A World of Heroes Timeline

Circa 66 Million BCE

The Seekers, a race of alien intelligences so powerful as to be considered cosmic gods, visit Earth for the first time. They find a native species recently grown to sentience, the Saurians, evolved from the dinosaur’s branch of the terrestrial tree of life. The aliens undertake to study and test the species, as they have done on countless other worlds across the universe for uncounted eons. Their motives and ultimate goals are as inscrutable to the Saurians as they have been to all other species who have met them; and while their methods often seem capricious or even cruel, it is believed by many of those lesser species that the space gods seek some higher purpose, beyond mortal comprehension.

Over the course of almost two thousand years, the Seekers make repeated visits, in their Cultivator aspect, to check on (and perhaps tweak?) the Saurian’s progress. At the end of this period the alien gods return in their Reaper aspect, to judge the results of their experiments… and harvest anything worthwhile (as judged by whatever standards such beings might have). They apparently find the Saurians wanting in some way, and decide to end their study. What follows has long been debated amongst those familiar with the history — either the Seekers aim an asteroid at the planet, knowing it will trigger an ELE (extinction level event) and thereby reset the evolutionary process and give life a chance to try again; or they simply allow a naturally occurring event to take place without any intervention. There is fragmentary evidence to support either scenario, but across such a vast gulf of time, it seems impossible to know the truth with any certainty.

Whatever the truth, the Saurians are advanced enough to see their doom coming, if not advanced enough to stop it. Many of them do blame the Seekers, of course, whether for causing the event or simply for not stopping it. Whatever the ultimate reason for their impending extinction, one faction of Saurian scientist/mages are determined to survive, at any cost… and they devise a terrible ritual to achieve that end. It will require the death of over three million of their fellow Saurians, a mass sacrifice designed to power a great techno-magical spell which will send a large island landmass, La’suria, forward in time 10,000 years. This should be enough time, the techno-mages calculate, for the planetary ecology to have recovered sufficiently to support higher life again.

Not wishing to risk this ploy becoming known to either the Seekers, or to their fellows, the Saurian rebels time their unholy ritual (the Great Working) for the instant of the asteroid’s impact, on the far side of the planet. What their best and brightest have failed to account for, however, is how the necrotic energies of billions of other lives — plant, animal, and sapient — being snuffed out in that same instant will impact their Working. The result of this miscalculation is a ritual overcharged by several orders of magnitude – the Circle of Masters is literally burned to ash, from the inside out, their physical forms unable to contain such power. Even while dying, however, they manage to channel that power to their purposes. As planned, a sphere containing the island-continent, some ocean, atmosphere, and a great deal of planetary crust and mantle, is hurled forward in time — not by a mere 10,000 years, but by a staggering 66 million years.

Circa 20,000 BCE

The Saurian techno-sorcery of 66 million years earlier brings a small-continent-sized chunk of matter into existence in the southwestern reaches of what is today called the Pacific Ocean, exchanging places with the equivalent matter already there. The tremendous energies involved send massive tsunamis around the world, and shockwaves into the very core of the planet. A bubble of magma, mantle and crust on the opposite side of the globe thrusts up a corresponding, if somewhat smaller, mass of land out of the future Atlantic Ocean, birthing the island-continent of Atlantis.

In the first few years following their arrival in the future, the Saurian survivors are in considerable disarray. The leaders of the Great Working are dead in the casting and overcharging of their ritual. The land, although on the whole relatively intact, has nonetheless suffered massive earthquakes and tidal drainage – coastal regions are essentially destroyed by becoming inland areas as the vast shallow seas around the island pour away into the much less deep ocean of this new era. A great deal of the existing Saurian manufacturing capability and infrastructure is badly damaged or completely destroyed, but it is the enormous psychic trauma of the 100,000 or so survivors that nearly breaks their civilization.

That mental trauma results from the realization of just how far into the future they have been cast – their astronomers determine the exact size of the time-jump within the first few days after arrival. Chaos ensues, and it is over a decade before the Saurians can stabilize their society enough to even begin thinking about exploration beyond the boundaries of their own land. Food production and even basic survival in this much cooler, much more oxygenated world takes all of their remaining resources in those early years. But eventually they are secure enough to work on regaining their seafaring ability, and then to turn their efforts to learning about this new Earth. Sailing from their own shores, they quickly learn how very much the world has changed in their long absence… and the shock of that is like another body blow to the collective Saurian psyche.

All of the great beasts of their lost age are vanished, and in their place has arisen a terrible world of repulsive, hairy mammals! Across the globe, a multitude of the creatures dominate every ecological niche, except for the air – there, small feathered things that are eventually recognized as being very distantly related to themselves, still dominate. It is a blow to their innate sense of superiority, and their initial response is outright rejection of this reality, and a retreat back to La’suria. The Saurian response is to ignore the larger world, and instead focus on trying to recreate their old, familiar world as best they can…

A few of the great beasts of their own time still survive on La’suria, and the vegetation they knew of old, and for almost 400 years the Saurians remain very insular, rebuilding a civilization that will, ultimately, look very little like the one they left behind so many millions of years earlier. Over that time, most of the great animals of the Cretaceous period die out, in the new environment, as do so many of the plants they depended on. New forms take their place, particularly plant species, although the Saurians do their best to keep their land free of the disgusting mammals. Eventually adaptation, population pressures and cultural changes, including both physiological and psychological adaptations to their new world, lead to a new balance, and a desire to expand back out over the planet that the Saurians still think of as theirs by natural right. 

While much of their old technology has been lost, including that of powered flight, thanks to the legacy of the mystics who had brought them forward in time, their arcane powers remain strong, even enhanced. In combination with what few of their machines survive, it is magic which primarily fuels the new Saurian civilization. Just 423 years after the island-continent’s time-displaced arrival in this unforeseen future, the ships of La’suria set sail east and west. Small colonies are planted in future Central America and the islands of Indonesia. Although the Saurians are not cold blooded, a few centuries of adaptation are hardly enough to alter their mesothermic preference for the warmest regions of the planet.

In both locations, however, they eventually come into contact with Homo sapiens…

circa 19,800 – 19,400 BCE

Within 200 years of its violent birth from beneath the waves, the small island-continent of Atlantis has grown lush and fertile. By the third century following that cataclysmic uplifting, humans from Central America, Iberia, northwestern Africa, and eastern North America have found their way to this verdant paradise, and made it their home. Agriculture and animal husbandry first develop in that friendly land, and the various peoples there flourish beyond others of their kind elsewhere. Around the end of this period of the first blooming of humanity’s founding civilization the Saurians have themselves begun expanding out of La’suria. Contact with the humans of Indonesia and Central America becomes inevitable… and with it, just as inevitably, comes conflict.

The initial meetings of the two species do not go well — the Saurians, already repulsed by mammals in general, are horrified at sentient mammals! Although themselves not actually reptilian, the Saurians in turn spark an atavistic fear of reptiles in the humans. Given that these first meetings are with primitive bands of hunter-gathers, the Saurians easily overwhelm the humans at every turn. The human species might well have come to a quick end then, if not for an unintended aspect of the nature of the Saurian’s own arrival in the current era.

The Saurian’s Temporal Displacement Event, manifesting more than four centuries earlier, has torn open dimensional rifts in the very fabric of reality, around the globe and far out into space. These will remain open for many millennia, allowing various alien energies and entities to enter Earth’s dimension, forever altering the flow of the planet’s history. Unsurprisingly, such rifts are especially prevalent around both La’suria and Atlantis, and it is in Atlantis that humans first begin to utilize the properties inherent in the rifts. Rumor of the reptilian terror in Central America eventually makes its way to the peoples of Atlantis, allowing them some years to begin developing defenses – and laying the foundations of the human magic tradition. Such knowledge will provide the needed edge when the proto-Atlanteans finally meet the predations of the Serpent People of Lemuria (as they quickly come to misname both the Saurians and their homeland), in Central America.

There, for the first time, the Saurians are checked in their attempts to eliminate their mammalian rivals, and it infuriates them. For almost a century the conflict escalates, and while the the humans are slowing the  Saurian advance, they are nonetheless losing ground to the superior numbers and technology of their enemies. That pressure has forced the various tribes of Atlantis to merge and forge themselves into one people. But although they have absorbed much from the Saurians themselves, of both magic and technology, it proves to be insufficient. This might well have been the last generation of a free humanity on Earth – if it were not for the unexpected return of the Seekers.

circa 19,500 BCE

It is uncertain why the Seekers return to Earth in this era. One prominent modern theory is that it is simply a regularly scheduled visit; the more widely held view, however, is that it is a result of the massive temporal energy flare, across multiple dimensions, which must have rippled out across the universe in the wake of the Temporal Displacement Event. Even the two entities still in existence with the most knowledge of the Seekers (see Nemesis and Nimrod) have offered no certainty on this point, and modern scholars are left with only guesses. 

Whatever the reason for it, the Seeker’s arrival changes the course of human history.

On their return, the space gods seem to have little interest in the Saurians, beyond a cursory re-examination of the species – and that is most likely simply to ascertain how they survived the asteroid impact of 66 million years past. They show a definite and intense interest, however, in humanity. For the first century after their return they examine, test and study both individual humans and small groups across the face of the planet. These Seeker studies are sometimes quite overt, while at other times the aliens use more subtle and elegant methodologies.

At the end of this period, the Seekers take two distinct actions – first, they obliterate the two major Saurian colonies in Central America and Indonesia, confining the remaining Saurian population to Lemuria behind an immense, impenetrable force dome. Second, they begin to instruct the humans of Atlantis in various technologies and sciences. 

Actually, to say that they instruct is to imply that they communicate directly with humanity. They do not. The fact is that, to this day,  there exists no evidence, on Earth or any other planet across the galaxy where the Seekers are known to have intervened, that they have ever communicated directly with any other species.

Instead, the Seekers modus operandi is to guide by the giving of gifts – the proper understanding and use of which is likely simply another test of humanity’s abilities and, some theorize, of their worthiness. It seems humanity passes these tests… at least to the extent that they are allowed to continue expanding and growing. But this growth is limited to the shores of Atlantis – the rest of the planet (with the exception of interdicted La’suria / Lemuria) is to be left to baseline humanity. These cousins are to remain untouched by the “uplifted” Atlanteans, perhaps as a control group, it has been conjectured.

For 500 years the Seekers observe, occasionally providing some new test / guidance for their human subjects, but for the most part remaining aloof and apparently uninvolved, engaged in their own enigmatic pursuits. During this period Atlantis develops a thriving culture, deeply rooted in the practical applications of both magic and technology. This synthesis of magic and technology will become the hallmark of Atlantean civilization as it grows, becoming stable, powerful (within its scope), and peaceful.

circa 19,480 BCE

Early in their current tenure on Earth the Seekers capture a human hunter from a tribe of proto-Semitic peoples in what will later be known as the Middle East. The hunter’s name is Gor-Thûn, and at 22 he is, by virtue of both his age and his hunting prowess, the leader of his band of hunter-gatherers. The night that the strange lights appear in the sky he is the only one of his people to stand and face whatever the sky spirits might bring. Despite the roiling in his gut, he is determined to protect the People, no matter the cost… he grasps his throwing stick nervously…

For all his courage and faithfulness, however, he stands no chance. He is taken up by the strange lights without a struggle, lifted into the sky and beyond it, to some bright, alien place that terrifies him. Here he is dissected, body and mind, by beings he never perceives as anything more than light, color, and music… occasionally an odor. The torment eventually ends, and he is put back together, just as he had been… and then it begins all over again. How long this agony goes on he will never afterward be able to say with certainty… years, months, days? Or was it merely hours? He has lost all sense of time suspended in the blinding white light, and whatever the duration of his suffering, eventually he also loses himself, even his name… he loses everything except the knowledge, core deep, that he is the Hunter. To that truth he clings unshakably.

Eventually the pain does end for real, and for another timeless period there is blessed darkness, and peace. Gradualy he becomes aware of being aware… first of the darkness, as a thing outside himself… and with that, of necessity, comes awarenss of himself. It seems to him that he hangs suspended in nothingness, without a body, only his awareness of himself. Over time he begins to remember and, remembering, senses his body as it was/should be. Gradually he comes to sense an invisible world around him, and in time he is able to see it. Naturally, he interprets this world as he once perceived and understood the physical world he’d been born into… as a place of sky, hills, trees, and animals, of dangers and opportunities..

He will eventually come to understand that his consciousness has become untethered from any physical form, and that he lives now as a disembodied mind within the virtual information storage systems of the alien Seekers. But is this something planned by the space gods, or is merely an accident?  If an accident, are the aliens unaware of his presence, or are they simply allowing events to proceed, out of curiosity or, worse perhaps, indifference? Whatever the truth, he will never know for sure, and both this understanding and those questions lie many years in his future. For now, he grows and learns, a virtual ghost within the physical framework of the alien gods’ crystal matrix technology.

At first he believes himself reborn into the world after his strange ordeal, as his memories and sense of self return. When his name finally returns to him, he begins to search in earnest for his mate and their two daughters, but he appears to be alone in a world empty of other humans. Over time, however, he begins to sense another presence in his strangely empty world, something he perceives as dark and dangerous. At first he visualizes it as the most dangerous creature he knows and fears, a great black lion, stalking the grassy plains beyond the safety of the hills and woods that shelter him.

But the Hunter, as he mainly thinks of himself, even after his memories begin to return, eventually realizes the presence has intelligence and purpose… and once he realizes that, the creature transforms, taking on a man-form. It is dark and shadowy still, retaining a thick mane of black hair and the golden eyes of a great cat. For a time the Other seems to avoid the Hunter, and he catches only glimpses of the mysterious figure amongst the trees and hollows of the hills. But there comes a day when the dark figure speaks to the Hunter… speaks to him, and begins to teach him…

Over time the Hunter learns to see their shared virtual world through the eyes of the Other, and his own perceptions gradually change until he is able to see the true physical space of the Seekers’ strange, alien vessel. It is during this period that he comes to understand the nature of his species, of his planet, and to some extent of the larger universe. He also comes to understand the nature of his virtual prison, and of his own peculiar status within it. He becomes aware of the Seekers, as much as his human perceptions allow, but can never get the Other to tell him if they know of his existence… he becomes convinced the Other doesn’t actually know either.

As more time passes the Hunter gains the ability to passively see through the tools of his captor/hosts, and so to see again the real world of which he was once a part. Of course he dares not try to actively use those instruments, even as he comes to understand some of them; but for many years the watching and the learning are enough for him. He watches as his fellow humans rise from the savagery that he himself had known to the heights of this new thing, “civilization”… learning along with them, of herding, agriculture, metal working, architecture, and most amazing of all, the miracle of writing.

He is also able to watch the Saurians, trapped behind the impenetrable Great Barrier, as they descend into decadence and decay. He comes to some awed understanding of the world as it had been, during the era of the saurian race’s birth, and of the vast gulf of time over which they had jumped to arrive in his own era. He is as fascinated by their alien culture as he is disgusted and repelled by it, especially by their causal cannibalism… it’s bad enough that they eat his own people, but they will devour their own kind in disturbing rituals…

For several centuries he watches through the Seekers eyes, seeing what they see — the people of Atlantis rising to create the first true human civilization; the aliens themselves uplifting other isolated pockets of humanity out of the Stone Age in strange, one-off experiments; the growing disintegration of Saurian society, as if on a see-saw with humanity, one sinking as the other rises. In that time, of course, neither he nor his earth-bound cousins ever see an actual Seeker, at least not in any form they can understand or fully perceive… only as occasional lights or colors, perhaps an ethereal sound, a celestial melody that haunts the mind forever afterward.

When the Seekers depart Earth after five centuries of study and experimentation, the Hunter remains behind within the station-keeping platform which they leave in orbit. The artificial intelligence left in charge of the facility, the Caretaker, turns out to be the Other, the mysterious entity who has shared the Hunter’s virtual world for so long. Once again, the question of whether the Seekers knew or, knowing, cared about the human rat in their crystalline wainscoting, remains unanswered in the Hunter’s mind.

For the next thousand years, alongside the generally silent Caretaker, the Hunter watches the Atlanteans grow and evolve, and his own knowledge and intelligence grows along with them. As does his familiarity and control of the alien technology in which he is embedded. He had long go found his original people, and continues now to follow the lives of his children, grandchildren and all their descendants. During this long period his relationship with the Other, now the Caretaker, changes. The AI, previously reticent and aloof, now more often acknowledges the Hunter’s presence, and begins to more actively teach him — about the world, the larger universe, and even the inner world of the mind.

circa 19,000 BCE

The Seekers depart Earth, leaving behind two major artifacts that are known to modern experts – an ecological repository / biobank on the far side of the moon, and an auxiliary base on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons. Modern theorists believe neither facility had true AI caretakers; their automated systems, while advanced and very capable by 21st Century human standards (even after all this time) do not reach truly sentient levels of intelligence and lack self-awareness. 

The observation platform the Seekers leave at the Earth-Luna system’s L5 Lagrange point, however, will become known to only a very limited number of modern humans. It is left under the control of a true AI, called the Caretaker. This intelligence is tasked with the continued observation and cataloging of events on Earth, presumably to report back to its creators in some way, and at some time, currently unknown.

It is theorized that it is at this time that the Seekers seeded a great many suitable worlds in the relatively nearby (astrographically speaking) regions of the galaxy with life taken from Earth, particularly human life. There is little doubt that a great many alien humanoid races around the galaxy share the terrestrial genetic code to varying degrees, as do a great many of the plants and animals on their “home” worlds. Such precise congruence is virtually impossible to have evolved independently, and the Seekers are the most likely possible vector for such transmission.

On Earth, for almost a thousand years after the departure of the Seekers, Atlantean civilization continues to grow and expand. Without the restraints imposed by the alien space gods, they slowly begin to settle other parts of the globe, especially the Caribbean, North America and Europe (although small outposts are also established in many other areas, from Africa and India to the Far East). Theirs is a deeply conservative culture, stable and slow to change what works; but they are also dynamic, and not afraid of purposeful change when it is reasonable and thought out. Certain forms of mechanistic technology begin to gain primacy toward the end of this period, although a synthesis of magic and technology remains the Atlantean hallmark.

And then they breach the Great Barrier around Lemuria…

Circa 18,150 BC

Atlantean voyagers have long avoided the area of the Great Ocean which legend describes as the abode of the evil, demonic Serpent People of old, and the few who do come close over the centuries find the way blocked by an almost invisible but completely impenetrable barrier – until a techno-sorcerer by the name of Thalor-Van finds a way to breech that Great Barrier. Disbelieving in ancient tales of space gods and lizard people from out of time, he seeks new horizons to explore and new challenges to engage his mind… and in so doing he unleashes hell on Earth.

Sealed behind the Seekers’ Great barrier for 14 centuries, Saurian culture has not fared well. At the time of their confinement they were already much degraded from the heights of their ancestors of the Cretaceous Era, and the enforced isolation has only worsened that downward trend. They have turned to dark magics and demonic, extra-dimensional beings to try and break their bonds, and an already cold and emotionless (by mammalian standards) race has become truly evil. Social order breaks down in many places or, in the few regions or cities where it remains strong, turns to harsh totalitarianism. 

Ritual cannibalism has remained common among most sects, and for almost all Saurians the consumption of human flesh is taken for granted. They had captured many human slaves in the years prior to the Great Barrier being erected, and the Seekers had done nothing to relieve them of such chattel before confining them, locking masters and slaves, Saurians and humans, all in together. The Saurian mage-scientists have experimented on their human slaves over the centuries, creating various sub-races for very specific purposes – including as food stock.

The Saurians have also delved deep into the earth, seeking in vain to find subterranean paths around the Great Barrier, honeycombing their island-continent with tunnels, caverns and whole cities. As many Saurians adapted over the centuries to underground life, they also bred some of their human stock to subterranean living, some sub-species of which survive to this day in lost areas beneath the planet.

Thalor-Van barely escapes alive from his first encounter with the fury of the now-free Serpent People… while most of his crew are not so lucky. He returns to Atlantis with only seven others, a chastened and much humbled man, and devotes the rest of his long life to undoing the damage he has caused. In so doing he becomes the first Magus Prime of Earth. Unfortunately, once the Great Barrier is down, there is no way for mere humans to raise it agin. Mystic barriers of human design are tried, but all fall easily before the dark magics of the Saurians, and technological solutions remain beyond the Atlanteans.

A long, slow war begins then, and it will last for another thousand years. Unlike the first war against the Saurians, humanity is now the more numerous species, and has both magics and technologies to match their ancient enemy. But what that enemy has lost in technical and strategic superiority, they more than made up for with savagery, deviousness, and mastery of dark arts. The Atlanteans have long been at peace, with little more than occasional skirmishes with less developed human lands such as Hyperborea and Cimmeria, while the Saurians’ degeneration has only amplified their aggressive habits.

The Ice People, blue-skinned humanoids who have evolved a civilization based on technology and science, establish a thriving city above the Arctic Circle in what will be called Europe. They retain cool relations with the Atlanteans, who believe them to be a lost colony of their own people, and ignore all other civilizations. Given the Saurian’s dislike of the cold, remaining aloof from the great wars of the age is relatively easy for the Ice People.

17,205 BC

The current Magus Prime of Earth is Dolórüska the Shining, 19th successor to Thalor-Van and considered the greatest to hold the title since him. Unfortunately, as he nears the end of his long life he seems to go mad, attempting to sell the Earth to unspeakable ancient horrors from beyond our reality in exchange for eternal life and dominion over the planet under their rule.  His former apprentice, Kahar’Beth Sül, learns of his perfidy before the unholy pact can be completed. He gathers and leads a great coalition of mages from around the world, and with great struggle and sacrifice they eventually throw down and defeat Dolórüska. Unfortunately, once he is stripped of his mantle and power, they discover they cannot kill the former Magus Prime, thanks to the parting gift/curse of his would-be patrons — they have granted him his longed-for eternal life, but have forever trapped his spirit in a decaying mortal form.

Having succeeded to the mantle of Magus Prime himself, Kahar’Beth devises a ritual to bind Dolórüska the Damned’s insane but undying spirit to his Golden Helm. The former mage had already poured much of his power into the artifact, and the binding becomes unbreakable. Kahar’Beth then binds his own psychic imprint to a matrix crystal set atop a great staff. The Staff of Sül is buried along with decaying body and his Golden Helm in the Tomb of Ka’Solan, in a distant eastern desert – a failsafe should the undead litch ever manage to escape and threaten the world again.

17,167 BC

The seemingly eternal conflict changes both civilizations, and not for the better. Eventually the Atlanteans begin to gain the upper hand, driving the Saurians to ever-greater acts of desperation; and in their fight for survival the humans lose much of the grace and wisdom of their past, becoming more brutal and hardened as the war drags on.

The final move in the war comes when the Saurians discover both the orbiting Seeker observation platform, and a way (they believe) to reach and seize control of it. Atlantean intelligence learns of this plan, and determine that they themselves must either seize the vessel first or destroy it, rather than let it fall into the hands of their hated enemies.

This ultimately leads to the destruction of both civilizations, as the Caretaker AI observing Earth takes action. It invokes one of the fail safes the Seekers had left behind, designed to send the Saurian’s island-continent back in time to the instant after it had left its native era. The resultant upheaval of Lemuria’s departure causes Atlantis to collapse into the ocean, just as its arrival had raised it up. The heart of human civilization is destroyed, and the scattered surviving pieces descend into barbarism and a New Stone Age, while the majority of the Saurians suffer the fate their ancestors had sought to avoid — death by asteroid.

Not that the Caretaker knows any of that in the immediate aftermath, as it is nearly destroyed in the process itself. 

The Hunter had known what the Caretaker planned, and while he had no love for the Saurians of Lemuria, he had definitely become emotionally attached to the humans of Atlantis. Not to mention the descendants of his own lost tribe, whom he had long ago identified and followed from afar. He was determined to prevent their destruction as collateral damage.

When the Caretaker AI concentrates itself into the specific node which will trigger the temporal event and unanchor Lemuria from its current location in space-time, the Hunter springs its hastily-planned trap. He severs that node from the rest of the station’s physical structure, trapping the AI inside it and jettisoning the crystalline mass towards Earth, where he hopes it will burn up in the atmosphere. 

Unfortunately, he fails to achieve his coup before the temporal trigger is pulled. Lemuria and the Saurians are snapped back to meet their destined racial fate, the massive geologic upheavals sinks Atlantis, and the planet-wide devastation collapses most other less-advanced human civilizations around the globe. 

The Caretaker does not go without a fight. In the brief battle between the Hunter and the Caretaker the station is damaged, knocked out of its stable L-5 orbit. With key control systems either non-functioning or beyond the Hunter’s understanding, the station, too, is doomed to crash to Earth in fiery destruction, and the Hunter with it. He calculates that it is just possible that he might manage a controlled descent… but the odds are long, and his survival is enormously unlikely.

Having no wish for his existence to end, the Hunter sets in motion a plan he has long dreamt of, but which he has not previously thought feasible, given the constant watchful presence of the Seekers and their Caretaker. The genetic code of his original, organic body still exists within the matrix of the Seekers’ crystal memory devices, as does their total understanding of human DNA. The technology they had used to rebuild him time and again as they studied him remained operable. He will grow himself a new organic body, altering his own genes to make this new form perfect in every way possible. He will return to Earth truly alive once more, and the pinnacle of human evolution.

But the growth process takes time, even with the advanced alien technology, and the platform’s orbit begins to decay more quickly than he had originally estimated. His new body is still in the very early stages of gestation within its crystal birthing pod when the Hunter calculates that they will hit the planet’s atmosphere in less than ten days. The body is too immature for him to transfer his consciousness into it at this stage… and ten days will make no significant difference.

He had planned to escape in a landing craft and to come among the descendants of his own ancient tribe as a guide and mentor, a teacher to lift them up to the heights of lost Atlantis, and eventually beyond. And though he knew that his physical body, however perfect, must eventually die, and him with it, it would have been good to truly live again. To have raised his people out of the mud and set them on the path to the stars would have been a legacy worth leaving.

Now such hope is lost, but still the Hunter’s will to survive is strong. He can send the birthing pod safely to Earth, where it would eventually, under the right conditions, “birth” the body growing within it. But as perfect as that body might be, it would still be that of a newborn infant. In the wrack and ruin of the world as it stood at that moment, how likely could its survival be?

Very well, then he will not send his “son” into the world as it stands now. By his calculations, without the influence of the Seekers it will be at least 10,000 years before human civilization rises again to heights approaching those of Atlantis. The temporal rift which the Caretaker’s fail safe has reopened in the fabric of space-time is still resonating up and down the timeline… the calculations are complex and take him days, but in the end he knows he can do it. Like the ancient Saurians, he will send his legacy into the future, to an era when he calculates the child has the greatest odds of not only surviving, but thriving. Even without his own mind in control the child, and eventually the man, will be extraordinary by any standard – the ultimate human. 

With his knowledge of the Saurian’s ancient attempt at this same ploy, and its unexpected result, the Hunter is able to more precisely calculate the energies needed to achieve his goal. More precisely, but still not perfectly… by his best estimates there exists the possibility of being off by as much as 300%. But 10,000 years or 30,000, it will be better than the alternative. With less than a day left he completes his calculations and the physical preparations required to send the heavily shielded birthing pod into the still-roiling time stream….

Once his hope has vanished into the future in a brilliant flash of violet light, the Hunter attempts to guide the platform down into the Great Ocean – it is not massive enough to cause an extinction-level event, such as the one 66 million years earlier, but the Hunter nonetheless wishes to minimize any further damage to the planet’s ecosphere. He draws the shields in, focusing them around the crystalline core which holds both his mind and the critical remaining knowledge and technology of the Seekers, letting the bulk of the structure melt and (hopefully) vaporize on reentry. If what remains strikes in deep water, the fallout around most of the planet will be minimal.

In the end, the results are both fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate, in that the Hunter beats the odds and survives the impact. Unfortunate in that he misses the Pacific Ocean by about ten miles. The mass of the platform that isn’t vaporized is not insignificant, and that surviving semi-molten structure plunges into the Earth like a flaming spear, just south of the mouth of what will come to be called the Columbia River. It pierces the planet’s crust, rupturing it down to the mantle, and magma flows upward to burst out in a volcanic eruption of impressive size. In a series of eruptions that last for almost two years the mountain today called Mt. Defiance is born; and deep in its heart is buried the crystal matrix containing the mind and soul of the Hunter.

The damage to the Seeker craft is massive, but by no means complete. Seeker crystal technology is both self-healing and fractally holographic in nature… for the most part any piece contains the whole. In time, the central core is able to repair itself enough that the Hunter’s consciousness can restore itself. Once he is again awake, he is able to more actively direct such further repairs as are possible. With the Caretaker AI purged from the system, the crystal technology accepts the Hunter as its master, and for the first time he has unfettered control of his “body.” Unfortunately, that “body” is buried beneath two miles of now-solidified rock…

Circa 17,300 BCE

A significant number of Atlanteans, in the later years of the Great War with Lemuria, object to many of the decisions being made, and actions taken, in pursuit of victory. Seeing the weakening of the moral and ethical strength of their people, several opposition groups choose to separate themselves from their homeland, migrating too remote areas of the planet. At least two of these groups discover dimensional rifts, or beyul, allowing them to establish themselves in pocket dimensions adjacent to, but hidden from, the Outer World.

After the Great Cataclysm, the people of Salomon Island close themselves off completely from Earth’s prime dimension. Believing magic was at the root of Atlantis‘ problems, they downplay it (although they cannot eliminate it entirely) and focus instead on technology and their own spiritual and psychic improvement. The Salomoni will remain cut off from mainstream humanity, with only a few notable exceptions, until the modern era.

On the other hand, the Atlanteans who discover the extra-dimensional land in the Himalayas which will come to be called Shambhala, believe magic can be used wisely, if the mind and soul are properly ordered and aligned in harmony, and that unfettered technology can lead to dehumanization. They focus on magic and their own physical and spiritual improvement. After nearly thirteen hundred subjective years of isolation (in most beyuls time passes at about 10% the rate of time beyond), they open themselves up, in a limited way, to contact with the Outer World. Once they reconnect, over time they become a source of mystical and martial inspiration for the peoples of Eurasia and, in the modern era, the world.

Circa 10,000 BCE

A group of human experimental subjects, victims of the genetic manipulation and breeding of the Serpent People, escape from Terra Cava to the surface world. They appear in the British Isles, and are led by a powerful one-eyed giant named Balor. Seeking to make a home for themselves, they soon come into conflict with the primitive humans of present-day Ireland. The proto-Celts call them Fomóiri—meaning “demons of the underworld” — and their ancestors will build much of their myth cycles around the wars to contain them.

The end of the Great Ice Age spells disaster for the Ice People. With rising temperatures threatening them with extinction, they reluctantly accept the aid of the Salomoni and begin the Great Migration to Antarctica. There they will establish a new and even more isolationist culture. A more aggressive handful remain behind in a pocket dimension adjacent to several already occupied by fierce base-line humans, and the two forces will battle sporadically for millennia, giving rise to the legends of the Norse Gods and the Ice Giants.

Circa 3000 BCE

In the Golden Age of ancient Greece heroes arise, including Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, and Jason and his Argonauts. They fight monsters like Medusa and the bronze giant Talos, oppose the schemes of the dark god Hades, and deal with sorceresses like Circe and Medea. The “gods” are more active in the world in these days, and “divine” interference in the Trojan War and the voyage of Odysseus prove no end of trouble for humanity.

Explorers from sunken Atlantis, where the survivors have taken millennia to crawl back to a semblance of civilization, begin to penetrate areas of the oceans beyond their tribal homes. They eventually discover that the whole of the surface world was not entirely flooded in the Great Cataclysm, as their legends and myths would have it. This eventually leads to a war between a particularly militant city-state of Atlantis and the people of Athens in the Aegean Sea. The cunning of the Athenians allows them to drive off the Atlanteans, who will not renew contact with the surface world for centuries, as their sages and scholars begin searching for ways to allow them to breath the surface air once more…

2670 BCE

The undead Atlantean sorcerer, and former Magus Prime, Dolórüska escapes his tomb when it is discovered and opened by two Egyptian brothers, Imhotep and Ahmose. Peasant farmers, both brothers have some inborn talent for the arcane but it is Ahmose in particular who is drawn by strange dreams to the long hidden location of Ka’Solan. It is he who dons the cursed Golden Helm, and becomes possessed by the undying sorcerer… although he retains enough control, for a short while, to prevent the outright murder of his brother. Instead Dolórüska seals the youth within his old tomb before leaving to begin his conquest of the world.

Searching for escape, Imhotep discovers a hidden staff, with a strange arrangement of twisted metal on its top, encasing a brilliant white gem. When he lifts the staff a beam of light strikes his forehead… and suddenly the ghostly form of a man, garbed in strange robes stands before him. It is the psychic projection of Kahar’beth Sül, the mage who had led the fight against Dolórüska in the distant past, and he imbues the young Egyptian with his own arcane knowledge, awakening Imhotep’s own latent power to the full.

For nine years Imhotep seeks for the thief of his brother’s body and soul, with little success. Along the way he becomes advisor, architect, physician and eventually chancellor to King Djoser (aka Netjerikhet, Tosorthos, and Sesorthos) of the Third Dynasty. He becomes the Pharoh’s closest confidant, and eventually tells him of the danger the world faces in Dolórüska; Djoser becomes his steadfast ally in pursuing the undead renegade mage.

2664 BCE

Having bided his time, regained his strength, and rebuilt his resources, Dolórüska makes his bid to conquer the known world, starting with Memphis. But Imhotep and Djoser have not been idle. They have gathered together a great many Mages of the Light at Saqqara and they lure the undead mage there. Led by Imhotep, and despite terrible losses, the combined power of the united mages proves enough to bind Dolórüska once again in a new, hidden tomb deep beneath what will become the Step Pyramid of Saqqara. He will remain imprisoned there until again accidentally released in 1938 BCE.

As he has feared, Imhotep is unable to save his brother’s corrupted body. But, far worse, he discovers that Ahmose’s soul, although free of the taint of Dolórüska, is still bound by the curse to the Helm. He is unable to move on, bound to the mortal world for as long as the Helm , and the evil soul it contains, endures. All his brother can do for Ahmose is to use his newly granted power as Magus Prime to cause him to be reincarnated into new bodies down the ages, thereby granting him the gift of forgetting, at least for a time. This begins a cycle of reincarnation that will endure for the next five thousand years.

2663 BCE

Having located the first body into which his brother has been reincarnated, Imhotep takes the infant and raises him as his son, even naming him Ahmose. The child grows up unaware of his origins and past life, and at the age of 15 falls in love with the Princess Nephthys, at 14 the youngest daughter of the Pharaoh Djoser.

2649 BCE

The Pharaoh Dosjer weds his youngest daughter, Nephthys, to the “son” of his beloved Chancellor Imhotep (he knows the true nature of the boy as the reincarnated soul of Imhotep’s bother, Amhose), making the youth a royal prince. The Pharaoh dies just three months after the wedding, however, and is succeeded by his oldest son, Sekhemkhet.

2646 BCE

Having served two Pharaohs, the Chancellor Imhotep dies in the autumn, at the age of 49. He is murdered by his long time rival, Sobek, a priest of Anput (Anubis) and a disciple of Dolórüska the Damned who had escaped the fall of his master. He has plotted for years to kill his hated rival and to seize from him the mantle of Magus Prime. While succeeding at the one, he fails at the other, and the Powers-That-Be settle the mantle on Amri-Daro, of the Indus Valley Civilization. Sobek does succeed Imhotep as Chancellor to Pharaoh Sekhemkhet, however.

Imhotep’s death triggers a memory cascade in Amhose, who is suddenly flooded with all of his memories from his previous life. He shares the revelation with his wife and soulmate Nephthys, which strengthens their bond. She is determined that, if they cannot be together in the afterlife because of the curse, then she will reincarnate with him through the ages. They begin work on a ritual to bond their souls together in such a way as to make that possible.

2645 BCE

Chancellor Sobek, having lusted for years for two things — the body of the Princess Nephthys and the power of his former mentor, Dolórüska, conceives of a plan to obtain both. He contrives to fake the death of Prince Amhose, while in fact secretly taking him prisoner. He hopes to wrest the secrets Dolórüska withheld from him from the mind of the man whose body the undead mage had possessed for almost a decade. With Amhose out of the way, securely guarded by his minions and the pet crocodiles he keeps as an affectation, Sobek convinces Pharaoh to give the grieving widow to him as wife.

Unaware that Ahmose has already regained his memories, Sobek is surprised on his wedding night, while trying to force himself on his unwilling “bride,” to have the man appear at the window and attack in a rage. Sobek had been in the process of casting a spell to bind the unwilling princess to him, body and soul — in the ensuing melee Ahmose is killed, Sobek is wounded and badly disfigured, and Nephthys takes her own life. The “blood of a third,” which was needed to complete both binding spells, creates a complicated arcane synergy which binds the three souls and the ancient curse together through time. 

2642 BCE

Chancellor Sobek arranges the death of the Pharaoh Sekhemkhet, and despite his own disfigurement, assumes the throne as Pharaoh Sanakht. His reign is short, however, as he becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the bodies into which Ahmose and Nephthys have reincarnated, so as to enact his vengeance on them. Unable to do so by either mundane or arcane methods, in his frustrated inattention one day he is killed by his own crocodiles. And thereby finds success — for he will himself reincarnate in proximity to the two lovers, a process while will repeat down the ages, for at least the next 45 centuries…

505 BCE

The Confederated Union of Worlds is declared, with twenty founding worlds, led by the Kevrin Ur, the Syganti, and the Tulromites. All but two of the founding races are offshoots of the human race, seeded on their worlds by the Seekers 20,000 years earlier (although none of them are yet aware of this fact).

407 BCE

The Confederated Union of Worlds jointly settles and develops the empty, but life-rich, world of Halicon as the capital of its interstellar government. Within a century the planet’s population will reach a billion souls, from almost all of the now 27 member worlds.

370 BCE

The hidden realm of Avalon is founded by the Fae, an offshoot of humanity with a deep affinity for both nature and magic, who flee human persecution in the British Isles.

127 BCE

Exploration vessels of the Confederated Union of Worlds first meet representatives of the Dramorg Consensus in deep space. Not realizing the shapeshifting nature of the species at first, the three Union ships are easily infiltrated. Thanks to Kevrin Ur mentats, however, the humanoids realize the nature and severity of the Dramorg threat before they return home. In the ensuing fight, two CUW ships are destroyed, and the third vessel voluntarily quarantines on arrival back in the Union, until independent Kevrin Ur mentats can determine that the alien infestation has been eliminated. It will be over a century before the Union knowingly encounters the Dramorg again.

circa 100 CE

The dimensional rifts caused nearly 20,000 years earlier, by the arrival of the time-displaced Saurians, are beginning to heal. As they do, the barriers between Earth and various extra-dimensional realms become stronger, making travel between them ever more difficult. As a result, magic becomes increasingly more difficult, and therefore less prominent as a force in mortal affairs.

166 CE

Roman general Titus Varinus and his Legion find their way into the Lost World and remain to claim it in the name of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. They eventually found the walled city of Nova Roma in this steamy land of dinosaurs, saber-tooth tigers and primitive tribes of humans and Neanderthals.

468-477 CE

The First Union-Dramorg War occurs, and will last for almost a decade until the Paladins of Light intervene and broker a peace. Thereafter, many individual worlds sign the Compact of Light, although neither the Union nor the Consensus does so as a whole. The Keepers of Rampart begin placing Sentinels throughout the region of the galaxy containing the two growing empires, on the lookout for worlds in need of protection.

circa 700 CE

Merlin, a being born of both the mortal world and mystical Avalon, becomes Magus Prime. Foreseeing the chance to bring a new mortal champion into the world capable of uniting the British Isles under a single banner, the sorcerer manipulates events to place the youth Arthur on the throne. Arranging for the young king to wield the sword Excalibur, he assists Arthur in the formation of Camelot and the Round Table.

The machinations of Morgan LeFay, Arthur’s half-sister, bring chaos to Camelot. Betrayed by his wife, Guinevere, and his best friend, Lancelot, and challenged by his bastard son, Mordred, Arthur’s realm falls to the forces of darkness. Arthur is taken to Avalon to await the time of his return. Merlin also leaves this world, supposedly imprisoned in one of the fading gateways to Avalon. As a result of Merlin’s failed experiment, subsequent Magi Prime generally adopt a quieter, more behind-the-scenes approach to their duties.

Half-mad Arabian mystic Abdu Al-Hadrat, after years spent seeking occult knowledge by visiting the ruins of Babylon, exploring the subterranean depths of Memphis, and spending a thousand and one nights of meditation in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, retires to Damascus. There he writes his magnum opus, the Al Azif. Not long after finishing the work Abdu suffers a sudden and terrible death, as he is seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly in front of a large number of terror-frozen witnesses.

In subsequent years the Al Azif  gains considerable, though surreptitious, circulation amongst philosophers and scholars of the arcane. In 950, it will be translated into Greek and given the title Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, a scholar from Constantinople, and in 1050 the book will be suppressed, and most copies burned, on the orders of Patriarch Michael.

811 CE

The first Paladin of Light assigned to Earth’s region of space, Telvon Kar fights a battle in orbit around Earth after being ambushed by three ships of an unidentified alien race. The aliens seek to exploit the primitive world, in violation of the edicts of the Keepers of Rampart, and the Paladin is honor-bound to oppose them. Despite destroying two of the intruder ships and driving off the third, Telvon Kar is badly injured. Setting down on the coast of what will become Oregon, he collapses. He is found and taken in by the local Chinook peoples, who have witnessed some of the battle and his fall. They nurse him back to health, and in his time amongst them he grows very fond of his rescuers. He eventually repays them by using his light powers to drive off a savage Haida raid before returning to his duties in space. He leaves an enduring legend of a god of light among the Pacific Northwest tribes from the Aleutians to the Columbia.

1442 CE

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence will epitomize the Renaissance humanist ideal is born in Anchiano, Tuscany. His mother passes on the emerald pendant she has worn for years, a gift from his father (the two are not married) when, at age 5, he goes to live on the estate of Ser Piero’s family. Much of his upbringing will be undertaken by his uncle, from who he gains a particular appreciation for nature.

1491 CE

An Incan army, marching to subdue a rebellious town, stumbles instead into the Lost World. Unable to find their way home, they establish a mountain empire that comes to be called Viracochasuyu, named for their creator-god Viracocha, They will successfully defended their territory against all threats for centuries, creating incredible terraced farms to feed thousands, and will even domesticate pterodactyls as flying mounts.

1491 CE

An imbecilic Italian, funded by the King & Queen of a newly united Spain, stumbles onto the Americas by pure luck. He has grossly underestimated the (well known to his contemporaries) size of the globe, but his error will prove a boon to Spain and other European powers, and a genocidal disaster for the native peoples of this New World.

1499 CE

When Leonardo is forced to flee Milan ahead of the invading French, something he has been growing slowly aware of for years becomes obvious to him – he does not seem to be aging as other men do. At age 57 he is as healthy and fit as he was at 30… and looks little different. People have been commenting for years on how “well preserved” he is, at first merely enviously, but increasingly with suspicion. He takes the opportunity, as he travels first to Venice and then to Florence, to artificially age his appearance.

1519 CE

Having left Italy for France three years earlier, Leonardo faces difficult personal decisions at his Château d’Cloux. His lover of 13 years, the much younger aristocrat Francesco Melzi, is the only person with whom he has shared the secret of his apparent immortality. But as he himself has grown older, the younger man has come to wish for a more conventional life, to marry, and to have children. Leonardo decides it is time to end his life – at least as far as the world at large is concerned.

He is already at a point where it is clear that he cannot continue the deception for much longer, and he takes the occasion of Melzi’s engagement to stage his own death. With his ex-lover’s help, and a cadaver from his laboratory, he pulls it off. He cuts his long hair and removes his great, grey beard, becoming a man of 30 again. Leaving his entire estate to Melzi, save for a few mementos and some traveling cash, the exemplar of the Renaissance Man begins a long sojourn around the great cities of Europe and, in the next century, the Americas.

1574 CE

A coalition of tribes in east-central Africa, form the small nation of Kurunda. They are the first to forge the metal alloy chak’taru, an amalgam of several metals fused with the powdered k’taru crystals abundant in the region. This begins a technological revolution that will propel the secretive and insular culture to advances far ahead of any other civilization of the era. This is a technical superiority they will retain up through the modern era.

1606 CE

Jamestown, Virginia is founded, the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

1630 CE

Dutch settlers landing on the shores of what they called Pavonia (later New Jersey) are met by the Native American geomancer Tisquantum (Squanto in later versions of his name). Having dealt with Europeans before, including the Mayflower settlers, and having actually been to England, Tisquantum has no illusions about these newcomers. Having been adopted into the Turtle Brotherhood of the Lenape, who have no concept of land ownership, he wishes to spare them the predations he knows will come; but he also has no desire to kill the Europeans. So he offers the Dutch a compromise — he will raise up a new land for them to occupy, if they will agree to leave the Lenape in possession of their own lands in perpetuity.

Michiel Pauw, leader of the Dutch settlers, laughs at this absurd offer… right up until the moment Tisquantum raises his hands and the shore line they stand upon begins to rise up. The waters of the Mullica River drop off to either side as the land ripples and rises, spreading out eastward in a great arc. Soon, land is rising up from the sea, sending great waves crashing up and down the coast. The would-be colonists cower in terror, and even the Lenape seem taken aback at this display of power. Pauw agrees to Tisquantum’s terms.

In the first idealistic rush created by witnessing this miracle, the newly raised land is named New Atlantis by Pauw. The name is chosen in honor of the book The New Atlantis, published three years earlier by Francis Bacon as his vision of the perfect Enlightenment society: just, pious and rational. Pauw and his people establish the first settlement on what comes to be called Middle Bay (modern-day Union Bay). The land is incredibly rich and fertile, and though barren at first, it soon becomes green and lush – not having to clear forest proves a great time saver to the settlers, who are soon feeding many settlements up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

In the end, however, the agreement with the Natives proves to mean little. Tisquantum, sinking into a fever after his great creation (a circle of land more than ten miles across has been raised up, mostly from the ocean) dies within a fortnight. For over a decade, with the planting and developing of their new colony to occupy them, the Dutch do keep their word. But when none of the other natives show any signs of such power, and as new settlers begin to arrive from the Old World looking for land, old promises are forgotten and American history resumes its usual tragic trajectory. But the seed of Bacon’s Enlightenment ideals planted in those early years never wholly dies out in New Atlantis…

1632 CE

On 5 April the township of New Atlantis is officially founded with the building of its first common house and town wall. Between the years 1637 and 1735 the communities of Bensalem, Rock Point, and North Hill are founded on the island of New Atlantis, while Port Mystic, Seagate and Queensport are founded on the nearby mainland and seaward islands.

1637 CE

The community of Bensalem is founded on Plato’s Knoll by a group of Enlightenment philosophers and their followers, based in large part on the principles found in Francis Bacon’s 1627 book The New Atlantis, for which the island itself was named. They soon open a school for all the children of the island of New Atlantis, the second public school in the New World, after the Boston Latin School in the English colony of Massachusetts. It becomes Bensalem College in 1641, and is chartered in 1665, after the English take-over, as a gesture of British goodwill to their new subjects. 

1664 CE

The settlement of North Hill is incorporated on the northern heights above the Palisades of New Atlantis, on 29 February.

King Charles II of England grants his brother the Duke of York the Dutch New Netherland colony, despite the two countries being then technically at peace. When the English Duke arrives with four warships and several hundred soldiers, Governor Stuyvesant, despite his personal wish to fight, is persuaded by numerous prominent New Amsterdam citizens to avoid bloodshed. On 8 September he signs over the colony without a shot being fired. 

In New Atlantis, there is some initial resistance to the takeover, but it quickly fades when it becomes clear the English have no intention of expelling the Dutch or seizing their property. As in New Amsterdam, they even allow Dutch mayors and aldermen to continue to govern, and while Pavonia and New Netherland become New Jersey, and New Amsterdam becomes New York, New Atlantis is allowed to retain its name.

1673 CE

During the Third Anglo-Dutch War the Dutch briefly reconquer Manhattan with a force of 600 men. They make no attempt to retake New Atlantis, and in fact give up Manhattan again the next year as part of the peace treaty in which they retain control of Suriname in South America. They believe it will prove the more valuable possession in the long run; history will prove them spectacularly wrong.

1692-93 CE

Josiah Elder arrives in New Atlantis, a man of both god and science, supposedly fleeing the horrors of the on-going Salem Witch Trials, which he had vehemently opposed. An erudite and charismatic man, he quickly gains a following, but many of his particular views are opposed by the established scholars of Bensalem College.

1693-94 CE

The Spanish galleon Santos Cristo de Burgos, sailing from Manila to Acapulco, is shipwrecked on the Oregon coast near modern-day Nehalem Beach. The survivors (or at least those able to reign in their arrogance) are taken in by the local Chinook natives. They are probably the first Europeans to hear the local legends of how Mount Pi-ah Kwass (Fearsome Fire, modern-day Mt. Defiance) fell from the sky long ago, during a great battle of the gods.

No Spanish ship will travel so far north again for almost four decades, and the surviving shipwrecked men are eventually absorbed into the existing native population, leaving behind only a few technological and lexicographic traces of their existence amongst the north Oregon coastal tribes.

1695 CE

The settlement of Queensport is founded on Mihannon Island (modern Victory Island), east of New Atlantis, on 17 June. Josiah Elder is forced out of Bensalem College by his rivals and, with a number of followers founds the township of Seagate on 15 March on Egg Island (the island will eventually come to bear his name). They establish the Elder Athenaeum, a school of philosophy and science open to all, regardless of social, economic or educational status.

1719 CE

The settlement of Port Mystic is founded on the mainland to the north of New Atlantis on 5 May.

1722 CE

St. Giles’s Church and North Hill Cemetery are established in North Hill Township.

1735 CE

The settlement of Rock Point is founded to the south of New Atlantis on 11 August.

1741 CE

Peter the Great commissions the Great Northern Expedition, led by Vitus Bering, commanding the St. Peter, and Aleksi Chirikov, in command of the St. Paul. On 20 June the two ships are separated by a storm, never to see one another again. The St. Peter runs aground off of Bering Island, Bering himself falls ill and dies, and the ship is dashed to pieces by high winds, stranding the survivors.

Chirikov meanwhile continues down the coast of mainland Alaska, past the future site of Sitka, unable to find a safe harbor. When the first of his longboats, sent out to find anchorage and fresh water, fails to return after a week, he is forced to send his remaining longboat to search for them. This is a risky ploy, for if he loses both, he will be unable to make landfall again or replenish his fresh water. On 27 July, with water running critically low if they are to make it back to Russia, Chirikov feels he can wait no longer.

Prepared to sail, he is convinced by his first officer to wait one more day – which proves fortuitous. The second longboat returns on 29 July, having discovered the fate of the first boat and its crew, and narrowly escaped suffering the same – massacred at the hands of the war-like Haida people of the region. Escaping the natives, the second longboat had found a safe anchorage to the south, and a source of fresh water.

With this renewal of his resources, Chirikov decides to continue south. On 14 August the St. Paul makes landfall a dozen miles north of the mouth of the Wimahl River (later to be known as the Columbia).  Wary at first, after the Haida debacle, the explorers soon warm to the coastal Clatsop tribes of the Chinook peoples who populate the area, and spend several weeks trading for high-quality otter pelts with them. They do not continue south after this, however, turning for home on 1 October. Although they hear rumor of the mighty river, they never actually see the mouth of the Wimahl. Chirikov himself acquires an unusual yellow gemstone in trade, a bauble that will remain in his family for generations.

1770 CE

New Atlantis becomes a focus for anti-British sentiment among the colonies. Her citizens are vocal in their protests against unfair taxes and the insults and injuries inflicted on the colonists by British soldiers.

1773 CE

The Queensport Massacre occurs on 19 December – in solidarity with rebels in Boston, anti-British protesters in Queensport attack the Customs House, English troops fire into the rioters, seven colonists are killed. Governor William Franklin, needing a scapegoat, holds harbormaster Robert Templar responsible and has him hanged after a public show trial.

1775 CE

Battle at Lexington Green and the start of the American War of Independence.

The Basque explorer Bruno de Heceta is the first documented European to see the mouth of the mighty Wimahl River (which will eventually come to be known as the Columbia), though being short-handed and on the advice of his officers, he does not try to cross the bar and actually enter the river.

1776 CE

The Declaration of Independence is signed, and the Revolutionary War gets into full swing.

1781 CE

The British surrender to the American army at Yorktown.

On 4 July the township of Port Republic is founded on the western shore of Lake Squanto, west of New Atlantis.

1783 CE

Kúng is born under a Blue Moon on the mystical island of the Haida people, Sgang Gwaay Llanagaay. He will prove to be the last child born in that pocket dimension, where time moves much slower than in the Outer World.

1785 CE

New Atlantis and the five major outlying settlements of the area formally incorporate as New Atlantis City on 1 March. The nascent town of Port Republic opts to remain independent.

1786 CE

Bensalem College becomes Bensalem University on 17 April, the third such in the new United States, following William and Mary (1693) and Harvard (1780).

1792 CE

After nine days of unsuccessful attempts, on 12 May American Captain Robert Gray becomes the first non-Native to cross the bar and enter what the native Chinook peoples call the Wimahl River. He renames the mighty river after his fur-trading ship, the Columbia Rediviva, on 18 May.

Port Republic is incorporated on the western shore of Lake Squanto, across from New Atlantis.

1804 CE

The Lewis and Clark expedition sets out westward to map the North American continent for the young United States government. With the expedition’s reports of vast westward lands fit for settlement, American adventurers and fortune-seekers soon begin the long, arduous journey across the Mississippi River, establishing the Oregon Trail.

1811 CE

Agents of wealthy Eastern investor John Jacob Astor arrive in the Pacific Northwest aboard the ship Tonquin to establish a fur-trading post, choosing for themselves a prime spot at the mouth of the mighty Columbia River. By the end of 1812, Astor’s people have mapped the surrounding area for eventual future settlement and established Fort Astoria. They establish good relations with the resident Chinook tribes from their very first encounter, and the resulting amity between settlers and natives will endure, more or less, into the modern era.

1812 CE

Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates his first creature, and immediately repents of it, considering it monstrous. The creature, taking the name Adam, is hurt by this rejection, and a violent battle of wills ensues as he demands a mate from his creator.

1815 CE

In the remote Orkney Islands Dr. Victor Frankenstein works on a second creation – but not the mate his first creation, Adam, longs for. Rather he attempts to perfect his art and create a champion capable of defeating the “monster” for him, and thereby redeem his “sins.” He succeeds, creating a more human, if still not perfectly human-looking, construct who takes the name Seth. Unfortunately, an unforeseen interaction between the two creatures renders Seth vulnerable, and he is defeated and left for dead by his “brother.”

1818 CE

Victor Frankenstein pursues his monstrous first creation across the globe after it murders his brother and his bride, the latter on their very wedding night. Tracking it to the Arctic Circle, Victor dies, and the creature, Adam, vanishes into the icy mists.

1820 CE

New Atlantis’ first daily newspaper, the New Atlantis Inquirer, begins publication. New Atlantis has become a busy port and a center for scholarship and the arts. The outlying districts of the city are largely defined and several neighborhoods to the west and south begin to grow with the influx of new immigrants from Europe.

1846 CE

The Oregon Treaty between the United Staes and Great Britain finally settles the decades of border disputes between the two powers in the Pacific Northwest, giving a boost to the growth of both Fort Astoria and Portland (the latter having been founded the year before).

The whaling ship Maine, after two years prowling the South Seas, puts in at Astoria in late August with 1,400 barrels of whale oil, 120 barrels of spermaceti, and seven tons of whale bone. After a tricky bar crossing the cargo is successfully unloaded, to be processed by facilities the ship’s owners have caused to be constructed over the past year. This establishes Astoria as “the Nantucket of the West Coast,” and will help fuel the city’s growth for the next 20 years.

1847 CE

The first U.S. post office west of the Rockies is established in Fort Astoria.

1851 CE

Simen Bergersen Klaeve, who will later change his name to Simon Benson, is born in Oppland, Norway.

1854 CE

On 6 January Sherlock Holmes is born in Shropshire, England. He will grow up to be the world’s first consulting detective, possessing one of the greatest analytical minds in history.

The first discovery, on 23 September, of the unique metallic ore uruite (initially called Oregon Silver) at Svenson’s Bluff, near Mt. Defiance, OR. This leads to the Oregon Silver Rush the next year and the famed men known as the Fifty-fivers, as prospectors flock north to Astoria from the California gold fields, as well as from the East Coast. During the height of the mining boom (1855-68) the fortunes, and population, of Astoria explode. The influx of money and people allows the burgeoning town to compete as a port with the quickly growing Portland to the east.

1855 CE

On 27 March physician-inventor Dr. Abraham Gesner patents a technique for refining petroleum into something he calls Kerosene. This will eventually prove to be the death knell for whaling profits in the great American whaling centers of New Bedford, New Haven, and Astoria.

1857 CE

On 5 August Fort Astoria officially incorporates as Astoria, an event commemorated with raucous celebrations in the fast-growing, hard-drinking town of miners, whalers and lumberjacks.

1862 CE

The American Civil War begins. It is bloody and terrible for both sides, and takes a heavy toll on the heroes who fight for the ideals on either side.

1863 CE

In Germany, Hamburg Professor Otto Lidenbrock discovers an ancient manuscript which, once deciphered, reveals an entrance to the Hollow Earth. He and his nephew, college student Axel Lidenbrock, travel to Iceland where, after hiring native guide Hans Bjelke, they descend into Snæfellsjökull Crater and discover an entrance to strange subterranean realms. For two months the trio explore this dangerous world, narrowly escaping death or worse numerous times. Eventually they are ejected out of the island volcano of Stromboli, just north of Sicily. Their published findings cause a stir around the world, and sparks a wave of global exploration that will last into the early years of the next century and reveal many other “lost worlds” to the public – who will not always believe in them.

1864 CE

On 12 August a surprise raid by Confederate agents operating from British Columbia hits the strongly pro-Union Astoria, Oregon. They badly damage the port’s whale processing facilities and loot the silver exchange, making off with gold, silver, gems, and raw uruite ore. The theft causes greater upset at the time, but it is the damage to the port that will prove the worse blow to Astoria’s economy. The provocateurs make good their escape, although their ultimate fate will long remain a mystery. 

1865 CE

The Daily Star is founded, born from the ashes of the bankrupt New Atlantis Inquirer, and by the end of the century it will become the nations newspaper of record, rivaling the New York Times, founded 14 years earlier, and the Washington Post, which will be founded 12 years later.

Astoria’s whaling fleet suffers unexpected losses when the Southern raider CSS Shenandoah—unaware of the Civil War’s end—claims five prizes off the southern Alaska coast in July. On 3 August, whilst steaming toward Astoria to attack the city itself, the Confederate warship encounters a British barque and learns of the war’s end four months earlier. Fearing Union reprisals if convicted of piracy, Captain Waddell chooses to circumnavigate the globe, to surrender his ship instead to the British in Liverpool, England. 

Jane Artemis Valentine is born 18 November on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia. She will grow up to be the immortal warrior known by many names, in many places – Demoness of Death, Angel of the Night, Red Lady, the Midnight Rider, and a dozen others… but most commonly she will go by Artemis, when she gives any name at all.

1866 CE

The growing popularity, and affordability, of kerosene combines with the damage inflicted by Confederate agents on her whaling facilities two years earlier, and the depredations of the CSS Shenandoah on her fleet last year, to effectively end the whaling industry in Astoria. Fully rebuilding the infrastructure is deemed economically unfeasible, and by the end of the decade most of the remaining whaling ships based out of Astoria have shifted to San Francisco.

1867 CE

The Bergersen family emigrates from Norway, arriving in New Atlantis where the family name is changed to Benson during naturalization. They soon travel to Black River Falls, WI, to join the family’s older siblings, and take up farming. 16-year-old Simon first works as a farmhand, then in logging camps and sawmills in Wisconson.

1868 CE

Outlaw Javier Peron is beaten and left for dead by his own gang near Lost Pueblo. His will to survive triggers the magic of the area and his body and spirit merge with the land. That night, the bandits who attacked Peron are caught in a terrible sandstorm, and their flesh is stripped from their bones. This inhuman force, now watching over the mystic nexus of Lost Pueblo, becomes known as el Latigazo (The Lash).

1871 CE

In the American southwest, six members of the Texas Rangers, led by Captain Dan Reid, pursue a band of outlaws led by Bartholomew “Butch” Cavendish, only to be betrayed by a civilian guide named Collins. Secretly working with Cavendish, the man leads the unsuspecting rangers into an ambush at Bryant’s Gap canyon. Later, a Potawatomi Native American named Tonto stumbles onto the grisly scene to discover one of the Rangers, Captain Reid’s younger brother, 21-year-old John, barely alive. Burying the others, and marking an empty grave for John, he nurses the injured man to health over the winter.

The Earth’s Magus Prime Wilhelm Franz Steiner (uncle of up-and-coming philosopher and social reformer Rudolf Steiner) dies. He is succeeded by the Navajo shaman Shilah Atsa (Brother Eagle). 

1880 CE

Stories about life and adventure on the western frontier find their way to the East Coast in the 80s. They include “dime novel” tales of the exploits of mysterious masked men like the Lone Ranger, the Quick Draw Kid, and the Native American shaman Shilah Atsa of Lost Pueblo, along with the legends of el Latigazo, the Midnight Rider, el Diablo, a new Zorro, Lady Remington, and others.

Chinese and Japanese immigrants continue to flock to Astoria, both from their homelands and from the increasingly hostile regions of the American West. Here they find an overall climate of benign neglect, which is as good as a welcome to them in these less-than-enlightened times. The new arrivals find work readily enough in the city’s growing industries, including fishing, timber, and the railroads. 

New Atlantis celebrates the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the first European settlers with a gala parade and a month-long series of festivals in the late spring. 

1881 CE

During the summer a resurgent Ku Klux Klan finds itself demon-haunted and hunted. Beginning in Georgia and soon spreading throughout much of the Old South members of the organization, however clandestine they think their associations, find themselves tracked, hunted and killed in the night. Where once they had brought terror after dark to others, now it is they who cower behind locked doors, fearing to go out once the sun has set. 

But hiding does them no good, and they die by the score, usually gruesomely and painfully — all at the hands, it is whispered, of a dark woman of terrifying strength and ferocity. By year’s end not a soul can be found who dares declare for the Klan for fear of the vengeful Angel of the Night, also called the Night Demon. For a generation the terror will keep the hate contained, if not truly rooted out.

Astoria City University is founded in Astoria, Oregon.

In China, Zhao Xiw`ang—the future Dr. Fu Manchu—is born into an impoverished Mandarin family. Even at a very young age the child displays incredible genius, and he is groomed as the hope of his family, destined to restore their fortunes.

1885 CE

New Atlantis celebrates its Centennial on 1 March, the festivities culminating in the opening of the Centennial Station train terminal.

In a London warehouse Dr. Henry Jekyll acquires a crate at auction that he believes might hold the long rumored second creation of the disgraced scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein. His suspicion is correct, it does contain the apparently inert form of Seth, along with copious notes from his creator.

Hoping this creature might aid his own studies into life and morality, Jekyll uses a rare gemstone of supposed mystical qualities from Afghanistan, acquired from fellow physician Dr. John Watson, to try and revive the construct. The attempt appears to fail, but in fact was a partial success, returning consciousness to the creature, but not mobility. In the end his own enraged alter ego, Mr. Hyde, seals up and hides the crate once more, before both aspects of the poor man meet their joint fate.

1887 CE

The residents of Astoria finally have enough of the tides and intermittent river flooding that have, for years, too often forced water back into the sewer lines and people’s homes and businesses. After considering several alternatives, the city fathers solve the problem by literally burying the first few blocks of the city closest to the water, then rebuilding atop the original, now-subterranean, structures. The resultant dark, dank, and malodorous area is soon forgotten, but will remain surprisingly intact over the next century. 

In Paris, the seemingly ageless creation of Victor Frankenstein, Adam Victorson, encounters a disfigured youth fighting off a group of thugs to protect his few possessions. Impressed with the young man’s skills, Adam aids him and later takes him under his wing, calling him Billy Blue due to his startling ice-blue eyes.

1891 CE

On 10 January the Navajo shaman (and Magus Prime of Earth) Shilah Atsa is killed by the Secret Service in Washington, D.C. while attempting to confront President Harrison, outraged over the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota on 29 December the previous year.

The Italian Contessa Viola Girabaldi takes on the mantle of Magus Prime. Believing in cooperation between mages of good will, she organizes several European and American occult groups into a single organization she calls the Lightbearers in the hopes of one day creating “light enough to illuminate the world and drive away the shadows.”

On 4 May the British criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarity perishes in his final conflict with his arch-rival Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. The Great Detective is believed to have died as well, but he will resurface several years later, having hunted down Moriarity’s confederates and dismantled his organization.

Adam and his faithful companion Billy Blue dog the foot steps Sherlock Holmes as he hunts down and brings to justice the confederates of the late Professor Moriarity. As the detective dismantles his old foe’s criminal empire, the two pick up the pieces and re-assemble them to turn the network to their own purposes.

A series of grisly murders take place in the West End of New Atlantis. A killer butchers four women over the course of the summer and autumn, identifying himself only as “Jack” in letters to the local press, similar to the “Ripper” killings in London two years previously. Despite the best efforts of the police, the murderer is never caught, although the killings—and the letters—eventually stop. Rumors attribute the end of the reign of terror to either a mysterious dark “avenging angel” of the night first seen around that time, or the presence of the famed British consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his associate Dr. John Watson, on holiday in New Atlantis at the time.

1892 CE

The vampire Dracula terrorizes London, before being driven out by Abraham Van Helsing and a group of survivors of the undead nobleman’s predations. They track the vampire lord to Transylvania, where they believe they destroy him.

On 4 November the Lightbearers, led by the Magus Prime, drive off a faction of the Brood of the Bronze Claw hiding on Iron Rock Island, thwarting their dark rituals.

1894 CE

After three years of clandestine effort to dismantle Professor Moriarity’s European criminal network, Sherlock Holmes reveals his survival to his old friend and partner, Dr. Watson – and sets himself up as a target for the late mastermind’s last remaining lieutenant, the infamous Colonel Moran.

With Colonel Moran safely behind bars, the last obstacle between Adam‘s control of Moriarity’s extensive criminal network is removed. With the aid of Billy Blue, now going by the more dignified William Bleu, he will spend the next 25 years refining and expanding and strengthening the strands in his web of control throughout Europe and the Americas.

1895 CE

Magus Prime Contessa Viola Girabaldi dies thwarting the efforts of The Voracious to re-enter Earth’s dimension. The Lightbearers take on the responsibility of seeking a new Magus Prime, attempting to force the will of the Powers That Be who actually bestow the mantle. Thanks to that distraction, the handful of survivors of the Cult of the Devourer manage to steal Girabaldi’s gathered Bloodstones of the Voracious before the Lightbearers can properly secure them.

Tom Swift, Sr. is born to Barton Swift, owner of Swift Construction Company; his mother dies shortly after giving birth.

1898 CE

Having carefully watched his ancient enemy Nemesis, Nimrod manages to collapse the immortal’s shell companies for his American corporate dealings. This catastrophic loss will cripple Nemesis’ influence in the New World for a generation.

Zhao Xiw`ang—the future Dr. Fu Manchu—is one of the original 160 students in the inaugural class of the new Imperial University of Peking. For two years he will voraciously devour the curriculum of the school at a rate that impresses, and occasionally intimidates, his teachers.

1900 CE

Clark Savage Jr. is born to geneticist Dr. Clark Savage Sr. and his wife Martya neé Oberon. Born with bronze skin, golden eyes, and bronze-red hair, the child is trained almost from birth by a team of experts, assembled by his father, to hone his mind and body to near-superhuman levels, giving him great strength and endurance, a photographic memory, mastery of numerous martial arts, and a vast knowledge of the sciences. By his 26th birthday he will become the physician, scientist, adventurer, detective, inventor, explorer, researcher, and musician the world will come to know as “Doc” Savage, the Man of Bronze. 

In China the Boxer Rebellion paralyses the Imperial University of Peking, interrupting Zhao Xiw`ang’s education just short of earning his first doctorate, in engineering. It is his first close brush with Western imperialism, and it makes a deep and lasting impression on him, altering the arc of his future dramatically.

1901 CE

The Black Dragon Society is founded in Japan by martial artist Uchida Ryohei as a successor to his mentor Mitsuru Tōyama‘s Gen’yōsha organization (The Dark Ocean Society). Its name is derived from the translation of the Amur River, which is called Kokuryū-kō (“Black Dragon River”) in Japanese, and its public goal is to support efforts to keep the Russian Empire north of that river and out of East Asia. It’s less public goal of Pan-Asian domination by Japan quickly attracts a number of powerful mystics devoted to the idea, and it will evolve into a powerful occult secret society.

1903 CE

Kúng, the last Haida child born on the mystic island of Sgang Gwaay Llanagaay turns 12 years old. The Elders are deeply concerned that no Haida of the Outer World have come to the Island for shamanistic training in so long, and at the apparent lack of fertility of their own people. They debate what to do – no native of the Island has ever left it since its founding in the Mythic Past.

1904 CE

Chinese polymath genius Zhao Xiw`ang is one of 47 students sent by the Imperial University of Peking to study abroad, the first time such is allowed by the imperial government. For the next eight years Zhao will study at various Western universities, including Heidelberg, Oxford, the Sorbonne, and Harvard, gaining several more doctorates in physics, medicine, and chemistry.

1905 CE

A British anthropologist, Professor George Edward Challenger, discovers a world seemingly displaced in time on a hidden plateau in South America. Catching only a glimpse of a primeval world, populated by dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and various primitive human tribes, Challenger will return two years later with an expedition to properly explore his “Lost World.” Later adventurers will discover that it actually exists in a parallel reality, with hidden access points in several locations around the world, including Europe, Asia and Peru.

Whole fucking paragraph on the Exposition has vanished. Shitty WordPress shit!

1906 CE

The Hunter Museum is established in a nineteenth-century mansion in New Atlantis’ Inner North Side district. 

An earthquake and fire destroy much of San Francisco, giving birth to a mysterious entity known as the Phoenix.

1908 CE

16 January Reginald Crecy is born in New Atlantis, NJ. Later in the year his father, Arthur Crecy, will gain a controlling interest in the city’s great metropolitan newspaper, the Daily Star.

On 30 June, over Tunguska, Siberia, in Imperial Russia, the crystalline gestation pod enters Earth’s atmosphere approximately 19,000 years after the Hunter ejected it from the doomed Seeker observation platform. Encased in a shell of rocky iron, the bluish glow of esoteric energies it releases via the time rift ripples across the planet, triggering the dormant matrix-infused gene complex latent in many humans, as well as re-energizing the myriad matrix crystals scattered across the planet. 

It also once again weakens the inter-dimensional rifts around the globe. These had been healing, the dimensional barriers strengthening, over the past two millennia, which had made it increasingly more difficult for “gods” and other extra-dimensional entities to travel to Earth; now the paths are easier to navigate once again.

The impact blast leaves several hundred square miles of Siberian taiga forest flattened, although it will be several years until investigators reach the epicenter of the blast.

1912 CE

The R.M.S. Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage, with great loss of life. Although the ship struck an iceberg, some later scholars suggest the Atlanteans were responsible, although there has never been any evidence to support this theory, and the Atlanteans themselves deny it. One of the lifeboats goes missing, with one of the wealthiest couples in the world aboard, adding another layer to the mystery of that night to remember.

In the wake of the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the formation of the Republic of China, the brilliant Zhao Xiw`ang returns home after eight years studying in numerous Western universities. Given his illustrious educational career and valuable understanding of the West, he is initially welcomed as an advisor by newly-elected President Sun Yet-Sen. He advises Sun not to resign in favor of Yuan Shikai, who controls the northern army, but his advice goes unheeded.

1913 CE

As a “guest” of the Atlantean scientists who had rescued her and her husband, and forty other survivors, from the sinking of the Titanic, Madeline Astor gives birth to her son, John Jacob Astor VII. Her husband is suspicious of the “vitamins” the Atlantean have been injecting her with, but the boy seems healthy enough.

19 September Zhao Zhengyi Jian is born to Zhao Xiw`ang in Shanghai. It is unclear if the boy’s mother was married to his father, or merely a concubine. Whatever the truth, she dies in childbirth, and the boy will be raised by his father.

1914 CE

On 28 June, high in the Himalayas, the immortal warrior Artemis, weary and soul-sick with fighting and death, finds the hidden entrance to Shambhala, for which she has spent two hard years searching. She passes within and will not be seen in the Outer World again for 25 years.

The Great War begins in Europe, eventually drawing in the United States and becoming a truly world-wide war.

1915 CE

In the late spring a Russian-Jewish astro-physicist and amateur geologist named Jacob Cohen and his wife Martya are semi-exiled to Kezhemskoye village, a remote post in Siberia relatively close by the site of the 1908 Tunguska Event. After hearing many lurid tales of that fateful day, Cohen is inspired to seek out what he assumes will be a meteorite. He is the first scientists to venture into the heart of the blast area, almost exactly seven years after the event. Expecting to find a mile-wide crater, the scientist is shocked to find only a 1 meter egg-shaped rock laying on the surface of the ground, at the center of a circle of vaporized taiga forest about 20 meters in diameter. Beyond that for kilometers the trees are flattened in a radial pattern that remains, even after all these years.

Cohen and his small crew secure the geode and he takes it back to his observatory/lab for study. The stone is unlike anything he has seen before, despite resembling a common geode in many ways. He is anxious to crack it open, but his wife Martya is adamant that he not do so, insisting that it “is not ready yet.” Not understanding her odd fixation, but wanting to please her (she had suffered her second miscarriage shortly after their arrival in this exile), he accedes to her insistent request. He sets the stone aside, and eventually it comes to be stored under their bed.

On 23 October Winston Washington is born in Baltimore, Delaware. He will grow up to become the WWII-era superhero American Eagle. Father of the second American Eagle and grandfather of the third.

When President Yuan Shikai declares the Empire of China, with himself as Emperor,  Zhao Xiw`ang resigns from his government posts. In frustration at the turmoil within his country, and the continued interference of foreigners, he goes underground. He assumes the name of Fu Manchu, both as a disguise and in mocking contempt for a character in a recent  British pulp novel (alleged to have been based on himself, in fact). He soon becomes a powerful warlord in the Shandong region, opposing not only the influence of Western imperialism, but also Yuan’s imperial ambitions, and the socialist ideas of his former friend Sun Yet-Sen. He becomes a significant factor during chaos of the Warlord Era.

1916 CE

Word reaches St. Petersburg of Jacob Cohen’s find in Tunguska, and it eventually makes its way to the ears of Grigori Rasputin, spiritual advisor to the Imperial family. Shortly thereafter, on 22 October, Cohen and his wife are summoned back from their Siberian quasi-exile — along with his “interesting geologic find.” 

At first overjoyed to be returned to civilization, the 32 year old scientist soon becomes concerned by the turmoil and social unrest of the time. When Rasputin takes an interest in the geode, Cohn begins to be afraid for the safety of his wife and himself. By now he, like his wife, has become strangely attached to the odd object, and he finds the mad monk’s interest in it to be unnerving. In late November and again in early December he manages to rebuff attempts by the Czarina’s advisor to take control of the stone, but he fears he will not succeed a third time.

On 14 December, as Jacob and Martya discuss the possibility of fleeing the city, a loud crack comes from their bedroom. Rushing in, they find that the outer shell of the geode has cracked all along its equatorial diameter. Lifting up the top half, an internal cavity is revealed – and a translucent organic “sack,” within which floats a human fetus. Instinctively, Martya reaches out, and the sack ruptures, spilling amniotic fluid out to fully expose the child. It is, to all appearances, a perfect, healthy baby boy, umbilical cord still attached to some sort of artificial placenta.

The Cohens flee St. Petersburg the next day, fearing they will never be able to resist Rasputin’s influence on the Imperial family once he learns of this unprecedented birth – both are certain he, or the Czar’s men, will take the child from them. They are forced to travel light, and therefore leave the remains of the geode behind, loath as Jacob is to do so. Rasputin pieces together the clues, and sends his agents after the couple and what he comes to call “the Star Child.” Fortunately for the Cohen family he is assassinated shortly thereafter, on 30 December, and his agents abandon the search as soon as news of his death reaches them.

On the night of his assassination Rasputin is wearing a crystal he’d had set in silver, taken from the remains of the “crystal womb,” as he thinks of it. He has been studying the object almost continuously for the prior two weeks and, given the evidence he found in the Cohen’s abandoned home, he believes that something was born from that strange geode. He remains uncertain as to what form it might have taken, however.

It is the crystal, and his exposure to the womb itself, which allows Rasputin to survive his attempted murder. Poisons have no effect, and the bullets that should have killed him merely render him insensible. When one of the assassins returns to get rid of his body, he attacks the man, and when Rasputin is shot in the head his mind – jumps. In a welter of confusion, he finds himself looking out from Vladimir Purishkevich’s eyes… and down at his own corpse.

In that initial disorienting moment he is unable to seize control of this new body, but he does exert enough subtle, subliminal control to cause Purishkevich to strip the crystal pendant from his body and tuck it into his own pocket. For the most part, however, he is a passenger in his killer’s body, able only to watch as the conspirators disposed of his body in the river.

1917 CE

It takes time, but gradually, Rasputin’s mind begins to exert dominance over Purishkevich’s, and in the end he is in complete control of their shared form, the Russian nobleman reduced to a screaming prisoner buried deep in the grave of his own skull. A prisoner, but not without influence. Rasputin never senses the degree to which his own intellect has merged with that of Purishkevich, believing himself to be only and entirely “Rasputin.” He is soon able to recover and take possession of the remains of the crystal womb, to continue his study of what he comes to believe is an alien artifact.

By the time that he contracts typhus in the city of Novorossiysk in 1920, Rasputin has mastered the ability to jump to another host, and he does so the week before Purishkevich’s body dies. This time he is fully aware of the process and is able to seize complete control of his new host at once, never giving the native mind time to resist. But still, the original personality is always there, submerged but able to exert subtle influence on the dominant mind.

Rasputin, as he continues to think of himself, begins a series of body hops over the next several years, until encountering a rising young German scientist named Gerhart von Richter.

On 14 August Himari Kenshin is born into a poor family in Kyoto, Japan. In time she will become the most feared assassin in East Asia, the Kaminari.

1918 CE

On 3 March the bolsheviks make peace with Germany, signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Jacob Cohen accepts a long proffered position from an old friend at Heidelberg University. He, Martya, and their young son Carl relocate there in April. Within two years Jacob will become a full professor of astro-physics.

Tom Swift develops a unique alloy of titanium and uruite, which proves to be the strongest metal thus far created by humans. He names it adamantine.

The Thule Society, a German occultist and Völkisch group, is founded in Munich, Germany by Walter Nauhaus, a wounded World War I veteran from Berlin. Originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum (“Study Group for Germanic Antiquity”), the Society is notable chiefly as the organization that will sponsor the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP, or German Workers’ Party), which will later be reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party).

Simon Benson donates land and creates an endowment for the the building and maintenance of a private college in Astoria, OR.

1919 CE

On 14 May Elizabeth “Ellie” Campbell is born in Boston, MA.

On June 23 land on the western bank of the South River, from the Lipane wetlands to Shad Point are officially annexed into the city of  New Atlantis.

In China, warlord Zhao Xiw`ang, having established the pseudonym of Dr. Fu Manchu, begins building an international network of spies, informants, saboteurs, and assassins. His agents begin to come into conflict with the agents of various Western powers, especially the British Empire, although he himself remains mostly behind the scenes, little more than a shadowy rumor to the West.

Having spent years consolidating control of the late Professor James Moriarity’s criminal network, Adam and Billy Blue (now going by the name William Bleu) have used the chaos of the Great War to infiltrate many European institutions, both governmental, commercial, and criminal. Now they leverage that access to fully activate the Plexus, a secret organization intended to give them influence over the political, economic and criminal centers of the Continent and North America from a centralized command. Adam adopts the pseudonym of The Forsaken at this time.

Circa 1920-1935 CE

The second decade of the twentieth century sees New Atlantis grown into a modern metropolis, in many areas rivaling her northern neighbor of New York City. Reports begin to surface of “mystery men” fighting crime in both cities. The police and the newspapers in New Atlantis tell of criminal enterprises broken by a mysterious crime-fighter called the Blue Spectre in 1923, and by 1925 the Inferno and the Silver Sax have entered the fray. Others will follow their lead once the Great Depression takes hold.

1920 CE

In the remote Atlantean outpost where he has grown up, it turns out that John Jacob Astor VII was indeed altered by the Atlantean scientists supposedly giving his family shelter. By age 7 he has become amphibious, although unable to breathe in the air much longer than a full-blooded Atlantean. His father, Colonel Astor, is furious, but has little choice but to pretend to accept the Atlanteans‘ absurd explanation of “spontaneous adaptation.”

Inspired by The Forsaken’s creation of his impressive criminal network, the Plexus, Nemesis activates his own globe-spanning organization. Over the centuries he has been using his meat-puppets to build up generational cells of operatives around the world, but now the ancient AI has realized human civilization has reached a technological and organizational point that finally allows, and indeed now requires, his own efforts to become more unified and centralized. He begins the process of linking his various scattered cells into a massive organization he calls the Crucible. Within the year it is ready to continue his work of testing, pushing, refining, and honing Mankind as never before possible, through the fires of war, disaster and ruthless competition.

1921 CE

Leonid Kulik, Russian geologist, leads the first Soviet expedition to investigate the Tunguska site, intrigued by what he learned from his friend and colleague Jacob Cohen and his odd stone “egg” years earlier.

In the U.S. the self-inflicted disaster of Prohibition brings economic and social decline to the country, along with a massive increase in crime. Police departments, especially in major metropolitan centers, are hard pressed to combat the increasing scourge of organized crime. On 23 July a mysterious vigilante known as the Blue Spectre begins to wage a one-man war against organized crime in New Atlantis, beginning the rise of the so-called “mystery men.”

Benson College opens its doors in Astoria, OR, enrolling its first students in the fall. Shortly thereafter the school’s benefactor and namesake, Simon Benson, donates a large tract of land to the city of Astoria. The hilly, heavily forested parcel south of Youngs River and Haven Lake will eventually become an urban wilderness preserve known as Forest Hills Park.

1923 CE

Shortly after gaining his doctorate, promising young German scientist Gearhart von Richtor has the misfortune to meet the current host body of the psychic vampire Rasputin. Young and very fit, attractive, wealthy, aristocratic, with wide connections in German society and a keen intellect, von Richtor is everything the Mad Monk is looking for in a new host, and he soon possesses the young man, taking him over body and soul. This will be the body he keeps for many decades.

1924 CE

Dr. Gearhart von Richtor accepts a position at Heidelberg University, where he runs into Professor Jacob Cohen. Cohen doesn’t recognize von Richter as Rasputin, of course, but von Richter recognizes him. When he learns of the Cohen’s young son Carl, he takes certain actions that reveal his true identity to the couple. Already growing uncomfortable with the rising tide of anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany during the Weimar years, Cohen and his family take this as a sign to once again flee, this time to America.

The Cohen’s arrive at Ellis Island on 4 July, and within a month Jacob secures a position as a professor of astro-physics at Princeton. He will remain there for the rest of his career, and eight-year-old Carl will grow up as an American.

1925 CE

On 12 March Benjamin Franklin Airport opens north of New Atlantis, on the outskirts of Port Mystic.

On 20 June jazz saxophone player Geronimo Jones adopts the identity of the Silver Sax to fight crime in New York.

The Inferno makes his first appearance in Boston, MA in late August, lighting up crime around the city.

Tom Swift, Sr. marries his long-time sweetheart Mary Nestor.

1929 CE

The stock market crashes on Black Friday, and triggers the beginning of the Great Depression, ushering in a dark period for much of the world. Organized crime, already a growing problem in the U.S. thanks to Prohibition, becomes entrenched as the newly poor and desperate look for any means to survive. The so-called “mystery men” (and women) begin to be seen as heroes by the public, and even by some in the police fraternity. Their exploits are written about in the pulp magazines produced by National Times Publishing, although the legitimate press has tended to downplay such stories. Given the often fantastic nature of the tales, it had been easy enough at first for the public at large to dismiss them as mere fiction, exaggerations at best; but with increased visibility the reality can no longer be swept under the rug.

1930 CE

Against his parents’ wishes John Jacob Astor VII, at 17, marries L’alwa, the granddaughter of their chief Atlantean captor, Thar Holthorus. Eight months later, John Jacob Astor VIII is born. Like his father, he is a true amphibian, but with both the physical strength of the Atlanteans and the surface-dweller’s ability to breath for an unlimited amount of time out of the water.

On 13 April Port Republic is officially annexed into New Atlantis City, bringing the metropolis’ population to 5,687,000 according to the 1930 U.S. Census.

24 September Tom Swift, Jr. is born in New York City.

1931 CE

5 June Louise Karen Lancaster is born in Philadelphia, PA.

Despite occasional conflicts, a number of police departments begin to welcome the help of the growing number of new crime-fighting adventurers, such as the Shadow and Doc Savage, both of whom dominate the news in New York. They have joined the likes of the Blue Spectre, the Inferno and the Silver Sax, and will soon be joined by others.

1932 CE

5 April New Atlantis celebrates the 300th anniversary of the founding of the initial township that would eventually grow into the thriving metropolis of today.

In November an American film crew, led by well-known filmmaker Carl Denham, are the first Westerners to set foot on Kaiju Island, although they know it as “Skull Island.” There they encounter and eventually capture the gigantic ape they call King Kong, and by the new year they prepare to transport the beast to New York.

1933 CE

On 2 March filmmaker Carl Denham presents a Broadway theatre audience in New York with “Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World!” The 25 meter tall ape escapes during the show, panicking first the audience and then the city, and eventually climbs the Empire State Building with actress Fay Wray in his grasp. Military biplanes, dispatched by the Army, are able to bring down the creature, who dies trying to protect Wray.

On 13 April polymath genius Clark “Doc” Savage, Jr. delivers Lester “Calzone” Dent to justice in New York City, breaking up the Dent crime syndicate.

During a series of wars in the Xinjiang region of China,  Dr. Fu Manchu, now generally referred to domestically as simply the Doctor, is driven out of his strongholds in Shandong by the Nationalist government. Forced to flee, he manages to retain the nucleus of the international organization he has been building for years. He re-establishes a new base in Qinghai, near the border with Tibet. Leaving it under the command of his son, Zhao Zhengyi Jian he returns to his birth name of  Zhao Xiw`ang, to seek out and enter the fabled Himalayan land of Shambhala.

1934 CE

At age 17 Carl Cohen leaves home to attend college downstate at Bensalem University in New Atlantis, although he has also been accepted at Princeton. His powers have been growing steadily stronger since he was about 12 years old, although he has not yet attained the power levels he will reach when fully mature.

1935 CE

Gearhart von Richtor, already a rising presence in German scientific and occult circles, joins the Thule Society in Germany and immediately begins to subvert the group.

In Japan, Himari Kenshin, a powerless geisha employed by the Yakuza, discovers the long-lost Storm Tessen, magical creation of the kami Raijin. Intelligent, ruthless, and cunning, she uses the magical war fan to elevate her own status in the organization, something almost unheard of for a woman. She eventually catches the eye of agents of the Japanese military command, and by the spring of the next year she has become a covert assassin known only as the Kaminari.

1936 CE

Gearhart von Richtor, showing great aptitude for the occult and incredible ruthlessness in eliminating his rivals, rises to a position of power in the Thule Society.

In Japan, the Black Dragon Society of occultists has risen to a position of great power within the Imperial government. Sharing similar goals, the group makes tentative contact with the Thule Society in Germany.

In Shambhala, Zhao Xiw`ang steals the secret which he believes will grant him immortality, despite the dire warnings of his mentor. He flees the hidden land before he can be restrained and punished, returning to his fortress in China, near the Tibetan border. He resumes his alias of the Doctor and begins plotting against both the West and the rising tide of socialism in China. Tensions arise between Xiw`ang and his son, Zhao Zhengyi Jian, who has grown used to control in the years of his father’s absence.

On 17 October Devaj Acharya is born in New Delhi, India to a prominent Brahmin family.

1937 CE

Declining to return home after her Grand Tour of Europe, Ellie Campbell enrolls as a Chemistry major at the University of Vienna. She quickly becomes a star pupil of noted scientist Hans Fischer, who soon has her assisting him in his theoretical research. Unfortunately, their work draws the attention of Dr. Gearhart von Richtor, who has himself appointed head of the Chemistry Department. When the purges begin, after the Anschluss, Campbell and Fischer are both expelled and von Richtor seizes their work for his own purposes.

1938 CE

The Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Germany) occurs 12 March as the Nazi party begins to take its first steps toward European hegemony. 

Ultra makes his first public appearance in New Atlantis, stopping a bank robbery/hostage situation on 3 June 1938. The picture of him lifting a car over his head as bullets bounce off his chest, which appears in the evening edition of the Daily Star under the headline “The New Heroic Age!,” becomes an iconic symbol in American history. The term “superhero” begins to replace “mystery men” in the American lexicon… although scientists will eventually settle on the term meta-human as the preferred nomenclature for the “exotically gifted.”

On 21 June mild mannered Carl Cohen, 21, receives two undergraduate degrees from Bensalem University in economics and political science. In the fall he begins his graduate studies for his Ph.D.

Ellie Campbell finishes her first year studying chemistry at the University of Vienna in June. When classes are to resume in the fall, however, she finds that she and hundreds of other “undesirable” students, as well as many professors, have been banned under the new administration of Dr. Gearhart von Richtor – including her mentor Professor Hans Fischer.

In Egypt, archaeology student Roland Reid is part of a team that discovers a hidden chamber beneath the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, and on 9 May unwittingly frees the mystically imprisoned lich of the evil Atlantean (and undead) former Magus Prime, Dolórüska the Damned. The unliving sorcerer possesses the body of Reid’s teacher, Professor Morton and slays the other students, but finds himself for some reason unable to kill Reid. Instead, he restrains the youth in mystic chains as he escapes, leaving the youth to die in the tomb’s depths at the jaws of summoned jackals.

But the young man doesn’t die – instead, the staff he has grabbed to defend himself, with the strange metal-and-crystal arrangement on top, begins to glow. The ghostly figures of two men appear before him in the dark, one in ancient Egyptian garb, the other in strange robes. Both apparitions reach out, each touching an insubstantial finger to Rolands forehead. This combined touch opens his third eye, awakening him to the mystical world.

The “spirits” are the psychic imprints of Kahar’Beth Sül, the ancient Atlantean sorcerer who first imprisoned Dolórüska, and Imhotep, the ancient Egyptian magus who helped re-imprison the insane Atlantean after his first escape, five thousands years ago. After Imhotep and his king, Djoser, had re-entombed the litch in a special-built chamber beneath the king’s own burial crypt, the vizier had imprinted his psyche on the staff alongside Kahar’Beth’s original imprint. The guardian Staff of Sül was again left in the tomb as a precaution against any future escape by Dolórüska. All of this is transmitted to Reid in an instant, and without hesitation Roland accepts the responsibility of becoming the tool to set this disaster to rights.

With his latent affinity for magic awakened, and imbued with the arcane knowledge of the mage Imhoptep, he collapses the ancient chamber as he leaves, burying the bodies of his friends – Roland Reid will be the sole survivor of this horrific archeological accident. He immediately pursues Dolórüska and, with knowledge bestowed by the staff and his own innate talent, defeats him, once again sealing his undying spirit into the Golden Helm.

12 May Brently Ambrose is born in New Atlantis, the sole heir to the Ambrose Industries fortune.

A Thule Society expedition discovers the location of Salomon, a hidden island refuge descended from survivors of Atlantis. While amused by the humans and their primitive notions of “racial superiority,” the matriarchal Salomoni reject the Thule Society, their philosophy, and their request for knowledge. Indeed, they give them just the opposite, erasing not only their memories of their visit but of the very idea of the island’s existence. However, a seed is planted in one ambitious Salomoni, Neanon Var, a male who chafes under the rule of the matriarchs. He connives to have himself appointed as the Salomoni who will accompany the Germans home just long enough to assure that any physical evidence they might possess concerning the island is destroyed.

On the night of November 9-10 Nazis officials initiate a brutal pogrom against Jewish citizens. They pretend that it is merely a ‘spontaneous uprising’ of citizenry outraged by the assassination, by a Jew, of the German ambassador to France. During the Kristallnacht, the Roma (Gypsy) people also suffer, if less publicly. 

At the Marzhan detention camp outside Berlin, 16-year-old twins Vadim and Vadoma Straka see their parents murdered while they hide beneath the family vardo (wagon). Trying to make themselves smaller, crowded together in the tight space, their terror and grief somehow triggers a latent meta-human power – the two fuse into a single, androgynous being, who glows with a brilliant white light. 

Bursting forth from their hiding place, the confused, frightened, and merged twins unleash a blast of white energy that shatters their vardo and blinds and burns several of the Nazi killers. Rising into air, they vanish into the night sky… over the next several weeks they will be spotted across the Reich, and come to be called Die Weiße Laterne (the White Lantern).

1939 CE

Under the rule of Gerhart von Richtor, the Thule Society begins a pogrom against all rival mystics in Europe, looting their magical resources and killing those who resist. Many members of the Lightbearers in Europe flee or go underground.

Taking the name Arkanos, on the death of the previous bearer of the mantle, Roland Reid successfully claims the mantle of Earth’s Magus Prime.

A rejuvenated and renewed Artemis returns to the world from Shambhala. Appearing near the town of Meiringer, Switzerland, she is surprised to find that what was two-and-a-half years for her in that hidden land has seen 25 years pass in the Outer World.

Making her way to Vienna Artemis has the misfortune of coming to the attention of Gerhart von Richtor. The Nazi occultist quickly comes to desire the mystical Shadow Cloak she now possesses, and he makes several attempts to capture both her and the artifact. At first contemptuous of him and his absurd Thule Society, after several close calls she realizes he may well present an actual danger to her. She leaves the Continent for England and then New Atlantis after one last narrow escape in early February. While foiling von Richtor’s final attempt on her and her cloak, the Nazi scientist does manage to snag a small piece of the fabric during their last confrontation.

After a year of attempting to recreate their stolen work, Ellie Campbell and Professor Hans Fischer realize the futility of working under the rising tide of Nazism. Campbell marries her half-Jewish lover, Nico Steiner on 12 February, and on 9 March they sail for America.

On 16 August Bensalem University engineering graduate student Winston Washington returns from a year traveling around Europe, where he has discovered a lost Leonardo da Vinci folio detailing a strange flying harness and mechanical wings. Constructing the device as part of his thesis project, using the specific materials detailed in an encrypted addendum and discovered alongside the folio, he discovers it actually works!

In mid-September, before he can present his paper and the device, German fifth columnists attempt to steal both the plans and the harness from him. Washington prevents the capture of his device, but the thieves make off with the plans. Donning the harness (and a mask to protect himself in flight), he gives chase, which ends in a spectacular car crash. Unfortunately, both the spies and the plans are destroyed in the fiery wreck. Realizing his mask has concealed his identity, Washington decides to continue to use the harness to fight crime, taking the “mystery man” code name of American Eagle.

On 11 October the Aurora Building opens in the North Canal district of New Atlantis. Designed by famed Chrysler Building architect William Van Alen, the 40-story building is a masterpiece of Art Deco style and beauty, and quickly becomes a beloved landmark on the city’s skyline.

In late October National Times Publishing begins detailing American Eagle’s adventures as a backup feature in their American Comics magazine. Founded earlier in the year, it had been limited to fictionalizing the exploits of Ultra, who remains the comic’s featured star. Despite his repeated objections, and those of his lawyers, Washington’s skin tone in the comics keeps suffering “printer errors” that make him look white in early issues. Even the threat of a real lawsuit fails to resolve the issue, which is only cleared when Ultra speaks privately with the publisher. It is with some satisfaction that Washington notes early the next year that there is no drop in sales even when he is portrayed properly as a negro.

On 1 September Germany invades and conquers Poland, heralding the beginning of World War II.

In Germany, Neanon Var, having destroyed the Thule Society’s physical evidence of the existence of Salomon Island, defies orders to return home. Instead, he presents himself to Adolph Hitler as the pinnacle of Aryan perfection. In November he makes his first public appearance as der Übermensch, the first of Hitler’s Übersoldaten.

1940 CE

Nikola Tesla announces a new uruite alloy that is more than twice as strong as adamantine. He dubs it ultroniom in honor of the new super human making headlines around the world recently.

Despite his failure to obtain the full secrets of the Shadow Cloak, Gerhart von Richtor does manage to learn something from the fragment he managed to capture. As the recently-appointed head of the Synthesis Division of the Cerberus Project he subjects brutal S.S. officer Sigmund Dietrich Volkmar to dark, arcane rituals based on that knowledge, combined with an untested chemical serum, derived from the work of Ellie Campbell and Hans Fishcer. The result transforms the man into the murderous Shattenjäger (Shadow Hunter).

Mystic Heights teenager Harry Carter is soaked in a mixture of unknown chemicals when lightning strikes the police forensic lab where he works after school as a janitor. The chemicals speed Carter’s metabolism to superhuman levels, as he discovers a few days later when he is leaving the hospital. A gang of hoodlums is attempting to rob the hospital pharmacy, and he uses his new super-speed to defeat and apprehend them. Later, hearing the criminals describe him as “just a red blur, racing around,” Carter adopts the name Red Racer and begins his career as a costumed crime fighter.

On 23 June, Lady Philipa Harman-Smith discovers a bronze torc incised with Celtic runes while on an archeological dig. At her touch the runes begin to glow and her mind is overwhelmed with past-life memories of all the women who have worn the artifact before her. She is invested with the mystical power of Boudica, eternal protector of the British Isles.

In Japan, Keiko Ishido, a woman who has discovered she has the ability to control the emotions of others, uses her power to fleece men out their money. When she chooses the wrong victim, however, she comes to the attention of the Black Dragon Society, who recruit her as the operative codenamed Geisha.

The Mystical Division of Cerberus enacts a massive ritual to draw down the power of the Norse Gods to aid the Third Reich. The attempt kills or cripples 18 volunteers, but produces two successes: Edvard Bettinger, a soldier in the German army, is empowered with strength and lightning powers, and is codenamed Blitzkrieg; while Helga Loosen, daughter of a high-ranking Thule Society member, gains strength and the power of flight, and takes the codename die Walkürie.

In the remote Atlantean outpost of Kenyon’s Reef a long-ill Madeline Astor dies; her husband and 10-year-old grandson, John Jacob VI and VIII, are devastated. The younger Astor begins to spend all his time working with his grandfather on their mutually fascinating engineering projects.

A coup in Atlantis results in the death of the king and the exile of Princess Malina, whose latent meta-human powers are awakened in the crisis. While the princess establishes a group of loyal followers in exile, the coup leaders seek to further isolate Atlantis from the surface world, despite some factions favoring an alignment with the Axis powers.

Alden Corbin is born 22 July in Cardiff, Wales, UK, to a comfortably middle class family; he is the youngest of seven children, by a wide margin.

In September RAF pilot Harry Miller, his plane shot out from under him while on escort duty over France, begins flying under his own power. Possessing great strength while in flight, the hero starts tearing the wings off of Nazi planes, bringing down many bombers. Taking the codename Iron Hawk, the charming young flyer becomes the British government’s poster boy for recruitment.

While flying his first mission for the Luftwaffe, young pilot Helmut Volgel scores his first kill, shooting down a British fighter over France — only to see the pilot begin flying under his power! Apparently incredibly strong, as well, the Brit pulls the wings off Volgel’s own plane, forcing him to bail out. When his parachute fails to open, Vogel panics… only to find himself hovering in midair. In shock, he floats gently to the ground, unseen by the Englishman, who is busy destroying the rest of the German flight. But once on the ground Vogel is in danger of capture, and quickly discovers that he too has the power of true flight — as well as the ability to generate force fields and devastating shockwaves. On his return to his homeland Vogel is transferred to the Übersoldaten and codenamed Reichsadler (Imperial Eagle).

On Halloween Daily Star publisher Reginald Crecy, while attending a charity costume party as Robin Hood, uses a bow and arrow to deal with criminals attempting to rob the event. After his success that night, and by sheer luck having retained his anonymity, he decides to put his extraordinary skills as an archer and an investigator to good use, and in the next year he begins a war on the criminal elements of New Atlantis, using the name coined by his own paper: Sure-shot.

Artemis is intrigued by the “mystery men” and the new “superheroes,” and is tempted to once again don the mask the Lone Ranger gave her 60 years earlier. Instead, she contents herself with dealing justice from the shadows in a more intimate fashion. Nevertheless, she generates some notice, and soon comes to be whispered of as the Angel of the Night in both New Atlantis and New York – a feat made possible by the teleportation abilities of her mystical cloak and its power to make her invisible in shadows. She befriends industrialist-playboy Thomas Grey, and comes to trust him. She allows him to study her Shadow Cloak, out of her fear of what von Richtor may have learned himself from the piece of shadow material he stole.

On 5 November comics publisher National Times adds Liberty League Adventures and Crime Crushers to its list of titles.

In Poland, the mystical construct Golem is created by Rabbi Dayan to protect the Jewish people from  the rising tide of anti-semitism sweeping Europe.

The White Lantern begins a counter-propaganda campaign across Nazi-occupied Europe, focusing on undoing the brainwashing of Germany’s children by the Hitler Youth.

1941 CE

On 2 February Amandine Siraudin, the only survivor of a French family killed for resisting the Nazi occupation of their town, uses her newly-awakened meta-human powers as the heroine la Fantôme d’Argent.

On 22 June Germany violates the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, launching a massive invasion of Russia.

Reginald Crecy, in his Sure-shot guise, encounters and eventually adopts Leo Feldman, an orphan whose parents were killed by the Mob in their deli for refusing to pay protection money. Sure-shot undertakes to train the youth as his junior partner, Arrowhead.

First appearance of Calypso, the codename adopted by the exiled Atlantean princess Malina to disguise her identity while in the surface world. She has come to New Atlantis seeking allies in her effort to rescue her people and restore her family’s throne. Encountering Ultra for the first time, she uses her seaborne powers to help him stop fifth columnists attempting to steal a prototype submarine.

National Times adds Angel of the Night to its list of titles, but with no real information about its titular heroine to work from they can only rely on public accounts of her exploits, making it the most fictionalized of the company’s comics. But with no licensing fees, it is also proves one of the most lucrative. Artemis decides to be amused.

She is less amused by the actions of her friend and confidant, Thomas Grey. At an impasse in their argument about her taking a more public stance with her own powers, he decides to take on a costumed identity himself. Adopting the name Midnight Hour, he uses a chemical mist he has developed from his study of the Shadow Cloak to empower himself. When inhaled, it grants him certain darkness-based powers for approximately 60 minutes per dose. He makes a dramatic public debut on 17 August, stopping an assassination attempt on the mayor of New Atlantis by German fifth columnists.

On 7 December Japan launches a surprise attack on the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawai’i.

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Gaia appears in San Francisco, disabling a Japanese sub as it is attempting to enter the Golden Gate. When the American authorities demand to know who she is, she merely identifies herself as “a friend to liberty and justice.” Over time, it will become general knowledge that she comes from a hidden island of advanced, peaceful philosophers and scientists.

On 8 December Heinrich Sauer, a resistance fighter from an alternate future Earth where the Axis Powers won World War II, travels to what he believes, mistakenly, to be his timeline’s past. The reality-hopping scientist obtains an audience with President Roosevelt, warning him of the future defeat at the hands of the Axis if steps are not taken to prevent it, specifically that Ultra will die if he goes to Germany alone. He suggests a team be formed…

In late December Gerhart von Richtor leaks information that the Science Division of Cerberus is about to test a new Nazi super-weapon. Eight heroes take the bait, and several are killed when von Richtor and his Übersoldaten ambush them. The survivors, who include the Golem, Boudica, Iron Hawk, and la Fantôme d’Argent, form a team that comes to be called the Freedom Front.

1942 CE

On 10 January President Roosevelt asks Ultra to form a team of American superheroes, and New Atlantis becomes the group’s home base. Joining Ultra, Gaia, Sure-Shot, American Eagle, Red Racer, Calypso, and Midnight Hour fill out the the Liberty League’s first roster.

The White Lantern joins the Freedom Front in March, and the American hero Inferno joins the team in June.

Grigori Rasputin, in his current identity of Gerhart von Richtor, has risen to become the one of the heads of the Cerberus Project, Hitler’s mystical/super-science research organization. It is organized into three divisions, under three directors: one pursuing science and technological weapons development; one seeking out arcane and mystical weapons and techniques; and von Richter’s branch, which seeks to synthesize both science and sorcery into a single ultimate super-weapon.

When Ultra finally confronts him, von Richter has no idea who the American really is; but he is still wearing the crystal he took from the birthing pod which Carl’s father had been forced to leave behind when the family fled Germany. Von Richtor quickly realizes that something about the crystal weakens Ultra, dampening his power enhancements and leaving him almost as vulnerable as any normal man.

Ultra barely escapes with his life, thanks to his teammates; the store of remaining crystals, which von Richter controls and dubs ultrite, are scattered across the Reich at key points, and become the shield which prevents Ultra from using his astonishing powers to end the war quickly.

On Ultra’s return to the States, his father, Jacob Cohen, reveals to his son the true identity of von Richter as the disembodied intellect of the Mad Monk Rasputin. He finally confesses to Carl the full story of his own discovery/birth (insofar as he knows it), and theorizes as to why the crystals from his birthing chamber might block his powers — perhaps to protect him while in the womb, to keep him from damaging the very thing that was then keeping him alive.

On learning what is happening to the Jews under the Nazi regime, but being unable to stop it due to his vulnerability, Ultra is consoled by FDR, who discourages him from revealing to the world that he himself is Jewish. He cites his own hiding of his polio handicap, not out of shame, but from the need of the people to believe in the strength and infallibility of their leaders… and their heroes. He encourages Ultra to remain “all things to all people” as much as possible. The president also refuses to accept Ultra’s offer to reveal his secret identity, saying it’s best that not even the President should know all the hero’s secrets… to protect Ultra in the future, from other, less scrupulous leaders. He encourages the hero to not even hint to anyone else that he has a secret identity – given that he wears no mask, the idea is unlikely to ever occur to anyone independently.

2 June Brigade, a result of early American attempts to create a super soldier, first appears on a battlefield in France. He is quickly invited to join both the Freedom Front and the Liberty League. At the insistence of the government, he remains a free agent (under Army command), although he will work throughout the war with both teams.

21 June just before midnight, the Japanese submarine I-25 surfaces and lobs 17 shells at Fort Stevens in Astoria, OR. The attack generates panic far greater than any actual damage inflicted (a nearby baseball field takes most of the damage), but it leads to the formation of Astoria’s first publicly known team of costumed superheroes, the Victory Flight.

14 August first meeting of the criminal organization known as the Syndicate in New Atlantis. It is conceived by several costumed criminals threatened by the activities of the Liberty League as well as various other home front heroes, and soon attracts more criminals of a similar bent. Founding members include Dr. Malice, the Puppeteer, the Crimson Masque, the Sandman, and the elemental swamp creature known as the Revenant.

The ranks of the Nazi Übersoldaten swell, and in Japan the Imperial government, with the sub rosa help of the Black Dragon Society, creates their own super-powered team, the Fukutsu Seishin (Indomitable Spirits). The exploding meta-human codenamed Kamikaze is the teams first recruit, followed by the Kaminari.

On 7 October, Dr. Tom Swift, Sr. establishes the Science Trust in New York City, which includes some of the foremost inventors of the day, including Nikolai Tesla, his rival Thomas Edison, Clark “Doc” Savage, and Albert Einstein. Known for eccentric habits and the willingness of some members to field-test the special weapons they develop, they become an important part of the home front defense.

On 13 September the Japanese submarine I-25 returns to the Oregon coast. Launching a Yokosuka E14Y floatplane, they attempt to drop incendiary bombs on the forests surrounding Brookings. A combination of light winds and Victory Flight’s intervention prevents any serious damage. 

1943 CE

Takekuma (Taki) Takei becomes a member of the Astoria-based superhero team Victory Flight, despite the internment by the US Government of himself and his family to Minidoka, Idaho. He takes the codename Supido Kyo (Speed Demon).

German forces attempt to conquer the small African nation of Kurunda, seeking to gain control of their rare mineral resources. They are driven off by the Kurandan army, which is far more technologically advanced than they have previously allowed the outside world to know, led by an apparent meta-human known as the Golden Cheetah.

Ellie Campbell graduates from Cornell University with a doctorate in Organic Chemistry and is quickly hired by the Houghton Chemical Corporation.

1944 CE

Der Übermensch faces off against Ultra in occupied France; losing the battle, the war criminal flees Europe, leaving the Nazis to their fate. He attempts to return to Salomon Island, but the way is hidden from him, and in frustration he makes his way instead to South America, where he sulks while pondering his next move.

Beginning in November the Japanese military unleash nine thousand bomb-laden “fire balloons” towards North America. While only about 10% of them survive the trans-oceanic voyage, a great many that do so land along the Oregon and Washington coasts, especially in the Astoria area. The Victory Flight spends much of the last few months of the war intercepting and disarming “fire balloons,” or else dealing with the aftermath of the damage they cause.

12 May Dylan Grey is born to Thomas and Wanda Grey. Jane Valentine is named the child’s godmother. The growing darkness in the Midnight Hour, which has concerned Artemis of late, seems to abate at this time.

Late in the year Gerhart von Richtor, realizing the war is lost, makes plans to flee to South America with all the knowledge of the Cerberus Project and scraps of Salomoni science, the latter of which he has gleaned from Neanon Var. He develops orders for Shattenjäger, in the event, to cover his escape by killing as many Allied heroes as he can.

1945 CE

On 28 March the Freedom Front attempts to capture Gerhart von Richtor, but he activates his escape plan, all too successfully – Shattenjäger slaughters nearly all of the heroes before taking off towards New Atlantis, the White Lantern and Inferno in pursuit. The White Lantern sacrifices their life by trapping the Nazi shadow-creature in a prison of solid light made from their own substance, which Inferno then manages to launch into space, aimed at the Sun…

John Jacob Astor VIII and his grandfather plan to use the 15-year-old’s miraculous nano-material to finally escape their undersea prison. Unfortunately the plan is discovered, and JJ’s beloved grandfather and his mother are both killed by his hated Atlantean grandfather, who he himself then kills. JJ is critically wounded in the fight, but manages to escape Kenyon’s Reef into the abyss. His armor puts him into a healing suspended animation, but cannot revive him at depth… and so he waits, asleep.

Princess Malina’s forces, with the help of Ultra and Gaia, defeat the usurpers of Atlantis and she regains control of her undersea realm once again. The newly crowned Queen Malina proposes to her US Navy liaison Captain Lance Halpirn, asking him to be her consort. He accepts and resigns his commission in the US Navy.

Germany surrenders to the Allies.

In August the United States drops two atomic bombs on Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrenders, ending the Second World War.

In September, at the request of the occupation government, the Inferno of the Freedom Front and Supido Kyo of Victory Flight, arrive in Osaka, Japan, to take down the last two of the Fukutsu Seishin, the exploding meta-human known as Kamikaze, and femme fatale  assassin the Kaminari. While Kamikaze is captured, the Kaminari escapes.

On October 24 the United Nations is founded in San Francisco, CA, USA. After the ceremonies, at which the Inferno and Supido Kyo were among the guests, both heroes are assassinated by the Kaminari, who barely eludes Ultra himself to make her escape.

1946 CE

Ultra seems to vanish from public view, with only a handful of confirmed sightings this year. Suffering a post-War depression, brought to a head by the deaths of the heroes Inferno and Supido Kyoand his own failure to capture their killer, he spends most of the year “undercover,” doing good anonymously.

With the disbanding of the Science Trust after the war, and appreciating the research possibilities in his home city of New Atlantis, Dr. Shaun Renner establishes the Advanced Scientific and Technological Research Association (ASTRA) Labs. With his deep government and business connections, made during his time working in the Science Trust, ASTRA quickly becomes a lucrative scientific research company.

Astoria Community College is founded to help provide an educational resource for the many veterans returning to school on the GI Bill.

Ellie Campbell leaves the Houghton Chemical Corporation to found her own company, Steiner Pharmacuticals. She begins a seven year streak of patenting significant discoveries in her field.

1947 CE

Several UFO sightings are reported over Mt. Rainier in Washington State and Mt. Defiance in Oregon. Unknown to all but a few, the sightings are the result of a drawn-out  Dramorg/Union skirmish on and around Earth and the moon.

Damaged by a Union vessel, a Dramorg scout ship crashes near Roswell, New Mexico. The wreckage and the bodies of the crew are taken into government custody, whisked off to a top-secret location, and the incident covered up. Two other Dramorg ships evade Union detection, however, and land secretly in the Smokey Mountains. Six of the shapeshifting aliens begin a slow, calculated infiltration of the American government.

Ultra meets his biological progenitor, Nimrod the Hunter, for the first time during the Passover holiday (4 -12 April), and learns the truth of his origins. As a holographic representation, the Hunter spends the holiday with the Cohen family, revealing more of his story to them than he has shared with any others in millennia. Afterward he offers the Bastion to Ultra as a secure base, and a refuge from the world, when he needs it. Between the sage advice of both his fathers, and his mother, his post-War funk begins to finally ease, and by May he is again regularly sighted over the skies of New Atlantis and seen thwarting crime in the streets.

In Tokyo the International Military Tribunal for the Far East convicts the exploding meta-human known as Kamikaze of numerous war crimes. He has been kept heavily sedated during much of his trial, allowed to testify only by closed circuit television from a heavily reinforced bunker. He is executed by lethal injection on 18 November.

In December, the Midnight Hour’s on-going mental deterioration turns to full-on insanity, due to his long-term, repeated, and unfiltered exposure to the Shadow Dimension. Artemis is forced, with great anguish and the help of Ultra and the Liberty League, to kill Thomas Grey when there proves no other way to stop his rampage, which threatens not only his wife and son, but New Atlantis itself.

1948 CE

In January Ultra officially returns to active duty with the Liberty League, following the tragic Midnight Hour incident last Christmas. His 18 month absence, despite half-a-dozen sightings, has led to theories that he: left Earth to visit the remains of his dead home planet; fight in an alien war; hunt down the Kaminari in revenge for her murder of his friends; gone on a post-war retreat to some hidden fortress to renew his fading powers; and on and on. Many of these ideas will persist for decades and, despite unresolvable conflicts, become a part of Ultra’s legend.

On 30 January the Hindu hero Hanuman first appears, saving the life of Mahatma Gandhi at Birla Lodge in New Delhi, by interposing himself between the would-be assassin and the holy man. The three bullets fired by Hindu fanatic Nathuram Godse are converted into a golden light and reflected back at the man, killing him instantly. The Mahatma thanks the hero for saving his life, but gently remonstrates him for taking another life in the process. Gandhi continues his fast in protest of the terrible violence of Partition, and dies less than two weeks later, on 12 February.

On 16 May the Liberty League takes its first post-war action outside the US when several members arrive in the newly founded state of Israel to defend it from invasion by the Arab Legion of Transjordan and Egypt. With their aid the Israeli army easily throws back the Arab and Egyptian invaders, and when complaints about rouge American actors are raised internationally, President Truman makes it clear the heroes acted at his request, and that the US firmly backs the government of the new Jewish homeland (the truth is a bit more complicated, however).

1949 CE

Louise Lancaster, despite graduating valedictorian of her high school class, is unable to go to college thanks to her father’s insistence that she needs a husband, not an education. Determined to make her own way, she leaves Philadelphia shortly after graduation and moves to New Atlantis. Her moxie, wit, and peppy prose style impresses Daily Star managing editor Philip Black, and she becomes his youngest (and only female) cub reporter.

1950 CE

The Dramorg infiltrators who arrived on Earth three years earlier have managed to gain a foothold in key positions of the United States, where they have been working to sow dissent, in an attempt to make the planet ripe for conquest. The shapeshifters use the already-existing fear over communism to turn citizens on one another in a frenzy of distrust, and to turn public opinion against superheroes, encouraging the government to tighten control over them, if not outright ban them.

Daily Star girl reporter Louise Lancaster, pursuing a story on corruption and Mob influence in city government, is captured by gangsters and almost killed. Only the timely intervention of Ultra saves her; keeping her wits, she parleys the situation (and the hero’s obvious attraction to her) into the first interview he’s ever granted to a reporter. The front page story makes her career, and marks a more open phase in the heretofore reclusive hero’s own career.

Ellie Campbell Steiner gives birth to what will prove to be her only child, Nico Steiner, Jr., on 11 July, after a difficult  pregnancy.

The youngest sister of assassinated Victory Flight member Supido Kyo, Ariso Takei marries Toshio Yamamoto on 14 May, in Portland, OR.

12 October Gerhart von Richtor, one of the former heads of the Nazi research organization Cerberus, uses an army of synthetic soldiers and El Hombre Fuerte (the re-branded Übermensch), to seize control of Argentina. His early successes force Juan and Eva Peron to flee Buenos Aires, and from the balcony of the Casa Rosada he declares himself President-for-Life on 16 November. 

1951 CE

Tired of running a large business, and wishing to devote more time to her own esoteric researches, Ellie Campbell Steiner concludes a deal in late December to sell Steiner Pharmaceuticals to Sovereign Industries for millions in cash and stock options.

Harry Carter, aka Red Racer, marries his high school sweetheart Velma Marsh. On 16 December their first child is born, Melody Marsh Carter.

On August 27 the Nazi mastermind Gerhart von Richtor, trying to hold on to his self-proclaimed title of President-for-Life of Argentina, perishes aboard his Aerial Fortress while facing a combined force of conventional Argentine military and superhumans, led by Ultra and Gaia of the Liberty League. Once his body is positively identified in the battle’s aftermath, much of the world breathes a collective sigh of relief.

Neanon Var, unwilling to face Ultra again, flees in the confusion before von Richtor’s final defeat in Argentina, escaping to Brazil. There he adopts the nom d’crime Cabeça de Mortes (Death’s Head) and becomes in involved in the Brazilian underworld as an enforcer.

During the Korean Conflict, Brigade leads a commando raid into the North to destroy a meta-human research facility. But a major intelligence failure leads to the death of almost his entire command and his own near-fatal wounding. Disillusioned with the military and feeling betrayed by his own side, he moves to quit his service. His Army commanders try to force him to remain, but President Truman intervenes, and by the end of the year he has retired into civilian life.

On 29 November Sakura Kensin is born to Himari Kenshin, the infamous East Asian assassin the Kaminari. Hiumari is not married to the child’s father, a member of the Black Dragon Society, and she arranges the man’s death shortly after the birth when he expresses his displeasure that the child is female.

1952 CE

A mysterious figure known only as the Overlord founds the secret terrorist organization called the Hierarchy to Usurp and Subjugate Humanity (HUSH), running it from a hidden base in the Alps, on the border confluence of France, Switzerland and Italy. Although the world will not be aware of the organization for several years yet, HUSH and its Overlord will come to bedevil the world in the decades to come, even into the present era.

On 31 October Darnell Davidson is born into poverty in the Hollows district of New Atlantis. The second son of a single mother, herself a daughter of immigrants from Senegal, he will have a difficult childhood, culminating in his older brother’s death in a gang-related shooting when he is 14.

1953 CE

With the aid of a renegade shapeshifter the Liberty League becomes aware of the Dramorg infiltration and begin to wage a secret war against them. The heroes ultimately root out the aliens, destroying some and driving the rest off-planet. But the damage the infiltrators have done in whipping up fear and hatred in America is beyond easy repair; the repercussions will be felt for years to come, particularly in the lingering public distrust of meta-humans.

1954 CE

Abandoned on Earth by the comrades he betrayed, not fully trusted by his still-wary human allies, and with no way to leave the planet, the Dramorg scout who aided in rooting out his people’s fifth columnists vanishes and goes underground. Seeking to better understand the race for which he has given up everything, he takes on the identity of high schooler Danny Bendis in River City, Iowa, when that youth dies in a car accident.

Despite the Dramorg infiltration having been secretly uprooted, governmental and public distrust of superheroes rises to a new high and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) intensifies its investigation into all superhuman activities. This leads to the incarceration of Lashkari, a member of the Victory Flight, for contempt of Congress and the public revelation of Arachnae’s identity as Georgia Katopodis when she attempts to testify against the Liberty League. The Committee raises accusations of communist sympathies and immoral behavior, demanding that all masked heroes reveal their true identities and submit to government control. When the League refuses, other teams and individual heroes follow their lead. The government insists they disband, and the groups regretfully dissolve, while many heroes choose to retire. 

Gojira makes its first appearance near Odo Island in Japan. After several sightings at sea, the sinking of numerous ships, and the devastation of villages on Odo, the creature surfaces in Tokyo Harbor, wrecking considerable havoc in the city. Both Japanese and American conventional forces are unable to stop the monster’s rampage, and it is only the Japanese meta-human Shokubai (Catalyst) who is finally able to drive it off by converting the oxygen in the water around it into an inert gas.

Reginald Crecy, the secret identity of Sure-Shot, is one of those who retires from the hero business, over the heated objections of his now-adult ward and partner, Arrowhead.

Gregory Greer, of the Wasco tribe is born 3 November on the Warm Springs Reservation, east of Portland, OR.

1955 CE

In the wake of the McCarthy hysteria a joint US House and Senate committee is formed to investigate and regulate the activities of the increasing number of meta-humans appearing, seemingly daily, across the country. Called the Special Committee for Oversight of Paranormal Entities (SCOPE), it will become a standing committee in 1965, dropping the “Entities” portion of its name in favor of “Endeavors,” and be given oversight of the newly created SHADE agency. After 1987 and the formation of the Department of Metahuman & Extraterrestrial Concerns (DOMEC), the influence and power of SCOPE will diminish considerably.

Deciding to retire as American Eagle, Winston Washington and his young wife move back to his home town of Baltimore, where their first child, Winston Washington, Jr., is born late the next year (7 October 1956).

On 7 January Harry Carter, Jr., the second child of Harry and Velma Carter, is born in Boston, where the semi-retired Red Racer has moved his family after the disbanding of the Liberty League.

The former sidekick Arrowhead, having never approved of giving in to the government’s demands that heroes unmask or cease operating, takes up the identity of his former mentor, becoming the new Sure-Shot. Reginald Crecy doesn’t fully approve, but nonetheless he backs his former partner with money and resources, using his power as publisher of the Daily Star to keep his ward’s activities as quiet as possible.

Having retired from the military and given up his heroic identity of Brigade, Col. Pat Townsend has grown increasingly concerned about his country’s ability to deal with meta-human and (although he is one of the few who know it) extraterrestrial threats. He begins formulating ideas on possible organizational solutions the government might undertake to ensure the nation’s security.

1956 CE

Wealthy scion Bentley Ambrose inherits control of the Ambrose Industrial Consortium when his parents are killed in a plane crash. The 18-year-old puts off college for a year to devote his energies to understanding the complexities of his family’s far-flung business interests.

On 7 February Amilia Yamamoto is born to Arisu and Toshio Yamamoto. She is the niece of slain Victory Flight member Supido Kyo ( Takekuma “Taki” Takei).

On 25 November Percival Lazarus is born in Rockville, Maryland. Next year his father Charles will rebrand the family’s children’s furniture store business into the toys-only Toys-R-Us, which will become a massively successful chain over the next two decades.

1958 CE

On 4 June Astoria’s new open-air shopping district, named the Silver River Promenade, is finally opened to the public.

The 14-year-old son of Thomas Grey discovers the secret of his late father’s super heroic identity as the Midnight Hour. Dylan Grey confronts his godmother Artemis, who has watched over her one-time friend’s family since his death, and insists he wishes to follow in his father’s footsteps. Realizing his determination, seeing his potential, and hoping to guide him along a better path than his father’s, she agrees to train him – as long as he obeys her absolutely during his apprenticeship. He agrees, and his training begins.

1959 CE

On 11 January 1959 successful author and professor of Economics and History Carl Cohen marries Louise Lancaster, intrepid girl reporter for the New Atlantis Daily Star. She has known for some time about his secret identity as the world’s greatest hero, Ultra.

In the early hours of 21 October Martya Cohen, adopted mother of Ultra, dies in her sleep.

1960 CE

On 3 January Álvaro Juan de la Vega is born in Astoria, Oregon. An only child, he will prove to be a technological and engineering genius, and will eventually  found one of the worlds great tech companies, AzTech International.

Brently Ambrose finishes his Harvard undergraduate degree in business and finance, and returns to take active control of Ambrose Industries, over the concerns of a dubious Board of Directors. He soon establishes the Ambrose Foundation to support philanthropic and educational endeavors around the world.

On 18 September Joseph Lancaster Cohen is born in New Atlantis. The pregnancy and birth are difficult for Louise Lancaster, and this will prove to be her only child, although there will be two miscarriages over the next five years.

In his efforts to create the ultimate undersea exploration vessel, retired US Navy Admiral Dr. Harriman Nelson develops a transparent alloy of uruite and aluminum which he dubs herculite. 

In a fit of optimism Daniel Bendis, the Dramorg shapeshifter who turned on his people to protect Earth seven years ago, proposes to his high school sweetheart Emily Stanton. She accepts, but it isn’t until several months after the wedding that he finally reveals to her his alien origin. She does not take the revelation well. The marriage quickly disintegrates, until she leaves him in the middle of the night. They never officially divorce.

1961 CE

The Sesen (aka the Lotus) makes his first pubic appearance. Wielding incredible mental powers, he claims to be the reincarnated soul of an ancient Egyptian mage named Ahmose, and uses his abilities to fight crime. He also seeks to find his eternal enemies, the undying Atlantean sorcerer Dolórüska the Damned, and the Atlantean’s would-be successor, the Egyptian wizard Sobek. The destruction of Dolórüska is the only thing that can free Ahmose and his beloved wife Nepthys (and Sobek) from their endless cycle of death and rebirth. 

14 February Emily Stanton gives birth to a Human-Dramorg hybrid, something only possible due to the uniquely adaptable nature of Dramorg “genes.” Stanton has been in deep denial over her pregnancy, believing it was biologically impossible, until she was nearly to term. Almost mad from the horror, she refuses to even look at the boy when he is born, and the infant is quickly sent to an orphanage. Daniel Bendis remains entirely ignorant of the existence of his son, having done as Emily wished and stayed away from her. Over the course of the next several years Stanton herself will end up in various institutions, her sanity broken; she will commit suicide in 1968.

The first civilian STAR (Superhuman Tactics and Restraint) Team is formed in New Atlantis, under the command of NAPD captain Reggie Carlton, to combat meta-human criminals.

1962 CE

While diving in the Agean, American oceanographer Vanessa Vervayne becomes the chosen vessel of the immortal Calypso, an Atlantean spirit of the sea. Desiring a champion to encourage amity between the surface world and Atlantis, she imbues the young woman with a portion of her own power. Taking her patron’s name, the new Calypso begins operating along the Gulf Coast.

After years of training under the critical eye and skillful hand of his godmother Artemis, 18-year-old Dylan Grey makes his first public appearance as the costumed crimefighter the Raptor, stopping a nighttime museum heist in New Atlantis.

The so-called Ghost Dimension is discovered by ASTRA labs physicist Dr. Peter Helstrom, who opens a one-way viewing window into the strange, surreal “landscape” of the extra-reality plane. When his cat, Bunsen, leaps through the portal, he realizes he’s opened more than just a window – he also realizes that his door is one-way only. Bunsen becomes the first known Earth exile in the Ghost Dimension.

1963 CE

The Confederated Union of Worlds and the Dramorg Consensus agree to a tentative peace, creating a state of détente between the two interstellar governments that disallows any interference, by either party, on non-FTL-capable worlds such as Earth.

Sensing in the subtle undercurrents of world events that the dark forces he has spent years opposing behind the scenes are preparing to move into the open, the immortal inventor and polymath Leondardo da Vinci decides the time is right to take a more public stance himself. Donning a sophisticated suit of armor of his own design, he takes the codename Vitruvian to conceal his actual name and history from the world.

Gojira makes its first attack on American soil, coming ashore near Astoria, Oregon. The kaiju inflicts minimal damage on the city, however, before it is driven off by Lashkari, former member the WWII home front team Victory Flight. The once disgraced hero has been trying, with little success, to rebuild his heroic career after serving his time on the HUAC contempt of Congress charges, but his confrontation with the giant monster turns the tide of public opinion. The black-and-white photo of him hovering in mid-air, snapping his energy whips at Gojira’s face, makes papers across the world. How exactly his powers cowed the creature is never really explained, and Lashkari himself is tragically killed just two weeks later, gunned down while stopping a liquor store robbery.

HUSH and its mysterious master the Overlord launches Operation: Overthrow, a plot to seize control of every major city in North America. The Sesen discovers the plot before it is initiated, but no one in the government listens to him, aside from Pat Townsend. The former Brigade uses his connections to mobilize military forces to protect key American installations, while also alerting friends in the armed forces of both Canada and Mexico to the threat. Combined with the intervention of several heroes, including the Sesen, Vitruvian, Ultra, the Raptor, Red Racer, Gaia, and the second Sure-Shot it proves enough to derail the Overlord‘s plans.

Realizing that the world is growing more dangerous, the heroes decide to remain together as a group. They name themselves the Liberty Alliance, to honor the past while looking forward to a more unified future. Reginald Crecy (the first Sure-Shot) offers his family’s mansion in Midtown New Atlantis, once the HQ for the old Liberty League, as the new team’s headquarters. 

Despite his increasingly obsessive efforts to create a two-way connection to the Ghost Dimension, neither Dr. Peter Helstrom nor his expanded team of ASTRA physicists devoted to Project Casper has made any progress. It is one of his graduate doctoral students, Elisa Dorn, who eventually develops the theoretical equations that prove why such a goal is inherently impossible. The project is scrapped late in the year, and the equipment is mothballed in an up-state ASTRA warehouse.

1964 CE

The US government opens Iron Rock Penitentiary, a prison specially designed to hold meata-human inmates, on Iron Rock Island off the coast of New Atlantis. The United States Department of Justice declares Iron Rock the de-facto super-max prison for super-humans in the United States. Carlos Emanuel is appointed Warden.

New Atlantis faces a British invasion when the Beatles visit the city.

His attention drawn by Project Casper’s investigations into the Ghost Dimension, which “borders” on his own realm of the Weld, the extra-dimensional despot known as Kronos sends an expeditionary force into our reality. His Weldian drone forces attack through a portal opened over ASTRA Labs’ New Atlantis facility, and quickly overwhelm the city’s conventional forces. Even the Liberty Alliance finds it difficult to repulse the invaders, until Ultra leads a counter-assault into the Weld. With his home base threatened, Kronos is forced to withdraw his troops.

A newly resurgent HUSH tries a more subtle attempt at world dominance. In the aftermath of the Kronos Incursion, with attention focused on extra-dimensional threats, HUSH infiltrates the nuclear control systems of both the United States and the Soviet Union with a sophisticated computer virus. The virus is able to bring the two superpowers to the brink of war before the plot is foiled by a team-up of Ultra and the Soviet hero Red Star.

Eight-year-old Percy Lazarus is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, which has caused his body to effectively stop growing, if not stop aging. As a result, he will spend the rest fo his life looking like an 8-9 year old boy. His parents take him out of school the next year, to avoid his public humiliation as his peers continue to grow past him. Despite the tutors they hire to school him at home, he begins to retreat more and more into a fantasy world of just himself and his beloved toys.

1965 CE

In the wake of the back-to-back attacks by HUSH and the Kronos Incursion, the US government forms SHADE (Super-Human Affairs, Domestic Enforcement) and gives the new organization police powers to supervise and regulate the increasing number of meta-humans operating on U.S. soil (as well as extraterrestrials, although that fact will remain a state secret until after the Z’ardani Revelations of 1985). It is placed under the authority of SCOPE, which becomes a joint standing committee and alters its name slightly, to the Special Committee for Oversight of Paranormal Endeavors. Former war hero Brigade, Col. Pat Townsend, is named as the agency’s Director, and its first offices are located in the Treasury building alongside the Secret Service.

Townsend immediately begins reaching out to his sources in both the military and other police agencies to recruit experienced law enforcement personnel, many of whom were involved in the defeat of Operation: Overthrow two years earlier. This ensures that SHADE has both accurate intelligence and well-trained agents from the start, and allows the agency to hit the ground running. He also uses his friendships in the superhero community to make contact with the new generation of heroes, proposing covert partnerships, with the promise that SHADE will fight for superhero rights to prevent another witch-hunt like HUAC. Although initially dubious, many heroes agree to cooperate with the new agency, at least provisionally.

Daniel Bendis, now a private investigator in New Atlantis, reveals himself to the Liberty Alliance as the Dramorg shapeshifter who helped them defeat his people’s infiltrators back in ’53. He has been living as a human for the past 12 years, graduating from high school and then college (with a degree in Forensic Science), marrying, separating, and then taking various jobs around the country before settling in as a PI. While some are still wary of the alien, the Sesen vouches for his deep loyalty to the people of his adopted world, and he is invited to become a member of the Alliance. He accepts, adopting the codename Variance.

1966 CE

Amazing Allies, a cartoon loosely based on the exploits of the Liberty Alliance and produced by Hanna-Barbera Studios, premieres September 10. Although campy and childish, the show is extremely popular, but only lasts until May of 1970 when legal issues and “creative differences” with the Alliance lead to its cancellation. It remains a cult classic to this day.

On 22 September groundbreaking nuclear submarine the United States Oceanographic Survey Vessel Seaview is launched under the command of Captain Lee Crane, beginning several years of deep sea exploration that will greatly expand human understanding of the planet and its history.

Leo Feldman proposes to Charlene Gehnheim, after revealing his secret identity as Sure-Shot to her. She accepts, although she is hesitant about the idea of children as long as he continues in such a dangerous profession.

Warden Emanuel accepts the assistance of Vitruvian to redesign the cellblocks of Iron Rock Penitentiary so as to reduce the chance of escapes, especially by “exotic” prisoners.

Under the name Ned Halprin, the son of Atlantean Queen Malina and her surface-dweller husband Lance Halprin, is enrolled in Bensalem University. When the Ocean Reavers attack New Atlantis, he is forced to use the meta-human powers inherited from his mother to combat the menace alongside the Raptor and Variance. To protect his civilian identity, and remain in school, he adopts the codename Proteus. He is invited to become a Reserve member of the Alliance, an honor he eagerly accepts.

1967 CE

On 2 June Mark Sampson is born in a commune in Northern California to Icarus and Rainbow Greenleaf (Roger Sampson and Carrie Dorfstetler). He will grow up to become one of the greatest intellects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Being raised by serious New Age hippies, the polymath Mark will absorb his parents’ laidback attitude toward life, even while rejecting the logic-free mystic hoo-haw of their beliefs.

Local teenage stoner Randy Kline rediscovers Astoria’s long-buried underground buildings, astonishingly well-preserved, and begins giving guided tours of “the Lost Undercity.” This threatens the secrecy and safety of the homeless and those societal cast-offs who, wishing to hide, began to move into the remoter areas of the underground a decade earlier. The community of outcast people eventually come to an understanding with Kline, who becomes a sort of interface, making sure the tourists stay in the limited “public” areas, and actively protecting Downsiders.

Arkanos teams up with the Liberty Alliance for the first time, when the newly freed (again) Dolórüska the Damned attempts to enslave the people of New Atlantis as his “new Atlantean subjects.” The Magus Prime turns down their offer of membership afterward, but does agree to consult, on an “as-needed” basis, on matters concerning the arcane or occult.

Realizing there is simply no way to permanently eliminate the threat of Dolórüska, Ultra proposes using the mothballed technology of Project Casper to exile the litch to the Ghost Dimension. With the help of Dr. Eliza Dorn, Vitruvian creates the Ghost Portal in the basement of Liberty House.

1968 CE

Shortly after her 16th birthday Melody Carter, daughter of the Red Racer, begins to exhibit super speed powers of her own. With her mother’s encouragement, her father begins to train her in the proper use of her abilities. Her younger brother anxiously awaits the expression of his own powers.

4 April, Jacob Cohen, adopted father of Ultra, suffers a massive stroke. He dies two days later without ever having regained consciousness, although the Hunter is able to connect father and son on the psychic plane for a final goodbye.

In September Nico Steiner, Jr. begins classes at NYU where, three years later, he will meet rising model Lily Chapman. The two will immediately fall for each other and enjoy a wild jet-set lifestyle together.

1969 CE

On 20 July Earth takes “one small step for a man, one giant leap for Mankind” with the first lunar landing.

The moon landing awakens an ancient Seeker program in the hidden genetic repository which the cosmic gods left behind on the far side of the moon.

On her 18th birthday, Sakura Kenshin, having been trained, at her mother’s insistence, by the greatest occultists in the Black Dragon Society in the ways of sorcery and treachery, poisons the old woman. The girl has long coveted her mother’s great treasure, the mystical Storm Tessen, a war fan of immense power. Assuming her mother’s title of the Kaminari, and already a skilled sorceress, she soon becomes an even more heartless mercenary than was her mother. With larger ambitions, she founds the Rising Sun terrorist group, committed to Japanese hegemony throughout East Asia, and is soon spreading fear across the region.

1970 CE

The Golden Cheetah, traditional protector of the African Kingdom of Kurunda, joins the Liberty Alliance at his king’s insistence.

Melinda Dawkins, long-time girlfriend of Liberty Alliance member Gaia, dies in a car accident.

Sprint, a new female speedster, makes her debut in Boston, finishing the Boston Marathon in  2 minutes, 15 seconds. The point of the prank is to highlight the fact that women aren’t allowed to officially compete in the race – as a result of her protest, not only will women be allowed to compete from 1972 onward, but the results of all the women who had run “unofficially” between 1966 and 1971 were retroactively recognized – with the exception of her own, of course.

The US Navy officially decommissions the OSV Seaview, after it sustains significant damage while saving Honolulu from an attack by Gojira. Despite its still-cutting-edge-design, it is not deemed cost effective to repair and upgrade the ground-breaking vessel. With Admiral Nelson’s death during the encounter, Captain Crane alone has insufficient pull at the DoD to reverse the decision and, once the submarine is mothballed, he retires.

On his 18th birthday, 31 October, teenager Darnell Davidson, a poor youth living in the Hollows district of New Atlantis, inherits a strange amulet, a snarling wolf’s head carved from jet and hung on a twisted leather necklace. He soon discovers that it grants him the ability to become a powerful wolf-human hybrid, with tremendous strength, speed, stamina and resilience – as well as razor-sharp claws that can cut through almost anything. After a rocky start, he comes to realize he wants to use these new powers to help people, not to hurt them, and soon becomes a local hero. After helping several members of the Liberty Alliance quell the New Years Eve Southbank Riot he is invited to join the team.

1971 CE

To honor her memory, Vitruvian uses Melinda Dawkins’ brain patterns to create Euterpe—a life-like android with amazing vocal/sonic powers. Euterpe becomes a valued ally of the Liberty Alliance as well as a popular entertainer. Gaia is less than pleased by Vitruvian’s actions, however, creating a rift between the two old friends.

After graduating from Bensalem University with an undergraduate degree in Oceanography, Ned Halprin becomes a full-time member of the Liberty Alliance as Proteus. His mother, Queen Malina, is not particularly pleased, having expected him to return to Atlantis after graduation, to take up his duties as Crown Prince. Nonetheless, she is willing to indulge her son… for a time.

Nemesis creates the Arsenal, an organization intended to develop and distribute advanced technology, especially weapons, to humanity with the ultimate goal of forcing their evolution into something greater and more powerful through the crucible of continual conflict. His frontman in this endeavor is Dr. Pieter Hänks (in reality just another of Nemesis’ many meat puppets).

1972 CE

Leo Feldman, the second Sure-Shot takes a hot-headed street punk named Byron West under his wing when he catches the 15-year-old breaking into Alliance HQ on a dare. Recognizing the youth’s raw talent, he undertakes to train him, as Reginald Crecy once did for him.

Cascadia College is founded in Astoria, Oregon.

1973 CE

Dracula, Lord of Vampires, stalks the streets of New Atlantis. He and the hero Artemis have a brief but very intense affair, before she is forced to oppose him. When she defeats him in honorable combat, and refuses his “gift of immortal youth,” he agrees to leave the United States.

SHADE is quietly rolled into the Justice Department as a sister agency of the US Marshals Service.

5 September Jacob Feldman is born to Leo and Charlene Feldman.

Byron West makes his first appearance as the new Arrowhead, when he and Sure-Shot quell a riot in the Hollows district of New Atlantis.

The long-closed Davis Cannery in Astoria is converted into the upscale Whaler’s Wharf shopping center, anchoring and revitalizing the city’s famed Silver River Promenade shopping district.

Percy Lazarus’ parents are killed in a plane crash just weeks before finalizing the sale of Toys-R-Us. The sale is meant to leave their stunted and increasingly odd son enough cash reserves to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life. He himself dislikes the idea of giving up the family toy company, but is assured it really is in his own best interests. Authorities consider the crash suspicious, and attention is focused on the the Lazarus’ business partners, but nothing can be proven and the matter is eventually closed.

After reports of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) over the ocean east of New Brunswick, Canada, agents of the Arsenal recover a sphere of solid light from the depths of the North Atlantic. They bring it secretly to a hidden facility on an island off the Maine coast, where none of their devices seem able to pierce the object, nor to see within. A young woman, one of several youths taken from the streets of Boston, New York and New Atlantis as potential experimental subjects, is sent in to physically examine the sphere. When she touches it, the glowing orb vanishes, its light apparently absorbed into her body. Glowing softly now herself, the girl talks the men and women around her into freeing her, along with the other captives, and allowing them to leave the facility. She assists with this objective by flying them all off in a bubble of light.

After the girls departure, the Arsenal personnel are left wondering what happened and how are they going to explain it to their bosses. Their concerns are made moot moments later, however, by the sudden appearance of a monstrous, shadowy, man-shape. The Shattenjäger, even more insane than ever after decades trapped in the shadow dimension with only the voices in his head for company, murders them all in an orgy of blood and violence. He then also departs the facility, leaving the small island lifeless… but hidden cameras have recorded it all. More importantly, one of the scientists managed to capture and contain a tiny fragment of the monster’s shadow-form before her own grisly death.

On his 18th birthday Percy Lazarus inherits full control of the family business, and cancels the sale of Toys-R-Us, keeping the the business a closely held private company.

1974 ce

Industrialist/philanthropist/playboy Dylan Grey, secretly the hero Raptor, marries beautiful socialite Gwendolyn Brant, secretly the high-end art thief Night Owl, his sometime-opponent, sometime-ally, and the great love of his life.

Dr. Bejamin Quaestor, experimenting with a new dimensional probe, pierces the veil between the Outer World and the Haida people’s mystical island of Sgang Gwaay Llanagaay. He, his Algonquian ward Achak Dyami (Spirit Eagle), and bodyguard/pilot/tutor Brad Canyon, visit the island and learn of the plight of its natives. Danny, Achak and Kúng form a friendship during their time on the island. When they depart, Dr. Quaestor agrees to leave his device behind, to augment the veil.

In July a mysterious young woman appears in the Hollows district of New Atlantis, stopping robberies, assaults and other street-level crime. She glows with a soft white light, and when she casts it at someone, they become incapable of lying, even to themselves, and very open to positive suggestion. Most criminals, on being faced with their truth, and her call to surrender, do so. Those who do not, find that her light blades can be very painful, and very difficult to fight. She appears and vanishes at will, giving no name, but the press take to calling her Veritas.

1975 ce

Gaia takes 15-year-old orphan Wendy Wisemann under her wing, becoming her legal guardian and training the naturally gifted athlete in Salomoni martial arts and philosophy.

Vitruvian, tiring of the endless battles and beginning to question the purpose of his immortal existence, constructs a starship of his own design (after years of extensive study of the Dramorg ship captured in ’47). After saying his goodbyes to a handful of close friends, he boards the Star Grazer and leaves Earth to explore the galaxy. Variance, feeling increasingly isolated on Earth, hitches a ride back to the stars with the immortal inventor. 

On the death of his king, the Golden Cheetah leaves the Liberty Alliance, returning to Kurunda to assume his responsibilities in overseeing the royal succession.

13 September Elizabeth Grey is born to Dylan and Gwen Grey in New Atlantis.

Retribution, an assassin created by the Arsenal using the fragment of the Shattenjäger’s shadow-form that one of their scientists managed to isolate before being dismembered, is sent to eliminate Veritas. She uses her light and truth powers to override the Arsenal’s mental conditioning, freeing the would-be assassin’s will. Able to see in total darkness, but blind in full light, they find that her light of truth is the only illumination that allows him full vision, day or night. He takes the new codename of the Reckoning, and the two become partners in crime-fighting.

1976 ce 

Outfitted with various Salomoni technology and martial arts training, Wendy Wisemann makes her public debut as Miracle Lass alongside her mentor Gaia.

Fifteen year old Cameron Snow runs away from the orphanage where he has spent much of his life. Never adopted because “there’s just something not right about that boy,” he was moved from orphanage to orphanage, never really fitting in or easily making friends. He has been at the Mount Saint Vincent Children’s Home in Denver since he was ten, the longest he’s stayed anywhere. The crisis occurs the night of his first sexual experience when, in the throes of passion, his face morphs into that of the girl he is with. In the hysteria that follows, he flees and catches the next bus out of Denver, as shaken as his companion by his strange ability. He will eventually master his powers to become the teenage hero Switch.

The 18-year-old daughter of Queen Malina of Atlantis and her surface-born consort Lance Halpirn begins her freshman year at the Tesla Institute of Science and Technology, studying Engineering, under the name Lenore Halpirn.

The Cabal is formally organized in Astoria, Oregon.

Álvaro de la Vega graduates from high school at age 16, and is accepted into the Engineering program at the Tesla Institute of Science & Technology in New Atlantis.

The 16-year-old Joseph Cohen’s maturing super abilities lead him to “take up the cape” and fight crime as Ultra Lad, much against his parents’ wishes. Nonetheless, father and son do occasionally team up, leading to much speculation in the press as to the relationship of the two heroes. They never comment on such speculations, however, and contradictory rumors abound.

While at home from college for the summer, Winston Washington, Jr. (son of WWII-era hero American Eagle), discovers his father’s old flying harness and costume in the attic. Realizing his father’s secret, he takes the gear and over the summer teaches himself to use it. Returning to Bensalem University in the fall, he makes his first public appearance as the new American Eagle. His parents are not pleased when they learn of this, but they eventually come to accept his decision to take up his father’s mantle.

An op-ed piece in the Daily Star refers to the team of Veritas & The Reckoning as the city’s living embodiment of “Truth & Justice.” The public takes the name, and the duo into their hearts, and their popularity soars, especially in the Hollows and Southbank districts where they primarily operate..

1977 ce

Black Wolf quits the Liberty Alliance, deciding he can do more good in his civilian identity of social worker Darnell Davidson, mentoring at-risk youth in the poorer neighborhoods of New Atlantis, such as the Hollows (where he grew up) and Southbank.

Ultra Lad teams up for the first time with several of the younger generation of heroes, mostly sidekicks or offspring of older heroes. They eventually form their own team, the Teen Squad, despite their elders’ initially dubious reaction to the idea. The team proves very popular with the media and the public, however, and will break up and re-form in various incarnations over the next eight years.

Variance returns to Earth with senior Paladin of Light K’lar Nethu, the two having learned of yet another attempt by the Dramorg to infiltrate and subvert Earth’s governments. They team up with a Coast Guard officer, Lt. Greg Greer, who has uncovered the alien conspiracy on his own. Using Union psi-tech the three are able to reveal the aliens to the Liberty Alliance, and together they root out this second secret Dramorg infestation before it can really take hold.

Impressed with with his courage and cleverness during the conflict with the Dramorg, Paladin K’Lar Nethu grants Greg Greer a pair of Power Bands (which had previously belonged to Telvon Kar, the first Paladin to visit earth), and she makes him a probationary Paladin of Light. After the Dramorg threat is neutralized, Greer returns to Rampart with K’Lar for formal Paladin training.

Desiring the power meta-humans would give him when turned into cyber-drones, Kronos attempts a second invasion in his campaign to absorb Earth into the Weld. This time he leads his drone army in person, wearing his Temporal Armor, which is the only thing that can keep him alive when he is outside the Weld (and within the flow of time). While the Liberty Alliance and their allies fight the drones, Ultra and Gaia confront Kronos himself. The battle is a stalemate, bordering on outright defeat for the heroes, until Ultra uses the alien’s own technology to crack his armor, forcing Kronos to again retreat into the Weld.

The serial killer known as Zodiac, who has killed scores of people across the country since 1968, is finally brought to justice. SHADE agent Devon Regent manages to identify and track down Zodiac, using experimental anti-psionic technology to help overcome the killer’s meta-human abilities.

1978 ce

HUSH initiates a second Operation: Overthrow using Overlord’s army of clones, this time focused on the United States. The plot is foiled when the Sesen pushes his mental powers to the limit and turns the clones against each other by making them, temporarily, believe they are each the true Overlord, forcing the real villain to initiate the incendiary failsafe mechanisms embedded in each clone. 

Percy Lazarus, growing bored with trying to run the family business, and furious at the humiliation heaped on him by his Board of Directors the one time he showed up in person, decides to turn his creative energies from toys to weapons. Devising several clever and subtle devices, he tests them out by murdering two of his most hated board members, making both deaths look either accidental or natural. He had thought the thrill and satisfaction of killing his parents, and getting away with it, had been a one-time thing, but these murders were equally enjoyable. He soon adopts the persona of Killer Tot, an assassin for hire, and begins making a name for himself in the underworld.

1979 ce

The immortal Nemesis possesses Laurence Mordecai, the latest member of that family to serve as his unwilling host, and re-establishes the law firm of Mordecai & Strang in New Atlantis. 

Sobek unleashes his current iteration of the Sword of Vengeance on New Atlantis in the hopes of drawing out his eternal enemies Amhose and Nephtys. Amazingly, the sorcerers  manage to actually seize control of the minds of most of the Liberty Alliance. Sesen’s new protégé, Mentat, tries to defeat the Sword, but is no match for their sheer numbers; he dies just as the Sesen arrives. in his grief, the Sesen, still not at full-strength after taxing his abilities during the second Operation: Overthrow, pushes himself past his limits to free the Alliance from the Sword’s’ control. He succeeds, but the effort proves fatal. The freed Alliance members overcome the Sword with the aid of Arkanos, who slays Sobek himself, but Liberty House (the old Crecy mansion), despite years of remodels and reinforcement, is destroyed in the battle. Among the many things lost in the destruction is the Ghost Portal.

After almost two years of training on distant Rampart, Greg Greer returns to Earth as the planet’s official Paladin of Light. He is immediately invited to join the Liberty Alliance. Working from detailed plans Vitruvian left behind for just such an event, he assists in the construction of a new headquarters for the Alliance on the site of the old mansion.

Jet-set dilettantes Nico Steiner, Jr. and Lily Chapman marry at St. Rupert’s in Vienna, about the last thing they will do for many years that really pleases his parents, Elllie and Nico Steiner, Sr.

1980 ce

With the unexpected birth of his second child, an older Sure-Shot decides to retire, wishing to devote himself more fully to his family. His decision does not sit well with his partner in crime-fighting, Byron West, aka Arrowhead, who has been growing increasingly frustrated with the rising levels of corruption he sees in New Atlantis.  When Feldman offers to pass on the name of Sure-Shot to West, the younger man angrily refuses it. Instead, he chooses the new codename Recurve, and begins a ruthless, and increasingly violent, war on drug-lords, organized crime, and corrupt city officials. 

Serena Carver is born 25 June in Austin, TX.

Álvaro de la Vega graduates at the top of his class with a Ph.D in Engineering from the Tesla Institute of Science & Technology, having compressed six years of coursework into four years. He is immediately recruited by NASA.

Nimrod the Hunter recreates the Ghost Portal, a one-way doorway into the Ghost Dimension, in the heart of the Bastion. For years the Alliance had, with some difficulty, warded off the governments occasional demands to use the alien dimension to exile inconveniently powerful enemies. With the destruction of the original Ghost Portal, and the general believe it could not be reconstructed, Ultra agrees with his “father’s” argument that this time they should keep the new Portal a closely held secret.

Humans Against Metahuman Malevolence, Excess, and Recklessness** (HAMMER) is founded. The organization calls for greater regulation and control over costumed heroes, citing dangers to impressionable children as well as to law and order. Some members go so far as to demand a full ban on “costumed vigilantes,” although that is not initially an official plank of the organization’s platform.

Alliance Hall is completed and the Liberty Alliance holds its first meeting in their new HQ on 6 September, inducting several new members int the group, including the brother/sister duo of Tectonic and Halogen.

The alien Z’ardani begin a covert operation on Earth, kidnapping humans, testing and dissecting them in an attempt to unlock the secret of human meta-powers. They believe them to be a result of the Seeker’s interference, and thus possibly attainable by off-shoot human races such as themselves.

1981 ce

A massive bronze statue honoring the sacrifice of Mentat and the Sesen is established in the courtyard of 1 Tesla Plaza, which is (more-or-less) where the battle in which they died had ended.

Winston Washington, Jr. (son of WWII-era hero American Eagle), marries Amilia Yamamoto (niece of Supido Kyo) on 6 April in New York City.

Truth & Justice are married on 21 April. The New Atlantis Police Department makes the duo honorary police officers and appoints them official deputies of the Department. 

Twenty-seven-year-old Bradley Donner is a former Air Force test pilot and brilliant meteorologist, currently working for Tomlin Aircraft in Astoria. While test piloting his new experimental “storm chaser” plane, hurricane force winds tear it apart around him. Energies from the cutting-edge technology meant to calm the winds, designed by his partner Dr. Stavros Diamandis, imbues Donner with superpowers. Surviving the destruction of his plane, he quickly finds he can fly, control the winds, and has greatly increased strength. In time he will also discover he possesses minor electrical powers.

He tells no one of his new abilities, crediting his survival to a strong parachute and the luck of a fly-boy. Only his co-worker and project partner Diamandis see through his deception. He then confesses the truth to his friend, who encourages him to “take up the cape.” Not averse to the idea, he eventually relocates to Kansas City and adopts the codename of Jetstream, soon becoming the Midwest’s resident super hero.

The Rising Sun launch a devastating attack on the Liberty Alliance, resulting in the deaths of two new members, Tectonic and Halogen, and the destruction of the new Alliance Hall. After the terrorists are defeated, Ultra formally disbands the Liberty Alliance.

With the Alliance disbanded, and under increasing pressure from his mother, Queen Malina, Proteus leaves the surface world and returns home to Atlantis, where he takes up his duties as the Crown Prince of the Royal House.

1982 ce

Backed by support from HAMMER and a secret cadre of criminal organizations, including the Genovese Crime Family, A.R. Wentworth is elected mayor of New Atlantis on a platform of “zero tolerance” for superhuman vigilantism. On his personal orders the official police recognition of Truth & Justice, and their status as deputies, is revoked.

A grassroots plan to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the founding of New Atlantis township are scrapped in the face of opposition from various business interests (several of which, it will later be discovered, Mayor Wentworth holds interests in) who are planning the bicentennial of the city’s incorporation in three years time. Fearing the earlier celebration would take focus (and money) away from their own plans, they succeed in quashing the movement.

Korith Dhal, a member of the saurian-offshoot race known as the S’kleth from the planet Sha’ruhn, is inducted into the Paladins of Light, the first of his species to be so honored. He shows great promise, and rises quickly through the ranks during training and his early career.

1983 ce

Inmates at Iron Rock Federal Penitentiary, led by Doctor Blood and Mad Mazie, incite a riot. The warden and 32 guards are killed, as are both of the instigators. Also killed are the villains Bullshead, Straight Razor, the Red Reaver, the Whippoorwill, Lady Vengeance, and the giant known as the Big Kid. Only the clear-headed actions of the prison staff, led by rookie guard Caleb Rivers, and the technology of Dr. Susan Trainor keep any prisoners from actually escaping the island. Public blame for the disaster falls partly on the state Corrections Department, but it is the absent heroes who take the brunt of it, despite evidence that distractions had been set up to keep heroes like Ultra occupied during the prison break. HAMMER, in particular, rails against the failures leading to the riot; their membership swells as a result.

A week after the Iron Rock Riot, an envelope arrives at the Daily Star and the National Inquirer, containing the secret identities of the heroes Truth & Justice. The Daily Star refuses to publish the information, but the tabloid does. With the names of Emily Tran and Ezra Reyes now public, it effectively ends the heroic couple’s career.

Using the excuse of the heroes’ failure during the Iron Rock Riot, and with the acquiescence of a supine City Council, the mayor signs executive orders requiring enforcement of antiquated laws on vigilantism, long unused but still technically on the books. This effectively outlaws all costumed heroes in the city, threatening them with arrest if they continue to operate outside the law.

The police and mayor’s office become increasingly corrupt and criminal kingpins begin to assert a powerful influence in New Atlantis, operating with near impunity. Most heroes comply with the law and either retire or leave the city. Others choose to ignore it and continue to operate, if more discreetly. SHADE Director Townsend covertly uses the organization’s assets to help superheroes who have not descended into violent vigilantism, even as lawsuits opposing the Wentworth Orders begin making their slow way through the courts.

New Atlantis mayor A.R. Wentworth disbands the city’s storied STAR Team on the basis of fiscal responsibility, claiming that with meta-human activity now banned, it is a costly indulgence that “the city can ill-afford in the current economic climate.” Even many of his supporters find his logic indecipherable.

His deeply buried resentment and jealousy over the fact that his friend gained the power from his machines to become Jetstream finally bubbles over in Dr. Stavros Diamandis. He begins a series of experiments to try and recreate the circumstances that empowered Bradley Donner, in the hopes of gaining similar abilities for himself. Fixated on the idea of machines to control the power, just as he does on using them to control the weather, he eventually succeeds… in a manner of speaking. His final experiment puts him in a coma for 10 days, but when he awakens he finds he has indeed gained a power. He is also quite mad, although this fact seems to escape him. With a kind of techokenisis, he is able to devise machines to achieve various weather or environmental effects, usually on a localized scale. Calling himself Dr. Tempest, he begins a series of crimes to gain money to pursue bigger and better machines.

Defeated and arrested by his former friend Jetstream, Diamandis is remanded to Ravencliff Asylum for treatment. But when his devices are examined by others, they fail to work; in fact, they seem entirely nonsensical. Dr. Elizabeth Sampson eventually concludes that it is Diamandis himself that causes the atmospheric effects supposedly created by his devices, via a meta-human power. She argues that his psychosis only allows him to manifest his powers through the agency of some device he has “created.”

On 23 September Taki Washington is born to Amilia and Winston Washington, Jr. in Washington, D.C.

Adam Victorson, aka The Forsaken, creates the Midnight Cartel, an entirely fictional criminal organization designed to take public responsibility for numerous bank robberies, hijackings and murders around the globe, as a distraction from the real perpetrator, the Plexus; failed or clumsy HUSH operations are soon attributed to the made-up group as well, by agreement between Adam and the Overlord.

After thirty years wandering the country, Artemis decides it is time to settle down. Learning that one of her favorite cities, Astoria, OR, has become the target of a resurgent white supremacist movement, she returns there and to her roots – putting the fear of Hell into the soulless men (and women) of the Klan and their spiritual successors. For the first time in years she feels she has a true purpose.

1984 ce

An unintended consequence of the Wentworth Orders is a tremendous increase in meta-human activity in other large metropolitan areas across the country, such as New York, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Dallas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

After years of following the conventional underworld wisdom and not taking any jobs in New Atlantis, the Killer Tot accepts a major contract on a high-profile target in the city, industrialist/philanthropist Dylan Grey. He runs afoul of the Raptor, who not only prevents the hit, but actually captures the assassin and publicly reveals his identity as Percival Lazarus.

Mayor Wentworth appoints the corrupt Charlie Costerman as Police Commissioner on a platform of “restoring law and order.” Costerman forms the “Price of Freedom” SWAT team, heralding the new unit as the most innovative and unique squad of police in the city’s history, blithely ignoring the recently disbanded STAR Team.

Breaking a long loosing streak, Superior (the former Nazi Übersoldaten named Der Übermensch) finally scores big with the robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, netting over 50 million dollars. In the process, however, his actions lead to the deaths of a large number of civilians and two heroes, Lavender Lad and Toolbelt. When Ultra and Gaia track him down and capture him, they realize that he is too dangerous to be put in a prison, even a super-max, from which he will certainly escape. The two heroes, with the agreement of the Hunter, therefore consign their old enemy to permanent exile in the Ghost Dimension, using the Ghost Portal in the Bastion.

Mark Sampson graduates from college at 17, having excelled in almost every area of learning he undertook. He earns multiple degrees in fields ranging from physics and chemistry to engineering and applied mathematics… with a minor in Eastern Philosophy.

After years of frustrating attempts to develop super speed, like his father and his sister, Harry Carter, Jr. cuts off almost all contact with his family and moves to New Atlantis. There he marries Sharon Ridenour.

Escaping jail before he can be tried, Percy “Killer Tot” Lazarus goes underground. While his legitimate assets are frozen or confiscated, he has stashed millions in off-shore accounts and set up several back-up bases. He scales back the assassination side of his business for awhile, to concentrate on becoming an advanced arms (and death trap) provider to the underworld and certain small-time rogue nations. On occasion over the next several years he will work with or for the Arsenal, the Crucible and HUSH.

Álvaro de la Vega founds Vega Electronics in Astoria, OR, having left NASA for the private sector. Patents on his first two integrated circuit designs will make him a multi-millionaire over the next three years.

1985 ce

Galaxy Comics starts up in New York City and buys up the rights to the pulps and comics properties of the recently bankrupt National Times Press and NT Publishing Group.

21 February kicks off a weeklong celebration of the 200th anniversary of the incorporation of New Atlantis City, culminating in a city-wide party and a spectacular fireworks display on 1 March. Despite massive promotion by the Chamber of Commerce and the Wentworth administration, it is not the financial success that had been hoped for, and numerous protests over rising crime and political corruption mar the festivities.

Feeling trapped in his father’s shadow, Joseph Cohen hangs up the identity of Ultra Lad and disbands the Teen Squad for the final time. He adopts several solo masked identities over the next three years, none of which really take, and he will eventually hang up his costume for good in early ‘89.

Recurve forms a new team called Special Criminal Organizations Reprisal & Proactive Interdiction Operations Network  (SCORPION), consisting of himself, Bruiser, Modem, Kismet, Black Cat, and Outrage. The group wages a brutal war against Mayor Wentworth’s corrupt political machine as well as other organized crime operations. The new heroes are quickly branded outlaws by the mayor’s office and much of the media, but some see them as the heroes the city needs in dark times.

Mark Sampson meets Elizabeth Reid in graduate school at UCLA. She is the great niece of Roland Reid, the Magus Prime of Earth, despite which she rejects the entire concept of magic and mysticism in favor of pure rationality. Despite his hippy-dippy upbringing and laid-back attitude, she falls for Sampson, in whom she sees a kindred spirit.

On 20 June in Oregon, a mysterious new superhero appears, and takes down a cloaked Z’ardani research ship that has been experimenting on human subjects. The hero, dubbed Stormfront by Oregonian reporter Nina Baker, defeats his former captors in a display of tremendous elemental power. The battle is widely publicized and the US government is finally forced to acknowledge not only the existence of aliens, but of their on-going presence on Earth. A populace that is relatively used to inter-dimensional incursions and the proven existence of alternate realities takes proof of advanced alien races more-or-less in stride; rabid conspiracy theorists feel joyously vindicated, but many more people are fearful of what the presence of aliens on Earth means for humanity.

With mounting public anxiety over the recent Z’ardani Revelations and the fact of aliens on the planet now common knowledge, Ultra, the Raptor, and Gaia formally announce the reconstituting of the Liberty Alliance. For the last four years many of the old teammates have been working together, quietly and unofficially, outside of New Atlantis. Publicly active again, the group establishes a new headquarters in upper floors of the recently revitalized Sears Tower in Chicago.

1986 ce

Mayor Wentworth is re-elected in New Atlantis—despite numerous rumors and accusations of corruption, misappropriation of funds, and nepotism within the administration, as well as a rising tide of crime—due mainly to the support of HAMMER, a few other citizen action groups, and organized crime.

Wentworth’s campaign may have been helped by the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which finds that the mayor was within his rights to enforce laws still on the books, even if long superseded by disuse and custom. The court also finds, however, that the the revived laws may still be in conflict with superseding federal law, and refers the case to the Supreme Court for an ultimate resolution.

Mark Sampson finishes graduate school, and proposes to Elizabeth Reid, who accepts, contingent on her own graduation next year.

On 3 June Suzume Washington is born to Amilia and Winston Washington, Jr. in Washington, D.C.

Governor Vic Atiyeh names Stormfront the official “superhero” of the State of Oregon. Although based out of Portland, the powerful hero covers much of the Pacific Northwest in his “beat,” including Seattle and Astoria

Truth & Justice return to New Atlantis and again operate in the Southbank and Hollows neighborhoods, in defiance of the Wentworth Orders. Their first act is overthrowing the Fearsome’s control of the criminal underworld in that area of the city.

On 14 December Aoi Kenshin is born to Sakura Kenshin, the second woman to bear the title of the Kaminari. The child’s father is a nameless Yakuza foot soldier who Sakura has found to be simply the best candidate to sire the child she wants – after confirming her pregnancy, she slays him without a second thought. Although she does secure frozen sperm samples first, just in case.

1987 ce

The despotic Star-Master, brutal ruler of a savage interstellar alliance, leads his fleet against the Confederated Union of Worlds. After a series of stunning victories, the Paladins of Light and Vitruvian join the battle on the side of the Union, and the barbarians are driven back. Paladin Korith Dhal’s strategic prowess and tactical skill, demonstrated brilliantly during the war, brings him considerable renown in much of the known galaxy.

At the urging of Vitruvian, the Confederated Union of Worlds establishes a diplomatic legation with the United Nations of Earth, acknowledging the planet’s potential while still considering it a “developing world.” The immortal inventor accompanies the legation, finally returning to his home world after 12 years exploring the stars.

An Arsenal test subject develops the power to teleport through doorways, steals a prototype sonic weapon, and escapes. Calling himself Poltergeist, he gains a reputation as a Robin Hood figure—stealing, but giving money to orphanages and other charities. What is not known to the general public is that the business he targets are all fronts for the Crucible, Plexus, Arsenal or HUSH.

While on a solo climb of Mt. Defiance, Álvaro de la Vega is mortally injured in a fall while struggling against assassins sent by a business rival. As he lays dying he is contacted by the psionic projection of Nimrod the Hunter, who promises to save him if he will agree to become one of the disembodied intellect’s avatars. He agrees.

Mark Sampson and Elizabeth Reid marry when she finishes her graduate studies in June, having earned double doctorates in molecular biology and medicine. Together they begin to plumb the depths of fringe science, having a series of science-based adventures. Over the next six years they will amass a fortune in patents, both separately and jointly.

On 13 August the US government announces the formation of a new Cabinet-level department, the Department of Meta-human & Extraterrestrial Concerns (DOMEC). SHADE is moved under the jurisdiction of the new department, and its Director now reports directly to the Secretary of Meta-Human Affairs, although the agency retains its co-equal law-enforcement status with the US Marshals Service.

The armored villain Nimrod makes his first appearance, attacking a Harrison Electronics facility in Seattle. He eludes the authorities easily, but has a more difficult time escaping the regional hero Stormfront.

In the Pacific Northwest Stormfront teams up for the first time with Seattle’s SWAT-Man and Vancouver, B.C.’s Captain Canada. The three heroes work well together and and over the next five years find numerous occasions to team up, with the Oregonian wondering if they might be the “core of a West Coast Liberty Alliance?”

On 23 October Keith Carter is born in New Atlantis to Harry Carter, Jr. and his wife Sharon. Because his father remains estranged from his family, Keith will not meet his grandfather or his aunt (the heroes Red Racer and Sprint) until he is eight years old.

Ultra destroys a major HUSH island base in the Mediterranean Sea, and in the resulting chaos the Overlord is apparently killed… his armor is recovered, but the his body is so badly burned and crushed that establishing who he might have been in life is impossible. Ultra has his suspicions, but no confirmation…

Late in the year Stormfront teams up with Jetstream in Seattle to defeat a plot by Nimrod to steal an experimental spaceplane being developed by Boeing.

1988 ce

The Confederated Union of Worlds, following the invasion of the Star-Master and facing increasing incursions by the Dramorg, encourages the Kevrin Ur to accelerate attempts to genengineer more powerful mentats. 

HUSH’s leaders, splintered into rival factions after the death of the Overlord, break out into open warfare with each other. Heroes around the world attempt to keep the collateral damage from spilling onto the public… not always successfully.

Trevor Sampson is born 17 July in San Francisco, CA to Mark and Elizabeth Sampson.

The Raptor, with the assistance of the Night Owl, has his final confrontation with his long-time nemesis, the insane anarchist known only as the Mime. The madman is killed when his elaborate death-trap implodes, sucking him and an entire city block to the surface of the moon. With his greatest foe dead, Dylan Grey considers retiring and, at his wife’s suggestion, running for mayor of New Atlantis. 

Álvaro de la Vega founds AzTech in Astoria, OR, having bought out the bankrupt Harlan Technologies for pennies on the dollar. This begins a technological boom that will revitalize the economically stagnating city over the next decade.

At fifteen Jacob Feldman wishes to begin serious training to follow in his father’s footsteps as a bow-wielding hero. He has practiced archery since early childhood, and shows the same facility for speed and accuracy as his sire. But his mother is dead set against him taking up the mantle, and Leo reluctantly backs her up. In frustration, Jacob turns to his “uncle” Byron, and Recurve agrees to secretly train his old mentor’s son.

Nimrod joins the Cabal in Astoria.

New Atlantis Deputy Mayor Angus Newell is indicted for his involvement in the murder of two DEA agents. Over the next 13 months, 29 other members of the Wentworth administration will be charged with crimes ranging from racketeering to bribery and tax evasion. Of those, 27 will lead to guilty pleas or convictions.

1989 ce

Wendell Epstein takes the helm of Galaxy Comics and immediately plans to move its central publishing house and main offices to New Atlantis.

An embarrassingly pliant City Council allows Mayor Wentworth to ram through an amendment to the city charter which would allow him to run for a third term.

Through insane luck, the Mime survived his translocation to the moon, and manages to return to Earth. On 14 August he lures Night Owl into an ambush, where he savagely beats her to death. The Raptor arrives too late to save his wife, and in the ensuing rage-fueled battle he himself is severely injured – but not before snapping the insane clown’s neck with his bare hands. And then driving a piece of rebar through his brain. There will be no returning from the grave this time.

The Raptor’s injuries are nearly crippling, and in any case having lost the will to continue his crime-fighting career after his wive’s death, he makes the decision to retire. Hanging up the cape and cowl for good, the Raptor’s last public sighting is the night of the Mime’s death, and rumors swirl around the city about what happened that night, and where the hero has gone – or if he is even still alive.

After her mother’s death and her father’s injuries Elizabeth Grey stumbles onto her parents’ secret: that they were the costumed adventurers the Raptor and Night Owl. Her father at first adamantly rejects his daughter’s suggestion that he train her to take on the nocturnal activities which he is no longer willing, or able, to pursue. She doesn’t back down, however, and recognizing Elizabeth’s natural persistence and iron will, he fears his daughter will undertake a costumed career whatever he says, prepared or not.

To forestall such an eventuality, Dylan contacts his godmother, Artemis. Also Elizabeth’s godmother, she reluctantly agrees to train the girl, if she will adhere to the same strict conditions under which Dylan was taught. Elizabeth promises to do so, and the adults hope that a grueling training regimen will keep her too occupied to try actively fighting crime… at least until she’s an adult.

Leo Feldman learns that his former partner, Byron West, aka Recurve, has been secretly training his son Jacob as a crime-fighting archer. This is the final rupture in the two men’s relationship, and they come to blows. When the dust settles, Jacob agrees to stop training with Uncle Byron (with some relief, although he refuses to admit that to his father – the 17-year-old has been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the escalating violence of Recurve and his SCORPION team, for all that his uncle has kept him away from most of the serious action). In return, recognizing that his son is less than a year from adulthood and is still determined to take up the title of Sure-Shot, Leo agrees to take over Jacob’s training.

The United States Supreme Court finds that Mayor Wentworth’s executive orders reviving old anti-vigilante laws are unconstitutional in the face of Federal laws on meta-human activity that override them. Despite this, the city government essentially ignores the ruling; however, those elements of the police force not yet corrupted refuse to continue pursuing cases against heroes.

Erik Thorson is introduced to The Forsaken and inducted into the Plexus after proving himself sufficiently ruthless — as a show of loyalty, Erik is instructed to kill his own father, who has stood in the way of certain Plexus initiatives. Although the death appears to be natural, foul play is suspected. Nothing can be proven, however, and Erik takes over as head of the powerful Thorson Industries. In fact, Erik had been unable to murder his father, but used his timely (and truly natural) death to fake his way into the Plexus.    

Industrialist and philanthropist Dylan Grey, mostly recovered from the injuries suffered in the tragic automobile wreck that took his socialite wife’s life, announces his candidacy for mayor of New Atlantis. Despite numerous attempts to discredit him, as well as several death threats, public sympathy over the recent loss of his wife more than offsets the smear campaign. Grey’s “Wentworthless!” campaign slogan, and his promise to root out corruption at every level of the city government, starting at the top, gains real traction with voters tired of corruption and crime.

1990 ce

Facing irrefutable evidence of corruption with SCORPION’s revelation of the mayor’s ties to organized crime, the Wentworth administration is soundly defeated by Dylan Grey and his “Wentworthless!” campaign. A.R. Wentworth leaves office in disgrace, and is arrested by the FBI on the steps of City Hall, accused of multiple counts of corruption, influence peddling, and racketeering. The Watchdog SWAT team is disbanded and most of its members, also facing corruption charges, leave the city. Mayor Grey devotes his effort and a great deal of his personal fortune to reestablishing the public’s trust in the government, starting by reinstating the NAPD’s STAR Team and calling for the return of the Liberty Alliance to its home town.

Analis Sampson is born 3 February in New Atlantis, NJ to Mark and Elizabeth Sampson. Later in the year the Sampson’s take possession of the Aurora Building in downtown New Atlantis, converting it into extensive laboratory space and living quarters.

AzTech Programmable Paint is introduced. Originally marketed to the US military for camouflage purposes, it soon takes the worlds of fashion and consumer products by storm. Within the next 18 months it makes AzTech a billion dollar company.

Despite his enhanced physiology, SHADE Director Pat Townsend suffers a massive heart attack brought on by years of stress and overwork, forcing him to retire. He has long trained his eventual replacement, however, and it is no surprise when Devon Regent is named the new Director of SHADE.

Overlord proves to be not quite as dead as believed, and returns to reassert control over his organization. He does so by violently purging those who have weakened and corrupted his HUSH with “crass commercialism and pointless factionalism.” Ultra’s suspicions as to the Overlord’s true identity are intensified.

Believing the transition in power at SHADE has left the organization vulnerable, and to consolidate his renewed control over HUSH, Overlord uses the powers of the captured anti-hero Poltergeist to invade SHADE HQ. His attempt to cripple or destroy his old adversary is a resounding failure, and he barely escapes capture himself, and only by betraying his own forces. 

Security Chief Caleb Rivers is appointed the new Warden of Iron Rock Federal Penitentiary. He appoints Dr. Susan Trainor as the new Chief of Security. 

On 1 October Kyle Steiner is born to socialite parents Lily and Nico Steiner, Jr. in New York City.

1991 ce

On 1 February ground is broken for a new headquarters for the Liberty Alliance. To be named Alliance Hall, it is situated in the heart of Alliance Park (formerly Gateway Park) for the general safety of the city.

Zandros Jovanović, a brilliant cybernetics engineer at University of Priština in Kosovo, is forced to flee the ethnic cleansing of Kosovars during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. He ends up in the United States, where he is unable to find work in his field. He is eventually forced to take whatever work he can find, and late the next year he becomes a janitor at the Aurora Building in New Atlantis.

The Southbank Youth Center is established in New Atlantis. The center, run by social worker Darnell Davidson, the former hero Black Wolf, becomes extremely successful in reducing gang and youth violence in the district. 

Jacob Feldman makes his first public appearance as the new Sure-Shot, single-handedly stopping a gang of thieves attempting to steal the gate from a Sea Devil’s playoff game at the Sea Dome.

After a corporate buying spree that diversifies his holdings into biomedical, electronics, and other areas, Erik Thorson renames his company the Thorson Conglomerate.

In Seattle, Stormfront and Captain Canada are forced to stage an intervention when it becomes obvious that SWAT-Man’s addiction to cocaine is threatening not only his own life but the lives and safety of the public. They convince their friend to commit himself to a residential treatment program; after treatment, he decides to give up his heroic identity and live as ordinary Matt Jameson, high school music teacher.

On 23 November Dael Dayan is born in Jerusalem, Israel to Miriam and Meir Dayan, their first child and son.

1992 ce

On New Year’s Day Alliance Hall is officially dedicated, and that evening the Liberty Alliance holds their first meeting in the new building.

On 28 May Gideon Young is born into a large, unhappy Catholic home in Weymouth, MA, the ninth, and penultimate, child of George and Denise Young.

Jetstream reveals his secret identity to Lily Carter while proposing to her; the two are married on 6 December in their home town of Des Moines.

Near the center of the galaxy, at the edge of the event horizon of the Sagittarius A black hole, on a desolate, dead world, Paladin of Light Korith Dhal, discovers a massive black crystal. It imbues him with a dark energy, the very antithesis of the pure white light of the Keepers, claiming him for its own.

1993 CE

On 27 May Bradly and Lilly Donner’s son, Bradley Donnner, Jr., is born in Kansas City.

Angry about the anti-gay fervor being whipped up again by hate groups in his home state, Stormfront becomes the first superhero to come out publicly as gay. The media has a field day, especially with questions as to why he didn’t come out in ’92 during the previous vote to restrict gay rights. His impassioned speech on the floor of the Oregon Senate, however, polarizes the debate over next years Ballot Measure 13.

Chronos initiates a third attempt to absorb Earth into the Weld. This time he uses two Earthers he has rescued from the Ghost Dimension (which “borders” his own) – Dolórüska the Damned, and Neanon Var (Superior, Übermensch, etc.). The newly renewed Liberty Alliance, including allies such as Stormfront and the Doctors Sampson, defeat the incursion with minimal damage to New Atlantis. The Earth villains manage to escape in the chaos, however, leaving two vastly dangerous beings once again loose on the planet.

1994 CE

Mayor Grey easily wins re-election to a second term.

The Fear-Master activates an experimental device that turns the citizens of New Atlantis against their superheroes. The officers of the New Atlantis STAR Team are able to rally enough people to fight their fears and force the villain to retreat.

The otherworldly imp known as Quisp makes his first appearance in New Atlantis, before Ultra tricks him into returning whence he came. 

Stormlord’s “coming out” is credited with playing a significant role in the resounding defeat of the anti-gay Measure 13 in Oregon on 8 November, which goes down to defeat at nearly 2-to-1. Governor Barbara Roberts reaffirms his position as the official superhero of the state.

On 31 October 22-year-old secretary Jennifer Allman, an introverted wall-flower who has been systematically seduced by a member of a splinter faction of the Sons of Set, is used in a ritual of the cult. Intended to call down their god to possess her body, instead of Set the cultists get a demonic succubus of no small power. After draining the life essence of all nine cultists, the newly free Succubus sets out to enjoy life on the Material Plane in her delightful new host body.

On 15 November Astoria fishery and timber heiress Sloan Davis marries Volksmacht Technology Solutions junior executive Michael McGregor in Faith Cathedral, becoming stepmother to his two young daughters.

On 5 December Atara Dayan is born in Tel Aviv, Israel to Miriam and Meir Dayan, joining her brother, three-year-old Dael.

On returning to Rampart with his new-found power, Korith Dhal is enraged when the Keepers wish to expunge it from him. They claim it is an evil that he doesn’t understand, and an extremely grave danger, not only to himself but to the very universe. He rebels, killing several fellow Paladins and injuring many more as he flees Rampart and his former masters.

1995 CE

Joseph Cohen marries his former Teen Squad teammate, Miracle Lass (Wendy Weismann), who has also been retired from the hero business for several years, after a falling out with her own mentor, Gaia. 

Mark and Elizabeth Sampson found the Momentum Foundation in New Atlantis, devoted to education (especially critical thinking) and technological progress. Elizabeth discovers the talents and educational credentials of their janitor, Zandros Jovanović, and brings him on board as a cybernetics engineer.

Dolórüska the Damned takes control of Succubus and has her seal up five occupied buildings in New Atlantis for a ritual sacrifice on a massive scale. Arkanos, Gaia, and Calypso defeat both the enslaved demoness and the undead sorcerer. Dolórüska appears to be slain when Gaia drops a building on him, but will  reappear to battle Arkanos again next year. The Magus Prime exorcises the demon from its host, freeing Jennifer Allman, who has little memory of the past year.

Harry Carver, Jr. reaches a deténte with his father and sister; for years he has bitterly resented the fact that he failed to inherit his father’s speed powers (and, perhaps even more so, that his sister did). With his own son growing older, Harry, Jr. gives in to his wife’s pressure to reconcile, and young Keith is allowed to spend the summer in Boston with his grandparents.

Stormfront is offered membership in the new Liberty Alliance, but turns it down to focus on his duties in the Pacific Northwest. He and Jetstream team up to defeat another scheme of Dr. Tempest shortly afterward, and he recommends the Midwestern hero to the team. Jetstream accepts the Alliance’s offer, after discussion with his wife, but the family decides not to relocate to New Atlantis at this time.

Movie director James Cameron, seeking the wreck of the Titanic, discovers a coral and sediment encrusted statue on a deep shelf above the abyssal plain. It stirs limited interest in archeological circles and is used as a prop during the opening of Cameron’s blockbuster movie, after which he donates it to a museum in New Atlantis.

1996 CE

The incorporation of the U.N.’s superhuman agencies is completed; the new organization is named the United Nations Extranormal Inderdiction Service (UNEXIS). Juan Granada of Brazil is named its first director.

Quisp returns, turning the citizens of a suburban town outside of Ottawa into living chess pieces, and challenges Ultra to a game of “multi-dimensional chess.” The hero eventually wins the game, thereby forcing the imp to obey his own rules and return to the “Nth Dimension” for another year-and-a-day. 

The Forsaken (Adam Victorson) creates the android Manifold, the Replicant, able to mimic the powers of almost any meta-human. Manifold nearly defeats the Liberty Alliance and is only stopped by the genius of Vitruvian — a power which the construct is unable to duplicate. 

On 7 December, in Astoria, OR, Sloan Davis gives birth to a son that is very obviously not her husband’s child. To spite her husband she gives the boy the sarcastic name he hurls at her in the delivery room, Jonny Osaka. She refuses to reveal the boy’s true parentage to anyone, eventually taking the secret to her grave many years later.

1997 CE

Stormfront and Ultra confront and finally unmask the Overlord, master of HUSH – confirming Ultra’s long-held suspicion that he is in fact the long-thought-dead Gearhart von Richtor! Or more accurately, the psychic vampire Grigori Rasputin, in the possessed body of von Richtor. The villain has perfected a cloning technology that allows him, on the death of his current form, to transfer his mind into any other of the many clone bodies he has had grown. He had faked his death in Argentina in ’51 precisely so that he could go underground and launch HUSH, while perfecting the cloning technology, which was partially stolen from the Salomoni.

The arch-villain remains in SHADE custody for several days, before being remanded to UNEXIS for transfer to Brussels and the justice of the World Court. Despite heavy security (including the presence of Ultra) the Overlord is freed by his loyal minions when literally thousands of them both overwhelm the transport plane and threaten major populated areas with mass casualties.

Stormfront is again offered membership in the Liberty Alliance, and agains turns it down. Privately Raptor urges him to at least accept a Reservist position on the team and, persuaded by her arguments, he eventually does. Late in the year he teams up with his old friend SWAT-Man, who comes out of retirement to help defeat another scheme of the Thieves Guild.

Succubus again possesses the body of Jennifer Allman, Arkanos’ exorcism having proven merely temporary. The demoness takes care to avoid the Magus Prime this time, leaving New Atlantis for Europe as soon as possible. Over the next several years she will come into conflict with several European and African heroes, but even when defeated, she remains firmly in control of her human host body and is never again exorcised.

In Astoria, Artemis, having driven the white supremacist movement in Oregon back underground, decides to reactive her birth identity of Jane Valentine. She opens up Valentine Investigations, becoming a P.I. by day while continuing her nighttime activities as Artemis. She continues to seek a crack in the wall the Cabal has built around their activities, but fears she is little more than an irritant to the organization,

1998 CE

Thanks to the never-repealed amendment to the city charter pushed through by disgraced former mayor Augustus Wentworth, Dylan Grey wins re-election to an unprecedented third term as mayor of New Atlantis.

Vincent Harrington III organizes the Arena, a very illegal underground gladiatorial combat league featuring meta-human fighters exclusively. It proves to also be very lucrative, as the jaded wealthy will pay a great deal for such entertainment. The site of the Arena’s activities moves around at the whim of its founder, mainly in North America and Europe, somehow always staying one step ahead of law enforcement and the heroes.

Levi Gonzales, known throughout the New Atlantis police force for his tough but effective methods, becomes the new commander of the city’s STAR Team.

The Collective makes its first appearance. The Sampsons manage to stop the alien cybernetic hive mind by breaking it down into its component parts. Elements of the swarm survive, however, and will eventually reform. 

On 14 December (her grandfather’s birthday) Karen Elizabeth Cohen is born in Denver, CO. The daughter of Ultra Lad and Miracle Lass, and granddaughter of Ultra himself, she appears to be a normal human baby.

1999 ce

UNEXIS Director Grenada is assassinated by agents of HUSH; he is replaced by Filo Eliopoulos of Greece. 

Brandy Hamilton, a young woman from the Hollows area of New Atlantis, gains sonic powers and takes on the identity of Audiophonic, training with her mentor Darnell Davidson, the former Black Wolf. 

Despite worldwide fears of computer chaos, on 31 December the Liberty Alliance handily defeats the cyber terroist Y2K and his Millennium Drones.

“Cameron’s Titanic Statue,” after sitting in a subbasement of the New Atlantis Museum of Natural History for two years, is loaned to the Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR.

2000 ce

A year to the day after his capture, the cyber terrorist Y2K manages to infiltrate the secure computer systems of Iron Rock Super Max, and  wreaks havoc by freeing all the inmates. While the villain and most of the prisoners suffer defeat that night at the hands of the Liberty Alliance and the duo of Truth & Justice, it will take the heroic community more than six months to recapture all the escapees.

Keith Carver, the grandson of the Liberty League member Red Racer, manifests super speed powers just after his 13th birthday. His father goes ballistic, his long-buried resentment over his own lack of meta-human abilities boiling over. When, in the course of their confrontation, his son announces that he is also pretty sure he’s gay, Harry, Jr. kicks the boy out of the house. Not knowing where else to go, Keith runs to his grandparents’ home in Boston, where he is taken in without question. Both his grandfather and his aunt, the speedster Sprint, undertake to train the boy in the use of his powers.

While returning to Earth from an interstellar mission, Paladin Greg Greer is ambushed by an elite assassination squad of the shapeshifting Dramorg. Although he manages to defeat the aliens, he is mortally wounded in the fight, and makes it only as far as Mars, before succumbing to his injuries on 27 December.

After more than two decades of stalled efforts, the citizen initiative to change the name of New Atlantis’ Lake Squanto finally passes in the November elections. As of the first day of the new century it will become Lake Tisqauntum.

On 31 December the late Greg Greer’s Power Bands decide on a new Paladin-candidate, locking themselves onto the wrists of West Point cadet Serena Carver. Once she realizes exactly what has happened, and the gravity of the offer being made to her, Carver accepts. After a brief visit to her family to explain her departure, the Bands transport her to Rampart for evaluation, training and confirmation by the Keepers.

2001 CE

Avian warrior Talona attacks Thorson Conglomerate over a threat by one of the company’s projects to the Aerie. Gaia is able to stop Talona from doing any serious harm, and the Liberty Alliance provides aid to the Avians. 

The White Knight, a radical racist believed to have been empowered by the dark entity Trastada Infante, attacks the opening ceremony of the Celebrate Diversity festival in the South Canal district of New Atlantis. Sprint and her new sidekick, the Streak, are able to prevent the White Knight from disrupting the ceremony, although this means the villain manages to escape capture.

In July the last villain to escape from Iron Rock Super Max, the plant-controlling Green Man, is defeated by a group of super-powered teenagers, including the Streak. The press speculates wildly about the possibility of a new Teen Squad, although none of the super-kids comment, beyond eye-rolls at the un-coolness of the very idea. 

Nico Steiner, Jr. goes missing in Africa on his way to a meeting in Kurunda with a group from Savage International. Although no body is ever found, he will be declared legally dead the next year.

Terrorist attacks on 11 September are entirely foiled by the Liberty Alliance and other heroes (and a few villains), making little more than a blip in the public consciousness… just another day in the world of heroes. The Saudi mastermind of the plot, Osama Bin Laden, is captured by the some-time villain Nimrod within two weeks and is remanded to the World Court to stand trial. It is Nimrod’s penultimate public appearance.

2002 ce

Serena Carver, newly minted Paladin of Light for Earth’s region of space, returns to her home world to take up her duties on 12 April. After several encounters fighting side-by-side with members of the Liberty Alliance, as well as other individual  heroes, she is invited to join the team in September.

On 5 May Manifold reactivates and breaks out of ASTRA Labs, rampaging across the city until the Liberty Alliance is able to once again deactivate it. Manifold’s sudden reactivation is caused by its creator, The Forsaken, and serves as a distraction while Crucible agents pillage several local tech companies.

On 20 June the Raptor and her long time foe, the world-class thief Silver Fox, temporarily join forces to capture a mysterious dimension-warping thief who has stolen several art treasures.

On 22 June Lily Steiner dies in a drunken single-car accident in upstate New York, leaving her son Kyle an orphan. The boy becomes the ward of his grandparents, Ellie and Nico Steiner, Sr.

On 7 July Gojira, driven from the depths by Atlanteans under the influence of the Serpent Scepter, rises up in Union Bay and attacks the Nelson Naval Ship Yards. Members of the Liberty Alliance are able to rescue the yard personnel and eventually drive the monster back into the sea. The Sunrise Bridge does suffer some damage in the fight, however.

On 15 September Sakura Kenshin, the second Kaminari, commits ritual seppuku to transfer her spirit into her powerful war fan, the mystical artifact called the Storm Tessen. She has arranged to have the weapon passed down to her estranged daughter, Aoi Kenshin, on the girl’s 16th birthday.

UNEXIS Director Filo Eliopoulos is assassinated by HUSH.

The first major military engagement with alien forces on Earth occurs on 14 October, when an advance force of Z’ardani attacks key points around the planet. They have been in the Sol System for years, slowly building a Stargate in the Asteroid Belt to pave the way for a full-scale invasion. When they are discovered by Dr. Mark Sampson, they launch an early, preemptive strike. They hope to delay Earth’s heroes long enough for the Gate to become operational, allowing a full-scale Z’ardani invasion fleet to pour though and overwhelm the planet.

Through collaboration with the Overlord (Gerhart von Richter), the aliens have gained access to several ultrite crystals, which they wield against Ultra, to devastating effect. Marginally less impacted than his father, Joseph Cohen, who once again takes up a super heroic identity during the crisis, this time  as Ultrason, shields his father long enough for Ultra and several other heroes to teleport from New Atlantis to the almost-operational Stargate. Joseph suffers extensive injuries, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down thereafter.

In the Asteroid Belt, Ultra, Dr. Jovanović, and the two senior Sampson’s battle the garrison protecting the Stargate, and even in the face of ultrite-based defenses Ultra manages to destroy its power source. The effort costs him his life, however. The Sampson’s recover his body and return it to Earth; Jovanović suffers a serious head injury during the battle.

In the aftermath of the failed invasion the planet mourns the loss of not only its greatest champion but of scores of other heroes (and villains), as well as the more than 1,000,000 human casualties worldwide. Both the general public and the world’s governments realize just how close the planet came to falling, and that it was the meta-humans that tipped the scales. Meta-human approval ratings climb to a high not seen since the 30s and 40s.

Jetstream, Gaia, and the Raptor, with the temporary aid of Reservists Calypso and Stormfront, publicly renew the Liberty Alliance, putting out a world-wide call for new members.

Gerhart von Richter’s collaboration with the invaders becomes general knowledge, and he is soon the most wanted (and hated) man on Earth. With every government, hero and ordinary citizen on the planet actively hunting him (and an international “kill on sight” order approved by the UN), he is forced to go underground. Moving covertly from hiding place to hiding place, he struggles to effectively run his clandestine HUSH organization remotely. Even many of his criminal peers turn on him, especially once the bounty on his head, dead or alive, is raised to $100,000,000 dollars.

The Yin-Yang hero Taiji is born from the death of Veritas and the Adjudicator during the Invasion, merging couple’s individual powers into a single being of light and shadow. 

On her 16th birthday Aoi Kenshin is tricked by her deceased mother’s Rising Son minions into laying hands on the now-cursed Storm Tessen. As soon as her flesh comes into contact with the ancient war fan, the spirit of Sakura Kenshin possesses her daughter – the culmination of a long-planned bid for immortality. While not a trained sorceress, Aoi is far more skilled in the martial arts than either her mother or grandmother, and is able to make better use of the war fan’s offensive arcane powers of wind, thunder, and lightning — which her mother’s possessing spirit now forces her to do in service of anarchy, despite the girl’s continued psychic resistance.

At 16 Suzume Washington experiences a meta-human metamorphosis, brought on by the stress of the Z’ardani Invasion – she sprouts wings from her back, giving her the ability to fly; she also finds that she has increased strength, stamina, speed, and toughness.

2003 ce

The 2002 New Atlantis mayoral election, delayed by the chaos and destruction of the Invasion, is held on Tuesday 6 January. Having reluctantly extended his term for several months by emergency decree, Dylan Grey is finally able to step down, and retires as one of the most beloved mayors in New Atlantis history. He departs to a well-earned retirement amidst the luxuries and elegance of stately Grey House. He is bored senseless in less than a month.

Dylan Grey’s successor as mayor of New Atlantis is Eleanor Ramos, a long-time City Councilwoman who has the misfortune to be elected facing two major problems – filling the shoes of one of the most revered leaders the city has had in generations, and dealing with the aftermath and cleanup of the Invasion, with all the competing demands this creates.

The gynoid hero Euterpe, “killed” during the Invasion, is somehow reanimated – but not by the mind that had previously motivated the synthetic body. Urbana, as the new entity calls herself, has no memories of either Euterpe or of Melinda Dawkins, and claims to channel the Spirit of Cities. Her power set is vastly different than Euterpe’s, and within hours of her reanimation the synthetic body has taken on a very different look. She is able to speed the rebuilding of New Atlantis by an order of magnitude, and quickly becomes very popular in the city. After careful vetting by Arkanos and others, she is invited to join the Liberty Alliance, an offer she quickly accepts.

With the help of Arkanos, Aoi Kenshin has her mother’s evil spirit exorcised from her mind, and is now able to use the Storm Tessen for her own ends. In an attempt to remove the taint of her ancestress’ evil from it, she adopts the Kaminari name and fights evil wherever she can… starting with the decimation of her mother’s terrorist organization, the Rising Sun. Unfortunately, exorcising the spirit of Sakura from the war fan itself proves impossible and, in moments of weakness or exhaustion, Aoi is is still able to influence, and occasionally even seize control of, both the weapon and her daughter.

Suspected mobster Thomas Genovese is assassinated by the sonic weapon-wielding Silencer, the vigilante’s sixth victim.

In the wake of his father’s death and his own crippling, Joseph Cohen opens the Brookhaven Preparatory School in the Port Republic suburb of New Atlantis, to train the next generation of meta-humans in the skills, and moral philosophy, needed to be true heroes. Dylan Grey accepts a teaching position at the school, as does Melody Carter, the former hero Sprint, who was de-powered during the Invasion. Her nephew, Keith Carter, is one of the first students to be enrolled (taking the name Red Racer in honor of his grandfather, who died in the Invasion), along with Suzume Washington and Tula Halpirn.

SHADOW (Super-Human Alien Defense Over-Watch) is founded via the United Nations. It is an international treaty organization, like NATO, and while it operates under the general auspices of the United Nations, it is not a part of the UN’s organizational structure. Tasked with overseeing the combined military and meta-human defense of Earth against extraterrestrial and extra-dimensional threats, its mandate extends from Earth orbit outward, with minimal authority planetside, at least theoretically. It’s terrestrial administration headquarters is based in Geneva, but much of its work will be based in orbit, especially once the newly authorized Overwatch space station being built by the Liberty Alliance is operational. A joint UN-SHADOW Moon Base is also authorized in the initial Charter.

Pat Townsend, formerly the war hero Brigade and first Director of SHADE, suffers a second, fatal heart attack. Prior to his death he has volunteered for Project: MIMIR (Memetic Intelligence & Memory Integrated Repository), which he had green-lit years earlier. On his death his previously downloaded memories and personality are integrated into the great positronic brain designed and built by Vitruvian, becoming part of the whole super intelligence called Mimir.

While searching, like many other scientists, for ways to safely increase Earth’s meta-human resources, Dr. Mark Sampson experiments with kundalini/matrix crystals. This leads to  a catastrophic accident with a kundalini-powered device, irradiating the entire Sampson family, along with cyberneticist Zandros Jovanović, in elemental rays, transforming them all.

Mark (aka Doc Aqueous) gains hydrokinetic powers, including the ability to change his form into water; Liz (aka Zephyr) gains control of the winds and weather, the power of flight, and the ability to become insubstantial (but not invisible, merely somewhat translucent); Trevor (aka Geode) gains geokinetic abilities, including the power to armor himself in a rocky shell at need; Analis (Nova) gains the powers of pyrokinesis, including the ability to completely sheath herself in flame and to fly; while Zandros (Dr. Magnetík) gains electro-magnetic powers, including control over machines.

Collectively they become known as the Phenom Five— eventually. The press initially refers to them as the Far-out Five, thanks to Mark’s enthusiastic outburst after their first public appearance. It is a name Zandros and Liz both hate but are forced to grin and bear, at least for a time… they know well enough that the media love the fact that Mark talks like a hybrid of a flower child and an absent-minded professor. By whatever name, however, they quickly become known as America’s First Family of Science, fighting evil-doers, aliens, extra-dimensional entities, and the occasional street criminal with their new abilities.

After a series of interim directors, and a serious overhaul of its security measures, Maj. Regina Edgerton, a former SAS officer, accepts the appointment as Director of UNEXIS. She manages to escape the expected assassination attempts by HUSH, which in any case is busy falling apart in the wake of the world’s backlash against its leader.

In New Atlantis, the Ravencliff Asylum announces a controversial program to treat mentally ill super-criminals.

A battle between Stormfront and the cat-burglar Columbine in the Portland Art Museum results in the accidental revival of John Jacob Astor VIII, who has been in stasis, encased within the so-called “Cameron Titanic Statue,” since 1945. The revived teenager becomes an overnight sensation as the Lost Scion of the Astor family.

Dr. Tempest captures Jetstream and reveals the hero’s secret identity on live TV. Jetstream manages to escape and in turn captures Tempest. With his identity now common knowledge, Jetstream decides to finally relocate with his family from Kansas City to New Atlantis, to take advantage of the heightened Alliance security available. Soon after, his son Bradley Jr.’s electrical powers emerge and he is enrolled in Brookhaven Preparatory School, taking the codename Blue Bolt.

2004 ce

On 22 February the Mojave Space Port is dedicated in Nevada, USA.

On 19 May Gideon Young’s oldest sister, Kelly, dies of an accidental drug overdose. Long his primary maternal figure, Gideon blames his neglectful parents and begins spending as little time as possible at home. He eventually reconciles with his mother, but becomes increasingly estranged from his father.

In their latest bid to claim Earth, the Dramorg Consensus sends a flotilla to try outright conquest, apparently unaware of the recent failed Z’ardani attempt. In early June Dramorg infiltration agents kidnap and replace the Sampson Family with shapeshifting duplicates and imprint Darr’Kann, a specially bred and modified warrior, with the powers of all of the Sampsons. They intend him to be the first of a new generation of super-Dramorg. Although originally planning on the Liberty Alliance as their target, circumstances lead them to switch goals mid-operation. As a result something about the Sampson’s elemental powers breaks Darr’Kann’s connection with the Overmind. Awash with a sudden sense of individual self, overwhelmed by a new fear for its life, and full of sudden personal ambition, the so-called Ultra-Dramorg turns against its creators. 

The betrayal of Darr’Kann allows Variance to help the captured heroes to escape. They and the Sampsons inflict major damage on the Dramorg flotilla, while the Liberty Alliance and its allies and reserve members, including Stormfront and his young protege JJ Astor, manage to hold off the aliens’s troop landers. Arkanos defeats the Dramorg Overmind in psychic combat, with the aid of the Earth’s gathered psychics and mystics. The telepathic shock disables the Dramorg, sending them fleeing back into deep space — but not before assassinating the Ultra-Dramorg. They are forced to leave its body behind on Earth, however. With the residual psychic power of the combined effort at his disposal, Arkanos is able to dampen the memories of this second alien incursion in the minds of the general public – a task made easier by the fact that most of the incident took place either in orbit or in limited areas of New Atlantis.  

John Jacob Astor VIII makes his public debut in his nano-orichalcum armor during the  attempted Dramorg incursion, fighting alongside his friend and mentor Stormfront. In the crush of superheroes involved, and the general chaos of the aftermath, he is little noted by the press, although he does catch the eye of both Dr. Mark Sampson and several members of the Liberty Alliance.

On 30 November Rabbi Meir Dayan, a Talmudic scholar and Kabbalist, performs a ritual to imbue his 13-year-old son, Dael Dayan, with the full mystic power of their community, to create a new protector of the Jewish people. But the ritual goes amiss somehow, and the power flows instead into his 10-year-old daughter, Atara, who has snuck in to the chamber to see what’s going on. This causes chaos in the mystic sect, and Rabbi Dayan is furious; although her mother Miriam neé Mizrahki seems unsurprised. While the power is apparently dormant in the girl, attempts over the next year will fail to move it from Atara to Dael, a fact which seems to bother the youth not at all… a fact which infuriates their father all the more.

2005 ce

In May construction begins on the moon of the joint UN-SHADOW Moon Base.

The increasing atrocities occurring in his native country, as the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević tightens his grip on the Balkans (after several failed attempts to oust him), leads exiled Kosovar Zandros Jovanović to try and convince his teammates in the Phenom Five to intervene. When they decline, citing UN restrictions and international law, he feels betrayed and leaves the team in August to take matters into his own hands. Within days he captures and publicly executes Milošević, then single handedly decimates the Serbian army in Kosovo. 

His leadership inspires uprisings across the former Yugoslavia, and within the month he declares the sovereign nation of Illyria, which encompasses Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, northern Albania, and a bit of southeastern Serbia. By the time the Phenom (now) Four gain the international permissions needed to pursue and confront him, Dr. Magnetík has an army with him, which includes human, meta-human and cybernetic forces. He also enjoys enthusiastic public support from large parts of a populace weary of decades of war, oppression, and genocide. 

Unwilling to engage against Illyria’s conventional forces and unable to take down their former friend without doing so, when Jovanović calls for free elections, the heroes are forced to withdraw.

The Liberty Alliance completes their satellite headquarters, called the Overwatch, and expands their ranks internationally in an effort to become guardians of the entire planet, not just New Atlantis and the United States. Alliance Hall becomes their local embassy in New Atlantis, while other “Alliance Embassies” are constructed in cities around the globe, in those countries which welcome the Alliance. 

Having graduated in June from the Brookhaven School, Red Racer is invited to join the Liberty Alliance, an offer he accepts with some excitement. Suzume Washington is also offered a place on the team, which she too accepts after long conversations with both sets of grandparents. She adopts her paternal grandfather’s WWII codename of American Eagle, while the colors of her uniform honor the memory of her uncle, Supido Kyo.

Stormlord returns to Reservist status with the Liberty Alliance, relocating full time back to Portland.

On 14 October Mayor Ramos establishes Remembrance Day, an annual citywide holiday to commemorate the end of the Z’ardani Invasion and honor the sacrifice of Ultra and the many other fallen of the city. The event is capped by the dedication in Alliance Park of the Eternal Hero Statue, a 100 foot tall sculpture of gold tinted marble overlooking the Narrows, designed by local artist Kaela Salez. Statues of the other heroes who died that day, arranged around a bronze statue of Ultra, are raised at Heroes’ Circle in the newly-renamed Memorial Park at the heart of the city.

On 12 December Dr. Zandros Jovanović, aka Doctor Magnetík, is elected President-for-Life, in voting closely monitored by international observers, and the United Nations formally recognizes Illyria  as a sovereign nation, granting international legitimacy to Dr. Jovanović’s government.

2006 ce

After three years at the US Flight Academy, JJ Astor VIII graduates and accepts his officer’s commission into the USAF. He is drafted into the test pilot program, a natural fit or him, and he quickly becomes one of the Air Force’s top test pilots.

After the Succubus’ latest outrage in Athens, Arkanos gathers several of the Lightbearers and hunts her down. Determined to rid poor Jennifer Allman of her curse once and for all, he performs the most powerful exorcism he knows, and then wards the women’s physical form with a host of magical defenses. Unfortunately, after years submerged beneath the demon’s control, Jennifer is practically catatonic and is committed to the Ravencliff Asylum for treatment.

HUSH develops LV-13, a techno/biological agent intended to suppress the will of those infected. It mutates into a sentient, telepathic organism and escapes the secret lab, spreading across the world before Vitruvian, the Drs. Elizabeth and Mark Sampson, and Dr. Magnetík are able to work together to create a vaccine. Although all samples of LV-13 are destroyed, HUSH manages to retain the gene-map and Overlord plots to turn the discovery to his advantage.

New Atlantis mayor Eleanor Ramos faces a difficult re-election, with a crowded field of candidates and a petulant and dissatisfied electorate. Local business mogul Erik Thorson enters the crowded mayoral race late in the campaign, and pulls off a surprise win, promising to “keep New Atlantis moving forward.”

2007 ce

Doctor Magnetík sends a squad of his mercenaries into the Iraqi dessert to find and retrieve four mystic gems he has learned of. Each one is reputed to channel the energy of one of the classical elements. Inspired by Manifold and the alien Ultra-Dramorg, he hopes to use them to power an android he is creating (it will eventually be called Chimera). He plans to imbue his creation with all the powers of the Phenom Four, in aid of his ongoing feud with the Sampson family. The five mercenaries (Antione Boucher, team leader, French; Jürgen Heinz, muscle, German; Gisele Auclair, communications and ECM expert, French; Maggie Mueller, demolitions, American/Austrian; and Jean-Philip Marizan, sniper, French) find the gems, but in arguing over them the five are changed, losing their human forms and becoming living embodiments of corrupted, merged elements: mud, crystal, smoke, sand, and ember-like heat. They revel in their new powers at first — until it becomes apparent they are unable to regain their human forms. They soon become the super-criminal gang known as Le Quatre Fatale (the Fatal Four), after Mueller refuses to join them. Taking the name Sandblaster, she strikes out on her own as a meta-mercenary.

The Kevrin Ur of the Confederated Union of Worlds succeed in enhancing the psionic potential of Tia-Kim, a young recruit, and send her to study at the Brookhaven Preparatory School on Earth under the codename Starmind. She joins other new students like Quills, Africanus, Argent, Exemplar, and Raster. 

2008 ce

Inspired by the Brookhaven Preparatory School and more than willing to play the long game, The Forsaken acquires and establishes the Mordecai Preparatory Academy in New Atlantis, a front organization for his “Shadow Academy.” This is a school for young supervillains where they can be inculcated with loyalty to Adam and the Crucible. A woman codenamed Miss Bones becomes the schools headmistress. Among her first students are Zeroth, Protostar, Hellbinder, Lolita, Atticus Rex, and the Gonzo. 

Agents of Doctor Magnetík succeed in stealing the cryogenically frozen remains of the Ultra-Dramorg from the Aurora Building and deliver the body to him in Illyria for study and dissection.

On 20 June the joint SHADOW-UN Moonbase Armstrong is dedicated by its namesake, former astronaut Neil Armstrong, and the initial roster of 20 international scientists and researchers takes up residence.

When a test flight in an experimental jet goes disastrously wrong and his ejector seat malfunctions, JJ Astor VIII learns that he can use his innate bioelectric field to fly, at least when amplified by his nano-armor. He decline’s the military’s offer of a codename and a transfer to the super soldier program, preferring his test pilot duties and as low a profile as he can achieve.

The Simian uses a sample of Red Racer’s DNA to grow a female clone—which he mockingly names “Randi Racer”—intending to use her against his foe. Red Racer, however, learns of the plot and with the help of Geode, of the Phenom Four, rescues the child before the villainous ape can corrupt her. Given their connection and her potential super-powers, the 21-year-old hero decides to adopt Randi and raise her as his daughter.

2009 ce

Red Racer, of the Liberty Alliance, and Geode, of the Phenom Four, go public with their relationship after paparazzi manage to get photos of the two kissing. For the most part the public reaction is a shrug, although the usual vocal elements try to make a scandal of it all, especially as Red Racer “has a young child.” While nothing comes of the hate campaign, the stress of a public relationship, on top of their work duties, leads to an amicable break-up later in the year.

Kid Manga takes advantage of his 18th birthday to make a clean break from his juvenile delinquency record and creates Takashi Technologies, a tech firm specializing in robotics that will become a multi-billion dollar business within two years.

Denise Young dies, and Gideon Young leaves home for good. He begins a life of petty crime with his best friend, Eddie Dean.

On 13 September a stellar probe is launched by the engineer-scientists of the the planet Dezirin into the chromosphere of their sun, the star Erigayn, to study it and as proof-of-concept for their new thermal shielding technology. When the probe appears to be destroyed, the dejected engineers go back to the drawing board. In reality, however, the probe was not destroyed. Its presence awakened an eons-dormant artificial intelligence, created and then mothballed by the alien space-gods known as the Seekers. Possessing the intellect of a new-born, the AI took the probe and studied it, beginning its slow journey to full sentience.

Dr. Aqueous manages to cure Adam Ward (aka Gamma, the “Atom Smasher”) of his radioactive powers. Ward undergoes court-ordered therapy and rehabilitation.

Dael Dayan begins his two years of national service in the Israeli Army, but is kidnapped by rogue Palestinian forces less than a month into his enlistment. 15-year-old Atara wishes to go to the Gaza Strip to find her brother, utilizing the mystical powers that have been growing ever stronger in her since her 13th birthday. Her father, who has refused to give her any significant training, believing such power should not be wielded by a woman, absolutely refuses to allow her to go. With her mother’s implicit approval, Atara defies her father and goes anyway. Unfortunately, she arrives too late to save Dael, and all she can do is bring his body home.

2010 ce

After aiding in capping the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Calypso chooses to return to Reserve status with the Liberty Alliance to again operate full time in New Orleans, the Gulf region, and the Caribbean. 

Blue Bolt (Jetstream’s son) drops out of Bensalem University. 

Doctor Magnetík secretly completes his masterpiece of cybernetic technology, the android he names Chimera. Possessing the full powers of the Phenom Four, as well as a subset of his own power, he arranges for his creation to be delivered to the Aurora Building, where it attacks the Sampson Family on their home turf. Although eventually defeated, the android escapes capture, and is secretly returned to Illyria… Mark Sampson suspects the creature’s origins, but has no proof.

Renegade Paladin Korith Dhal arrives on Earth, having heard the tales of its powerful meta-humans and relatively plentiful supply of Seeker matrix crystals. Shortly after his arrival Dhal meets Nemesis, who realizes the true nature and inherent power of the dark crystal energy the renegade bears; realizing the near-impossibility of seizing the crystal for itself (and in any case unable to leave the Sol System because that would be abandoning its post), the AI conceives a plan to use Dhal to its advantage. Nemesis proceeds to unlock the secrets of the dark crystal for the renegade, who takes the name Ebony Night.

The Guardian first appears in San Francisco, and high school reporter Meg Halcyon scoops the major papers by scoring the first interview with the new hero.

John Jacob Astor VIII finishes his four-year hitch in the Air Force and declines to re-enlist, instead beginning a two year trek around the globe on various missions for the Quest Foundation and Savage International.

New Atlantis mayor Erik Thorson wins re-election to a second term by a comfortable, but hardly remarkable, margin.

2011 ce

While training in the use of his new powers, Ebony Night comes into conflict with the Liberty Alliance and Earth’s Paladin several times; while generally suffering defeats, he learns much, about both his enemies and his own growing power; and he always manages to escape capture. 

The Council Hill Academy, a private preparatory school, is founded in Astoria, Oregon. Located, unsurprisingly, on Council Hill, it has a very small student body made up of the children of the wealthy and “special cases” — those that make it in due to family history, extraordinary talent, or very good performance on entrance exams. In fact, it is a front for the Crucible’s second training school for young supervillains, purchased the year before and set up by arrangement with the Cabal.

Kyle Steiner spends a feverish summer trying to realize his grandmother’s dream of improving humanity after Ellie Steiner’s death in the spring. On the evening of 16 August, after 70 straight hours of inspired work, he injects himself with a serum he believes will prove a panacea. He awakens five days later in a NYC hospital, essentially unharmed, but also seemingly unchanged.

Unable to deal with her fathers silent disapproval, amplified by both her parents’ grief over the death of her brother, 16-year-old Atara Dayan is allowed to move to the United States, to finish high school while living with her maternal uncle’s family. The Mizrakhi family lives in the Mystic Heights neighborhood of Port Mystic, a northern suburb of New Atlantis.

2012 ce

Marriage equality becomes law in New Atlantis. Red Racer marries his boyfriend, civil rights activist Paul Desmond, in a highly publicized, but private, ceremony. Shortly afterward, Desmond formally adopts Randi Carter, his husbands clone-child.

In Astoria, OR Captain JJ Astor VIII founds Apergy Systems International, named after his grandfather’s fictional anti-gravity energy in his one published novel, and begins producing small, compact batteries and capacitors. Superior to any others on the market, he especially gears them to Third World uses, bringing technology to the disenfranchised and poor.

Kyle Steiner beats Bartosz Piasecki of Norway in the Men’s Épée final at the Summer Olympics and wins the gold medal. It is only after his victory that he realizes his serum has indeed, over the last year, improved him both mentally and physically. He vows never to compete again, and renews his work on his doctorate at Stanford.

After years of intense therapy, Jennifer Allman is released from Ravencliff Asylum. Arkanos can detect no trace of the demon Succubus within her mind, and the Liberty Alliance helps her get back on her feet financially and professionally – a much needed assist, given her spotty work record while first possessed and then institutionalized.

Popular union organizer and current City Councilor, Claire Syrett, is elected mayor of Astoria, OR.

After a final battle with the Liberty Alliance, Ebony Night decides he’s ready to undertake Nemesis’ plan, and leaves Earth for the stars. Over the next year he will recruit the first seven of his Nightwraiths. Before he leaves, however, Nemesis uses the power of the dark crystal which Ebony Night wields to energize its own collection of matrix crystals, and begins to form its plan to metafy all humans on Earth.

2013 ce

On 19 January Atara Dayan makes her first public appearance as Sabra, when she comes to aid of the Liberty Alliance as they battle the demoness Lilth. She is quickly invited to join the Alliance, an offer she accepts with some ambivalence. This brings her to the attention of Arkanos, the Earth’s Magus Prime, who reactivates himself from Reserve Status to Active Status in the Alliance, the better to study her in action.

Unwilling to take a “superhero” code name, JJ Astor nonetheless dons his armor and uses his “powers” for good when he absolutely has to – which thankfully isn’t often in Astoria. But the press is relentless, and as the city’s only public meta-human, they name him themselves – Scion, a moniker he’s not terribly fond of, but now answers to, however reluctantly.

The Elders of Sgang Gwaay Llanagaay island decide they must act while they still can. They choose the last child born on the island, Kúng, to be their emissary to the Outer World and task him with bring back new Haida youths for training. At 23 the young man is already a trained shaman, but he is now granted an extraordinary gift – the linking-tattoos of all the Great Beasts. He is given a new name: Sgwáansang (The One). On arriving in the Alaska of the Outer World, he makes contact with his friends Johnny Quest and Hadji Singh, and is shocked to find that they are now men in their late 50s! The Quest Foundation aids him in setting up an identity as Cooper Ravenwing, and he eventually also takes the codename Totem.

Nimrod recruits teenager Randall Reynolds to receive his newly developed nano-technology armor, hoping he will become the immortal’s agent amongst the stars, as a counter to Ebony Night. But the youth has other ideas; naming himself Superstar, he takes off for New Atlantis to try out for the Liberty Alliance. Impressed at first by his armor and powers, the Alliance is prepared to take him on until they learn that he’s only 15 years old. “Almost 16,” he protests to Sabra, when he is gently but firmly rejected. He crushes hard on Sabra, who tries to let him down equally gently, but he is majorly bummed.

2014 ce

Kyle Steiner relocates to Astoria, OR and soon realizes he has developed a truly meta-human power, beyond the serum-induced physical and mental improvements he has previously noticed  – he is able to create and control matter on the quantum level, open wormhole-like portals across long distance, and even fly, in an awkward sort of way. He considers creating a superheroic persona, and goes so far as learning to create a carbon-fiber shell to encase his entire body… but finds himself reluctant to actually pull the trigger. If he ever does, though, he likes the name Quanta…

Superstar tries to make a go of it as a solo hero in Boston, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, LA and Astoria, but seems unable to get his shit together long enough to be successful. After the inevitable major screw-up he moves on to the next city and a promising new start… only to run the cycle all over again.

Totem’s drinking problem leads to the serious injury of several annoying, but otherwise innocent, frat boys. This is his wake-up call and he goes on the wagon.

On 13 December Sabra accepts an offer by Arkanos to train and hone her skills, as he begins in earnest the search for his eventual replacement as Earth’s Magus Prime. He continues to keep an eye out for other possible candidates, although he has a good feeling about the young Israeli woman.

While hardly the universally beloved politician Mayor Grey was, current New Atlantis mayor Erik Thorson nonetheless wins a fairly close re-election to a third term.

2015 ce

Totem spends several months, on and off, training with and being tested by Arkanos, alongside Sabra (technically the Magus Prime’s formal apprentice), as well as the young Bay Area hero known as the Guardian.

On 12 May Sloan Davis is killed by a drunk driver in a hit-and-run, while her son is in Japan on a once-in-a-lifetime tour of his mysterious father’s ancestral land. Jonny Osaka returns to Astoria and spirals into depression for several moths, before taking two part-time jobs – one at Bridgeport Brewery, the other as a night janitor at the University of Astoria.

After years of getting increasingly involved in being “mules” for the Sinaloa drug cartel,  Eddie Dean and Gideon Young (using the noms d’crime Ace and Phantom) agree to take a mysterious package over the border, beginning a disastrous chain of events. Gideon accidentally ingest the Reactive Agent 11 they are carrying, gaining meta-human density control and teleportation powers, neither of which helps him to save the life of his best friend. Eddie’s death leads Gideon, now calling himself the Phantom Ace, down a road of vengeance against the Cartel and it’s head, El Chapo.

In early September Totem attempts to take the handful of Haida youth he has recruited back to Sgang Gwaay Llanagaay, but finds that the dimensional portal has vanished, his people apparently lost to him. The shock almost drives him back to the bottle, but instead he returns to Astoria and his schooling.

After years of increasing illness, Percy “Killer Tot” Lazarus learns that the genetic disorder that has kept him looking perpetually 8 or 9 years old is now also killing him. Furious at the injustice, over the next several years he seeks out increasingly radical and outré treatments, looking for a cure – from the medical and scientific, to the arcane and outright magical. Nothing works, not even an attempt to transfer his consciousness to a cybernetic body, and he becomes increasingly desperate… and deranged.

2016 CE

On 16 May the so-called Astoria Incident in Astoria, Oregon creates an enormous number of new super-powered individuals and even more potential new “breakthroughs.” It also kills thousands of people. A group of these new heroes, and a few existing ones, quickly band together to stabilize the city, forming a team called the Vanguard. When the dust settles, Astoria has becomes the second greatest concentration of meta-humans in the country after New Atlantis, significantly changing the demographics of supers in the U.S.A. and the world. The Cabal’s alliances fracture, leaving Astoria wide open in an “every-villain-for-themselves” scramble.

Entropy destroys and consumes Halicon, the capital of the Confederated Union of Worlds, throwing the known galaxy into chaos.

The alien artificial intelligence Nemesis attempts to recreate its Astoria Incident on a global scale; Astoria’s new heroes, the Vanguard, manage to prevent it, and the ancient AI vanishes back into one of its many avatars scattered around the planet.

Claire Syrett wins a second term as mayor of Astoria, OR.

The long lost second creation of brilliant, but infamous, scientist Victor Frankenstein is discovered in an old crate and is revived in Astoria, OR. Taking the codename Prometheus, the construct (named Seth) joins the Vanguard.

Humanity launches its first interstellar vessel via the the newly re-opened Stargate left by the invading Z’ardani. The Argos VII is a project backed by NASA and a consortium of tech giants, including Elon Musk, Tom Swift IV, Álvaro de la Vega, and Richard Branson. Sadly, the vessel vanishes when the Gate glitches, apparently the target of sabotage — alien or domestic is not immediately known. The Argos VII and the Ulysses family are feared lost.

After attempting to join the Vanguard, and again being rejected (even though he is now 18), Randy Reynolds finally accepts that his destiny really does lay amongst the stars when he sees Ebony Night in action. He accepts Nimrod’s mandate to counter the interstellar ambitions of Nemesis and Ebony Night, and leaves Earth to begin his mission. Before leaving, however, he adopts a new codename, to reflect his new, more mature outlook: Silverstar.

The Vanguard uncover a deep plot by the Russian government to plant a puppet in the American White House by interference in, and manipulation of, the upcoming election. Numerous bought-and-paid-for US politicians at the highest levels are arrested on charges of treason, as is the willing frontman of the Russians, a failed businessman and reality TV personality.

Refugees from the shattered Confederated Union Worlds come to Earth looking for asylum. When it is (reluctantly) granted, thousands more follow. They report that the forces of the Star-Master have overrun large areas of the Union and seized control of at least a sixth of its territory, while the Dramorg Consensus has seized almost as many star systems.

Vitruvian settles a number of alien refugees temporarily on Star Island in the Atlantic off the coast of New Jersey, 11 miles SE of New Atlantis. This immediately starts a round of semi-hysterical hand-wringing by city, national, and world authorities. Star Island becomes a large refugee camp under close guard by both UNEXIS and US forces, monitored closely from above by the Overwatch.

Throughout the year, between Vanguard missions, Totem spends several more months under the tutelage and watchful eye of Arkanos, who is still weighing his decision on who he will designate as his successor. Sabra and the Gatekeeper remain strongly in the running with Totem.

The Vanguard saves Christmas, and Santa Claus, on a visit to the North Pole.

2017 CE

Captain K’ra Khen leads a band of interstellar marauders who seize refugee vessels on the fringes of the Sol System and strip them of their valuables. The Liberty Alliance, able to confidently leave the safeguarding of Earth to the Vanguard, meets the alien marauders in force, and over several months manages to destroy or drive them off. This reopens the flow of refugees from the still-reeling Union, which increases political tensions on Earth.

Roland Reid, aka Arkanos, confirms Atara Dayan, aka Sabra, as his successor to the title of Magus Prime. While his other two choices are both good candidates, the Guardian already has important arcane duties to occupy his attention, and Totem is host to numerous avatars of extra-dimensional beings, which would conflict with the duties and responsibilities of the Magus Prime. His choice of Sabra must be ratified by the Powers-That-Be after his death, but with his prior blessing such confirmation seems all but certain.

On 12 June the multiverse is destroyed by the cosmic entity Kronos. Only the last-second intervention by the equally cosmic entity known as the Norn allowed the Vanguard a second chance to undo what had been done, and save all of existence. Which they manage do with the help of the alternate reality heroes of the Hand of Fate, with whom they had exchanged bodies, and worlds, the year previously.

15-17 June sees anti-alien sentiment in New Atlantis rise to a fever pitch when defense lawyer Sarah Thorson, estranged daughter of Mayor Erik Thorson, is viciously murdered, supposedly by one of the very aliens she defends. An alien associate of the murdered woman is arrested, and confrontations between pro-justice and anti-alien factions turn violent. Despite a curfew the threat of a major riot looms over the city. The Vanguard, still covering for the absent Liberty Alliance, race against time to find the real murderer and stop the violence. The situation is diffused when it is revealed the killer was a genetically altered human, experimented on by other humans.

Erik Thorson’s unintentional complicity in his daughter’s death, through the illegal gene-alteration activities of one of his own company’s, is made public by the Vanguard. Mayor Thorson calls a press conference to address the issue, and in his grief admits his own culpability, but insists that what they were trying to do, in engineering human-alien hybrids, was make a better, stronger human race to protect the world against the alien threat – before he can finish his statement, he is gunned down by the meta-human assassin Silencer.

At Elizabeth Grey’s suggestion, Joseph Cohen opens a second secret school for meta-humanly gifted children, this one in Astoria, OR. The Columbia Preparatory School is set up on the grounds of the Van Sant estate on Tidewater Island, and opens to students on 12 September. Chris Terazzo, aka Kid Singularity, and Cassie Hartwal, aka Ghostlight, are among the inaugural class.

Vitruvian and the Sampson Family begin renovation of an ancient Seeker habitat on Jupiter’s moon Europa, hoping to create a “Starhaven” for interstellar refugees, and to remove the increasing social and political pressure on Earth’s governments. While the idea of the removal of “illegal aliens” from Earth is generally lauded, the Alliance is subject to continued criticism for acting on their own authority, despite no Earth government having authority beyond the orbit of the moon.

2018 CE

On 30 January Roland Reid, the Earth’s Magus Prime, aka Arkanos, dies in his sleep.

On 2 February the Mantle of Magus Prime is passed on to Atara Dayan, aka Sabra, in an ancient ritual in the Tombs of  Kleth-Kiln in Shambhala. Devaj Acharya, Cooper Ravenwing (aka Küng, aka Totem), and Grant Bryant (aka the Guardian) join the mystical monks of the hidden valley to witness the transition of power to the new Magus Prime.

On 3 May the renegade former-Paladin called Ebony Night, while passing near the isolated Erigayn star system, senses a child-like mind calling out to the Void. He alters his course and soon makes contact with an artificial intelligence created eons ago by the Seekers. Intended to run a massive Stellar Foundry built within the photosphere of the star, the Star Forge (as it thinks of itself) was memory-wiped and put to sleep when the inscrutable space gods mothballed the facility over a million years ago. Nine years ago a stellar probe coming too close to the hidden facility re-awakened the AI, which was like a new-born child, knowing little more than its name/function and an inchoate desire to create. Ebony Night sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and seizes it, easily befriending the almost pitifully-eager-to-please AI…

Between 10-13 February Varina, the despotic ruler of the terrible Dark World, enacts her long-held plan to make Earth her 1000th conquest, and so ascend to godhood. With her old foe Arkanos dead, and the title of Magus Prime held by an inexperienced child, she expects her plan to run on rails… until she is slain, almost by accident, by Sabra. The young woman learns she must give up her title of Magus Prime of Earth to take over the dead sorceress’ responsibilities in her Dark World – if she refuses, trillions will die as the 999 bound worlds disintegrate into chaos. It is her hope that her own will and good intentions, over time, can reform and repair the centuries of evil Varina had forced on her realm. Earth is left without a Magus Prime.

Late in the year Jennifer Allman, after years of a normal life and finally feeling like her life is her own again, begins to have dreams of her time as Succubus. Also in those dreams is a shadowy Dark Lady, whispering to her about the power she once had… and the even greater power she could have, if only she were strong enough to reach out and take it… she wakes up screaming each time, but each time the lure of the Succubus is stronger…

On 17 November Fahar Synok, a political attaché to the High Engineer Gallago of the planet Dezirin, is the first native of the Erigayn System to be replaced by a replicant simulacrum under the control of the Star Forge, at the behest of that AI’s new best friend Ebony Night.

On 25 December the star Erigayn begins to show an unexpected, and highly unusual, chromatic shift as its energy output noticeably decreases. The main sequence yellow-white dwarf star drops from an F3 two an F2 classification, a change which quickly leads to small but consequential effects on the four inhabit worlds orbiting it.

2019 CE

On 20 February Benith Dantin, the Finance Minister on the Tulromite-settled world of Prokira, in the Erigayn System, is killed during his kidnapping and replacement by Ebony Night and the Star Forge with a replicant version of himself. In the next few months the faux minister will introduce and get passed legislation to reduce security around government installations, ostensibly as an austerity measure in the face of weather-related crop failures around the planet.

On 12 April Percival Lazarus, aka the Killer Tot, succumbs to the genetic disorder that has kept him a child for 63 years. In his final, semi-delirious months, however, a Dark Lady has come to him in his dreams, and promised to make him a living toy if he will serve her. He willingly agrees, and on his death bed his spirit is held back from whatever comes next by the power of his Dark Lady. True to Her word, he finds that he can now inhabit and animate any toy in the world, as well as animate and control a legion of other toys at the same time. He becomes the Dark Lady’s hands in the material world while she remains trapped outside of it, and begins hunting down the score or more of artifacts preventing her from achieving apotheosis.

On 17 April General Raffar Kantun, head of the military forces of the Geron-settled planet Aress’ka, in the Erigayn System, is kidnapped and replaced by a replicant doppelgänger created by the Star Forge on the orders of Ebony Night. She is placed in stasis beside the scores of other strategic, if less politically powerful, victims of the pair’s plan; her double begins feeding its masters with classified aerospace industry secrets from her government.

On 18 May a loose coalition of villains, egged on the the ancient Greek demigoddess/sorceress Medea, invade the Sanctum Primus in New Atlantis. Its guardian, Devaj, the elderly widower of Roland Reid, is wounded and in calling for help causes the Sanctum to relocate to Astoria. There Totem and the rest of the Vanguard manage to defeat the villains, forestall Medea’s plan for the Atlas of Eternity, and redeem the misunderstood creature known as the Revenant. What they fail to realize is that Killer Tot has used the invasion to obtain the list of Arkanos’ Arcane Wards.

On 14 June Zyrgan Thizim, the leading infectious diseases expert on the Krys’sadan-settled planet of Kyrnoka, in the Erigayn System, is taken and replaced by one of the Star Forges’ replicant doubles. On the orders of Ebony Night, the replicant uses its position to take advantage of a current pandemic sweeping the planet to place quarantines on areas the villain wishes to infiltrate. 

4-6 July: The French mercenary gang the Fatal Four attack a museum opening in Astoria, to steal a mystic gem, one of a set of five. They also steal a second of the gems from the ACU campus that day, and the Vanguard realize someone is attempting a dangerous mystical ritual. Sabra, although unable to leave the Dark World without catastrophy ensuing, helps from afar as the Vanguard travels around the world protecting the remaining gems. In a mystical hot-spot in Saudi Arabia the heroes confront and ultimately defeat the Succubus. While they stop her from absorbing the power of all five of the Bloodstones of the Voracious, she does manage to consume one and, when the villain Zirkon is killed, Totem absorbs the power of the Elemental Gem that had powered the German.

7-10 July: A series of bizarre happenings occur in San Francisco, New Atlantis, and Astoria, all involving fictional children’s TV characters/toys, called Transformers, coming to life and instigating rampages across the three cities. They are all meant as diversions from the real crimes, which involve the theft and destruction of several artifacts related to the late Roland Reid, deceased Magus Prime of Earth. In Astoria the Vanguard manage to track the apparent mastermind of the plot to an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. There they learn that a ghostly Killer Tot is responsible, and that he is after one last artifact – the Golden Helm of Dolórüska the Damned. An injured Gaoler grudgingly gives them permission to follow the marauding spirit into his prison dimension, the Cellblock, to stop him. The heroes manage to imprison the murderous ghost, and stop him from destroying the Helm, but not before the artifact itself escapes the Cellblock to return itself to Earth… somewhere.