (apparently, being the monotheistic equivalent of Captain Planet to a bunch of globally-dispersed Pantheon-leading "Planeteers" really, really sucks), Lucifel apologized and they agreed to never speak of that day again. Today, "Lucy" prepares every soul that is put on trial in the Court of Heaven for their judgement; his "makeover studio" causes the residual self-image of a person's body to be replaced by the true shape of their soul, revealing their vices (but also their virtues) so that no amount of lying can possibly hide the defendant's sins; they can try to pass it off as a crime of identical magnitude, but they cannot lessen it, cannot divert attention away from it, and can't even make it look worse than it actually is (you'd think no one would be "stupid" enough to make themselves seem worse than they actually are under divine judgement, but self-loathing and misplaced guilt can do a number on a person's self-preservation). The Preacher used a slur against him multiple times.
...also of note, despite not being relevant, is Iblis; not only are Lucifel and Ha-Satan not the same entity as each other, they are definitely not the same as Iblis, the Djinn who tried to replace God/E'l only to become the most infamous inmate of Hel (a prison for gods and other such entities who decide to use their position maliciously) and the one actually being referred to when someone in-universe says "the Devil". Iblis always, always takes the form of whatever his target has always wanted... at a price, of course. The less said about the cruel actions Iblis has enabled during his secret escapes to Earth, the better. The Preacher didn't know it, but Iblis had appeared to him when he was a teenager to offer him a way to murder the hypotenuse of his love triangle.
...last yet anything but least, E'l - the Abrahamic God Himself - has retired from governing the mortal/muggle world but is still the Court's judge. He doesn't speak so much as spout incomprehensively complex mathematical equations which must be translated into the defendant's language by Metatron. Apparently, E'l is the personification of "Omniscience", meaning that he knows... and is... every scientific truth of the Novel Comics Universe. One such truth is simply the nature of a human in a moral vacuum; despite the phrase "deliver us from evil" (which refers to the falsehood that humans start out as sinful and remain so until taught otherwise), humans start out truly neutral, and it is usually the love of a parent (or two) that puts nearly everyone on the side of good to start with. Even those who do not recieve such love naturally yearn for it, and it takes a truly unfortunate situation for any child to never recieve that, so it can be said that while a baby is not good or evil, it does want to become good. The Preacher, like most supervillains and more than one corrupt superhero, became evil because he believed he was inherently always right, something so maliciously false that E'l momentarily considered granting Ha-Satan temporary authority to punish the Preacher as Ha-Satan saw fit.
As you can guess, this is nothing like the Evangelical teachings that the Preacher latched onto in the 1960s, but even if it was, he would have essentially earned the ire of both sides of the war for the Throne of Heaven. With things being the way they are, and the Underworld being the local afterlife for Europe (including Nuremburg), you can tell exactly where the villain went. Cerberus (see Hades above) considers the Preacher's soul the tastiest part of the Tartarus Stew.
Founder of Mingl, the first social media giant, Anthony Ross was the son of a wealthy couple (Ross Arms has provided weapons to governments worldwide since at least WWI) and created Mingl while attending an prestigeous Ivy League College. This alone is pretty controversial, not the least because Mingl was supposed to be the college's new digital yearbook.
In 2008, a new hero appeared on the scene. Technetium, the Armored Man, was a mysterious individual in a suit of powered armor with a shiny white aesthetic reminiscent of Quill's product line at the time. Armed with non-lethal weaponry like zero-point energy generators, the new hero did a pretty decent job all considered... until the accident.
Mere weeks after first appearing, Technetium prevented a head-on collision between a school bus and a semi truck, which had been carrying unstable nitroglycerin to a disposal plant when its brakes had suddenly failed. Using his zero-point energy tech, he lifted the truck harmlessly into the air, let its wheels coast to a stop, and gently set it back down. Then, he turned to wave to the kids he'd saved... and was promptly hit from behind by a man driving home from work.
If you haven't read the history of the NCCU, you probably thought Technetium was killed or injured. Quite the opposite. The Technetium armor was made of advanced alloys discovered by Ross Arms (though only Anthony Ross knew this at the time, since he built it single-handedly), while the car that collided with him was made by a new car company based out of Shenzhen (a part of the Hong Kong urban area located in mainland China). The car's frame was made of an advanced plastic, but though the plastic was approved for use in automotive parts, it was originally designed to be used for the body panelling. The manufacturer of the vehicle used it as part of a composite with aluminum when designing the frame of this particular car, in order to cut costs.
The Technetium armor had a single dent in it from the sheer pressure of the vehicle tumbling directly on top of Technetium, after which he had to lift the vehicle off himself and save the man trapped inside the mangled car. It became clear in the investigation that the vehicle model was a death trap that would have to be recalled.
Technetium's reputation wouldn't have been worse for wear, if it wasn't for the fact that he had to appear in court to provide testimony. Since it was an international court for resolving situations involving foreign corporations, and the People's Republic of China was neither an American military ally nor a signatory nation of the Cosmic Code (China used its own Code, which - among other things - forced all Chinese heroes to take orders directly from the Chinese Communist Party), Technetium was forced to use his real identity to testify.
Since the Chinese car company was shut down by the CCP (who were not amused by the international incident it caused), and the driver knew Anthony had been standing in the middle of the road, Anthony decided not to take a chance of being sued and offered to pay the driver's medical bills and even build him an exosuit to compensate for the injuries sustained in the crash. Shortly afterward, he went public with his identity, knowing that keeping Technetium a secret anymore would be futile at best.
The public loved it. For once, a rich idiot with no day job was actually doing something good with his free time and money. At least, for a few years.
Technetium was more careful around cars and trucks after that point, which was probably a good thing because saving people from issues involving cars, trucks or limited access motorways somehow became a surprisingly common occurance for the Armored Man. In 2022, fed up with the dangers posed by automobiles, Anthony Ross bought the electric car company Techne Motors and initiated a software update that caused all the company's vehicles to be self-driving. The unintended issues (or, if you believe some of his less mentally stable fans, completely intended as a "final solution" to end the numerous downsides of car-centric infrastructure) that popped up from this forced update, which happened in November of 2022, are still being felt when the RP starts.
In 2008, a new hero appeared on the scene. Technetium, the Armored Man, was a mysterious individual in a suit of powered armor with a shiny white aesthetic reminiscent of Quill's product line at the time. Armed with non-lethal weaponry like zero-point energy generators, the new hero did a pretty decent job all considered... until the accident.
Mere weeks after first appearing, Technetium prevented a head-on collision between a school bus and a semi truck, which had been carrying unstable nitroglycerin to a disposal plant when its brakes had suddenly failed. Using his zero-point energy tech, he lifted the truck harmlessly into the air, let its wheels coast to a stop, and gently set it back down. Then, he turned to wave to the kids he'd saved... and was promptly hit from behind by a man driving home from work.
If you haven't read the history of the NCCU, you probably thought Technetium was killed or injured. Quite the opposite. The Technetium armor was made of advanced alloys discovered by Ross Arms (though only Anthony Ross knew this at the time, since he built it single-handedly), while the car that collided with him was made by a new car company based out of Shenzhen (a part of the Hong Kong urban area located in mainland China). The car's frame was made of an advanced plastic, but though the plastic was approved for use in automotive parts, it was originally designed to be used for the body panelling. The manufacturer of the vehicle used it as part of a composite with aluminum when designing the frame of this particular car, in order to cut costs.
The Technetium armor had a single dent in it from the sheer pressure of the vehicle tumbling directly on top of Technetium, after which he had to lift the vehicle off himself and save the man trapped inside the mangled car. It became clear in the investigation that the vehicle model was a death trap that would have to be recalled.
Technetium's reputation wouldn't have been worse for wear, if it wasn't for the fact that he had to appear in court to provide testimony. Since it was an international court for resolving situations involving foreign corporations, and the People's Republic of China was neither an American military ally nor a signatory nation of the Cosmic Code (China used its own Code, which - among other things - forced all Chinese heroes to take orders directly from the Chinese Communist Party), Technetium was forced to use his real identity to testify.
Since the Chinese car company was shut down by the CCP (who were not amused by the international incident it caused), and the driver knew Anthony had been standing in the middle of the road, Anthony decided not to take a chance of being sued and offered to pay the driver's medical bills and even build him an exosuit to compensate for the injuries sustained in the crash. Shortly afterward, he went public with his identity, knowing that keeping Technetium a secret anymore would be futile at best.
The public loved it. For once, a rich idiot with no day job was actually doing something good with his free time and money. At least, for a few years.
Technetium was more careful around cars and trucks after that point, which was probably a good thing because saving people from issues involving cars, trucks or limited access motorways somehow became a surprisingly common occurance for the Armored Man. In 2022, fed up with the dangers posed by automobiles, Anthony Ross bought the electric car company Techne Motors and initiated a software update that caused all the company's vehicles to be self-driving. The unintended issues (or, if you believe some of his less mentally stable fans, completely intended as a "final solution" to end the numerous downsides of car-centric infrastructure) that popped up from this forced update, which happened in November of 2022, are still being felt when the RP starts.
While King Card is obviously meant to be the counterpart of... a certain individual... he isn't that person or a stand-in for them.
Born in Las Vegas in the 1950s, King's early past is one of silver spoons and cunning. By the time he was 20, he owned every casino on the strip and controlled both the mob bosses and the cops. His criminal genius was outmatched only by his narcisissm, as he began forming a brand out of his family name... Card became synonymous with luxury, though infamously not in a way that implied exclusivity or quality.
As time passed, he began making mistakes because of his egotism. He became a business mogul only because he envied titans of industry, and lost money. He played golf only because he envied famous fictional athletes, and wasted money. He became a reality TV host only because he envied celebrities, and though he became famous, behind the scenes his "patronage" only ever led to the real talent becoming his enemy. Jealous of superheroes while simultaneously dismissing them as "weak" for having morals, he decided to become a supervillain, only to be turned in to the police by the first supervillain team he went to because they knew he didn't have any powers and that he was a treacherous bastard.
He bought his way out of the charges laid and decided those supervillains... nay, the WORLD! ...would pay for "underestimating" him. His criminal genius resurfaced, and the President Evil gambit began. (Suffice to say, he began the plan because he was envious of politicians. King had always seen power as something to take from those weaker than himself... which was everyone, in his eyes... and political power was no exception.)
He actually tried to run for POTUS several times, even before hosting The Scholarship, but it was only in 2016 - thanks to various underhanded tactics and a couple of actions that are outright illegal - that he succeeded.
Familiar crimes of President Card included eliminating taxes for the rich, blacklisting Mexican superheroes from America, and selling military and intelligence secrets to American foes, not to mention impeding various investigations into his activities (both as a private citizen and as someone holding a public office) during his time in office, but he is more than just a political strawman with a paper-thin disguise. He also tried to start a war with China by outright threatening to nuke them, hired the misandrist supervillainess Ashen Witch to sow seeds of anarchy in Colombia, and had "former" minions start wildfires in Australia, on the Pacific Coast of North America, and in Brazil. He's even suspected of being involved with the in-universe version of Brexit.
He was not re-elected in 2020, but true to his supervillain aspirations he attempted to stage a coup using his most radical supporters as insurrectionists before his term came to an end. When that failed, he stole the key to the Nuclear Football, clubbed the Secret Service Agent carrying the Nuclear Football, and tried to launch all of America's nukes, including the Orbital Hyper-Nuclear Offensive platforms, to destroy the world he couldn't own; he was narrowly stopped by Florida Man, and Card is currently in a supermax prison, awaiting execution for treason, crimes against humanity and the attempted extermination of the human race.
Born in Las Vegas in the 1950s, King's early past is one of silver spoons and cunning. By the time he was 20, he owned every casino on the strip and controlled both the mob bosses and the cops. His criminal genius was outmatched only by his narcisissm, as he began forming a brand out of his family name... Card became synonymous with luxury, though infamously not in a way that implied exclusivity or quality.
As time passed, he began making mistakes because of his egotism. He became a business mogul only because he envied titans of industry, and lost money. He played golf only because he envied famous fictional athletes, and wasted money. He became a reality TV host only because he envied celebrities, and though he became famous, behind the scenes his "patronage" only ever led to the real talent becoming his enemy. Jealous of superheroes while simultaneously dismissing them as "weak" for having morals, he decided to become a supervillain, only to be turned in to the police by the first supervillain team he went to because they knew he didn't have any powers and that he was a treacherous bastard.
He bought his way out of the charges laid and decided those supervillains... nay, the WORLD! ...would pay for "underestimating" him. His criminal genius resurfaced, and the President Evil gambit began. (Suffice to say, he began the plan because he was envious of politicians. King had always seen power as something to take from those weaker than himself... which was everyone, in his eyes... and political power was no exception.)
He actually tried to run for POTUS several times, even before hosting The Scholarship, but it was only in 2016 - thanks to various underhanded tactics and a couple of actions that are outright illegal - that he succeeded.
Familiar crimes of President Card included eliminating taxes for the rich, blacklisting Mexican superheroes from America, and selling military and intelligence secrets to American foes, not to mention impeding various investigations into his activities (both as a private citizen and as someone holding a public office) during his time in office, but he is more than just a political strawman with a paper-thin disguise. He also tried to start a war with China by outright threatening to nuke them, hired the misandrist supervillainess Ashen Witch to sow seeds of anarchy in Colombia, and had "former" minions start wildfires in Australia, on the Pacific Coast of North America, and in Brazil. He's even suspected of being involved with the in-universe version of Brexit.
He was not re-elected in 2020, but true to his supervillain aspirations he attempted to stage a coup using his most radical supporters as insurrectionists before his term came to an end. When that failed, he stole the key to the Nuclear Football, clubbed the Secret Service Agent carrying the Nuclear Football, and tried to launch all of America's nukes, including the Orbital Hyper-Nuclear Offensive platforms, to destroy the world he couldn't own; he was narrowly stopped by Florida Man, and Card is currently in a supermax prison, awaiting execution for treason, crimes against humanity and the attempted extermination of the human race.
The heiress to the Chandler family fortune, Ashley grew up in Washington D.C. and is as much a rich white person as someone can get. Her mother was an infamous mysogynist who only considered men to be a source of money and pigs who demanded intercourse in return for said money.
Easily bored by the more traditional indulgences of wealth and power, and feeling that her mother was a coward who wouldn't fight for her views, Ashley began investigating the occult to try and gain metapowers. She succeeded after summoning Invidia (the Kaiju personification of Envy) in 2004, who granted her black magic "in return for Ashley's soul" (the actual details of having your soul enthralled are a bit more complex but that's beside the point).
Ashen Witch is now a particularly hated supervillain, most surpisingly among women and especially women with knowledge of the arcane rituals of the Wicca. Her actions have propped up the idea of witch hunts enough for anti-magician sentiment to make a comeback in some places (the Southern USA chief among them). She also was revealed as working for President Card when she tried to promote a culture of anarchism in Colombia in 2017 and 2018.
Easily bored by the more traditional indulgences of wealth and power, and feeling that her mother was a coward who wouldn't fight for her views, Ashley began investigating the occult to try and gain metapowers. She succeeded after summoning Invidia (the Kaiju personification of Envy) in 2004, who granted her black magic "in return for Ashley's soul" (the actual details of having your soul enthralled are a bit more complex but that's beside the point).
Ashen Witch is now a particularly hated supervillain, most surpisingly among women and especially women with knowledge of the arcane rituals of the Wicca. Her actions have propped up the idea of witch hunts enough for anti-magician sentiment to make a comeback in some places (the Southern USA chief among them). She also was revealed as working for President Card when she tried to promote a culture of anarchism in Colombia in 2017 and 2018.
It's tough being beautiful, at least according to Silvia. Her powers manifested at an extremely young age in the form of her "angelic eyes", which have silver irises lined with tiny inscriptions in an unknown language. Anyone who directly sees them experiences sheer, overwhelming beauty, which has such a potent effect on the biochemistry of the human brain that it can cure non-clinical depression (along with temporarily treating clinical depression) and on more than one occasion has actually inspired a villain to give up crime entirely to pursue a career as an artist. Her parents, realizing what she was capable of, began making a name for her by entering her in beauty pageants from the age of six, but as Silvia got older (and realized how shallow and catty her skinnier, more buxom rivals could be), she saw more value in using her eyes to bring people joy and peace of mind than in pursuing profit.
When she was 19 years old, Silvia, now Silver Swan, joined the California branch of the Metapowers Guild. People loved her, she loved them, and everything was good... until Stratosphere decided that he loved her more than anyone else and wouldn't take no for an answer. She rejected his advances at first, but his ultimatum was clear: Be his, or get blacklisted and never work as a superhero again. Soon, she discovered that she was not the only one who had been manipulated in this way, and finally came forward with her story, starting a chain reaction that rocked the superhero community to its core. She does not approve of Lioness' methods, having seen the good that the men around her have achieved as heroes, but like Stratosphere, Lioness' ultimatum is clear: Join her, or have her career canceled and never work as a superhero again.
When she was 19 years old, Silvia, now Silver Swan, joined the California branch of the Metapowers Guild. People loved her, she loved them, and everything was good... until Stratosphere decided that he loved her more than anyone else and wouldn't take no for an answer. She rejected his advances at first, but his ultimatum was clear: Be his, or get blacklisted and never work as a superhero again. Soon, she discovered that she was not the only one who had been manipulated in this way, and finally came forward with her story, starting a chain reaction that rocked the superhero community to its core. She does not approve of Lioness' methods, having seen the good that the men around her have achieved as heroes, but like Stratosphere, Lioness' ultimatum is clear: Join her, or have her career canceled and never work as a superhero again.
It takes a lot for someone to fall from grace. It takes a lot more for someone to fall from grace twice in one lifetime.
Steven Wein had it all: Good looks, money, women, charisma, money, a successful acting career... oh, and money. Can't forget that. But as the years went by, his health slowly began to worsen, and so too did his reputation in Hollywood. In a one-two punch of bad luck meeting bad decisions, his latest starring role tanked at the box office, and allegations that he had been having an affair with his married co-star soured his pristine image. If all that wasn't enough, less than a month later, he found himself in the hospital - somehow, in a world of immortals, he was dying.
The doctors told Steven that he was suffering from a rare genetic condition called quasicratia - a half-developed superpower that was wreaking havoc on his body from the inside. They suggested that he enjoy the time he had left, but Steven wasn't about to be told there was nothing that could be done. He demanded that a treatment be found, and made it clear to them in no uncertain terms that money was no object. One day, he was visited by a "specialist", who made him an offer: Volunteer to test an experimental new Genius-developed drug, tailor-made (at great monetary expense, of course) for his particular physiology and genetic quirks. If it worked, it would turn him into a superhuman. If it didn't, the injection would kill him inside of an hour. You don't have to be a Genius yourself to guess how Steven responded.
Steven took full advantage of the second chance he had been given. Now calling himself Stratosphere, he burst onto the superhero scene like a bolt of lightning, marketing himself as "The Modern-Day Zeus" with the power to alter the weather in a spherical area. (Up to what limit, you ask? A reasonable one, but don't expect him to tell.) To his credit, he really did give the whole thing an honest try, but then the sponsorships and fan mail started pouring in, and before long, he'd started falling back into his old habits. Eventually, he was made head of recruitment for the California branch of the Metapowers Guild, and his steady decline into disgrace began once more.
The word no doesn't mean a lot to a man who had always gotten whatever he wanted, and his position of authority meant that he could blacklist anyone that wouldn't let him do as he pleased, including the impressionable young heroines who would do anything for a shot at the big time. Silvia Anati, the Silver Swan, wasn't the first of the women he coerced and certainly wouldn't be the last, but she was the one that never left his mind. He thought she was the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen - then again, who didn't? - and he was determined to have her all to himself. She refused his advances, unwilling to spoil the good name she had built up for herself during her time with the Guild, and in a fit of thunderous rage, he threatened to revoke her membership. So she did what he asked... and the very next day, gave the sordid details to every single newspaper in the country.
Was that last one-night stand worth sacrificing his status, his reputation, and his integrity? Probably not, but it happened anyway. Stratosphere disappeared from the public eye shortly thereafter and remains missing to this day, but ever since taking over his position, Lioness has sworn to hunt him down and bring him to justice. Well... justice as she sees it, anyway.
Steven Wein had it all: Good looks, money, women, charisma, money, a successful acting career... oh, and money. Can't forget that. But as the years went by, his health slowly began to worsen, and so too did his reputation in Hollywood. In a one-two punch of bad luck meeting bad decisions, his latest starring role tanked at the box office, and allegations that he had been having an affair with his married co-star soured his pristine image. If all that wasn't enough, less than a month later, he found himself in the hospital - somehow, in a world of immortals, he was dying.
The doctors told Steven that he was suffering from a rare genetic condition called quasicratia - a half-developed superpower that was wreaking havoc on his body from the inside. They suggested that he enjoy the time he had left, but Steven wasn't about to be told there was nothing that could be done. He demanded that a treatment be found, and made it clear to them in no uncertain terms that money was no object. One day, he was visited by a "specialist", who made him an offer: Volunteer to test an experimental new Genius-developed drug, tailor-made (at great monetary expense, of course) for his particular physiology and genetic quirks. If it worked, it would turn him into a superhuman. If it didn't, the injection would kill him inside of an hour. You don't have to be a Genius yourself to guess how Steven responded.
Steven took full advantage of the second chance he had been given. Now calling himself Stratosphere, he burst onto the superhero scene like a bolt of lightning, marketing himself as "The Modern-Day Zeus" with the power to alter the weather in a spherical area. (Up to what limit, you ask? A reasonable one, but don't expect him to tell.) To his credit, he really did give the whole thing an honest try, but then the sponsorships and fan mail started pouring in, and before long, he'd started falling back into his old habits. Eventually, he was made head of recruitment for the California branch of the Metapowers Guild, and his steady decline into disgrace began once more.
The word no doesn't mean a lot to a man who had always gotten whatever he wanted, and his position of authority meant that he could blacklist anyone that wouldn't let him do as he pleased, including the impressionable young heroines who would do anything for a shot at the big time. Silvia Anati, the Silver Swan, wasn't the first of the women he coerced and certainly wouldn't be the last, but she was the one that never left his mind. He thought she was the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen - then again, who didn't? - and he was determined to have her all to himself. She refused his advances, unwilling to spoil the good name she had built up for herself during her time with the Guild, and in a fit of thunderous rage, he threatened to revoke her membership. So she did what he asked... and the very next day, gave the sordid details to every single newspaper in the country.
Was that last one-night stand worth sacrificing his status, his reputation, and his integrity? Probably not, but it happened anyway. Stratosphere disappeared from the public eye shortly thereafter and remains missing to this day, but ever since taking over his position, Lioness has sworn to hunt him down and bring him to justice. Well... justice as she sees it, anyway.
Leona was born in Los Angeles under less-than-ideal circumstances. Her father, a rich white doctor, had what he thought would be a one-night stand with a black hairstylist, only for her to reveal that she was pregnant and essentially blackmail him into marriage. Though Leona lived a life of luxury growing up, her father was absent most of the time, and when he wasn't, he was a physically-abusive alcoholic. She was almost exclusively raised by her mother, who put the idea into her head that men, especially white men like her father, would always abuse even the smallest amount of power.
One night, when Leona was 15 years old, her father came home more inebriated and belligerent than usual. Her parents' arguing turned to fighting, which wasn't unheard of, but when he struck her mother across the face, Leona confronted him. At that moment, her powers manifested for the first time, giving her superhuman strength, sharp claws on her fingers, and a concussive roar than sent him flying out of a second-story window. As the paramedics took him away in an ambulance, Leona's mother told her that she had done the right thing, and that "evil done to an oppressor is no evil at all", a motto which has since gone down in infamy.
The newly-christened Lioness started her vigilante career not long afterward, a career which has made her a contentious figure due to her practice of ignoring, and sometimes actively abetting, crimes committed by women against men. A few months later, she had joined the Valkyries, and ten years after that, she had become the leader of their second generation of heroines as previous members retired. Today, she is the head of the California branch of the Metapowers Guild, attempting to rebuild the public perception of superheroes according to her own black-and-white ideas of good and evil. It's possible she believes she's taking some form of vengeance on her father by doing this. Then again, it's also possible that her father rubbed off on her more than she'd care to admit...
One night, when Leona was 15 years old, her father came home more inebriated and belligerent than usual. Her parents' arguing turned to fighting, which wasn't unheard of, but when he struck her mother across the face, Leona confronted him. At that moment, her powers manifested for the first time, giving her superhuman strength, sharp claws on her fingers, and a concussive roar than sent him flying out of a second-story window. As the paramedics took him away in an ambulance, Leona's mother told her that she had done the right thing, and that "evil done to an oppressor is no evil at all", a motto which has since gone down in infamy.
The newly-christened Lioness started her vigilante career not long afterward, a career which has made her a contentious figure due to her practice of ignoring, and sometimes actively abetting, crimes committed by women against men. A few months later, she had joined the Valkyries, and ten years after that, she had become the leader of their second generation of heroines as previous members retired. Today, she is the head of the California branch of the Metapowers Guild, attempting to rebuild the public perception of superheroes according to her own black-and-white ideas of good and evil. It's possible she believes she's taking some form of vengeance on her father by doing this. Then again, it's also possible that her father rubbed off on her more than she'd care to admit...
He'll tell you that he's one of the smartest men alive, but Dan Ryuzaki is not a Genius - if he was, he wouldn't be what he is today. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii to a Japanese-American family, he studied at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he acquired a PhD in theoretical physics by the age of 26. He and several other former students were directly responsible for an event now referred to as "The Twist", wherein a machine they had illegally constructed in a laboratory basement, intended for the purposes of studying hyperdimensional folding, suffered a catastrophic failure and exploded. Dan was the only one caught in the blast, and he was originally presumed dead, but six weeks later, he returned, claiming that he had been to the “eleventh dimension” and unlocked the secrets of folding space and time.
As his moniker implies, Dan possesses complete control over the region of space-time his body inhabits, allowing him to stretch, contort, and yes, fold his body into any shape he desires with no harm to himself. Besides the obvious benefits, it has also enabled him to consciously distort the lenses of his eyes in a way that neutralizes his lifelong nearsightedness. In addition, the gloves he wears contain a perfected version of the original machine’s spatial folding technology, allowing them to create two-way portals, though their active range is limited to about 15 feet.
Making use of his new powers and unusual technology, the Folding Man quickly became well-known among the Metapowers Guild’s Hawaiian branch, but despite his friendly and unprejudiced demeanor, his cavalier attitude of “science isn’t about why, it’s about why not” meant that others’ opinions of him were not always flattering. Thankfully, over the years, he’s become much more aware of his personal flaws, even managing to win the heart of Tidewinder, who originally argued with him incessantly, but his once-clean reputation as a hero has now been dragged through the mud by Lioness, and for the first time, he finds himself facing a problem that his powers, gadgets and intellect may not be able to solve.
As his moniker implies, Dan possesses complete control over the region of space-time his body inhabits, allowing him to stretch, contort, and yes, fold his body into any shape he desires with no harm to himself. Besides the obvious benefits, it has also enabled him to consciously distort the lenses of his eyes in a way that neutralizes his lifelong nearsightedness. In addition, the gloves he wears contain a perfected version of the original machine’s spatial folding technology, allowing them to create two-way portals, though their active range is limited to about 15 feet.
Making use of his new powers and unusual technology, the Folding Man quickly became well-known among the Metapowers Guild’s Hawaiian branch, but despite his friendly and unprejudiced demeanor, his cavalier attitude of “science isn’t about why, it’s about why not” meant that others’ opinions of him were not always flattering. Thankfully, over the years, he’s become much more aware of his personal flaws, even managing to win the heart of Tidewinder, who originally argued with him incessantly, but his once-clean reputation as a hero has now been dragged through the mud by Lioness, and for the first time, he finds himself facing a problem that his powers, gadgets and intellect may not be able to solve.
Hawaiian myth states that when a person dies, their spirit may remain in the mortal world in the form of an animal. Called aumakua, these ancestral spirits watch over their descendants to bring them good fortune and protect them from disaster. When she was nineteen, Hokulani Kamealoha learned that sometimes, truth is just as fantastical as legend.
Living next to the ocean your whole life can make a person into a dreamer, and Hokulani had a dream of her own: To become a champion surfer and have her mastery of the waves recognized by the world. She practiced obsessively, and every free moment not spent atop her surfboard was spent drenched in saltwater after a fall. She had to be the best, no matter the cost, and if that meant sneaking out in the middle of the night with a storm on the horizon, well… what could possibly stop a reckless teenager? She quickly came to realize her mistake when she was knocked off of her board, caught in the roiling undertow, and dragged out to sea. But just when she thought it was all over, she saw something that she struggles to believe to this day: A gigantic octopus curling its tentacles around her and lifting her up above the waves. The octopus spoke to her in the voice of her grandfather, telling her that he had been watching her, and that Kanaloa, great god of the ocean, was so touched by her unending love for his domain that he wished to grant her a blessing. She would become Kanaloa's agent in the mortal world, sworn to protect the bounties of the sea against anyone who would exploit them, and in exchange, all the waters of the world would be at her command.
After her brush with death, Hokulani finally understood just how precious and fragile life could be. She readily accepted Kanaloa's blessing and joined the Hawaiian branch of the Metapowers Guild before even deciding on an alias. It was here that she met her future husband Dan Ryuzaki, otherwise known as the Folding Man, who suggested the name Tidewinder as a clever play on words (well, he thought it was clever, at least). His devil-may-care approach to both science and superheroics was a constant point of contention between the two, but a decade of camaraderie and saving each other's lives on a regular basis made them both into more understanding people. Today their love and respect for each other is so strong that they're considered a threat to Lioness' misandrist agenda and have both been banned from the Guild, but Tidewinder has never forgotten the promise she made to herself. To her, all life is worth protecting, and she will not stand idly by and watch a once-proud organization of heroes devolve into civil war.
Living next to the ocean your whole life can make a person into a dreamer, and Hokulani had a dream of her own: To become a champion surfer and have her mastery of the waves recognized by the world. She practiced obsessively, and every free moment not spent atop her surfboard was spent drenched in saltwater after a fall. She had to be the best, no matter the cost, and if that meant sneaking out in the middle of the night with a storm on the horizon, well… what could possibly stop a reckless teenager? She quickly came to realize her mistake when she was knocked off of her board, caught in the roiling undertow, and dragged out to sea. But just when she thought it was all over, she saw something that she struggles to believe to this day: A gigantic octopus curling its tentacles around her and lifting her up above the waves. The octopus spoke to her in the voice of her grandfather, telling her that he had been watching her, and that Kanaloa, great god of the ocean, was so touched by her unending love for his domain that he wished to grant her a blessing. She would become Kanaloa's agent in the mortal world, sworn to protect the bounties of the sea against anyone who would exploit them, and in exchange, all the waters of the world would be at her command.
After her brush with death, Hokulani finally understood just how precious and fragile life could be. She readily accepted Kanaloa's blessing and joined the Hawaiian branch of the Metapowers Guild before even deciding on an alias. It was here that she met her future husband Dan Ryuzaki, otherwise known as the Folding Man, who suggested the name Tidewinder as a clever play on words (well, he thought it was clever, at least). His devil-may-care approach to both science and superheroics was a constant point of contention between the two, but a decade of camaraderie and saving each other's lives on a regular basis made them both into more understanding people. Today their love and respect for each other is so strong that they're considered a threat to Lioness' misandrist agenda and have both been banned from the Guild, but Tidewinder has never forgotten the promise she made to herself. To her, all life is worth protecting, and she will not stand idly by and watch a once-proud organization of heroes devolve into civil war.
Don't worry, nobody worth respecting actually calls her "Yellow Devil".
The Kingdom of Bhutan has two things going for it in-universe. One, as in real life, the monarchs of Bhutan have become progressively and refreshingly more pro-democracy since the 1950s, culminating in the country becoming a full-fledged Constitutional Monarchy - that can impeach their King with a two-thirds majority vote - in 2008. Two, something only in-universe, they're located on top of the world's largest supply of "unobtanium".
This rare material of extreme value is, in fact, a massive cache of various radioactive metals located deep under the ground of Bhutan's location in the Himalayas. It's never been mined, but it did provide Bhutan with an easy way to build futuristic cities and the world's largest meltdown-proof nuclear power plant, which accounts for 98% of the nation's total energy output (the remaining 2% being covered by wind and solar energy) and 107% of its total energy usage. Yes, that's right, Bhutan creates more energy than it uses entirely via carbon-neutral means, and is thus the world's only carbon-negative nation (even IRL, but obviously for non-fantastical reasons here in boringworld). They sell the excess energy to India.
Aside from that, Bhutan has a healthy obsession with Shenlong ("Oriental dragons"), which are called Druk in the Dzongkha language. If you're thinking "Wait, isn't that too similar to the words 'drake' and 'dragon' from Western culture?" then you've just learned about the long-extinct pan-Eurasian precursor language known to us as proto-Indo-European! Unfortunately, if proto-Indo-European cultures had a name for their language, it (like the cultures themselves) has been buried in the sands of time.
Anyway, it's unsurprising that Bhutan is known as Druk Yul ("Land of the Thunder Dragon"), and its people call themselves the Drukpa ("Dragon people"). If they were referring to Western dragons, this would be rather pretentious, however Shenglong are not meant to be taken as literal giant beasts of great power lording over humans the way Western dragons are. Rather, Shenlong are considered a living metaphor for the power of humans themselves to drastically alter their environments, and so such terms really just mean "I am Human, I am/was here."
The Dragon Queen - "Druk Gyaltsuen" in Dzongkha, the Bhutanese language - is not one person, but is a role taken by the current wife of the King of Bhutan (to date, every King of Bhutan in-universe has been a member of the Wangdruk royal family). Each Dragon Queen has been the nation's most famous superheroine since the 1960s, though her identity as the King's wife is a little-known open secret (especially to foreigners that underestimate Bhutan as "an unnoteworthy mountainous nation in Asia"). The powers of the Dragon Queen are rooted in Buddhist divine magics, which each successive queen has to learn before she can take on the role (though the basics of the culture behind said magic are known to pretty much everyone in Bhutan, ensuring a good foundation for learning). Many people in Bhutan have latent ability to use these capabilities, but so far and for reasons unknown, only the wives of the Wangdruk royal family have consistantly had this particular metapowered ability.
The current Druk Gyaltsuen is Pema Yangdon. She's a very worldly type, a skilled diplomat and a morally-grounded heroine. Her favorite hobby is beekeeping; while domesticated honey bees cannot survive in Bhutan, she knows how to harvest the hives of wild Giant honey bees that are native to the Himalayas without angering the aggressively defensive bees. As for her personality and her life outside of magic and politics, Dragon Queens are somehow aware of the fourth wall, and Pema makes an effort to keep herself private in that sense.
Now you're probably wondering "What kind of racist asshole calls a superheroine a 'yellow devil'?" The short answer is "politicians". The long answer is that politicians are so used to making deals with devils (both the metaphorical and literal kind), that when a beautiful and mysterious Asian Sorceress-Queen offers to give them their deepest desire in return for a "political favor", they take it.
The results? Well, as a heroine, what she asks such politicians for is always to the betterment of the world in general. In addition, to hold up her end of the deal, she simply grants the mark a blessing which causes them to vividly dream of their deepest desire every time they sleep. The dream isn't an illusion either, but an actual miniature astral plane that allows them to genuinely have what they asked for. That said, most politicians who she makes deals with are both corrupt and have dark secrets, traits which almost always become clearly visible to the public shortly after they play their part. Many disgraced politicians have found themselves sleeping constantly to be "awake" in their dreams and be "asleep" in life, desperate to avoid the "nightmare" of their well-deserved prison cell.
Thus, her reputation as the "yellow devil" is one of a boogeyman among the world's wealthy elite and supervillains. Even when you're evil, not every dark bargain you make is with someone who is also evil. Sometimes, every so often, an uncorrupted angel (even a metaphorical one) will make a deal to buy a rotten soul in return for something innocuous that (once again, metaphorically in this case) sets Yeshua's divine plan in motion... and secures that evil soul's damnation in the process.
The Kingdom of Bhutan has two things going for it in-universe. One, as in real life, the monarchs of Bhutan have become progressively and refreshingly more pro-democracy since the 1950s, culminating in the country becoming a full-fledged Constitutional Monarchy - that can impeach their King with a two-thirds majority vote - in 2008. Two, something only in-universe, they're located on top of the world's largest supply of "unobtanium".
This rare material of extreme value is, in fact, a massive cache of various radioactive metals located deep under the ground of Bhutan's location in the Himalayas. It's never been mined, but it did provide Bhutan with an easy way to build futuristic cities and the world's largest meltdown-proof nuclear power plant, which accounts for 98% of the nation's total energy output (the remaining 2% being covered by wind and solar energy) and 107% of its total energy usage. Yes, that's right, Bhutan creates more energy than it uses entirely via carbon-neutral means, and is thus the world's only carbon-negative nation (even IRL, but obviously for non-fantastical reasons here in boringworld). They sell the excess energy to India.
Aside from that, Bhutan has a healthy obsession with Shenlong ("Oriental dragons"), which are called Druk in the Dzongkha language. If you're thinking "Wait, isn't that too similar to the words 'drake' and 'dragon' from Western culture?" then you've just learned about the long-extinct pan-Eurasian precursor language known to us as proto-Indo-European! Unfortunately, if proto-Indo-European cultures had a name for their language, it (like the cultures themselves) has been buried in the sands of time.
Anyway, it's unsurprising that Bhutan is known as Druk Yul ("Land of the Thunder Dragon"), and its people call themselves the Drukpa ("Dragon people"). If they were referring to Western dragons, this would be rather pretentious, however Shenglong are not meant to be taken as literal giant beasts of great power lording over humans the way Western dragons are. Rather, Shenlong are considered a living metaphor for the power of humans themselves to drastically alter their environments, and so such terms really just mean "I am Human, I am/was here."
The Dragon Queen - "Druk Gyaltsuen" in Dzongkha, the Bhutanese language - is not one person, but is a role taken by the current wife of the King of Bhutan (to date, every King of Bhutan in-universe has been a member of the Wangdruk royal family). Each Dragon Queen has been the nation's most famous superheroine since the 1960s, though her identity as the King's wife is a little-known open secret (especially to foreigners that underestimate Bhutan as "an unnoteworthy mountainous nation in Asia"). The powers of the Dragon Queen are rooted in Buddhist divine magics, which each successive queen has to learn before she can take on the role (though the basics of the culture behind said magic are known to pretty much everyone in Bhutan, ensuring a good foundation for learning). Many people in Bhutan have latent ability to use these capabilities, but so far and for reasons unknown, only the wives of the Wangdruk royal family have consistantly had this particular metapowered ability.
The current Druk Gyaltsuen is Pema Yangdon. She's a very worldly type, a skilled diplomat and a morally-grounded heroine. Her favorite hobby is beekeeping; while domesticated honey bees cannot survive in Bhutan, she knows how to harvest the hives of wild Giant honey bees that are native to the Himalayas without angering the aggressively defensive bees. As for her personality and her life outside of magic and politics, Dragon Queens are somehow aware of the fourth wall, and Pema makes an effort to keep herself private in that sense.
Now you're probably wondering "What kind of racist asshole calls a superheroine a 'yellow devil'?" The short answer is "politicians". The long answer is that politicians are so used to making deals with devils (both the metaphorical and literal kind), that when a beautiful and mysterious Asian Sorceress-Queen offers to give them their deepest desire in return for a "political favor", they take it.
The results? Well, as a heroine, what she asks such politicians for is always to the betterment of the world in general. In addition, to hold up her end of the deal, she simply grants the mark a blessing which causes them to vividly dream of their deepest desire every time they sleep. The dream isn't an illusion either, but an actual miniature astral plane that allows them to genuinely have what they asked for. That said, most politicians who she makes deals with are both corrupt and have dark secrets, traits which almost always become clearly visible to the public shortly after they play their part. Many disgraced politicians have found themselves sleeping constantly to be "awake" in their dreams and be "asleep" in life, desperate to avoid the "nightmare" of their well-deserved prison cell.
Thus, her reputation as the "yellow devil" is one of a boogeyman among the world's wealthy elite and supervillains. Even when you're evil, not every dark bargain you make is with someone who is also evil. Sometimes, every so often, an uncorrupted angel (even a metaphorical one) will make a deal to buy a rotten soul in return for something innocuous that (once again, metaphorically in this case) sets Yeshua's divine plan in motion... and secures that evil soul's damnation in the process.
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