World History

### War in the Heavens

Centuries before the dawn of man the gods of various pantheons engaged in a devastating War in the Heavens, the conclusion of which saw them each exiled to their own individual realms, pocket dimensions inaccessible to each other. Norse gods were sent to Asgard, Greco-Roman deities to Olympus, Japanese gods trapped in Takamagahara.

These gods were the progenitors of the beings we now know as superhumans.

### Rise of Heroes

In the early years of man, around 18,000 BC, a woman known only to history as J’Daa saw through the barriers into the realms of the gods, and the gods looked back at her. Desperate for a way to impose their will upon the world once more, an agreement was made: the gods would remain in their individual realms, but J’Daa would become their conduit on Earth, a vessel for the combined power of all the gods. Shouldering this great burden willingly, J’Daa became the first superhuman, the being known as Pantheon.

The evolution of superhumans started slowly, with Pantheon gradually gathering strange creatures and mystical beings to her side over the course of thousands of years. This loose group has come to be known by historians as The Host, and consisted of a variety of powerful beings dedicated to protecting humanity from outside threats.

Figures previously considered to be myths and legends have since been discovered to truly be superhumans. From Theseus, Hercules, Odysseus and Achilles of Greek myth; Biblical figures Goliath, David and Methuselah; King Arthur, Merlin and Morgana le Fay; even fictional characters like Robin Hood, Dr Jekyll and Sherlock Holmes have been rediscovered as not only real, but also superhuman. Great historical figures like Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Rasputin and Albert Einstein all carry rumours of the superhuman around them, of varying levels of fact.

### Dawn of the Superhumans

However, while these beings emerged from the shadows gradually and over time, the true ‘dawn’ of the superhumans only truly began in the first half of the 20th Century. Some claim that the barriers between our world and its neighbouring realms began to break down thanks to the scientific discoveries of the age, while others believe that the increased emergence of superhumans was directly proportional to the increase in the human population.

Some notable superhumans from this period include:

* The legendary monster hunter Briar Rayne operated in the 1900s, using magical gifts bestowed upon her by the Merlinine Council of Great Britain to protect the realm from creatures of darkness.
* In the 1910s, struggling writer Christian Jones was mysteriously transported to a realm of pure imagination which has come to be known as the Great Subconscious. Although just a few weeks passed on Earth before he returned imbued with reality-warping powers and a new moniker, The Imagineer, he felt as though decades were spent in the other realm.
* World War I took place from 1914-1918, although a number of enhanced superhuman operatives were involved on all sides, notably the British agent known as Britannia, the German operative known as The Prussian Eagle, and the American Agent Apex in the last year of the conflict.
* Shadowy vigilante The Eclipse operated under cover of darkness in Starkweather from the 1930s-1950s, with powers related to the lunar cycle and the Norse moon god Máni.
* World War II took place from 1939-1945 and included the involvement of additional enhanced operatives - Agent Apex was once again heavily involved along with fellow American agent The Patriot; Britannia II, the son of the original Britannia and Monarch from Great Britain; and the immensely powerful Nazi superman known as Ubermensch.

### The Founder Invasion

The dawn of the age of superhumans began to draw the attention of many beings from neighbouring worlds, and alien encounters quickly became commonplace, and spread backwards through history. The UFO incident at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 was no longer a small, unexplained incident but a full scale invasion by a race of beings known as The Founders which was driven back by an alliance of heroes and followed by the formation of the first known super-team, informally named the Superior Squad.

### Formation of UNION

Following the Founder Invasion and the formation of the Unified Nations, superhero activity of all kinds became more public and widespread. Many of these heroes were recognised and even endorsed by the government, while others operated off book and were officially classed as Vigilantes.

### Rise of the Futurists

Now that humanity were aware of alien life forms in the great void beyond their world, some members of the human race took it upon themselves to begin exploring other worlds. The most infamous of these expeditions took place in 1956, when a crew led by ace pilot Rick Riley flew an experimental ship through a wormhole discovered close to Earth. Although the ship returned almost immediately, for the crew nearly 300 years had passed, and prolonged exposure to the unknown radiation generated within the wormhole had evolved them each to the peak of their individual forms.

Rick Riley had reached the very pinnacle of human physical condition, with enhanced strength, speed, stamina and durability. Chief Research Officer Professor Milo Keller had his mind and consciousness expanded to superhuman levels and had even gained some psychic abilities. Medical Officer Dr Laura Prescott had become a literal healer and protector, able to create localised disruption fields which could heal wounds and create force fields. Engineer Kate Castor found herself able to communicate directly with machines, sense and interact with electrical fields. Physicist Professor Holden Cunliffe developed an affinity with the energies of the world around him, able to control and project them. The only member of the team not to make it back was psychologist Dr Jonathan Drazen, who was lost in an accident and vanished from existence.

The team finally made it back to Earth, albeit with a multi-dimensional alien creature in hot pursuit. Utilising their well-honed abilities, they swiftly dispatched the creature and were welcomed back to their home planet with open arms, and provided with a state of the art UNION-funded laboratory named The Hub to both continue their research and to act as a base of operations for the new super-team which came to be known as The Futurists. The team, codenamed Mover, Thinker, Healer, Fixer and Shifter respectively, undertook missions both of exploration into other realms and dimensions, and protection of the Earth from any cosmic forces that would seek to attack it.

### The Drawing of the Veil

The mid 1960s saw an incident known as the Drawing of the Veil, in which a villainous sorcerer by the name of Augustus Crowne sought to tear down the barriers between realms and unleash untold gods and monsters upon the world. Although he was initially successful and the fabric of reality was changed, he was defeated and locked away, along with most of the creatures he had unleashed, by the combined efforts of the Superior Squad and Pantheon, who seemingly sacrificed herself to trap Crowne behind the Veil.

### The Arizona Incident

Just as people were beginning to come to terms with the presence of magic in their world, on January 10, 1973 the world changed forever after a cataclysmic event which came to be known as the Arizona Incident. An explosion at a remote EvoDyne Applied Sciences particle physics research laboratory just outside Phoenix devastated the local area, levelling most of the town and killing thousands of people.

An unexpected side effect of this event was the creation of Vanquisher, a young woman who would go on to become the world’s greatest hero. Formerly an EvoDyne research assistant named Clara Everly, Vanquisher was granted vast superhuman abilities as a result of her exposure to unknown energies originating from beyond the known universe. She gained complete control over every particle in her own body, and as her abilities grew she found that she was able to control the particles in everything around her.

While Vanquisher could have used these abilities for personal gain, or to remake the world in her own image, she was inspired to use them for good, and became the world’s first superhero. Coming from a scientific background herself, she willingly submitted herself to rigorous scientific testing to allow future generations to benefit from her enhanced physiology, with the single restriction that this research was not to be used for unnecessary violence or evil.

Using insights gathered from this testing, scientists made huge leaps forward in building new technology, curing illnesses and disease, and even in producing new generations of superhumans through a wide variety of means. Phoenix was rebuilt, in large part by the hero herself, as a brand new city named Rebirth, Arizona, now lauded as the hometown of Vanquisher.

### Void Incursion

The 1980s saw an unexpected cosmic threat hit the planet as Dr Jonathan Drazen, the lost member of the Futurists returned to Earth. Drazen had spent centuries trapped in a hostile dimension known as The Void, spending each day alternately hiding and fighting, until he was able to rise up and take control of the entire realm. By sacrificing thousands of the natural denizens of the Void, he was able to harness enough power to return him to his home realm, and attacked the Earth with an army of Void creatures, disguising his ultimate goal of bringing the entirety of the Void into existence in the same physical space as the Earth, thus merging the two and expanding his new kingdom.

While Vanquisher and the Superior Squad were able to repel Drazen’s forces, it was the Futurists themselves who took responsibility for stopping Drazen. Ultimately they saw no option other than to sacrifice themselves, opening the wormhole they originally entered and pulling everything back in: Drazen, the Void creatures and the Futurists themselves all disappeared, and although the Earth was safe it was at the cost of some of its greatest heroes.

### Evohumans

Vanquisher’s Emergence (the official term now used to describe the first manifestation of a superhuman’s abilities) accelerated the global spread of superhumans exponentially, many scientists theorising that the otherworldly energies involved in her creation have leaked out into the world and triggered genetic mutations in a large proportion of the population. These mutations often trigger with the onset of puberty in young teens, but can also lay dormant and trigger during periods of intense emotional or physical stress well into adulthood.

Superhumans whose powers derive from these mutations are classified as Evohumans, shorthand for ‘evolved humans’ as their genetic code remains very similar to non-powered humans aside from a few small alterations. The first recorded Emergence of what is now categorised as an Evohuman was a young man named Matthew Evans who manifested vast telepathic and telekinetic abilities and ultimately took the alias Phrenic. Terrified of what he had become, Evans fled from his friends and family and isolated himself as he came to terms with his new powers, then dedicated his life to finding and protecting others like him.

Living entirely off the grid, he managed to gradually gather a small group of Evohumans to whom he offered counsel and training through their various traumatic Emergences. At the same time, UNION tasked a select group of Unifiers, their elite military agents, to track down the group and bring them in for medical checks to allow a greater understanding of these newly emerged superhumans. Informed by his Jewish heritage and the associated unwillingness to be ‘categorised’ by any kind of government organisation, Evans and his team lashed out and inadvertently killed the soldiers sent after them. Marked as ‘highly dangerous’, the team were forced to go on the run, continually moving and gathering more and more Evohumans to their cause.

While UNION Director Marcus Cage was sympathetic to the group and didn’t truly believe they were dangerous, as their numbers grew they became an issue that needed to be dealt with. Feeling that fellow superhumans would be more sensitive in dealing with the situation, he sent The Union, a government-sponsored superhero team to bring the self-titled Fugitives in. However, with both sides unwilling to compromise on their stance, the situation quickly became violent and was only stopped from being catastrophic by the intervention of Vanquisher, who calmed the situation and advised both sides to go their separate ways.

The Fugitives, who had become slightly attached to the name even though they were no longer being actively hunted by the government, took up residence on Scepta Isle, a remote island off the coast of Scotland. Here they established a base of operations where new Evohumans are welcome to join them and better understand their abilities, even using them to help people while ensuring that they do not become involved in situations monitored by UNION. The government, on the other hand, remained uncertain about the motives and desires of the Fugitives and continued to monitor them, even providing an official UNION liaison named Agent Peter Hall.

### The Eternity Pursuit

In the early days of the year 2000, an event occurred which has come to be known as the Eternity Pursuit. As the clock struck midnight on January 31, 1999, an object fell from the stars and crash-landed in the middle of the Sahara Desert. The object was of unknown origin and unknown power, and seemingly appeared out of nowhere, not picking up on any of the long-range scans of local space carried out by UNION-S (UNION’s Space Division) before impact. As soon as earthbound groups became aware of the object, it became a race to find and recover it, with UNION competing against multinational corporations like MacOne Enterprises and Geist Industries, as well as a variety of superhuman individuals and teams desperate to uncover the mysterious power from outer space.

The first to reach the object was Victor Geist of Geist Industries, a ruthless scientist and businessman who used his near-unlimited genius and resources to reach the object and claim it for himself. The object was revealed to be an ancient cosmic artifact rumoured to have been forged in the Big Bang at the very beginning of the universe, and known as the Eternity Helm. Upon donning the Helm, Victor became a vessel of Eternity, blessed with ultimate knowledge of all history and creation, but his petty human emotions became intertwined with this power and he threatened to rewrite history.

Seeing the seriousness of the threat, Jacob MacTaggart of MacOne Enterprises, the rival company to Geist Industries, activated a suit of armour of his own devising and became the Steel Saviour to combat Geist. Using his company’s research and his connections within UNION, MacTaggart gathered the world’s greatest heroes to combat the Eternity threat: Construct, an alien with the ability to manipulate light into solid constructs; Hart and Sole, a pair of powerful sorcerers; and Pantheon, who had been lost to the world since the Drawing of the Veil. Almost outmatched by Geist and Eternity, the group were ultimately saved by the intervention of Vanquisher, and the Eternity Helm was removed and hidden away.

Geist was locked up in the UNION supermax prison named The Vault, and although the powers of the Eternity Helm had been removed when it was hidden, he retained some of the knowledge and spent his time in prison devising ever more ruthless plans for the world. The group of superheroes, on the other hand, agreed to come together in times of great need and officially formed the super-team known as The Ascendancy. MacTaggart used his considerable resources to develop an orbiting headquarters known as The Nexus, which exists continuously attached to every point in time and space, allowing the team to react to threats quickly and decisively.

### Bedlam

In 2009 a powerful and violent superhuman known only as Bedlam rained destruction down on the city of Starkweather in Illinois. Starting as a string of bombings, assassinations and chemical attacks on the city perpetrated by groups loyal to, and threatened by Bedlam, the attacks soon became even more devastating. It was ultimately revealed that Bedlam was in possession of superhuman abilities fuelled by chaos - the more conflict and violence he was surrounded by, the more powerful he became. Superhero teams including The Ascendancy and The Union tried to intervene but little did they realise that they too were contributing to the chaos being inflicted on the city.

Ultimately it was the intervention of soldiers representing the Homeland Agency for Defence Against Enhanced Subjects or HADES, a deep black division of UNION who were responsible for incapacitating and apprehending Bedlam. A highly trained Cerberus Unit consisting of three elite and psychically-bonded soldiers were able to infiltrate the city and use experimental weapons known as Nullifiers to remove Bedlam’s powers long enough to restrain him. The villain was locked away, but a core group of his followers, known as Bedlamites remained active in Starkweather for years to come.

### HADES

While the public praised HADES as heroes in the aftermath, the superhuman community were more suspicious, particularly as it seemed that UNION had been experimenting with anti-superhuman weaponry and tactics for some time. Heroes and former government agents Longsight and Scattershot took it upon themselves to infiltrate HADES and uncover its secrets - they discovered that not only had UNION recruited a former supervillain by the name of Professor Soren Magnussen to head their deep black division, they had also allowed him to abduct and experiment on countless members of the superhuman community over the course of several decades. However, before they could reveal this information to the world at large, Longsight and Scattershot were killed by agents of HADES and the files seemingly lost, the legend of their existence only continued by conspiracy theorists and known as the HADES Revelations.

### The Cortex Crisis

The disappearance of Longsight and Scattershot and the ongoing suspicion around HADES and their activities made the relationship between the superhuman community and UNION unsteady in the 2010s, with The Union disbanding and many of its members finding homes within other teams. This instability was identified and exploited by a malicious artificial intelligence created by Geist Industries using elements of superhuman brain structure, technology left over from the Founder Invasion and even information fed into the company from Victor Geist and the knowledge he gained from the Eternity Helm. This AI was named Cortex and it was able to responsively adapt to the powers and skillsets of the world’s major superhumans, defeating and imprisoning vast swathes of them, using their DNA to build a body for itself.

However, Cortex was only able to combat abilities that it had previously encountered, and Saviour was able to enact his final Hail Mary against the deadly machine: he forced open a wormhole above the Earth and brought the Futurists back, an extra few hundred years older by their time and a fair bit more grizzled from their ongoing conflict with Drazen, but still the same old heroes. They were able to defeat and deprogram Cortex and felt safe to stay on Earth once more.

Now, in 2018, scientific estimates put the number of superhumans in the world at approximately 840 million, or 12% of the entire population of the world with more Emerging every day.