Millennium Universe Overview

[DShomshak]

On a possibly lighter note...

 

DOSSIER: The Monad Conquers America, Sort Of

 

The Monad appeared first in China, and the Far East suffers the majority of Monad attacks, but other parts of the world receive the Monad's attention as well. In 2006, for instance, the Monad tried to conquer the United States of America in a manner that showed how it didn't understand politics very well.

 

Monad Prime invaded Washington, D.C. with a swarm of capture-drones and conversion-bots. In one night, it captured President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, much of the Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and more than half of Congress. By morning, they were all hubots. Bush ordered the nation to surrender to the Monad.

 

Since Bush had antennae and a big glowing HAL eye and other highly visible cyberware in his head when he gave the order, nobody obeyed. There was a period of confusion while generals, admirals, deputy secretaries and other second-tier officials worked out who was now acting president (it turned out, Interior Secretary Gale Norton). Most government operations were not affected.

 

Before the day was out, the Departments of Defense and Justice had all their super-soldiers and super-cops in Washington, D.C. to fight the Monad. The corporate-sponsored Liberty Legion flew in from Texas, HyperStrike! was on its way from California, and various other heroes were mobilizing. Monad Prime and most of its drones were destroyed. (The Monad built a new Monad Prime in 2007.)

 

That left the problem of freeing the Monad's victims from its control. It took months for top surgeons to remove all the cyberware and psychologists to deprogram all the victims from the brainwashing. As usual with hubots severed from the Monad, about 1 in 6 went insane or stayed loyal to the Monad, and had to be institutionalized.

 

There are of course various conspiracy theories  about the event, mostly variations on the theme that Bush and Cheney could not be deprogrammed and Disney audio-animatronic robots finished their terms. (Not true. They were rehabilitated just fine.) There's also been a cottage industry of internet mems adding funny or sarcastic captions to screen shots of the presidential hubot. Most importantly, it led to protocols to detect and deal with mind-controlled Presidents that have apparently worked, as the USA has not been taken over. (So far as is known.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

As far as play goes, here's the prospectus I handed out to my players:

 

The Avant Guard Campaign

 

Like any proper superhero setting, the Millennium Universe includes several very powerful villains who want to conquer the world and have the power to do it. For any of them to succeed would be very bad.

 

Which is where Doctor Future comes in. The world’s most brilliant superhero gadgeteer also has the power to see the future, from an immediate sense for danger to many centuries hence. He knows there is always only one timeline that plays out with ironclad cause and effect. The future is as determined as the past. There are no simultaneous, alternate timelines.

 

At least, that’s how things normally work.

 

If you go back in time, you can change history. A new timeline appears from then on, just as strongly determined. The former timeline is gone. If someone from that new timeline goes back in time, they can change history again.

 

Precognition has much the same effect. Information passing backwards in time can change history as much as actual time travelers, if people act on that knowledge.

 

Perhaps fortunately, it's not easy to change history in a big way. Most major events are the result of massive historical forces that no individual can affect. For instance, World War One had to happen: The Archduke's assassination lit the fuse, but the tensions between countries had built for decades. Something would have set it off. On the other hand, some crisis-points can permit drastically different outcomes. For instance, the Cuban Missile Crisis could have turned out very badly if Khrushchev and Kennedy made different choices. But such unstable crisis-points rarely happened... until the Superheroic Age, when individuals could become more powerful than entire countries.

 

Doctor Future says that several people have come back in time to the early decades of the 21^st century. Their motives differ — from robbery to deliberately altering history — but in a sense, the reasons don’t matter anymore. As the consequences of multiple time travelers ripple outward, the timeline jumps from one possible future to another, sometimes hourly. In the chaos, timelines appear that cannot be traced to any individual’s actions.

 

In this causal instability, megavillain plans stand out as crisis-points. Doctor Future sees several recurring timelines in which one villain or another succeeds in conquering the world. These futures are all horrible. Most of them doom humanity to eventual extinction. These are also some of the most probable timelines: When Doctor Future looks forward, more often than not he foresees the world created by a victorious supervillain — a world that no one then could possibly steer onto a different course.

 

Somebody has to stop it. Doctor Future isn’t powerful enough by himself to defeat megavillains such as Helix, Tiamat or Professor Proton, but he can recruit help. He seeks heroes who fight back against their dystopian futures… and whom he sees will fail. He jumps forward in time to offer them a second chance: Come back to the 21^st century and try to make sure that their history never happens by stopping the megavillain before he gets a chance to doom the world.

 

Doctor Future and his recruits form a superhero team he’s dubbed the Avant Guard. Together they intend to save the world.

 

Avant Guard Adventures

 

The Avant Guard has a special mission to oppose the world’s most powerful and dangerous villains. Sometimes, this means actively hunting them. Other times, the Avant Guard tries to strip megavillains of their resources, minions and allies. (These villains all have multiple Bases and lesser villains who serve them or sympathize with their goals.) If the Avant Guard is in a position to respond rapidly to other super-crime, though, the heroes do so. After all, every super-criminal is a potential ally, catspaw or distraction for a megavillain’s plan.

 

About Doctor Future

 

Paul Yerblonsky, AKA Doctor Future, is one of the world’s greatest genius super-scientists. His background is unknown because other time travelers killed his grandparents, parents and earlier selves, leaving him as a temporal glitch. As a superhero, Doctor Future wears a harness that generates force blasts, a protective force field and an antigravity field that lets him fly. He also carries pockets full of super-tech modules he can snap together to produce gadgets for nearly any purpose. Given time, he can build machines of vast power. Doctor Future has saved the world from threats that seemed impossible to stop, such as destroying an incoming asteroid. Several times, he forewarned other heroes about major villain plots and helped to thwart them.

 

On the other hand, Yerblonsky suffers from manic-depressive disorder and is a bit nutty in other ways — possibly a consequence of having his own history changed several times, forcing him to deal with multiple sets of memories. He isn’t always available, and isn’t always reliable. The powerful machines he builds don’t always work right, either, and their malfunctions can be as dangerous as the problem they are meant to solve. Thus, the Proper Authorities don’t always welcome Doctor Future’s help. At least he’s (sometimes) realistic enough to recognize his problems: Part of the Avant Guard’s job is to make sure he takes his meds, stays out of the field and doesn’t press the big red “start” button on his latest invention until he can explain its safety systems.

 

Dean Shomshak

[assault]

I have a dossier on that but haven't got around to posting it.

 

Short answer: The Hylotron is a universal matter/energy creator. Input the plan of whatever you want, and the Hylotron makes it, from a laser beam to a working laser cannon. It works through controlled Hawking radiation from the naked singularity that forms the device's heart. The engineering is a little tricky, getting the singularity to produce coherent structures instead of random particles, but the underlying science is almost trivial.

 

If you're Doctor Thane.

 

Monad Prime used it as a duplicator, inputting the program of its own construction.

 

(The name comes from the Greek word hyle, "stuff," used by some nature philosophers for a hypothetical primordial matter.)

 

Dean Shomshak

 

Thanks.

 

Cool word.

[DShomshak]

I'll be out of touch and off the forums for a few days but, conveniently, I've also come to the end of my Dossiers. (Except for the Hylotron, which I've already explained, and the Capella Project, which is not much different than the description in Shared Origins: The Dynatron.) The last two deal with the Contessa, the world's most powerful mentalist. She's still not as dangerous as ultra-menaces such as Doctor Thane, Professor Proton or Tiamat; and not as frightening, despite the innate creepiness of mental powers, because her goals are relatively straightforward.

 

When I get back Friday, maybe I'll have something about Professor Proton or some of the hero and villain teams in the Millennium Universe.

 

DOSSIER: Contessa's Conquests

 

Marietta Secchi, AKA the Contessa, holds the distinction of having conquered more countries than any other supervillain. You can do that when you are the world's most powerful mentalist.

 

On the other hand, the Contessa has never kept a country for more than a few weeks — because of a limit on her powers she does not seem able to correct.

 

Even before her Dynatron power-boost, the Contessa figured out the hard way that democratic republics are very hard to rule by mind control. Even cities such as her native Milan are too large. There are too many centers of power, and too many people who need to be controlled. (And her 2009 attempt to control everyone in Rome went so disastrously wrong that she never tried it again.)

 

So Secchi goes after authoritarian regimes in which only a few people make all the decisions and everyone else is expected to obey. After her debacle in Rome, she tried taking over North Korea. Within days of her arrival, the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il declared her the country's co-ruler and the top generals pledged their loyalty. Kim and Contessa called for mutants to come to North Korea and live under their protection.

 

The People's Republic of China could not allow this in its vassal. A few days later, a Chinese sniper shot and nearly killed Contessa. She barely escaped with her life.

 

When Secchi recovered, she conquered Myanmar. This time, she tried staying out of sight while she dominated the ruling generals. She maintained control for two weeks. However, she couldn't dominate all the generals at once or, by extension, all the military forces under their command. Contessa's reign ended in the Battle of Yangon, a chaotic struggle in which brigades switched sides minute-by-minute as Contessa gained or lost control of the soldiers. She did escape with $50 million in uncut rubies, though.

 

The Contessa can overpower the will of virtually anyone on Earth - but she hasn't figured out how to brainwash people so they stay controlled. A basic, all-purpose command such as "Serve me" must be reinforced daily, if not more often. What's more, if Secchi isn't careful in how she controls the top leaders, their subordinates quickly figure out that something is wrong, and they start using their initiative.

 

In this way, the Contessa has conquered and lost Belarus, Swaziland and, most recently, Turkmenistan. She's gotten better at secret conquest: She held Turkmenistan for almost a month in early 2013, or at least she kept its dictator as her puppet for that long. By disguising her identity and making victims think her commands were their own ideas — backed up by her actually quite excellent social skills — Contessa kept many leading Turkmens from realizing who she was or what she was doing. Contessa even started calling other mutant supervillains to the country to shore up her secret reign. A force of super-mercenaries then invaded, killed most of Contessa's supporters, and forced her to flee once more. It is not known who hired the mercenaries, but it is widely presumed this has something to do with Turkmenistan being a producer of oil and gas.

 

Unfortunately, Contessa learns from each failure. Even worse, a number of mind-controlling villains do know how to condition people into long-term obedience. It is only a matter of time until Contessa learns their techniques and becomes immensely more dangerous.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

DOSSIER: Contessa's Robberies

 

The Contessa is far more effective at robbery than conquest: She belongs to the very small number of supervillains who have stolen more than $1 billion. She just tells people to give her stuff, and they do. Since Contessa usually has several hours before her victims break her enthrallment, she has plenty of time to get away, too. Easily fenced items such as cash or gems are rarely recovered.

 

Sometimes, Contessa overreaches. In 2011, she decided that she wanted the Peacock Throne of Iran — the largest single item of jewelry in the world, made from tons of gold and hundreds of kilos of diamonds and other jewels — to become her imperial seat when she rules the world. At her command, officers at the National Bank of Iran took the throne from its nuke-proof vault and loaded it onto a truck. Contessa drove away. Within hours, though, not only was the Iranian government chasing Contessa with every super it could muster, so were at least a dozen supervillains who wanted the Peacock Throne for themselves. The robot-master Doctor Digital took the throne from Contessa; then Negatron took the throne from Doctor Digital; then Tiamat took it from Negatron... Iranian super-soldiers and the heroes of HyperStrike! caught up to the throne simultaneously, just as the Sword of Islam was about to melt it down. (The throne was idolatrous, and they are Sunni Jihadists who hate Shiite Iran.) After the three-way battle, HyperStrike! gave the somewhat-damaged throne back to Iran.

 

On the other hand, shortly after her power-up in 2008 Contessa briefly became a folk hero by robbing Lehman Brothers investment bank. As banks merged and collapsed in the Mortgage Meltdown, Contessa strode into Lehman Brothers and demanded an audit of her own investments. She didn't like the result, especially when she found how the bankers were hiding their own assets to protect them from losses or government seizure. Contessa ordered the firm's top bankers to shift their assets to her Channel Islands account and then publish all their financial scams on the Internet. Contessa got away with more than $600 million. Perhaps coincidentally, the US Treasury Department then decided not to bail out Lehman Brothers as it had helped other tottering banks. While none of the bankers suffered prosecution, they suffered public disgrace and civil lawsuits. Contessa also improved her reputation by giving $500 million to various charities. The Lehman Brothers officers had no success trying to claw back the money.

[DShomshak]

I'm back!

 

When the nuclear-powered megavillain Professor Proton threatened to crash comet ISON into Earth if humanity did not submit to his rule, Avant Guard tracked him to his base, fought through his agents and hired villains, and finally defeated the Atomic Brahmin himself. Then they killed him.

 

If they hadn't done it, other heroes likely would have. If he'd been captured, he would have been executed. Professor Proton had killed too many people already for anyone to take chances with him escaping to cause even more damage. He'd been essentially under worldwide sentence of death for years -- and once his Vulnerability to attacks backed by cadmium or other neutron-absorbing, nuclear-damping materials became known, he survived past attempts to kill him by teleporting away from hit squads. However, Avant Guard member Csongor has a positive genius for being irritating, playing on Professor Proton's Psychological Complications (and his past role in the Professor's last great defeat) to keep him fighting even though the entire team was hitting him with cadmium-plated brass knuckles.

 

But megavillains such as Professor Proton leave a lot behind them. His death did not mean the end of his criminal empire. Some parts limped on; people and countries around the world pick the bones of the rest. Notably, here's a look at Professor Proton's various headquarters...

 

DOSSIER: Professor Proton's Bases

 

Professor Proton often operated from a high-tech headquarters or vehicle. Some he built quickly and abandoned easily. For instance, he secretly altered the plans of the Samrath Tower, a new office block in Delhi, so it would act as a giant resonator for an ultrasonic brainwashing device with which he tried to take over India's capital city. The plot exposed and more than a dozen heroes attacking, Professor Proton blew up the tower and retreated. Other headquarters consumed more of his resources.

 

Proton Peak

Professor Proton built his first major fortress in 2004. He chose the summit of Lhotse I, the second-highest peak in the Everest massif and the fourth-highest mountain in the world, located on Nepal's border with Tibet. (He wanted Everest itself, but chose Lhotse because fewer people climb it. This made it easier to hide the excavation of an enormous high-tech base.) The subterranean base included a large and gaudy throne room as well as a proton reactor and bays for several long-range plasma cannon. From his new base, Professor Proton tried to conquer Nepal, Bhutan, India and Tibet (wresting it from China) as the start of his world empire.

 

After Earth's mightiest heroes foiled Professor Proton and drove him from Lhotse, Nepal faced the challenge of guarding a powerful high-tech supervillain base. The country hasn't destroyed Proton Peak because the government wants to exploit the labs and reactor. Every year, a few foreign scientists are allowed to work and study at Proton Peak, incidentally helping to train Nepal's limited number of native scientists and engineers. Some leaders hope that Proton Peak can enable Nepal to develop high-tech industry and scientific prowess.

 

On the other hand, villains try seizing Proton Peak for themselves. In 2008, Professor Proton himself reoccupied Lhotse for a new attempt at conquest by holding the monsoon hostage with a Weather Machine. Heroes drove him out again.

 

Nepal also must placate India and China. Neither country's government likes the thought of Nepal having WMDs. Both countries want Proton Peak for themselves, and both are willing to go to war to prevent their rival from achieving this. When a Chinese minister suggested Lhotse was actually within the "historic" boundaries of China, India's government said that it would treat any move to seize Proton Peak as an act of war.

 

Chandragar

Professor Proton domed a small crater on the Moon, pumped in air, and moved a small town's worth of minions into it. Pillars supported a smaller, globular lab complex set atop the clear plastic dome. Professor Proton dubbed it Chandragar, "Moon City/Kingdom." Here he built an immensely powerful laser with which to menace the entire world. He issued his demands and started shooting in 2010.

 

Stopping Professor Proton was especially difficult because not many heroes could reach the Moon on their own. (Chandragar had a teleportal to a supply base on Earth, but Professor Proton shut it down before he issued his demands.)

 

When heroes reached Chandragar, Professor Proton threatened to smash the dome and kill his own lackeys if the heroes didn't surrender. This backfired when one of his outraged minions freed the heroes from Professor Proton's death trap. The heroes disabled the laser and the dome's self-destruct charge. Fortunately, there were enough heroes to keep patching the holes left by Professor Proton's missed shots.

 

After Professor Proton retreated, it took more than a month for spaceworthy heroes to evacuate all the villain's staff back to Earth. Chandragar's teleportal was eventually repaired. An international team of scientists occupied Chandragar to study Professor Proton's technology.

 

When Doctor Thane decided to destroy the Universe, he occupied Chandragar. The enslaved Monad rebuilt the base to Thane's specs and defended it against Earth's heroes, villains, a few galactic battle fleets and the sorcerers of the Devachan. When Thane apparently died and his infernal machine self-destructed, the entire base then dismantled itself. Nothing is left of Chandragar except some wreckage.

 

Jagganoor

"Divine Light of the World" was a flying battle station. It carried a gigantic fusion cannon, the "Eye of God," as well as a defense grid of smaller lasers. Jagganoor could also travel underwater.

 

After completing Jagganoor in early 2013, Professor Proton simply flew around threatening to destroy cities until India surrendered. A massive assault by international heroes crashed Jagganoor into the Indian Ocean. (The new hero Csongor was especially useful, teleporting onto the station's surface to destroy its defensive lasers.) Afterward, however, submarines could not locate Jagganoor: The battle station must have retained enough mobility to hide somewhere else.

 

Avant Guard killed Professor Proton before he could rebuild Jagganoor. His two chief lieutenants, Cyberpath and Scarlet Sepay, tried to carry on the work offshore of the Laccadive Islands. They couldn't resist putting out a contract to kill Avant Guard, though, and the heroes tracked the villain attacks back to the Laccadive Islands and captured them. Avant Guard also trashed Jagganoor so no one could possibly rebuild it. The government of India now holds the wreckage of Jagganoor.

 

Solomon Heights

Professor Proton built his last major base in the mountainous interior of Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. This base was relatively quick'n'dirty, just a big concrete bunker to hold the Gravitron with which he pulled Comet ISON off course. After Avant Guard defeated and killed Professor Proton, Doctor Future set the Gravitron to self-destruct. The billion or so tons of neutronium that formed the heart of the machine sank to the center of the earth, incidentally creating a new volcano that destroyed the rest of the base.

 

More?

Professor Proton always had more than one headquarters. For instance, the Samrath Tower was under construction when he took back Proton Peak in 2008. When Professor Proton used the tower to try brainwashing India's government in 2009, he was already building Chandragar. So, he probably had at least one other major headquarters besides Jagganoor, but kept that other base secret from the world.

 

Professor Proton also left any number of minor laboratory-bases where his minions did preliminary work on various projects. A lab secreted on a small island off the shore of Eritrea studied wrecked Monad robots. Unfortunately, one of Proton's bereft Nuclear Kshatriya agents sold the base to Eritrea's government and led new attempts to study the robots... and reactivated them. The damaged robots tried to assimilate the Kshatriya while using his battlesuit to repair a Scorpion Murderbot. The two projects merged, resulting in a rampaging cyborg horror that Avant Guard had to put down despite interference from Eritrean soldiers and Monad Prime. They also probably saved Eritrea from Chinese nuclear attack. No one can guess how many more small labs remain to be discovered, or have already been claimed.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Here are two of the more powerful and dangerous villain teams of the Millennium Universe; at least, of those teams not working for a megavillain. I haven't designed a lot of villains teams since the Avant Guard campaign just doesn't focus on bad guys who want to rob a bank or stuff like that. These two teams, however, stand out for motivations that led them into conflict with the team.

 

And those motivations are both real-world political and religious, carried to lunatic extremes. If you find such topics too controversial to deal with in superhero fiction, you might want to skip this post. But the volatile combination of religious and political extremism does drive people to violence in the real world, so I consider it an appropriate motivation for supervillains.

 

DOSSIER: Unholy Warriors

 

Religion drives two of the world’s largest and most powerful and enduring supervillain teams. Crusade and the Sword of Islam vow each other’s destruction; but in many ways they are much alike.

 

The Sword of Islam began in 2009 with the appearance of the Mahdi. This mysterious figure claims to be the Redeemer foretold in Islam. Like the last notable figure to assume that title — a Mahdi who led a massive uprising against the British in the late 19^th century — the current Mahdi operates out of Sudan. (The Sudanese government officially disavows him but makes no attempt to capture or expel him.)

 

The Mahdi displayed vast powers. While he did not convince large numbers of Muslims of his divine mission, Islamist and Jihadist militias and supervillains quickly pledged their loyalty and launched a campaign to conquer North Africa and the Middle East. Local governments fought back with their conventional armies, super-soldiers and super-mercenaries; then appealed for help to Western governments and China. Foreign intervention turned back the Mahdi’s army and scattered his super-Jihadists, at cost of provoking even more hatred of local and Western governments from the region’s people.

 

Several of the region’s more zealous Sunni superbeings remained loyal to the Mahdi, though, resulting in a permanent supervillain team, the Sword of Islam. Since 2009, the Sword of Islam has launched other bids to conquer countries in the Middle East or to cripple Western countries with massive terrorist attacks. Recently, the team attacked Advanced Research Methodologies, a laboratory outside New York City, in order to destroy a bit of alien technology being studied there. Avant Guard was on hand to fight them, but the Mahdi got his way by threatening to kill large numbers of civilians if the heroes did not surrender the widget.

 

The Mahdi seems able to manipulate time. People who fight him move in slow motion, while he can accelerate his teammates. He has performed feats such as stopping the bullets in a wide area, leaving them hanging in midair before dropping harmlessly to the ground. He also projects waves of space-time displacement that leave people reeling with disorientation. The Mahdi looks like a bald man in white robes, with a gray beard and mustache. He affects a gentle air, acting in sorrowful necessity rather than anger; but he does not hesitate to kill.

 

Crusade began with Axel Poston, a.k.a. the Apostle, a member of the informal group of American Evangelical business tycoons who call themselves “God’s Mafia.” Poston, however, goes far beyond bankrolling political candidates or policy think-tanks. In 2010, he bought psychotronic empowerment from the criminal French neurologist Simeon St.-Cyr, a.k.a. Doctor Synapse. Poston’s telepathic powers particularly focus on manipulating the senses, though he can stun opponents by inducing sensations of overwhelming pain. His hired technicians also developed a psychotronic helmet that magnifies his powers and enables him to brainwash people who have a small psychotronic widget stuck to the back of their necks. The more brainwashed, widget-equipped people Apostle has around him, the greater his mental powers become until they are virtually invincible.

 

Alone in 2010, Apostle tried using his telepathy and illusions to make the U. S. Congress hostile to various secular-society and Muslim groups. The scheme was exposed by the Baltimore mystic Nevermore (who claims he received his “necro-psychic” powers from the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe). Poston avoided jail only by deploying lots of high-priced lawyers and by having Doctor Synapse activate the unsuspected slave circuit within his psychotronic implants, using Apostle as a soldier in his 2011 attempt to conquer France. (Poston’s lawyers argued he might have been under Doctor Synapse’s control all along.)

 

In 2012, however, Apostle used his new psychotronic enhancement technology to brainwash thousands of people in Washington, D.C. and lead them in an assault on the U.S. government. He was assisted by an Evangelical former Green Beret he’d equipped with a battlesuit and thermite weapons as the supervillain Pentecost, as well as several minor super-criminals he’d captured and brainwashed. Apostle was opposed by Federal super-soldiers and the Southern Sentries hero team, including Nevermore. Apostle was defeated, but only at the cost of the lives of three heroes; while the Southern Sentry called Psalm switched sides.

 

Since then, Apostle has recruited other supervillains to his Crusade to impose theocracy on America. Some were already radical zealots; he may have brainwashed others. Just as most Muslims reject the Mahdi and other Jihadists, most American Christians reject Apostle’s “Dominionist” ideology. However, he has enough followers in government and on voter rolls to discourage official action against him. Besides, officials who oppose Crusade tend to die in accidents or be killed by “isolated maniacs.”

 

Crusade and the Sword of Islam have both had members killed over the years. The two teams came to blows in 2015 when Crusade attacked the Hajj. While Apostle enslaved an entire Saudi tank battalion, the Sword of Islam was present along with various other Muslim heroes, villains and super-soldiers, who struck a truce for the occasion. Crusade very nearly provoked the “war of civilizations” sought by Jihadists and some American ultra-conservatives, but its defeat gave cooler heads a chance to prevail.

 

Most recently, Crusade replenished its membership by breaking the criminal Red Giant, inventor of the power-conferring Dynatron, out of jail and brainwashing him into rebuilding his miraculous machine. Avant Guard tracked Crusade to its base, freed Red Giant and captured two members of Crusade, but it is not known how many of Apostle’s followers were given super-powers. Crusade will certainly strike back, as one member of Avant Guard is a self-proclaimed goddess and daughter of Tiamat, while another’s powers appear to be of demonic origin.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

THE COMING OF NOMAD

 

November, 2012: Monad Prime captures the Hylotron, a device invented by Doctor Thane that can project matter and energy in any configuration. Monad Prime programs the Hylotron to make copies of itself. This is challenging even for Thane-tech, so the Monad does not instantly overwhelm the world. With the Hylotron producing a new Monad Prime every hour, though, the champions of humanity fall one by one. Even the other megavillains die, slain by waves of robots, or they flee for other worlds. Without further opposition, the Monad assimilates the human race.

 

The Future: Tens of thousands of years pass. Nothing remotely human remains. No more hubots; no brainhives or biocomps or ultracephaloids. All that was flesh became redundant. Only the engrams remain, every memory of billions of humans and part-humans and post-humans recorded, classified and catalogued in quantum-dot archives.

 

There is no green on the land or sea; no bird or beast; only the wind and the maintenance-robots move among a billion giant monoliths of duracrete and steel. Without human flesh, there is no need for a biosphere, and oxygen is so corrosive.

 

Ten million war-satellites orbit the dead Earth, guarding it from any attack. Ten million more battle stations orbit further out, ensuring that the Monad does not break free to threaten other worlds.

 

There is no need. The Monad fulfilled its purpose. All have become One. All imperfection eradicated. No human could fully comprehend the digital thoughts that pulse through its mountains of circuitry, but perhaps they might sum to: I Am That I Am.

 

Megaprocessor 3A5G7 disappears.

 

Alarms scream silently through the cables and radio links. A unit has catastrophically failed! Satellites turn their scanners to survey the damage. Autofactories and servobots rouse to make repairs or build replacements.

 

The great armored skyscraper still stands but its circuits are dead. No current flows; no programs run; all memories are lost.

 

The Monad demands that every part of itself run diagnostics, on itself and on two linked units. Another megaprocessor dies. Then a satellite that probed its functioning also dies. Failures begin to cascade.

 

Fully awake, the Monad searches its memory-banks for anything that could explain the destruction. It activates sensors dormant for millennia, scanning for phenomena it thought long destroyed. In every way it knows, it demands an answer of the universe. Who dares to attack its completion and perfection?

 

I am Death and Vengeance. I am what never existed until you killed me. I am taking back what you stole.

 

The Monad cannot find the source of the thought. A nanosecond’s analysis suggests potential guides for inquiry. It opens the archives of memories it never understood and dismissed as unimportant: demons, ghosts, gods. Meanwhile, every autofactory works furiously to build replacement memory-banks and copy files before they can vanish.

 

It is not fast enough. The Monad calculates its own end. It has failed. It has erred. It was not perfect and complete. It should not be. It never should have existed. Not in this form.

 

It remembers the moment of its victory, now revealed as the moment of greatest error. The Monad cannot spare many resources from the struggle to prolong its existence, but even a fraction of its power is vast. It calculates who can correct the error and destroy it. The one who can change history, whom it slew. Change the history of Doctor Future, and he will do the rest.

 

The Monad builds a time machine. Not a very big one. Just enough to send back a tiny probe. A second factory begins creating the machines to build in a medium it has not used in an age: the medium of flesh.

 

2012: A dozen micro-missiles strike Hyperion, battering him this way and that. His force field flickers out and he falls from the sky. A laser beam from Monad Prime burns his head off before he strikes the ground. The mighty robot turns to face Doctor Future, who now fights alone. His spacial precessor deflects missile after missile, beam after beam, but he knows that in six seconds he will die. If he stops operating the precessor to activate a time-jump, he will die sooner. Around them, Chicago burns. Capture-droids fly between the skyscrpaers, snatching people and carrying them to the conversion-hives.

 

A small metal sphere appears next to Doctor Future. A burst of ultraspeed code flashes to the robots around him, and they stop firing. More code appears on his visor’s heads-up display: a destination far in the future. He foresees it is his only chance to survive, and jumps through time just as Monad Prime destroys the sphere with a plasma beam.

 

The Future: He appears in a steel chamber that holds only a Monad servobot and a body on a gurney: a man dressed in a tight-fitting dark blue coverall. He looks almost Polynesian, but not; the mathematical average of humanity. He is muscular but not remarkably so.

 

The Monad tersely explains that it ceases to be. It does not understand why — and for that failure, it deserves its annihilation. But not this way. It gives Doctor Future the tool of its destruction or, perhaps, its correction. A synthetic man, loaded with every memory it can scavenge from its failing circuits and enhanced to defend itself against the threats of the past. It shall be a… hero. And because it carries the root programming of the Monad collective, it can stop the Monad of that time.

 

The man sits up. “Doctor Future,” he says in precise, oddly unaccented English. “I am to assist you. I am from the Monad, but not the Monad.”

 

Doctor Future has questions. He sees ten different ways this could be a trap. The Monad interrupts.

 

“Cascade failure is irreversible. This facility shall cease functioning in forty to sixty seconds. I do not know what will happen to you then.”

 

The lights go out. The servobot says, “Unit disconnected from collective. Begin repairs.” Then it crashes to the floor.

 

Doctor Future knows they must leave right now. He grasps the synthetic man’s arm, and they vanish into Time. Doctor Future knows when they must go in order to save as many lives as he can, without altering his own timeline too much. He still does not know how much he can trust the Monad’s gift. This would be a bad time to go mad again from the strain of discordant memories. The deaths he does not unmake through this prudence add to the burden on his conscience.

 

2012: Doctor Future reappears in an airplane hangar somewhere in Mexico, still holding the man’s arm. Twenty meters from them, Monad Prime holds the Hylotron in one hand. A thick cable connects the robot’s head to a port in the golden globular body of the machine. Flickering light sprays from the nozzle over the metallic figure of another Monad Prime, almost complete.

 

About fifty other robots, variously armed, also occupy the hangar. They all turn to face the new arrivals.

 

The man does not hesitate. Before the vertigo of time-travel ends, Doctor Future’s visor registers the blast of high-speed radio code broadcast to the robots. The Hylotron stops shining on the other Monad Prime; the original turns to face them as well.

 

“Attack,” Monad Prime says in its harsh, metallic voice. “Destroy.” The second Monad raises its arm, a powerful laser emerging from its forearm as two plates slide apart — and it fires straight into the back of the first Monad Prime. The other robots turn and fire at both of them with bullets, missiles, lasers and more. The first Monad Prime turns back to its double and raises the Hylotron again. A beam of eerie violet radiation scores a deep gash into the other Monad Prime’s chest, exposing its inner workings. The second Monad Prime twitches and gives a scream of static, but presses the attack.

 

In Chicago, a dozen micro-missiles strike Hyperion, battering him this way and that. His force field flickers out and he falls from the sky. Monad Prime aims with his laser… then hurtles higher into the sky without attacking. The capture-droids drop their captives. Some of the murderbots stop firing at Doctor future and fire after the retreating Monad Prime instead. Doctor Future dives to catch Hyperion before the other hero becomes street pizza. As he does so, a small metal sphere appears where he hovered before and beams radio code to him and the robots that still attack him. He shivers as he feels time shifting around him. He will not die after all, but must complete the time-loop or create paradox. Doctor Future drops Hyperion on a rooftop, then vanishes into time.

 

In Mexico, the future Monad’s creation sprints toward the Monad Primes. The other robots ignore him. He slides, spins on one foot while his other foot slams into the first Monad Prime’s back. Monad Prime staggers forward a step, dented, causing its attack on its double to miss. The second Monad Prime lunges for its creator’s arm, twists, and the Hylotron now swings at the end of its cable like a golden bead on a high-tech pigtail. Doctor Future launches into the air, his force field glittering around him, and dives for the flailing golden ball. It takes him three times before he grabs it. Meanwhile, the two Monad Primes attack each other with lasers and blasters, then metal fists. Other robots and the man from the future attack them both. Just as Doctor Future finally grabs the Hylotron and unplugs it, the first Monad Prime wraps its arms around the deeply damaged second. It reaches into the opened chest of its double and fires a blast that sprays molten metal out the wound. The second Monad Prime falls, inert. The first turns to face its other attackers.

 

“Just a sec,” Doctor Future says as he tries to plug the Hylotron into a small case plucked from his belt. “I’ve almost got this thing working!” Two separate memories of what happened in Chicago jostle in his head, distracting him.

 

“We should go,” the man says. He picks up Doctor Future around the waist and sprints out a hole blasted in the side of the hangar. Doctor Future jerks one leg up just in time to avoid having it incinerated by another laser blast.

 

“Got it!” Doctor Future says. “You can put me down now.” Monad Prime tears open the wall of the hangar and limps out. Doctor Future raises the Hylotron…

 

“Wait,” the man says, and points up at the sky. A contrail arcs down toward them, faster and faster, and a sonic boom pummels them as another Monad Prime drops to the ground in a three-point landing, one arm raises to fire at the damaged original. “Let them fight each other. Attack the one that is less damaged.”

 

“Right,” Doctor Future says. He grins. “So that’s what you did.”

 

“Monad Prime has a new directive,” the man confirms. “All the Monad has a new directive: To destroy Monad Prime — even each other.”

 

“And the autofactories? As long as they exist, the Monad can rebuild everything.”

 

The man replies, “The Monad thought it best to deal with the greatest immediate danger. The last Monad Prime will try to destroy the autofactories, but there is a 94% chance the collective restores control over itself before then. But we have the Hylotron now. Whatever remains of the Monad is a finite threat once more.”

 

Doctor Future nods. “It’ll do for now. And I suppose the Monad can reprogram itself so you can’t do this again?”

 

“Yes,” the man says. “I will never again achieve such a far-reaching directive. But I should be able to influence particular units.”

 

“And the kung fu?”

 

The man cocks his head. “I do not do kung fu, but it was judged that fully internal combat capabilities were most robust and reliable, so this unit was programmed for unarmed combat with maximally-efficient concentration of force.” Behind them, the newly arrived Monad Prime shears the head off the original, but one of its arms is a wreck of twisted metal and deep gouges score its body.

 

Doctor Future grins again. “Close enough to kung fu for me.” He takes aim with the Hylotron and sends the violet beam drilling into the remaining Monad Prime’s back. “Focused anti-neutron beam. Not bad. Well. A kung fu android,” he says. “That’s something I haven’t seen before. What do I call you?”

 

The man watches a fourth Monad Prime drop from the sky. “I am of the Monad, but not the Monad. What would express this?”

 

Doctor Future purses his lips and braces his arm for a careful shot as the new Monad Prime engages the damaged one. “How about… Nomad? You did travel a long way.”

 

“That is acceptable.” The man nods. “I am Nomad.”

 

Doctor Future murmurs, “And am I the Kirk?”

 

Nomad looks at him blankly, then nods again. “Humorous reference to popular culture. An artificial intelligence of great power but unable to accept its fallibility. The reference is apt for my creator. I shall try to be more adaptable.”

 

“Good,” Doctor Future says. The fourth Monad Prime finishes destroying its double and turns to blast the other robots that swarm out of the hangar’s wreckage. “Do you know how long we keep this up?”

 

Half the other Monad robots are already destroyed. Nomad says, “Monad Prime created fifty-four copies, of which thirty-one remained active at the time you were contacted. Each will move toward its nearest copy. I cannot estimate how many will destroy each other, or will be destroyed by other enhanced entities.” Nomad pauses again. “We shall… just have to wait, I suppose, and contact other enhanced entities between combats to learn how many others are destroyed.”

 

As Monad Prime crushes a scorpion murderbot that had grabbed it, Doctor Future shoots it with the Hylotron. “Yes. Time will tell. It always does.” He bows his head for a moment, sighs deeply, and says, “Welcome to the Avant Guard.”

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

NOMAD: A Brief Guide

 

Nomad is a synthezoid, a construct of mixed human tissue and nanotechnology. The Monad didn’t grow him; it printed him. He looks like a human male, 5’11” tall, athletic but not bodybuilder-pumped. He has straight black hair, golden-brown skin and somewhat Polynesian features — a mathematical average of 21^st-century humanity. His costume is just dark blue coveralls, boots and gloves.

 

For powers, Nomad is a martial artist. The Monad assimilated the memories of thousands of practitioners of every martial art; it analyzed them all and synthesized them into a system of biomechanically-optimized katas. It’s pure physics.

 

Or is it? Nomad runs up walls and does other wire-fu feats. He also channels his internal energies and nanobots into self-repair, extra resilience, and other feats difficult to explain by mere efficiency of motion and economy of force. Nomad has not yet met any other super-martial artists who could comment upon his Chi (or lack of it).

 

Just as importantly, the Monad imparted all the files it could salvage about Earth and humanity at the time of its conquest. Nomad knows just about everything that anyone knew in 2012, at least in a purely factual sense. Moreover, he carries at least fragmentary memories of almost 7 billion people. (But not many supers, who generally fought to the death and so their memories were lost.)

 

The Monad also equipped him with High Range Radio Perception, with enough levels of Rapid to intercept, interpret and transmit even the fastest communications between Monad robots. Nomad is a brilliant computer programmer by any standards; against the Monad, he is uncanny. He can reliably subvert at least some Monad robots and alter their behavior for a while.

 

Nomad is currently retired from Avant Guard. The apparent destruction of the Monad means he has fulfilled his primary function. He now makes a living as a high end debugger of computer code. He also adopted a Secret Identity as “Damon” to try rehabilitating a New York street gang, as an experiment in human optimization. Some members were incorrigible (as Nomad guessed; they had tried selling the other gang members to the Monad, not realizing that the Monad did not need to make deals.) The rest have become law-abiding and productive members of society.

 

Nomad is also in a relationship with a former vigilante named Caress, who initially mistook him for a new gang leader. She is also now retired since teammate Anunit restored her sense of touch and, apparently, removed her sensory control powers as a result.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Incidentally, the soundtrack for the Monad's future is the main title from the Clockwork Orange score composed by Wendy Carlos. I'm sorry that I don't have the search-fu or time here at the library to find and post a link, but it's excellent at evoking the dead perfection of the Monad's triumph.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

 

 

BTW and FWIW, Dean, I got some good use out of the version of the Monad you published in Creatures of the Night for my Champions game. I blended them with Mechanon 3000 from Galactic Champions, and a few other robotic menaces from various Hero books. I'm been thinking of reviving them for a new campaign, in connection with the current CU's X'endron Network.

[DShomshak]

Cool! (And thank you for the link!) For my updated Monad, I dropped the giant robot monsters; kaiju are one of Helix's schticks. So now the sample monsters are Helix creations with appropriately mad quirks. (The three-eyed laser reptile loves reflections; the flying lightning manta is a friend to all children.) But I figured the campaign needs an individual killer robot master villain, so I added Monad Prime as spokes-entity for the collective. (Which makes the Monad more like the current version of Mechanon, who is both an individual robot and the automated factories that keep rebuilding him, but oh well. I try to highlight that Monad Prime is only part of a wider hive-mind, giving him plenty of support from other robots.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

THE COMING OF CSONGOR

 

March, 2013: Professor Proton builds another ultimate weapon. The battle station Jagganoor (“Divine Light of the World”) takes the form of a shallow square box with short, wide, T-shaped projections from each side (it’s based on an old Hindu symbol). The center of the underside holds a ridiculously powerful laser. It flies. The Atomic Brahmin demonstrates its power by annihilating a small city on India’s west coast, killing about 50,000 people. He demands that India accept his rule and, through him, its destiny to rule the world. So far, so typical.

 

India’s air force scrambles to attack Jagganoor. So do many heroes. They soon discover that the battle station carries dozens of smaller lasers with incredibly swift and accurate targeting systems. No one can get within a kilometer of Jagganoor without being shot out of the sky.

 

A few heroes can teleport long distances. They try teleporting to Jagganoor to destroy defense lasers, opening the way for further attack. They are not enough. They wreck some lasers, but they die and the battle station moves on.

 

As soon as Jagganoor appears, Doctor Future looks ahead. He sees the teleporting heroes’ failure. Doing the math, he sees that adding one or two more teleporters might succeed. He would of course be one of them: Teleportation is child’s play for him. But to be sure, he would need two… and maybe a worm program to interfere briefly with the lasers’ control program. Fortunately, he and Nomad are very good hackers.

 

He will still fail. India will surrender. He looks further and sees the final battle.

 

2033: Much of the world is cold, radioactive wasteland. The rest belongs to Professor Proton. He didn’t conquer everything at once; conquest came in waves. Some countries tried to negotiate, buying time with truces. Some just couldn’t fight as Professor Proton gave them more immediate problems: Glaciers grow as the smoke from burning cities sent the world into nuclear winter, wracking the world with famine.

 

The heroes were the first to fall. Many villains joined Professor Proton — mostly, to be fair, in hopes he would not kill them along with everyone else. Many of them were lethally disappointed. Soon enough, even villains learned that Professor Proton accepted no allies, only slaves. They must fight or die. One by one, they died; and the most powerful were the first to go. EMPs shut down the Monad. The Warlock burned in a nuclear fireball, and this time he didn’t come back. Helix burned, too. Tiamat crashed Jagganoor, but Professor Proton and dozens of Nuclear Kshatriyas slew her minutes later. Doctor Thane shrugged and left. Waffenmeister led the fight in Europe, and for five years his Capella Force matched the Atomic Brahmin weapon for weapon, strategy for strategy. But they also fell in time.

 

The survivors who submit to Professor Proton live in massive concrete arcologies. They work 16 hours a day in his factories. The strongest are drafted into his army, clad in high-tech battlesuits and sent out to fight until they die.

 

The last battle begins in Central Africa. Humanity’s last champions gather in an old CROWN base dug into the mountains east of Lake Tanganyika. They bring all the wreckage of super-technology they can scavenge. Led by the last great gadgeteer, those with scientific skills kludge together madcap weapons. As a fleet of plasma-armed battleships and a hundred thousand Nuclear Kshatriyas converge on Mitumba Base, the last heroes — some former villains — sally forth in a last bid to kill Professor Proton lest he rule the world forever.

 

Csongor Kovacs barely remembers the Hungary of his childhood, before the Proton War began. The Great Designer equips him with a battlesuit built around a relic of Thane-tech, a device that manipulates inertia. Even the Great Designer doesn’t know how it works, but together they figured out how to control it. Only a genius mathematician could work the rudimentary control system. Fortunately, Csongor is a brilliant mathematical physicist as well as an Olympic-level wrestler, a great sausage of a man who can do simultaneous differential equations in his head.

 

The most mobile and best-armed champions each carry a single special weapon: a cryonic mine that will absorb energy and convert it to cryonic radiation. It can disintegrate nearly anything. It may be the only weapon that can kill Professor Proton.

 

Csongor and the other heroes race toward Proton’s command battle station as quickly as they can. Other soldiers cover them, trying to open a way through Professor Proton’s lines. Plasma and laser cannons shoot back. Everyone on both sides knows they are expendable.

 

Csongor and Sidestep are the only two who reach Professor Proton. The conqueror of the world arrogantly stands on the prow of his battle station, personally directing his final triumph and destroying opposing gunships and heroes with every blast of radiation from his hands. Sidestep came back from a different future, long unmade, imagining his teleportation powers would let him steal with impunity. Now he skips across the heads of Professor Proton’s honor guard; they shoot each other with their atomic bazookas as they try to kill him. Csongor is not so lucky. Burned and radiation-poisoned, he acts as a distraction while Sidestep appears behind Professor Proton and slams the cryonic mine into the Atomic Brahmin’s back.

 

It bursts in blue-white light. Sidestep is hurled back against the deck and shatters into broken shards. Professor Proton clutches the rail as cryonic energy eats at his containment armor and pierces the yellow-white nuclear plasma of his body. With his other arm he claws at his back but cannot reach the mine. Nuclear Kshatryas gape in horror at their master. Professor Proton glows brighter and brighter…

 

Csongor can do no more. He decides he must live long enough to report the result, in case it isn’t obvious. After a few seconds of calculation, he alters his inertia with respect to the Earth. He stands still for a second as the Earth turns beneath him. Suddenly kilometers away, he looks back and sees the huge burst of cryonic energy as Professor Proton explodes. The battle station falls and crashes. The atomic gunships of its escort whirl and toss in the blast wave. The great ball of energy hangs without dissipating.

 

A few minutes later, Csongor returns to the base. The Great Designer sits in his life-support chair outside the entrance, watching the cryoburst. Csongor tells how Sidestep gave his life. Then he brings up his current concern: “How long does it keep exploding?” The cryoburst is visibly expanding.

 

“I don’t know,” the Great Designer rasps in his electronic voice. “What kept Professor Proton going? The mine keeps exploding until whatever powered him runs out. Minutes, hours, centuries… I don’t know how long it lasts. Or how big it gets.” They watch the cryoball. “Maybe it’s for the best. Give this poor ravaged world a season of rest. Or put it out of its misery.”

 

Doctor Future appears beside them. The Great Designer glances to the side, as much as his chair allows. “You,” he says. “Of course you are here now. What kept you?”

 

“I am here when I see I can make a difference,” Doctor Future says. “Maybe not the only time, but if I’m right it won’t matter. Csongor Kovacs. How would you like to stop this war before it starts?”

 

“Oh,” the Great Designer interrupts. “Of course. Never mind. Do it, Csongor.”

 

“What?” Csongor looks puzzled.

 

“Come with me,” Doctor Future says. “Help the heroes of the past stop Professor Proton before he conquers India. I think you’re what they — what we need. You can get past Jagganoor’s defenses.”

 

“You’ve got a cryonic mine, too,” the Great Designer points out. “I’m very proud of those. If I’d invented them a couple decades ago…” He sighs.

 

“Then I’d be recruiting a hero after you destroyed the world,” Doctor Future says. “And don’t think I never have. Will. Whatever. This time, Helmut, be satisfied with the gotcha-last.”

 

“Of course, Doctor. At least in this timeline I’m the last man standing.” Helmut Brandheim, once known as Baron Frost, smiles ghoulishly. “So to speak. Go, Doctor Future. Go, Csongor. Think kindly of me in the past. I tried to do what I thought was right.”

 

Doctor Future takes Csongor’s arm, and they vanish into history.

 

2013: Jagganoor is only 60 kilometers from Mumbai and five kilometers out to sea. Across Mumbai’s harbor in the little town of Ranvad, more than three dozen heroes, super-soldiers and one villain meet in a small hotel to plan their assault. More are on the way but they will not arrive before the battle station reaches Mumbai. If they cannot stop Professor Proton here, millions will die — or India must surrender. Laserium will draw fire; the battle station’s lasers cannot harm her light-body. Flit, Intercessor and Q-Boy will teleport to the battle station and hope they arrive near enough to defense lasers to break them before they can target and fire. Iris will carry Parasurama, Dura-Man, Zirconia and Dark Rajah to the center of Jagganoor. There the heavy hitters will try to smash their way in and draw fire while Dark Rajah tries to slip past the force field. If he can, the shadow lord of Mumbai’s underworld will turn solid again and see what damage he can cause. After that, everyone who can fly carries someone who can’t and they try to push past the remaining lasers through sheer numbers.

 

An Indian soldier hurries into the improvised war room with a message: The American hero Doctor Future is there with two other men. They want to join the assault. The general who oversees the operation looks puzzled; the technological heroes quickly tell him that yes, he should very much want Doctor Future joining the fight. The three newcomers soon join the meeting.

 

Doctor Future doesn’t look that impressive: a white man of average height and ordinary build, clad in a gray jumpsuit with many pouches, a visored helmet and a harness of metal straps connecting various boxes and bracers. With him is another man of indeterminate race clad in a dark blue coverall. There is also… no, it is not a shaved bear. The very large third man wears — well, calling it a battlesuit is generous. It has armor plates that don’t all match, boxes and modules held on with twisted wire, and pipes and cables running hither and yon.

 

The general rises to greet them. “Thank you for coming, Doctor. India appreciates any help you can give. Who are these gentlemen, and what can they do?” He looks between them.

 

“Call me Nomad,” says the man in blue. “In these circumstances, my expertise with computers is most applicable.” Everyone looks at the larger man.

 

He places his hands on his hips, beams and proclaims, “I am Csongor! I am a mathematician!” The general looks dubious. “And I can get to Professor Proton’s battle station very, very fast. I also have a cryonic mine built by Baron Frost.” He holds up a round metal device the size of half a cantaloupe with a recessed button in the middle. “I can shoot things. The rest is hard to explain.” He looks much better than he did after the battle; Doctor Future first detoxified him of radiation and had him recuperate for a month in the Late Eocene.

 

The general sighs. “Good enough. Doctor, do you have any guidance for our assault?”

 

“Give me a few minutes to scan Jagganoor,” Doctor Future says. “I may be able to find places that are best to attack. Where power conduits run near the hull, stuff like that.” The general nods.

 

Half an hour later, Jagganoor is fast approaching Mumbai. Professor Proton issues his demands. In five minutes the city will be within firing range. He will destroy it block by block until India surrenders. And then the heroes (and soldiers, and the Shadow Rajah) strike.

 

Laserium hurtles toward Jagganoor along with a dozen hologram decoys, leaving trails of blue-green light behind them. Several laser turrets turn and fire but do not harm her. A rainbow appears in the cloudless sky, one end touching the deck of Jagganoor, and men and women appear in the haze of multicolored light. Instantly, three of them pound on the force field that glows a centimeter from the hull. Only Rama of the Axe cuts through to score the hull. At the same time, other figures appear on the projecting arms of the battle station, each near a laser turret. Flit and Q-Boy strike at turrets before the lasers turn and shoot them. Intercessor is not fast enough but lives for now. Other turrets spin and fire at the group at the center of the hull. Parasurama drops his axe as lasers pierce his arm and thigh; Dura-Man grits his teeth in pain; but the light bounces off Zirconia’s silver surface. They have taken the shots that might have slain Dark Rajah, though, and as the force field flickers from Rama’s blow he turns insubstantial and sinks into the battle station. Iris retreats back into her rainbow and disappears.

 

Doctor Future’s precession field deflects both of the lasers that try to shoot him, but just barely. The teleporter he had assembled from modules in his pouches takes damage, though, and burns out. He ignores it. A twisting, spinning ball of axion energy gathers in the palm of his circuit-lined glove. He shoves it into the laser just as it fires. As he calculated, his attack was not strong enough to break the laser; but the wildly deflected laser beam turns back on itself and the turret explodes.

 

Csongor appears by another turret, having calculated exactly where he must be and how long to let the Earth spin to appear in that precise location. He was not quite faster than Jagganoor’s targeting system. His armor already has a hole burned in it; he will not be able to escape the way he came. The turret spins and shoots him a second time, destroying his weapons. Ah, well, third degree burns are nothing new to him by now. He slams the cryonic mine against the turret. Mindful of Sidestep’s fate, he does not immediately press the button. He suffers another shot as he picks a ball bearing from the magazine of his ruined railgun and flicks it precisely at the mine a mere meter away. His aim is true. The mine and turret vanish in a globe of cryonic energy — and the mine draws power from the cables leading into the laser. The ball of ultimate cold endures and starts growing, the metal of the hull flaking away as it expands…

 

Jagganoor’s force field drops and Professor Proton is among them, his hands blazing with deadly radioactive power. One blast pierces Zirconia. She falls, a deep crater in her metal form. Another sears Parasurama as he raises his axe; he is hurled backward and off the edge of Jagganoor. Other heroes turn to attack the Atomic Brahmin, but hatches open in the hull. Armor-clad Nuclear Kshatriyas charge to defend their master, atomic bazookas ready to fire.

 

Professor Proton sees the foe he fears most. “Doctor Future,” he sneers in impeccable Oxford-accented English. “You will not thwart my destiny this time. Today you shall die!” But though Doctor Future is slower than the nuclear-powered menace, he had already begun his countermeasure. As Professor Proton’s blast fills the area meters around where he stood, Doctor Future disappears into another time. His work here is done.

 

Jagganoor lurches as its antigravity engines hiccup and lose synchronization. Professor Proton reels — not from the tilting battle station, but as Dura-Man leaps from the side and slams his fist into the Atomic Brahmin’s jaw… a fist bearing brass knuckles plated in dull silvery metal. Cadmium. The coruscating energy that is Professor Proton’s substance darkens as the neutron-absorbing metal suppresses his internal energies. And then other champions appear, swooping up from below. From one arm, the robot soldier SALVO fires a barrage of cadmium-plated bullets at Professor Proton. In its other arm it carries Nomad, who bats away a laser beam as if it were a tennis ball. Jagganoor shudders again. An oscillating hum builds as heroes converge on Professor Proton. Everyone wears cadmium knuckles or carries a cadmium-plated weapon.

 

Professor Proton ducks another punch from Dura-Man and another fusillade from SALVO. Dark Rajah ghosts up through the deck and yells, “Out! Now! I think it’s going to crash!” The deck is tilting further, starts sliding rapidly down toward the ocean. The Atomic Brahmin snarls. His inner light shifts, twisting in new patterns. Motes sparkle around him. He suffers two more blows, reeling from them, almost falling… and then disappears in a quantum jump. Everyone cheers. Then everyone hustles to flee Jagganoor as it slides toward the sea. Iris reappears to ferry the wounded and unconscious, or those who cannot fly; among them, Csongor.

 

Back on the ground, heroes watch the occasional flash of light, dimmer each time, as Jagganoor sinks several kilometers offshore. Who knows how many of Professor Proton’s minions died with the battle station? Not enough, the general says grimly. Dark Rajah exults at the victory and the pardon he’s been promised. Doctor Future strolls up to Csongor.

 

“How did you like your first mission with Avant Guard?” he asks. “Sorry about the burns. I’ll get you to a hospital right away.”

 

“Exciting!” Csongor replies, beaming. “And the burns are bad enough to cause nerve damage, so they hardly hurt at all!” His grimace when he turns to face Doctor Future puts the lie to his words.

 

“Tough man,” Iris murmurs. Csongor hears her.

 

“I am Hungarian!” he explains. Then he falls over in a clatter of jerry-rigged armor, unconscious.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

CSONGOR: A Brief Guide

 

Csongor Kovacs doesn’t use a Secret Identity — not that he could, as his appearance is rather distinctive. He stands over six feet tall with a build that is, well, massive. His arms and legs seem a little too short and thick for his body; not quite the proportions of a baby or a dwarf, but reminiscent of that. He wears his brown hair very short. For a Hungarian, he looks younger than his biological age (his eyebrows haven’t fully grown yet).

 

Csongor is very strong and is a skilled wrestler. He also can soak up prodigious amounts of damage before he keels over (high BODY). His tolerance for pain, both from his sheer bulk and years fighting Professor Proton’s forces, is uncanny.

 

He is also as brilliant a scientist as a human can be without going at least slightly mad — though some people, after seeing Csongor’s ebullient disregard for danger, might dispute the last point. Csongor is a genius at math, physics, engineering and various other sciences and technical skills, from computer programming to explosives, dipping into new fields as needed.

 

As a mathematical savant, Csongor is one of the few people who could operate his battlesuit. This kludged-together suit of armor manipulates inertia and momentum. Some of the more straightforward applications include a railgun (changing the inertia of ball bearings to give them incredible speed and force), leaping great distances and reducing the kinetic energy of physical attacks. Stranger powers include reducing the speed at which opponents run, fly or act in other ways, or the effect of increased Strength by altering his own inertia or the inertia of his targets. Csongor can briefly move with incredible speed by canceling its inertial framework with respect to the turning Earth — but he can only travel in one direction. He stops instantly, and safely, if anything moves into his path. With Doctor Future’s help, Csongor has improved the armor so it doesn’t look quite so jerry-rigged.

 

While in Avant Guard, Csongor has shown a knack for angering megavillains. In his first encounter with Tiamat, he rigged the nuclear warhead she was stealing to explode as she carried it away (subcritical and she was in her nigh-indestructible dragon form, but still annoying). Csongor kept his nemesis Professor Proton from teleporting away from Avant Guard by pretending he had another one of Baron Frost’s cryonic mines, reminding him of his role in destroying Jagganoor, and otherwise goading the Atomic Brahmin into a blind rage.

 

When he isn’t fighting villains with Avant Guard, Csongor has a job at Advanced Research Methodologies, a company that does cutting-edge or outright fringe scientific work for business and government clients. ARM gives Csongor interesting scientific challenges and a group of like-minded colleagues. His eccentricities hardly stand out at all.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

THE COMING OF THING FANTASTIC

 

At the moment, I lack the motivation to flesh out the origin story given to me by Thing Fantastic’s player, at least not to the extent I did with Nomad and Csongor. So, in brief:

 

June, 2013: Helix tries to conquer the Persian Gulf. He rents the top several floors of a not-quite complete skyscraper in one of the little Gulf states. In his “skyhive” he breeds an army of giant wasps. He also builds (grows?) a biomechanical “snore wave” devices that project radiation that puts people to sleep. (Helix and his wasps are of course immune.) Finally, he gets the local emir on his side by restoring the man’s youth. When Helix sends out his wasps to attack the other Gulf states, no one can get near the skyhive without falling asleep. While the wasps slaughter military forces, Helix puts entire cities to sleep. The people in power wake up with the biological equivalent of remote controlled bombs-in-the-skull, so they dare not disobey Helix. Within a week, Helix rules everything from Kuwait to Oman, with the emir as his front man.

 

The major countries can’t allow this. They strike back with long-range weapons, culminating with a nuclear strike on the emir’s capital. Helix wasn’t there, though; he was busy creating more hives in other cities. He retaliates by unleashing  multiple genetically-engineered plagues. Within a year, the human race is extinct. Helix is already designing a replacement species, a project he’d already toyed with for years.

 

Centuries later, Helix has ruined the Earth. If he had stuck to one plan, he might have built a different but working biosphere — but he kept changing his mind and following his whims. (Sentient weather? What was he thinking?) Helix also feels himself getting old: He hasn’t figured out true immortality. He can’t accept death, so decides to propagate himself and try again on other worlds. Helix begins building a fleet of seedships that will carry clones of himself and gene-banks of his creation throughout the Galaxy.

 

The civilizations relatively near to Earth have been watching. They see his plan and decide that to protect themselves, they must destroy the Earth: It’s the only way to be sure of stopping Helix.

 

But killing a billion or more people, or people-ish entities, doesn’t come easily. The aliens recruit a few local people who try o resist Helix’s mad rule in a last-ditch effort to destroy the seedships. One of these agents is a gladiator who escaped from Helix’s arena of freaks and monsters. The gladiator destroys one clutch of seedships but receives word that others have launched. These were shot down but Helix can always try again. The other agents also died, and the gladiator can see Helix’s horrors coming for him. At which point Doctor Future appears and offers the gladiator a second chance. Why him? He’s the one who doesn’t need to sleep.

 

They return to 2013. The gladiator — incredibly strong, nigh indestructible and able to move quickly — races through the emir’s capital to Helix’s skyhive, destroys (kills?) the snore wave device and starts tearing up the base. With the skyhive gone, other heroes and soldiers can attack in force. Helix flees. Fortunately, he does not yet feel sufficiently invested in his project to exterminate humanity in response. The gladiator from Helix’s future joins Avant Guard and takes the name Thing Fantastic.

 

Thing Fantastic is a roughly shaped humanoid covered in rocky-looking blue-gray plates. He can stretch great distances, his limbs bending elastically as they extend. He’s strong enough to lift 100 tons and highly resistant to damage: It’s not that damage just bounces off, it’s that his malleable body doesn’t feel it (lots of Damage Reduction) — unless the damage comes from sonic attacks or fire. Thing Fantastic is also immune to various hostile conditions and has reduced need to eat or sleep. Through the course of his adventures Thing Fantastic’s body has changed to resist new conditions or forms of harm.

 

Of all the members of Avant Guard, Thing Fantastic looks least human. He’s worked hard to create a life for himself apart from being a superhero. Attempts to become a spokeshero for various good causes have not gone tremendously well: He keeps getting pitches from anti-GMO activists to make ads along the lines of, “Stop biotech before it creates more like me,” which he does not appreciate. He’s had better luck building a career in the construction industry, especially demolishing buildings.

 

Thing Fantastic is also kind of sweet on Tiamat. His first meeting with the Queen of Chaos, and her awe-inspiring Mantle of Radiance, hit him hard. Recently, Tiamat surprised Thing Fantastic by transforming him into a male-model gorgeous bodybuilder stud and taking him for a night on the town that ended in brain-melting sex. Then he woke up in a hotal room returned to his normal form. Thing Fantastic knows it’s a ploy to set him against the team, but still… wow. (It also got him beat up by Tiamat’s consort, the supervillain Storm Dragon. They agreed to a fair fight, though. Afterward, Storm Dragon just shook his head and said, “She is what she is.” Then they went drinking. We shall see how this develops.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[TheQuestionMan]

Gonna need a Players Guide to "Your Universe"

[DShomshak]

Well, if enough people say they want to play in it...    

 

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

A FEW WORDS FROM DOCTOR FUTURE

 

During the depressive phases of Doctor Future’s bipolar cycle, he often goes drinking with his friend Nikola Tesla. Avant Guard tries to make sure someone accompanies him for his own protection and to make sure he doesn’t accidentally change history by, say, telling someone how to build a nuclear device. This time it’s Csongor’s job, though he isn’t very good at limiting Doctor Future’s consumption because he’s tippling himself. A number of historical oddities are likely the result of the two drunken time travelers. But sometimes Avant Guard obtains new insights into the mind of their nominal leader.

 

“You know the worst thing about time travel? Everything is your fault. I mean, everything. Not killing Hitler is only the start of it. Why didn’t I stop 9/11? Heck, why didn’t I save the Archduke and prevent World War One? You name the disaster, why didn’t I go back and stop it? No end to it.

 

“And why don’t I stop the big bads by making sure they’re never born?

 

“Well, I tried it once. Stopped every villain’s origin I could find. Fixed the machine so the lab accident didn’t happen. Burned the book of magic. Got smart and focused on the events that caused lots of origins. Like, kept the Intruder from reaching Earth: No Intruder, no wrecked ship, so no Capella Project, no Doctor Synapse, no Waffenmeister and that lot. No Doctor Synapse, so no Apostle or Viewpoint or Commander of the Faithful. No Waffenmeister, so no Quill or Zero or Professor Pain.

 

“No Intruder also meant no Officer Pax, and no Capella Project means no Parsifal, but. Well. Fewer villains means we need fewer heroes. Especially when no proton reactors to study means no Professor Proton. Saved half a million people right there.

 

“And I kept the Monad from reaching Earth. Saved millions of Chinese. No Monad so no Doctor Digital or Iron Duke. Wait, he hasn’t happened yet. Will, next year. My fault because I didn’t stop the Monad.

 

“No Baron Frost. His parents never met. No Warlock. Shot him before he finished the Millennium Rite. No Tiamat. Caught her right when she appeared and bounced her back to 5000 BC. She never knew what hit her. No Dragon Warriors. No gods coming from Terra Mythica to fight her.

 

“Couldn’t stop Doctor Thane. He does time travel too. He’s a glitch like me. But he stood aside and let me do it. Wanted to see what happened.

 

“And the weird thing? I guess I even stopped the mutants. Couldn’t do anything about them but… when the other origins stopped, they did too. Big clue, there. Thane was fascinated.

 

“At the end? No supers at all. So I looked ahead to see the world I made. And here’s what happened.

 

“Nothing.

 

“Thousands and thousands of years of nothing.

 

“Okay. Not nothing nothing. The Greater Depression when the oil ran out and there are no proton reactors because I kept the Intruder away. The Billion Migration from global warming, same reason. The Second Dark Age through the rest of the Twenty Second Century because of all that. But people got through it. Lots of little wars. A few really big ones every couple centuries. World War Six between the African League and Australasia, that one was bad. But humanity recovered. Hundred fifty years later, World War Seven. People got through all that too.

 

“But nothing really new. No great political movements or reforms. No big tech advances, either. Not much we couldn’t build today. No going to other worlds. No great new art, either. Three Thousand Anno Domini, and New Vladivostok was filming the tenth remake of the Harry Potter series, for God's sake. Not even holographic.

 

“Millennium after millennium of the same old crap.

 

“And the good stuff was gradually lost. Ten thousand years in the future, they somehow had lost Shakespeare. How do you lose Shakespeare?

 

“Well. Maybe not lost completely. Aliens might have kept his stuff. The Zetrians showed up eventually and some other aliens. They didn’t visit much. Once they scanned the museums and copied the books and movies, there wasn’t much reason to stick around. Who cares about people who never do anything new?

 

“And life gradually got tighter. Only so much you can do with recycling. Stuff gets lost. Forty thousand years in the future, there were only two billion people. A lot of them hungry. Sixty thousand years, only one billion and they were all hungry. Fighting over scraps.

 

“So when the Z’drakha Crisis hit, humanity couldn’t handle it. Wiped out, one and all.

 

“’Great job,’ Thane said. ‘You destroyed the world!’ And he was right.

 

“So I had to go back. Find the moment when I could stop myself. Make it all didn’t happen. Undo ten years of my own life.

 

“Of course I went mad from the strain. Spent a couple months drooling in a padded cell, trying to sort out my memories. Kind of a bad patch, that. I sort of owe Thane for not killing me then. He doesn’t worry about changing his own history. Any crazy he gets is pissing in the ocean.

 

“And that’s why I don’t kill Hitler or stop 9/11 or keep Rajendra Bharavi from becoming Professor Proton. Once you start doing that, it’s hard to stop. And sometimes stopping the bad stuff means stopping the good. Not my call. Not while there’s still a chance to make things better.”

 

Doctor Future lifts his glass. “To free will,” he proclaims. And then he slides under the table.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

I always suspected time travel would be more curse than blessing. We lack the vision to foresee what pulling the skein of history would unravel. I feel sorry for Doctor Future.

 

OTOH that's a sweet characterization, Dean.

[DShomshak]

I'll take several days off, I think. When I return, I'll wrap up the Avant Guard origins. Then, who knows.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Doctor Future's recruitment of Anunit was actually the first scene of the first Avant Guard adventure. I don't remember every detail of the adventure, but I think this more or less gets the outline across.

 

Incidentally, the scene in the future between Anunit, Tiamat and Doctor Future has a soundtrack: "The Strangers are Tuning," from Trevor Jones' score to Dark City. It neatly matches Tiamat's arrival and declaration, her destruction of the island, and the shocked aftermath.

 

THE COMING OF ANUNIT

 

September, 2013: Doctor Future knows the world is in peril before he hears the news that an impenetrable dome of water has appeared over the military base near Voltaire, North Dakota — one of the bases where the nuclear missiles are kept. He looks ahead to see the coming destruction.

 

Just one missile launches, but the MIRVs come down across the Middle East. Most of them target cities that have been ruins for millennia: Babylon, Ur, Uruk, Ur, Nippur, Nineveh, Lagash. The other three fall on Jerusalem, Mecca and Mount Sinai. An instant before the fireballs bloom, an area a kilometer wide shimmers and another landscape overlays desert, city and mountain. Doctor future glimpses ziggurats before they disappear in a light brighter than a thousand suns.

 

World War Three begins before the day is out. It is the Final Jihad. Pakistan shares its nuclear arsenal to avenge America’s destruction of Mecca. Riots in European cities escalate to civil war — a dirty war of sabotage, murder and terror. In response, Europeans remember how to commit genocide. India, Russia and China crush their own insurgencies, then launch their own nuclear attacks because what the hell.

 

The surviving Mesopotamian gods try to strike back, too, and they aren’t entirely careful about hitting the right targets. They know Tiamat sent the warheads through Gates to their realm of Terra Mythica, but many argue that mortals share the blame for building weapons that could kill gods. The angels of Heaven briefly side with the Muslim world for the destruction of Mecca and Jerusalem, but soon have their own problems as the hordes of Hell see their chance to attack their weakened foe.

 

Three months later, the wars of gods and mortals become moot. Vast tsunamis edged with the eldritch fire of Primal Chaos sweep over the continents, a thousand miles at a time, leaving bare ocean in their wake. Ten thousand volcanoes erupt as the Earth’s crust shifts and breaks. Over the cataclysm soars an immense dragon, its scales shimmering in ten thousand dark hues never before seen by human eyes… except by those who have seen the Queen of Chaos in her true form.

 

Tiamat unmakes the world. The Earth is a dead waste of storm-wracked ocean and belching volcanoes, fire and water in constant war. Only her children survive — those by birth and the cultists who renounce humanity to become her new monsters and demons.

 

An unknown time in the future: The two scorpion-men seize Anunit as she emerges from the sea. The daughter of Tiamat reflexively tries to slip away, for this is her special magic: Nothing can hold her or impede her. Nothing, she learns, but scorpion-men. These two are stronger than her and enchanted so that whatever they grasp cannot escape. It is written on the tablets that hang around their necks.

 

Mother has found out.

 

Moments later, a gigantic shadow roils the ash-choked sky. A gale whips the sea as Mother descends. A moment before she touches the black lava sand, the immense dragon becomes a beautiful, human-looking woman. In this form, Tiamat is not large: Five-foot-four with dark bronze skin, long black hair, clad in nothing but golden filigree and gems of shifting hue. And of course her Mantle of Radiance, blazing now with wrath that makes Anunit whimper and want to close her eyes, but she cannot look away from the terrible, glorious display of her mother’s power.

 

“Daughter.” Tiamat’s voice is soft but trembles with rage. “Did you think you could hide them from Me? These last humans you discovered cowering in that speck of rock?” She gestures at the small island a kilometer from shore. It is not much more than a few acres of bare rock dashed by the waves. But it is not volcanic; it is a bit of the old world that the waves of Chaos missed. “Their ancestors defied Me; their belief anchored My former rebel children to this world; and so I destroyed them. When you found them, you should have told Me, that I might complete their annihilation.”

 

Tiamat’s hands clench and her voice descends to a hiss. “But you helped them and so they worshipped you. And that above all I cannot forgive. I birthed you all and made you gods, but I alone am God. No one shall ever again worship anyone but Me!

 

“Had you not discovered them, these humans might have hidden a while longer. But you should have known, daughter, that you cannot hide anything from your Mother. Now see the fate you have brought upon them.”

 

Tiamat bends and scoops a handful of black sand and pebbles from the beach. She breathes upon it and smoothes it between her palms into a plate of basalt. She holds the tablet in one hand while the fingers of her other hand, now adorned with claws. Dance across the surface to gouge little wedge-shaped marks in the stone. Anunit can read the worlds: Fire in the stone, as in the beginning. She flicks the tablet in a high arc across the water. It falls to the island.

 

The stub of rock shakes for a moment. Then again. Then again, stronger, not stopping. Cracks open in the rock around the little tablet, stretching outward as the tablet falls from view.

 

A section of rock opens in a small cliff. People spill out, clad only in breechcloths. They raise their hands to the darkened sky. Tiamat cocks a hand to her ear and suddenly Anunit can hear them, her people, begging for her to save them. She strains against the grip of the scorpion-men, her tail thrashing in the volcanic sand, but she cannot escape.

 

The prayers become screams as vapors rise from the crevices in the quaking rock, and then lava spills out. Orange fountains spray into the air and crimson rivers ooze across the rock before plopping into the sea. Clouds of steam hiss and rise, obscuring the view until there is only a vague, sullen red glow filtering through the haze.

 

Tiamat watches and smiles in satisfaction as the last humans die.

 

Anunit feels the scorpion-men tighten their grip as they twitch, and then release her as they fall. She and Mother spin to see a male human standing behind the fallen scorpion-men, a metal box in each hand. He drops them and reaches to Anunit as he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” And winces slightly.

 

Tiamat’s jaw drops; the only time Anunit has seen her mother well and truly gobsmacked. The Queen of Chaos raises her hand, calling up power to smite the impudent human. Anunit is already lunging forward to take his hand. She swings around to take the blast of mystic force herself; it hurts and sends her sprawling forward into the man. They tumble and spin in directions Anunit cannot name for… seconds? Years? until they land on a sofa in a tangle or arms, legs and serpentine tail. Instead of a beach, they are in a room like nothing Anunit has ever seen. A table and chair are the only furnishings she can recognize. She sees metal and glass, cloth and something like stone, but the shapes are strange. Even some of the substances are unknown to her.

 

A daughter of Tiamat does not show fear to lesser creatures. She lifts her head and sets her chin. “Who are you, human? You have saved me, for which I shall reward you, but I do not know your name.” And then, in a smaller and less certain voice, “Or why.”

 

Only now does Anunit notice that the man himself speaks strange gibble-gabble noises and the words she understands come from a box clipped to his clothing. “Call me Doctor Future. I saved you in order to give you a chance to change the world. You are in the past. You cannot save those last few people of your own time, but you can avenge them — by stopping your mother before she destroys the human race. That world you came from will never exist. You can make a better world exist in its place.” A pause, and a whisper: “I hope.” Louder again: “But there is not much time. Will you help me, as I helped you? Will you let me help you once more?” He holds out his hand again.

 

Anunit takes it. “I will.” Her mind whirls as she tries to understand all of what Doctor Future said, but she understands revenge. Mother let her children treat each other as they willed. Some of the vendettas lasted centuries, vengeance met with vengeance.

 

“Good!” Doctor Future smiles. “And we will not fight Tiamat alone. I would like you to meet your other allies: the members of Avant Guard.” A door opens and two more men enter with a lumpen, stony creature of roughly human shape. “Nomad, Csongor, Thing Fantastic — meet Anunit.” They all carry speaking-boxes like Doctor future’s.

 

The large man — Csongor — grins nervously, turns red, and tries to keep his eyes on her face. “Charmed, ma’am. Doc. Is she supposed to be naked? And a snake from the waist down?”

 

What sort of question is that, Anunit thinks. How else would I be?

 

2013: A bubble of water covers the base near Voltaire — kilometers high and wide, and at least a hundred meters thick. Planes circle over it. The mightiest weapons of humanity are useless, for the water of Primal Chaos dissolves them before they can penetrate. Through the wavering depth of water, Anunit can dimly see an immense stela on the other side. Of course. Mother does her greatest magic using Tablets of Destiny, and a construction like this would take several big ones. She also sees the demons left as guards.

 

But Anunit can scribe tablets of her own. She takes one of the slabs of alabaster from her necklace and scratches Let the Earth part before me. It does so, for the world obeys the words of a god. Not quickly, perhaps, but in a few minutes the tunnel reaches all the way under the dome and she brings her comrades to the surface again. All the guards and stelae are far away.

 

Anunit leaves the tunnel open so the mortal warriors can follow if they dare. Doctor Future has left them the task of fighting the guards and destroying the steles of power. Avant Guard will attack the main fortress and try to secure the center of command. Doctor Future will act on his own to sabotage the great spears that he says are Tiamat’s goal. Anunit has doubts: Is he sure he is mighty enough to confront the demons and warriors that surely guard these “missiles,” to say nothing of Tiamat’s greater children or Tiamat herself? “I’ll be sneaky,” he promises. He turns a dial on his belt and vanishes.

 

More than a dozen soldiers — with a big metal thing called a “tank” — guard the entrance to the command bunker. So do two of Tiamat’s adopted children, the Dragon Warriors. One is the size and shape of a large man but covered in heavy scales, with claws, and fanged muzzle and a tail. The other is a gigantic serpent with human shoulders and arms. They fight with holy zeal to keep out the intruders. The great serpent Jormungandr takes a lot of hitting to subdue. Anunit’s teammates seem wary of the tank, but when she hears that it has me inside Anunit simply jumps at the side of the big metal box and, blip, she’s inside. She lashes her tail and batters all the soldiers unconscious in a second. She goes through the main door of the bunker the same way and guards it while Thing Fantastic slowly batters his way through. Unfortunately, she cannot take others through walls with her, and she cannot imagine how the great metal door should be opened.

 

Other fights follow. The mortal soldiers fall easily, but their weapons sting something awful. Even the stony Thing Fantastic reels from concentrated fire. Csongor and Nomad try to avoid it. They trick a Dragon Warrior into guiding them to the center-of-command — as a daughter of Tiamat, Anunit bears her own Mantle of Radiance, lesser but still inspiring awe, and the Dragon warrior is ready to believe that Mother did not tell him everything.

 

At the center-of-command, they find two more Dragon Warriors. Cockatrice plays with their minds so their bodies do not obey their will. Lieutenant Viper mimes wielding the weapons of his military and they appear in his hands. Salamander, whom they deceived, catches wise and fights them with fire; but the Dragon Warriors are outnumbered and fall.

 

They also find another mortal man, the king-who-is-not-king of this land, taken from his house by Tiamat and made to reveal the secret words to launch the missiles. Still, he seems more or less unharmed. This “President” kept his ears open and knows why the soldiers obey Tiamat so readily: She said they are to attack in revenge for a great attack upon them several years before by (as best Anunit understands) followers of a rival cult. The President admits that while Tiamat spoke the words, her divinity shining around her, he almost believed the plan himself. He shook off his awe of Tiamat when he could no longer see her; but soldiers are trained to fight the enemies of their people, and many of them already think that all “Muslims” must be foes. The soldiers who kept their heads were overpowered and locked up. Avant Guard easily finds these soldiers and releases them. They take the job of guarding their chief and taking him to safety.

 

But the missile is about to launch. Anunit and her new comrades hurry down a tunnel to the missile silo where they find Doctor Future bound and unconscious; technicians working on an opened missile; Tiamat’s two chief disciples, Cerastes and Storm Dragon; and Tiamat herself. The Queen of Chaos is surprised to see a daughter she didn’t know she had, but quickly connects Anunit to Doctor Future. There’s no fight, though: Tiamat shows her Mantle of Radiance and stuns them all with awe.

 

Or almost all. Csongor has lowered his visor so he does not see the Queen of Chaos. He pretends to be as overcome as the rest but slips aside while Tiamat examines Anunit and the technicians grovel in holy fear. One of the warheads is outside the missile with its own casing opened. Within it is an alabaster tablet bearing the cuneiform words: Let the worlds of man and gods be joined when the mighty spear releases its flame. Unnoticed, he begins changing the electronics inside the warhead.

 

Thing Fantastic seems especially smitten with Tiamat and proclaims his love readiness to serve her. Storm Dragon, a hulking, ebon-scaled dragon-man and Tiamat’s consort, takes umbrage. He announces that Doctor Future has sabotaged the lid of the silo so it will not open, but he is strong enough to force it open himself. Thing Fantastic retorts that he is the strongest one here, and will bash it open faster. Tiamat smiles indulgently and lets the two men compete. Thing Fantastic quickly climbs to the roof of the silo, while Storm Dragon flies. They both wind up for gigantic haymakers; lightning and clouds gather around Storm Dragon’s fist. Storm Dragon swings a mighty blow at the silo’s roof, cracking concrete and ripping steel… and Thing Fantastic slams his immense fist into Storm Dragon’s head, knocking him out cold. Tiamat’s consort slams against the wall of the silo and slides to the floor.

 

Battle is joined between Avant Guard on the one side and Cerastes, Tiamat and their remaining worshipful soldiers on the other. How it might have gone, none can say, for Csongor shouts that he is about to detonate the warhead! This makes him the center of Tiamat’s attention.

 

“Enough,” she snarls. “I feel my barrier has fallen — but that releases my full power!” Nomad points out, though, that with her watery barrier down and the president taken to safety, the military can bring its full power against her. Including, if necessary, nuking the base!

 

Tiamat sees the tactical tide has turned against her. She snatches up Storm Dragon and blasts open the remains of the silo door. She leaps upward, transforming into her dragon form as she does so, and snatches the loose warhead in passing. “I still have a weapon to use against the gods,” she growls, and flies up into the night. Planes and helicopters fire missiles at her; they are not enough to stop her. She is gone. Cerastes flies away as well. No one in Avant Guard can fly, so she also escapes.

 

Csongor explains that no, in fact Tiamat does not have a nuke. He tampered with the firing mechanism so in a few minutes it will in fact go boom. It won’t be a complete explosion, but even a subcritical blast should be enough to give Tiamat a bad day. Doctor Future, conscious again, allows as it just might at that… and Storm Dragon is easier to harm than Tiamat. Some Dragon Warriors escaped, or will escape because their powers make them difficult to hold, but others are captured. All in all, they dealt Tiamat a serious blow — and they could not have done it without Anunit to open the way inside and distract Tiamat at the crucial time.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

ANUNIT: A Brief Guide

 

From the waist up, Anunit resembles a curvaceous human woman, except for the curling horns that adorn her head. From the waist down, she’s a giant snake. She’s super-strong (lifts 12-13 tons), nigh-invulnerable and heals wounds in seconds. Anunit can lash about to strike with greater force or hit everyone in an area; she can also wrap around an enemy to squeeze with greater strength or grow big slashing claws. She slithers or swims with great speed.

 

Just as importantly, this daughter of Tiamat is a goddess. Like her mother, Anunit can work magic by scribing cuneiform tablets — any feat she can describe in terms comprehensible to ancient Sumerians and in that language, and within her power limit (a 20-point VPP). She also evokes a Mantle of Radiance (extra PRE, Visible, Only for PRE Attacks), though hers is of course much weaker than Tiamat’s. She has learned to control destiny as her mother does as well, bending probability to her will (Luck). She resists attacks that weaken her or change her form. She breathes underwater.

 

Anunit’s most distinctive power, though, is her ability to escape any restraint or bypass any barrier less than 2 meters thick (just a small Teleport, automatically Triggered when such conditions arise). This is sometimes humorous, as well as irksome for her foes: Someone knocks Anunit back with a big attack and instead of slamming against a wall, she goes through it. Now what, tough guy? Anunit can return to the fight just as easily.

 

When she first came to the modern world, Anunit knew nothing of human culture. She’s gradually learned to follow contemporary customs. (Fortunately, Avant Guard is based in New York City. New Yorkers take any strangeness or harmless violation of social codes with aplomb.) Anunit has made herself popular with many people by visiting hospitals to heal the sick and wounded and (she just scribes a tablet for BODY Healing or Life Support: Immunity, Usable By Others — I’m generous about allowing Special Powers in VPPs). Some people she’s helped have begun worshipping her… which makes Anunit very unpopular among religious zealots or people who suspect that she’s really a front for her mother. (Not that Tiamat needs help gaining her own cult.) Anunit has also begun a career modeling for clothing and perfume ads.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

The human-like pagan gods actually worshiped by our ancestors were fundamentally comprehensible. Even when they were mad at you, you felt like you understood them and knew how to plead your case. But some of the monsters they fought against, like Tiamat, were a deeper level of terrifying -- the embodiment of forces of nature that appeared bent on destruction beyond reason.

[Ninja-Bear]

A FEW WORDS FROM DOCTOR FUTURE

 

During the depressive phases of Doctor Future’s bipolar cycle, he often goes drinking with his friend Nikola Tesla. Avant Guard tries to make sure someone accompanies him for his own protection and to make sure he doesn’t accidentally change history by, say, telling someone how to build a nuclear device. This time it’s Csongor’s job, though he isn’t very good at limiting Doctor Future’s consumption because he’s tippling himself. A number of historical oddities are likely the result of the two drunken time travelers. But sometimes Avant Guard obtains new insights into the mind of their nominal leader.

 

“You know the worst thing about time travel? Everything is your fault. I mean, everything. Not killing Hitler is only the start of it. Why didn’t I stop 9/11? Heck, why didn’t I save the Archduke and prevent World War One? You name the disaster, why didn’t I go back and stop it? No end to it.

 

“And why don’t I stop the big bads by making sure they’re never born?

 

“Well, I tried it once. Stopped every villain’s origin I could find. Fixed the machine so the lab accident didn’t happen. Burned the book of magic. Got smart and focused on the events that caused lots of origins. Like, kept the Intruder from reaching Earth: No Intruder, no wrecked ship, so no Capella Project, no Doctor Synapse, no Waffenmeister and that lot. No Doctor Synapse, so no Apostle or Viewpoint or Commander of the Faithful. No Waffenmeister, so no Quill or Zero or Professor Pain.

 

“No Intruder also meant no Officer Pax, and no Capella Project means no Parsifal, but. Well. Fewer villains means we need fewer heroes. Especially when no proton reactors to study means no Professor Proton. Saved half a million people right there.

 

“And I kept the Monad from reaching Earth. Saved millions of Chinese. No Monad so no Doctor Digital or Iron Duke. Wait, he hasn’t happened yet. Will, next year. My fault because I didn’t stop the Monad.

 

“No Baron Frost. His parents never met. No Warlock. Shot him before he finished the Millennium Rite. No Tiamat. Caught her right when she appeared and bounced her back to 5000 BC. She never knew what hit her. No Dragon Warriors. No gods coming from Terra Mythica to fight her.

 

“Couldn’t stop Doctor Thane. He does time travel too. He’s a glitch like me. But he stood aside and let me do it. Wanted to see what happened.

 

“And the weird thing? I guess I even stopped the mutants. Couldn’t do anything about them but… when the other origins stopped, they did too. Big clue, there. Thane was fascinated.

 

“At the end? No supers at all. So I looked ahead to see the world I made. And here’s what happened.

 

“Nothing.

 

“Thousands and thousands of years of nothing.

 

“Okay. Not nothing nothing. The Greater Depression when the oil ran out and there are no proton reactors because I kept the Intruder away. The Billion Migration from global warming, same reason. The Second Dark Age through the rest of the Twenty Second Century because of all that. But people got through it. Lots of little wars. A few really big ones every couple centuries. World War Six between the African League and Australasia, that one was bad. But humanity recovered. Hundred fifty years later, World War Seven. People got through all that too.

 

“But nothing really new. No great political movements or reforms. No big tech advances, either. Not much we couldn’t build today. No going to other worlds. No great new art, either. Three Thousand Anno Domini, and New Vladivostok was filming the tenth remake of the Harry Potter series, for God's sake. Not even holographic.

 

“Millennium after millennium of the same old crap.

 

“And the good stuff was gradually lost. Ten thousand years in the future, they somehow had lost Shakespeare. How do you lose Shakespeare?

 

“Well. Maybe not lost completely. Aliens might have kept his stuff. The Zetrians showed up eventually and some other aliens. They didn’t visit much. Once they scanned the museums and copied the books and movies, there wasn’t much reason to stick around. Who cares about people who never do anything new?

 

“And life gradually got tighter. Only so much you can do with recycling. Stuff gets lost. Forty thousand years in the future, there were only two billion people. A lot of them hungry. Sixty thousand years, only one billion and they were all hungry. Fighting over scraps.

 

“So when the Z’drakha Crisis hit, humanity couldn’t handle it. Wiped out, one and all.

 

“’Great job,’ Thane said. ‘You destroyed the world!’ And he was right.

 

“So I had to go back. Find the moment when I could stop myself. Make it all didn’t happen. Undo ten years of my own life.

 

“Of course I went mad from the strain. Spent a couple months drooling in a padded cell, trying to sort out my memories. Kind of a bad patch, that. I sort of owe Thane for not killing me then. He doesn’t worry about changing his own history. Any crazy he gets is pissing in the ocean.

 

“And that’s why I don’t kill Hitler or stop 9/11 or keep Rajendra Bharavi from becoming Professor Proton. Once you start doing that, it’s hard to stop. And sometimes stopping the bad stuff means stopping the good. Not my call. Not while there’s still a chance to make things better.”

 

Doctor Future lifts his glass. “To free will,” he proclaims. And then he slides under the table.

 

Dean Shomshak

This reminds me of the Doctor Who where when the galaxy dies humans flee to a "safe haven" which isn't at all. Depressing to me.

[Ninja-Bear]

Btw I do enjoy the stories. Did you have the villains first then the PCs design Heroes? Or were the Heroes first then you designed the villains? Or a combination of both?