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Anarcho-Occultist's Way Too Soon Wikibox Thread

Kaiju
While technically dating back to the Mesozoic era, overall the phenomenon of kaiju is typically viewed as a fairly modern phenomenon, only emerging with the advent of nuclear weapons on a large scale. Many of the crises associated with kaiju did manifest in smaller amounts in older eras. The rampages of the likes of Typhon, the Kraken or Apophis certainly had a similar impact on societies that suffered from them. And while not as big, the early era was full of giant creatures that often threatened humanity. Dragons are of course the most infamous–while dragons could vary greatly in temperament, attacks by the likes of Smaug or the Red Death certainly could ravage an ancient or medieval city as easily as any modern city suffers from kaiju. The Alteration of the 17th century, triggered by the Brethren Court’s unleashing of Calypso against the East India Trading Company, caused many enormous monsters to emerge from the depths of the ocean and attack land. What all of these older monsters have in common, however, is that they were fueled largely or solely by magical phenomena. When magic faded, the dragons both good and evil, reduced greatly in numbers, to the point that they were pushed to the brink of extinction by the 19th century despite the efforts of Ernest Drake and his acolytes to preserve them. The Alteration eventually was halted and the seas largely calmed. The world was thus largely safe from giant monsters until the 20th century.
The earliest incident involving kaiju was rampage of King Kong in New York City in 1933. Kong was one of the last specimens of a species of ape later dubbed Megaprimatus kong. This was a species that naturally could reach a height of 18 feet. King Kong, notably, exceeded this general height, reaching 24 feet by the time he attacked New York. Scientists have concluded that while this was pre-nuclear in era, Skull Island had a natural uranium deposit that served the mutate the ape to even bigger sizes. After Kong, it would be a couple of decades before the world saw more kaiju on a large scale, aside from the failed experiment of Project Knickerbocker which sought to create irradiated giant monsters as weapons for World War II. In 1953, the world would see the first modern kaiju attack in the form of the Rhedosaurus. A nuclear test carried out under the supervision of Thomas Nesbitt in the Arctic Circle irradiated a frozen dinosaur, causing it to mutate to a vast size. The Rhedosaurus–a species native to the region that is now New York City–proceeded to rampage across much of the Eastern Seaboard, even spreading an ancient pathogen that killed thousands more than its rampage did before being destroyed. The Rhedosaurus would avoid becoming the quintessential kaiju however thanks to another one: Gojira. The infamous kaiju would emerge less than a year later for the first time and devastate much of Tokyo before being apparently destroyed by a superweapon known as the Oxygen Destroyer which likewise was destroyed.
This was the point in time where the world began to take anti-kaiju defense seriously, but the immediate aftermath of Gojira’s attack proved to swamp the world too widely. US nuclear testing lead to kaiju emerging as radiation enlarged ants, rabbits, spiders, molluscs and even a couple of humans (in particular a housewife named Nancy Archer and a colonel named Glenn Manning). The US government sought to cover up the role of its nuclear testing in at least a couple of these cases, trying to pass the kaiju off as natural phenomena or at least consequences of alien incursions. Meanwhile, Japan would see massive amounts of kaiju incursions. A second Gojira, Anguirius, Rodan, Gorgo, the Gargantuas, Reptilicus and Yongary all would emerge in this era. Not all kaiju were the result of nuclear experiments. Some were, instead, extraterrestrial in origin. The Giant Claw, the Blob, Dogora and King Ghidorah were among the more notable of these. Some were simply alien lifeforms who ended up on Earth via happenstance, but Ghidorah and the Blob in particular were explicit weapons of alien invaders. The Blob was a creature created by the Furons as part of their long-running efforts to destroy humanity while Ghidorah was a weapon of the alien race known as the Kilaaks as part of a bid to make invading Earth easy. Oftentimes, these alien kaiju would have to be opposed by the Earth-native ones, which was a key factor in moving kaiju defense away from trying to wipe out all of them and more towards containment. The creation of the Monsterland preserve was intended to provide a refuge for Earth-native kaiju who could combat the threat of extraterrestrial kaiju. Monsterland’s creation was also prompted by the fact that not all kaiju of either variant were inherently malevolent. While the being Gamerra was originally threatening on first emerging, Gamerra was originally created to serve and defend Earth and would regain his original purpose after a few years. Mothra too was a more mystical creature, but was loyal to a population of fae in Japan who wanted to avoid large-scale destruction. Other kaiju benefited from close relationships with humanity–Daigoro and Clifford were both kaiju whose destructive potential was averted by friendly relationships with specific humans. Even the second Gojira eventually proved to be more of a defender of Earth than enemy of it, playing a key role in defeating Cthulhu in 1984 following the Soviet attempt to awaken the entity.
Despite this, the recurring destruction caused by kaiju did lead to wide-scale adoption of contingencies aimed at them specifically. Japan in particular invested heavily in resources to defend against giant monster attacks. The creation of size-changing technology that led to the empowerment of Jet Jaguar and Masuru Daisato allowed for humans to directly fight kaiju. Even more useful was the development of mechas by the Japanese. While the Getter Robos originally were created to combat the subterranean Dinosaur Empire, they proved to be able defenders against kaiju attacks, as did Juzo Kabuto’s Japanium-derived mech Mazinger Z. These developments would pave the way for the eventual development of more sophisticated anti-kaiju defenses to be established. In 2008, an entity dubbed ‘Clover’ attacked New York City, devastating the place. The most worrisome thing about this kaiju was its lack of a clear origin. It is now believed Clover originated from a parallel reality where it was engineered from species from another reality dominated by unusual lifeforms naturally similar to kaiju (which had been discovered by the US in 1946) as a deliberate weapon of extradimensional aliens (perhaps the Combine Empire). In 2015, a rift to this reality was opened in the Pacific Ocean and kaiju attacks across the Pacific would once again spike. This prompted the creation of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps and the commissioning of Jaegers, a particular form of mecha requiring two pilots and adept at combating attacking kaiju.
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Earth-Yeerk War
Alien invasions have been a common occurrence and usually they prove to be quite flashy. The Molluscs came down with tripods firing like crazy. The Triffids rampages like monstrous beasts throughout the world. The Harvesters obliterated entire cities. The Furons abducted thousands and razed buildings into ashes. Even the Kanamits made a big show of how benevolent they were as a ploy to subjugate the world without resistance. However, not all aliens have attacked in such overt ways. Infiltration has been a common approach. The Pod People, Skrulls, Zygons and Visitors all attempted to conquer Earth by shapeshifting into humans. These attempts failed but another race attempted a similar strategy: the Yeerks.

The Yeerks as a species resemble a slug and on their homeworld they largely remained in aquatic environments, feeding off of Kandrona rays emitted from their local star. Their sentience was not fully harnessed until they began taking hosts in the form of the less-intelligent and short-lived Gedds. This allowed them to form a civilization that ultimately made contact with the Andalites. Ironically Andalite paranoia about the Yeerks seeking to conquer other races and take them as hosts would ultimately lead to the Yeerks pursuing exactly that course. In the Earth year 1966, the Yeerks entered a war with the Andalites and began working to subjugate other species. They successfully overtook the Hork-Bajir, the Taxxons and the Race. Andalite efforts to combat and contain them were assisted by the Galactic Federation, the Vulcans, the Nova Corps and the Green Lantern Corps, who successfully kept the Yeerks from large-scale infiltration of Hala, Remulak, Ork and Mesklin. The Vulcans pulled back from this alliance, however, after the Andalites carpet-bombed the planet Gor preemptively when Yeerk scout ships were discovered to have landed on the planet’s surface. The Yeerks, meanwhile, were given support in their efforts by the Goa’uld Empire. The Goa’uld, while viewing the Yeerks as lesser than them, suspected they shared a common evolutionary ancestor with the Yeerks and if nothing else they may at least offer a trial run for Goa’uld conquests.

It was shortly after Gor’s bombardment that the Yeerks made their way to Earth. Being made aware of the planet after intercepting an old broadcast of Galaxy Quest, the Yeerks began an infiltration of Earth in the late 1960’s. This initially proceeded slowly owing to the widespread proliferation of superheroes on Earth coupled with Yeerk worries about a nuclear exchange breaking out between the US and USSR with the Yeerks being caught in the crossfire. The Yeerks formed a front organization known as the Sharing to lure people to become hosts. The Sharing was consciously modeled on groups like Keith Winton’s Church of Practiology and Valentine Michael Smith’s Church of All Worlds, both of whose groups were growing in this era. More religious elements were phased out after an attempted lawsuit by Lancaster Dodd, who accused the Sharing of deliberately modeling itself after his own group The Cause. The Yeerks feared this could draw unwanted attention and expose their infiltration too soon, especially as the Skrull invasion was a recent memory. Early Yeerk infiltration also had to contend with the supernatural, discovering how widespread it was on Earth after making the witch Dolores Umbridge a Controller. As this was all new to Yeerks, some argued it was not worth it to proceed with a large-scale takeover, though this faction ultimately lost out.

The Yeerks additionally squabbled over how thorough an invasion of Sol should be. The 10th planet Mondas was considered a target until the mechanization of the native population made it seem impractical. Back when the planet was known as Mongo, the population would have likely been suitable hosts to Yeerks but the Cybermen’s mechanical forms offered them ample protection. The Yeerks would periodically raid Mondas to avoid the Cybermen becoming competition for Earth. The Mi-Go of Yuggoth and the Ganymedans were ultimately deemed unsuitable hosts, the Mi-Go in particular having driven Yeerks who infested them mad before rejecting them. An attempt to form a deal modeled on the one made with the Taxxons with the Vermicious Knids hit a snag when the Knids proved less reluctant with their ravenous hunger, which they quickly demonstrated to the Yeerk envoys who attempted to make a deal with them. The Yeerks retaliated with a bid to destroy all Knids, overseen by Vissser 2 whom was consequently absent from the invasion of Earth. However, there was a major debate in the Yeerk Council of 13 about trying to infiltrate Mars or the Moon. These plans soon ran into snags, however. A Yeerk scouting expedition to Mars headed by Hork-Bajir hosts was slaughtered by Barsoomians. A more successful effort was made to infiltrate the Moon, with Yeerks infesting a number of Selenites, Vespertillo-homo and Lunites. The Lunar Controllers would discover the ruins of the ancient Silver Millennium on the Moon, which was of immediate interest to the Yeerks. However, their investigations into the site drew the simultaneous attention of the Inhumans of Attilan and a Nazi moonbase on the far side of the planet. The Inhumans proceeded to mount an attack that killed many Controllers and destroyed the local Yeerk pool, leaving the remaining Yeerks on the planet to slowly die due to lacking Kandrona rays. An attempt to evacuate the survivors was repelled by a mecha originally created by Wilhelm Strasse, leaving the Yeerks to ignore the Moon in favor of Earth.

After the end of the Cold War, the Yeerks began drastically ramping up their infiltration, going from a few thousand controllers in 1990 to over 6 million worldwide by 1995. The Earth-Yeerk War’s official beginning in 1996 is attributed to that being the year humans not under Yeerk control first took real notice of the invasion. A group of teenagers in Bahia Bay, California were the first to end up in this war after encountering the Andalite Prince Elfangir who gave them access to an Escafil Cube that let them gain the ability to morph into animals. While this team fought a largely secret war against them and dealt major blows to their operations, they were not the only ones to be aware of or combat the Yeerks. UNIT, the UN’s alien defense body, would become aware of the Yeerks after a group of Controllers failed in a plot to place a Yeerk in the mind of Secretary-General Diana Palmer. UNIT advocated a large-scale investigation to root out the Yeerks but were constrained by resource limitations. The presence of the Tiberium element and the rise of the Brotherhood of Nod from former Augment-aligned groups aiming to seize it meant the UN was fixated on the Global Defense Initiative. The Exalt and their allies in the Syndicate likewise became aware of the Yeerks in 1997. The Exalt ordered their Syndicate allies to prevent the schismatic Men in Black faction as well as other groups like the SCP Foundation and Torchwood Institute from finding out about the invasion. While the Exalt did not truly want a Yeerk-ruled Earth as it was antithetical to their own agenda, they saw an opportunity to soften the Earth up for their planned 2012 conquest by helping the invasion grow. Stargate Command was made aware of the Yeerks in 1997, but owing to limited intelligence presumed they were simply a faction of Goa’uld and thus only had limited engagement against them prior to 1999.

While the Yeerk infiltration was global, the Yeerks prioritized securing California as their main fiefdom. By 1997, virtually every major town in California had a Yeerk presence. Sunnydale was the largest exception, as that town’s mayor Richard Wilkins had, after an attempt to forcibly make him a host at a meeting with leaders of The Sharing, absorbed the Yeerk in his head and threatened to unleash demonic forces on the invaders if they set foot in his fiefdom. In a bid to draw American security operatives to the state, the Yeerks made the leadership of the white nationalist group the Order into Controllers, who then stoked Earl Turner’s attempt to trigger ‘the Day of the Rope’ as part of a gambit to make FBI and military personnel into Controllers. This scheme would ultimately largely be unsuccessful. An attempt to infest the G8 leadership (Josiah Bartlet, Adam Lang, Sergei Karpov, Hayato Igashari, Clark MacDonald, Martin Schormann, Grace Bellanger and Marco Abiatti) during a conference in San Diego was foiled by the aforementioned teenage team. The war with the Yeerks remained a low-level guerrilla affair until the Yeerks attempted to make California Governor Eleanor Watson into a Controller after infesting her second husband (whom she had married shortly after he saved her from an asssassination plot headed by her first husband Brendan Grant). Governor Watson was saved from the Yeerks and publicly revealed them to the world in 1999.

With their exposure, the war with the Yeerks became public. The Yeerks destroyed Bahia Bay, though many were able to escape the city. Open conflict with UNIT and the US military took place across the globe. UN space assets discovered the Yeerks were dispatching a large space force to reinforce the Yeerk pool ship in orbit, with a secondary goal of crushing human defenses. With an Andalite presence at the time lacking, a human-led space fleet was formed. The flagship was the vessel the Archangel Michael, the ship that had brought humanity victory over the Fithp. That race, ironically, also was a participant in this fleet. The Chtaptisk Fithp herd viewed its loyalty as now belonging to the ‘herd’ who had defeated them which they viewed as the United States. Rounding out the force was a collection of reprogrammed Harvester spacecraft, an orbital weapons platform created by Tony Stark and several superheroes led by Captain Future. While the Yeerks had a technological advantage, they were taken by surprise by this force which bought enough time for support from the Coalition of Planets (an ally of the Andalites formed originally to resist the Viltrumites) to wipe out the remaining Yeerk fleet and the Pool Ship was denied crucial reinforcement as it was targeted from the Earth. The Yeerk defeat was triggered shortly after when Jake Berenson, the leader of the guerrilla fighters on Earth, blew a hole in the ship that sucked an estimated 150,000 Yeerks into the vacuum of space. This act, while a war crime, did force the Yeerk forces to surrender. Esplin 9466, the Yeerk leader who held the title of Visser One, was captured and tried for war crimes in The Hague. Remaining Yeerks were forced to leave human hosts and the planet as well.
The war produced a number of consequences for humanity. The Hork-Bajir and Taxxon aliens used as hosts for the Yeerks remained largely on Earth, the latter using the Andalite Escafil Cube to morph into less ravenous life forms. The UN declared reservations for the Hork-Bajir in Jellystone National Park and the Taxxon nothlits in the Amazon. Both species’ presence would help fuel human supremacist sentiment. The Hork-Bajir joined the Tectonese as a common punching bag for the American far right. Senators Bob Roberts and Kevin Keeley would for the remainder of their respective careers introduce bills calling for the Hork-Bajir settlement to be dissolved. Andalite advocacy and relations with them helped stave off the mainlining of this prior to 2009, when contact with them was lost. The cause of the Andalites’ disappearance remains unclear, with rumors including Dalek attack, devouring of the planet by Galactus, Viltrumite conquest or something more local. Since then, tensions with the other aliens met via the Yeerk War have risen and following Adams’ ascension by coup to the presidency anti-alien groups like the Sons of Jacob and the Defenders have begun raids into their Jellystone colony. The Escafil Cube technology was shared with the human race by the Andalites and used for both military and civilian purposes (including largely replacing hormone replacement therapy for transgender people) but after the loss of the Andalite homeworld, the Syndicate seized all of the Cubes present on Earth into their custody and it is believed the Exalt had them destroyed. As the Andalites kept secret how to replicate the Cubes, morphing technology is largely considered lost to Earth. Of the original team of teenage guerrilla fighters, only one is known to still be alive but her exact whereabouts remain unknown as she has sided with anti-Adams rebels.
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The Black Lodge

The origins of the Black Lodge are somewhat mysterious. Most attribute the creation of the Black Lodge to the demon king Chernabog, also known as the Black Thing or the Dark One in his more incomprehensible forms. Chernabog is said to have created the Black Lodge as part of his effort to restore reality to its primal nonexistent state. He viewed the shadow of oblivion as superior to the light of existence and sought to roll it back. However, Chernabog also wished to punish those who ruined the ‘perfection’ of oblivion and thus made it so those legions that followed him in the Lodge proper would feed off of human misery and suffering. Of course, this is just one potential account of the origins of the Black Lodge. Nyarlathotep and his acolytes the Chaos Gods have also been accused of being behind the creation of the Black Lodge as a tool to further their ends. The existence of the counterpart the White Lodge has led to some to conclude that the Black Lodge simply exists to embody evil and came into being with the universe, along with the conceptions of good embodied by the White Lodge. People who believe this attribute the creation of the Lodges to a variety of figures—the Lord of Nightmares, the Black and White Guardians or the Forces of Law and Chaos being commonly attributed sources for them both.

Whatever the origin, the influence of the Black Lodge certainly is significant. The Black Lodge has drawn a number of followers in the material world to aid them in achieving their aims. The earliest known acolyte of the Black Lodge is the dark lord Morgoth, who terrorized Europe in the Hyborian Age. Morgoth was an immensely powerful figure and his acolyte Sauron likewise sought to spread the darkness of the Black Lodge before he was defeated by his enemies. While he was the first, he would be far from the last follower of the Black Lodge to terrorize the world. These figures could vary considerably in nature. The Order of Aurelius was formed by vampiric worshippers of the beings of the Black Lodge and sought to subjugate humanity to please them. The Black Lodge takes a major joy in corrupting people into vicious murderers-Leland Palmer, Michael Myers, Johann Liebert and Oh Sangwoo are but a fraction of those whom have, wittingly or unwittingly, been led to kill on behalf of the Lodge. A number of history’s evil magicians were acolytes of the Black Lodge as well, including Kulan Gath, Koschei the Deathless and according to some accounts Mordred. The dreaded Horned King, a widely feared necromancer, also is believed to have been a devotee of the Black Lodge. Many infamous dark magicians and evil witches have also been at least part-time devotees of the Black Lodge, including the Sanderson sisters, Amos Hacksaw and Pacha Camac. Their reach is not limited to Earth either, with their servants in the stars including the Shadow Galactica, the Sith and the Shadows.

The Black Lodge additionally sent residents of their realm to the world to corrupt it. The entity known as Pitch Black, for instance, was sent to corrupt the Shinto gods when they faced extinction at the hands of industrialization in Japan. The infamous Randall Flagg was long associated with various kinds of demons or even Nyarlathotep himself, but in fact is a servant of the Black Lodge sent to the Earth to terrorize the place. The species known as Minions are thought to have originated from the Black Lodge, though they took on a will of their own that has in more recent times drifted away from the goals of the Black Lodge. The shapeshifting spider known as Pennywise in its most notable incarnation is another servant dispatched to the mortal plane to carry out the Lodge’s bidding. Another species that is thought to have originated from within the Black Lodge are the Weeping Angels, a race of beings that feed off of futures that are aborted when they transport people to points in the past. The primary argument for their origins as servants of the Black Lodge is their feeding off of detrimental impacts they have and their otherwise mysterious nature. However, these claims have not been confirmed and may in fact be unable to be confirmed. The forces of the Black Lodge also are capable of feats of necromancy, with results ranging from the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel and the vengeful spirit of Elly Kenward to the serial killer Jason Voorhees and the reanimated Deadite hordes that have at times terrorized the world.

The inhabitants of the Black Lodge are to an extent surrounded in mystery in part owing to the apparent lack of clear temporal or dimensional boundaries for the Black Lodge and its inhabitants. Nonetheless some elements have been discerned. Within the Black Lodge are two powerful entities that may be the de facto rulers: the Scarlet (or Crimson) King and the King in Yellow. Both are generally malevolent, but at times war with each other for dominance within the Black Lodge. The Scarlet/Crimson King is associated with the color red and has a number of cults active on Earth. Many who encounter the Scarlet/Crimson King associate the Black Lodge with red rather than the typical black. The King in Yellow is not as flashy as the Scarlet/Crimson King, preferring to manipulate the world from the shadows rather than establish clear cults. Immediately below the Kings are the Lords in Black—5 entities claiming to be deities with powers over aspects of reality. Beneath the Lords are a number of demonic beings who can interact with the world via dreams and possession of humans. The being known as BOB is one of the most notorious of these beings, but others exist as well. The dream-walking serial killer Freddy Krueger is in fact a former prisoner of the Black Lodge who was granted powers after becoming a servant of theirs. Other examples of these inhabitants include the Obsidian Lord, Art the Clown, the Cenobites, the Babadook, the Violencia and the Voidbringers. The entity known as the End of the Cycle, responsible for bringing ruin on a galactic scale, has been alleged to be the joint creation of the Black Lodge’s two kings, though this remains unconfirmed.

The Black Lodge is not without opposition. Some of this opposition came from within the Lodge itself. The entity known as The Giant and the lone sister of the Lords of Black are two beings who originated with the Black Lodge and ended up defecting to the White Lodge. The White Lodge, ruled by Maturin the Space Turtle, is the main hub of opposition to the actions of the Black Lodge. The White Lodge operates in parallel to the Black Lodge in many respects, having its own chosen champions work to challenge the Black Lodge’s servants in their efforts to corrupt the world. These champi ms include Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, the Ellimist, the Skull Knight and Zordon all have worked to advance the White Lodge against the Black Lodge’s own chosen champions. They have enjoyed several triumphs over the years-most notably totally taking control of the afterlife realms dubbed ‘the Good Place’ and ‘the Bad Place’ by inhabitants the two lodges had nominally cooperated to form. World affairs have at times been driven by this conflict-in the First World War, the White Lodge’s followers on Earth under the leadership of Cyril Grey backed the Entente while the Black Lodge’s aligned dark magicians under Heinrich Kemmler supported the Central Powers. The propensity of the Black Lodge to challenge the laws of time mean they often run afoul of those seeking to maintain a clear and consistent timeline. The Time Lords were often opposed to the Black Lodge prior to the Time War and the Time Baby has also frequently warred with the Black Lodge as well. Not all dark entities are aligned with the Black Lodge either. The being known as the Slender Man has been known to fight with entities of a known origin in the Black Lodge, despite also being generally malevolent. The forces of Hell also tend not to take kindly to the Black Lodge and view it as a threat to their plans, much like the Great Old Ones. The would-be Antichrist Damien Thorn at one point sought to carry out a ritual to cut the Black Lodge off from Earth before being thwarted by the Black Lodge servitor Slappy, a particularly humiliating event for Thorn as Slappy was an animate ventriloquist dummy. The Black Lodge also often struggles with the beings known as the Ancient Ones, who have their followers carry out ritual sacrifice using similar forces as the Black Lodge, but seek entertainment above suffering. The Ancient Ones often help their followers bind Black Lodge-connected entities to follow their rituals, thus putting them at odds with the more sadistic Black Lodge.
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The Immortal
The world has known no shortage of superheroes and supervillains. In various eras, one could ask who the most famous super is and one may encounter a wide range of answers. Asking this question in the 1940’s would generally lead to observers to point to Captain America, Superman, Wonder Woman or Jim Hammond’s Human Torch. By the 1960’s, the answer would have likely shifted to the Fantastic Four. In other times, you may have been pointed to anyone from All-Might to the Phantom. As heroes age and pass their mantles on, many of them change in nature. Bruce Wayne’s Batman operated in different ways than Dick Grayson’s or Damien Wayne’s, Miles Morales’ Spider-Man had to wrestle with being in Peter Parker’s shadow and even non-legacy heroes like the Powerpuff Girls or David Dunn have to reckon with the wider community. Different era’s reactions to superheroes has varied–the distrust of the 1970’s that saw the Keene Act briefly passed into law after the Black Prom Massacre yielded to adoration in the post-World War III world, especially thanks to the savvy PR moves of Vought-affiliated supes like Public Spirit and Homelander, only for the pendulum to swing back by the 2020’s. Few superheroes have been able to bear witness to as much of these developments as the Immortal, one of the oldest and longest-active superheroes.
The exact date of Immortal’s birth is hard to calculate, but he is believed to have been around during the late Hyborian Age. The man who would eventually become one of the most famous superheroes seemingly ended up with eternal life by accident, having been inspired by the stories the hobbits neighboring his village told of the Fellowship of the Ring to run away and go on a journey of his own. Immortal did not face down a great evil like the Fellowship did–in his time such things were rarer–but did discover the Pool of Kor. While the Pool was usually guarded by the Akasha, the first of the vampires, her ongoing conflict with the Watchers’ Council in Wakanda had drawn her away and enabled the younger man to consume its waters and gain immortality. Alone, this likely would not have done as much, but after doing so the Immortal encountered a nearby emanation of energy–the origins of which remain unknown but endowed him with an array of superhuman abilities including flight and superhuman strength. The Immortal initially fled and lived reclusively, which he maintained until he encountered another like him: a man at the time known as Vandar Adg. Adg, who had gained immortality via a very different means, had aspirations of becoming an eternal emperor of Earth. Initially, he offered the Immortal the chance to rule alongside him, but the more heroic immortal refused, leading to his first death at the hands of Adg. However, unlike Adg, the Immortal’s immortality was de facto invulnerability–when a neighboring tribesman reunited the Immortal’s parts, he rose from the dead, vowing vengeance on Vandar Adg.
The Immortal’s quest for vengeance would go unsatiated, but his opportunities for heroism would grow. Early in his hunt for vengeance, the Immortal would be guided by the Egyptian goddess Isis to Egypt, where the populace had been enslaved by the alien Goa’uld, who were impersonating the gods of Egypt to foster loyalty. Isis sought the Immortal’s aid in freeing the people of Egypt by fighting off the Goa’uld, which the warrior ultimately would succeed in, turning the tide of the revolt against the Goa’uld and pushing them back through their gateway to the stars. The Immortal would remain in Egypt for centuries and play a key role in many subsequent developments. When the mutant Apocalypse attempted to establish control over Egypt, it was the Immortal who ultimately defeated his efforts. The time traveler known in other eras as Kang the Conqueror was likewise ousted by the Immortal. This lasted until he was killed by the priest Imhotep in a bid to gain dominance over the Pharaoh Djoser. The Immortal’s body was cut into pieces in emulation of the myth of Osiris to prevent him from returning. This effort was undone in the later reign of Nephren-Ka, an avatar of Nyarlathotep who saw in the Immortal potential as a champion. When the Immortal refused, the Black Pharaoh was able to resist his attempted attacks, but out of sheer amusement simply sent him away from Egypt.
The Immortal would find himself in the realm later known as Russia, where he briefly ended up in the custody of the Kurgan tribe. The Immortal would reside with them for years before departing–his arrival would inadvertently have the effect of spelling the doom of the Kurgan tribe as a child he had with a Kurgan woman would reach adulthood only to discover he shared the Immortal’s gift, which would drive him to wipe out his people. This in turn would lead to the creation of the Gathering among many similar immortals, several of whom are believed to have been descended from the Immortal. The Immortal, after leaving the Kurgans, would become a wanderer. The Immortal would spend a great deal of time in Europe during the Roman era. He provided aid to the last free village of Gaul in their efforts to resist conquest. The Immortal, motivated by the knowledge that the general Julius Caesar was a fabricated identity of Vandar Adg, would fight the Roman forces off for a time, but eventually simply gave some blood to the village druid Getafix who used it to empower another generation of warriors. The Immortal’s hostility to Adg in his Caesar identity would come back to bite him when the Roman Empire was established, as he quickly became considered an enemy of the Romans. When he attempted to aid in crushing a Solanum outbreak, a Centurion who recognized him would decapitate him, leading to him remaining dead for centuries.
By the time he revived, the Immortal found himself in a very different world. Rome was no more and instead the Immortal found himself in the realm known as Camelot. His return was ushered in by the divine being known as the Lady in the Lake, who would help the Immortal adjust to his new era. The Immortal would end up becoming a knight in the court of the first King Arthur, the original Sir Lancelot. As Lancelot, the Immortal would do many things. He would infamously have a romantic relationship with Queen Guinevere, something that subsequent courts of House Pendragon would sometimes see repeat in line with Merlin’s spell of cyclical history for the realm. He would embark on a quest with several other knights to track down the Holy Grail used by Jesus himself. The Immortal-as-Lancelot would originally succeed in identifying the cup, but due to a tense relationship with Arthur, he would hide it alongside a collection of false grails in Egypt and proclaim he had failed to find it. Ultimately, the aforementioned affair with Guinevere would mark the undoing of the first King Arthur, as Mordred would exploit the tension this caused to pave the way for Arthur’s death. The cycles that Camelot would experience would persist with new Lancelots arising, each unique compared to the Immortal, who would subsequently move on elsewhere.
The Immortal had quite a bit of guilt due to his role in Arthur’s death and spent much of the Middle Ages engaging in smaller-scale activities. He would fight monsters sporadically–it is suspected that the Immortal may have at some point been the famed Saint George or the legendary king Beowulf. While these rumors are unconfirmed, it does seem to contradict the Immortal’s own recollection of largely keeping his head down for centuries. It is artwork and notes of others that provides the clearest indication of the Immortal’s whereabouts in the period prior to the discovery and settlement of North America. He is depicted in woodcarvings by Vikings chronicling the process of dragon-taming, is alluded to as a potential enemy enemy of the Caliph Vathek in a letter sent by Abdul Alhazred to him and his background matches with the scrawlings on the wall of a prisoner of the Templar Order in the Renaissance era. The Immortal may have spent some time in Asia, as rumors of an immortal samurai aiding the famed Jakku in his conflict with the demon Aku have been noticed, though the existence of a number of other known immortal samurai means he would hardly be the only candidate. What can be confirmed, however, is that the Immortal was an early migrant to North America following its discovery and subsequent colonization, settling near the town of Salem, Massachusetts at first. The Immortal would here find and clash with the infamous Sanderson Sisters upon discovering their true nature as evil witches. His efforts to destroy them were limited by their magic, but in the process kept them distracted enough that they grew careless around everyday citizens and thus ultimately they were executed just before the infamous–and more paranoid—witch trials, which drove the Immortal out of Salem.
The Immortal would not reemerge until after the triumph of the rebels in the American Revolution. In the early days of the US, the country’s future was uncertain and in an effort to ensure the nation was protected, Benjamin Franklin organized a team of gifted individuals to help protect the nascent republic. The Immortal was one of the recruited, alongside Thomas Haukins, Connor Kenway, Beatrice Whaley, Natty Bumppo and Ulysses Bloodstone. The Immortal would forge a close bond with Bloodstone in particular, as the man was like him an immortal. The team would foil efforts by Britain to sabotage the new nation and additionally protect the country from the frontier’s various ‘fearsome critters’ like the thunderbird, the hodag and the Jersey Devil. Ultimately, the group would collapse after they discovered the supernatural force known as the Unmaker, which they attempted to confront. The confrontation ended in disaster as Kenway and Bumppo perished outright, Whaley vanished and the Immortal would have his memory wiped. The Unmaker’s actions would, however, ultimately paved the way for the Immortal to lead what was undoubtedly his most prominent lifetime to date.
Shortly after the Immortal was mindwiped, he (now thinking of himself as Abraham Lincoln) would meet and befriend a boy named William Johnson, who would be attacked and killed by the vampiric plantation owner Jack Barts. The Immortal would confront Barts and attempt to fight him, only for him to nearly be overwhelmed (his powers likely eroded by the Unmaker). He would be rescued by Henry Sturgess, who would teach him about the existence of vampires and their role in propagating the institution of slavery to ensure an ample supply of blood to feed off of. An appalled Immortal would be trained to fight vampires and would spend the bulk of his career in a fight against vampires. One of his early confrontations would be against the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, who had set up a large plantation in Louisiana to feed. Despite the Immortal’s best efforts, Lestat would escape his stake, though a few lesser vampire associates of his would meet their end. The Immortal as Lincoln would terrorize vampires for much of the 1850’s, even as he built up a political career. Upon winning the 1860 election over a divided field, the Immortal would regain much of his memories and powers even as the South seceded from the Union. One might expect this would lead to a rapid triumph in the ensuing war, but the Immortal’s efforts to win quickly were stymied due to the prevalent vampire presence in the South, accompanying dark magical forces and even some other threats like time-traveling South Africans showing up to aid the Confederates. Nonetheless, the Immortal was able to lead the Union to victory in the war and presided over the abolition of slavery before being shot by John Wilkes Booth in 1865.
When the Immortal revived in the 1880’s, he spent the next several years adrift compared to earlier on. Despite repeated overtures from the likes of Brisco County, Jr, and James West he refused to aid the US government in their bids to curb paranormal phenomenon, leaving advice on this topic to the bound vampire Nathaniel Cade. The Immortal indeed viewed his assassination as a sign of ingratitude from more mundane individuals and would spend the latter years of the decade indulging in hedonism. He ignored such events as Dracula’s attempted takeover of Britain in favor of revelry–he even would have short-term relationships with the vampires Darla and Drusilla, scion of two of the most infamous vampires in history. This era would ultimately be brought to an end, however, following the Mollusc invasion of Earth. The Immortal, on seeing the horrors the alien invaders ravaged on the planet, was once again pushed into heroism, taking down several tripods intended to subdue the United States personally. The Immortal would subsequently be contacted by Thomas Edison, who asked for aid in conducting a counter-invasion of Mars (at the time erroneously blamed for the invasion). The Immortal agreed to help, but balked upon realizing the local Sorns, Barsoomians and other Martian races had not been responsible for the attack. The Immortal subsequently forced Edison to flee Mars back to Earth, though unfortunately Edison used a bioweapon that permanently crippled the Martian population.
By the time the Immortal returned to Earth, he found the planet in quite a different state. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicked off the First World War between the Darwinist Entente and the Clanker Central Powers. The use of air power, Clankers and Fabrications proved immensely devastating, especially in the early years of the war. The Immortal did not take a specific side in the conflict, instead focusing his efforts against the Fabricator and Clanker weapons, which were the most dangerous of the war. The Immortal’s attacks on both sides drew him enormous enmity, but did succeed in achieving his goal of forcing the war into a more conventional–albeit no less devastating–conflict. The Immortal would also wage a one-man war against supernatural factions in the conflict. He would defeat Heinrich Kemmler for the first time, as well as his disciple Tanya Degurechaff. The Immortal has also been credited with preventing the experiments of Herbert West from triggering a large-scale zombie outbreak amidst the war. After the war, the Immortal would be contacted by John Wainwright, who was setting up the world’s first would-be refuge for metahumans. The Immortal was initially curious, but ultimately elected to avoid joining it. In the 1930’s, the Immortal largely lived quietly as a new generation of heroes–from Doc Savage to Superman to the Human Torch–arose and became active.
Despite generally taking the backseat, the Immortal would end up involving himself in World War II on the side of the Allied Powers. While never a full member of that era’s Defenders or the Justice Society of America, the Immortal fought alongside them on several occasions. The Immortal’s age meant he was more resistant to supernatural artifacts wielded by the Axis like the Spear of Destiny, making him a vital resource for the Allies. He would be sent to Europe to capture Hynkel in the middle of the war, but would be confronted by the experimental Ubers Siegmund, Siegfried and Sieglinde alongside a force of weaponized dinosaurs the Germans had acquired in Maple White Land. The Immortal would be temporarily killed by these combined assailants, though he would kill many of the weaponized dinosaurs and mortally wounded Siegmund and Sieglinde. The Immortal’s body was taken into Nazi custody and kept by them until the final victory of the Allies. The US would reassemble his remains and offer the Immortal a chance to lead a postwar super team. The Immortal would decline this offer, but remained active on a smaller scale, defending against attacks by various kinds of giant insects created by radiation and fighting off an attempt by the Molluscs to invade once more. The Immortal would aid some of the various superteeams of the ensuing decades like the Justice League and the Avengers against massive threats. He would not formally become a member of any super team until the formation of the Guardians of the Globe in the late 1990’s, which he remained a member of until his death at the hands of Omni-Man. He was revived once again and returned to superhero heroics, but disappeared fighting the Combine Empire in 2021. His current status remains unknown.
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Alexander Luthor
Alexander ‘Lex’ Luthor (April 23, 1919-January 20, 1993) was an American scientist, businessman, politician and criminal. Luthor was born in the small Kansas town of Smallville to Lionel and Arlene Luthor. Lionel Lurhor was a businessman and a rather strict, cold parent to Lex and most accounts agree that the relationship between the two was frosty. Lex was closer to his mother but put off by Arlene’s extreme religious views (as she was a native of Moralton). Lex also had an uncle named Alexei Luthor, who was a supercriminal who clashed with the likes of Doc Savage and the Shadow in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Lex was named in his honor but growing up generally despised the man for his criminal acts (though the younger Lex did once spend time trying to emulate his uncle by carrying out petty crimes, most famously stealing 50 cakes from a local bakery). When the superhero Superboy made his debut in Smallville, Luthor was originally a fan and supporter, unlike his father. However, when he suffered an accident that rendered him bald while carrying out an experiment that Superboy failed to prevent, Luthor would turn on the young hero and developed following this a deep, abiding cynicism towards vigilante heroes in general. Luthor would, on reaching adulthood, be offered a scholarship to study engineering at Miskatonic University, which he attended and graduated from in 1942.
During the Second World War, Luthor would not see much action. Lionel’s company LuthorCorp was involved in arms production to support the Allies and to protect his son and heir from the draft, Lex was put in charge of factory administration in Metropolis. FBI Director Henry Lux would interview Luthor on several occasions as part of investigations to verify the company was not supporting his uncle’s criminal enterprises, which had opportunistically thrown its lot in with the Axis Powers. Luthor generally played coy with the FBI, but had few qualms about airing his father’s sympathies towards fascism (Lionel had been a supporter of the Corpo regime and while he had thrown his lot in with the New Underground in the regime’s final days, this is believed to be primarily owed to loyalty to Windrip in particular). Lex’s administration of LuthorCorp’s manufacturing during the war was praised for its efficiency and a few pieces of wartime propaganda used LuthorCorp’s factory as an example of the ideal standard for the US. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the rift between Lionel and Lex would widen as Lionel became paranoid about Lex seizing his company. Things came to a head when Lex tipped off FBI Agent Dick Tracy about Lionel’s intentions to join the Galtist strike of 1946. As the action was considered a violation of federal law, the FBI would subsequently move to arrest Lionel Luthor, leaving his company ready to fall into the hands of the ambitious Lex. Lionel Luthor would remain in prison for a decade, leaving in 1956 and subsequently vanishing. It is believed he ended up participating in the creation of the underwater city-state of Rapture and likely ended up a casualty of that project. Lex, meanwhile, continued to focus on his father’s business empire.
Luthor quickly became focused on making LuthorCorp a pioneer of technological advancement. He took a great deal of inspiration from the ‘wonder weapons’ of the Second World War–Cliff Secord’s jetpack, the power armor used by Hynkel in one of his last battles and even begrudgingly the various super-serums used on all sides of the conflict–and was interested in developing tools of his own. Opportunities for Luthor to make progress on this would come quickly. The immediate postwar era’s surge in alien activity was an opportunity for Luthor. Having already established himself as a skeptic of metahumans and aliens thanks to his attacks on Superman, Luthor was one of the first to warn of the potential dangers of the Kanamits and claimed vindication when they proved dangerous. Luthor obtained a government contract to reverse-engineer Kanamit technology, which while never fully being successful did have enough partial success that Luthor provided the bulk of armaments used against various kaiju of the 1950’s in the United States and helped design specialty flamethrowers that enabled the final defeat of the Triffid invasion of the early 1960’s. Of course, this positive publicity was part of what enabled Luthor to carry out numerous acts of supervillainy. Luthor’s vitriol towards Superman drove him to sponsor major criminal organizations in the city as part of a bid to discredit the hero, even on occasion personally carrying out petty crimes such as robbery to aid in his propaganda campaign against Superman. Luthor dedicated entire departments of LuthorCorp to developing weapons to use specifically on Superman as well as his key allies in the Justice League and Avengers teams-he even bought out OsCorp after the arrest of Norman Osborne in 1966 in the hopes of using the technology Osborne invented against superheroes. Luthor was a personal rival of Tony Stark, owing to both competition for government weapons contracts and due to Stark’s work with other superheroes. He also would form a group dubbed the Legion of Doom to oppose the Justice League’s members. At various times this included many enemies of the League’s members with Luthor often serving as the core financier of the Legion’s activities though he did his best to keep their operations out of the public eye to maintain his reputation.
Luthor made his first foray into politics in 1970 when he ran for Mayor of Metropolis on a technocratic, business-friendly platform. Luthor likely would have won had the Watergate scandal not enveloped the Monckton administration at the time. While Luthor was not especially close to the President, Monckton has sent Vice President Gilligrass to campaign for him, which likely doomed his campaign. Even then it proved quite close. A few years later, following Ferris Fremont’s victory over President Douglass Dilman, Luthor would be tapped as Secretary of Commerce. Luthor, in this position, worked to boost American technological output by pumping subsidies into Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, Stark International, and many other corporations. LuthorCorp notably was excluded as Luthor divested assets from the company and left it in the hands of an underling by the name of Alexander Cullen. Luthor was, surprisingly, not directly involved in the Secret Empire scandal that led to Fremont’s dramatic suicide. However, the surrounding scandal and allegations of his own genuine misdeeds (such as a rumored scheme to trigger large-scale earthquakes by detonating a nuclear missile along the San Andreas Fault as part of a bid to destroy Superman) led to him resigning before the new President Henry MacNeil could fire him.
To escape the shadow of this scandal coupled with an investigation into him being launched by Attorney General Archie Hall based on his historic supervillainy and possible links to Hydra, Luthor would fake his own death in 1979. Using material acquired in the immediate wake of Fremont’s death, Luthor discovered the hiding place of several Hydra scientists led by Dieter Vogel who had been attempting to clone Adenoid Hynkel and had for a time revived Hynkel’s brain. Luthor compelled them to clone a younger body and move his brain to it by threatening to have his associates share Vogel’s hideout with Mossad as well as reveal Eva Braun’s survival and work with Hydra to create a Fourth Reich in the US to the FBI. Luthor, after being moved, would pose as his own son, Alexander Luthor, Jr., whom he convinced the public should not be blamed for the crimes of his father. This allowed Luthor to return to business ventures. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s Luthor sought to invest in advanced technology. Using his ‘inherited’ wealth, he poured money into Aperture Science, Nova Laboratories and Biosyn, helping each company get off the ground. Luthor also was a financial backer of Buddy Pine’s efforts, hoping the younger supervillain would prove capable of creating technology to use against Superman, though this failed after Pine perished in his clash with the Parr family.
Luthor would end up politically isolated during the 1980’s. While a committed capitalist, he was dismissive of the religious bent of the Cyclops and Tresch administrations. He also was hostile to the alien Visitors whom were embraced by many of his compatriots, with Luthor claiming vindication when they turned out to be infiltrating the planet. During World War III, Luthor would be involved in the Crisis on Infinite Earths alongside his old enemy Superman. Luthor would return to discover Metropolis badly damaged by Soviet air strikes, although a nuclear attack on the city had been successfully detected and eliminated by some of his own company’s drones. This provided an opportunity for Luthor, who heavily invested in reconstruction not only in Metropolis, but Zenith, New York, Miami and New Boudreaux as well. This was not motivated by pure altruism, however, as Luthor saw an opportunity to break through in politics. Luthor would run for Mayor of Metropolis in 1987, winning in a landslide. Luthor would embark on an ambitious program of urban renewal and education investment, though critics held that he was corrupt (contracting with his old partner Cullen’s real estate company to build more public housing was seen as evidence of this) and questioned his use of robotics technology in the city. Luthor partnered with MegaTech, headed by an old business partner Newton Sanders, to use androids in law enforcement and teaching positions. While effective, in hindsight this has been blamed for the 1999 crisis where MegaTech robots massacred students.
Luthor ultimately viewed the mayor’s office as a humble stepping stone, however. Despite his position, the public of both Metropolis and the world at large continued to admire Superman. This to Luthor threatens the human race with destruction and he viewed American readiness to combat alien threats in general as lacking after the quiet acceptance of the Tectonese into the country and the 1990 Predator incursion into Los Santos. Abroad the decline of communism almost simultaneously was met by the rise of the Augment ideology espoused by the likes of Khan Noonien Singh and Wu Qinghua. Luthor was aware that the Augments enjoyed support from Ra’s Al Ghul, head of the League of Shadows and father of his successor as LuthorCorp’s CEO Talia Head. Luthor thus publicly opposed growing trends towards globalization viewing it as a security threat. Luthor also was concerned about impending ecological crisis after an encounter with a time traveler named Henry DeTemble who had arrived in front of Luthor on one of his jumps. Luthor viewed himself as the man best suited to avert this and in 1991 announced he would not pursue reelection as mayor (clearing the way for the victory of Mike Haggar) and that he would run for President as an independent in 1992.
Luthor’s campaign drew strong press interest and for an independent campaign seemed quite robust and with many endorsements. Luthor’s VP nominee was Chet Roosevelt, the former governor of California whom Luthor viewed as someone who could reach disaffected left-wing voters while being too naive and dim-witted to usurp him. His campaign manager was Jerry Bloom, whom had previously managed the independent campaign of Stephen Wendell and helped take it down after uncovering a corruption scandal within it. Luthor managed to grab endorsements from a number of prominent political figures. These included Democrats like Jack Tanner, Republicans like Robert Kelly and several prominent public figures in the worlds of business (such as Daniel Clamp and Gary Winston) and entertainment (such as Bob Roberts and Mary Flynn). Luthor managed to win nearly 30% of the popular vote against President Jack Ryan and Catawba Governor Jack Stanton, though he did not earn any electoral votes and Stanton ultimately won the White House. Luthor, undeterred, prepared for another campaign in 1996 but also sought to eliminate a hurdle to this goal: Superman. He sought to hunt down Braniac, another enemy of Superman to help him defeat the hero for good only for Braniac to forcibly take over Luthor’s body. Luthor would perish shortly after, bringing an end to his aspirations of global dominance. LuthorCorp would outlast him by only a few years with the firm going into bankruptcy in 1997 and its assets being split up by other companies including Masrani Global and the Hosaka Corporation.
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Dinosaurs
Dinosaurs are among one of the most iconic of primordial creatures. The exact time period they first arose is made fuzzy by the temporal anomalies and time travelers who have helped scatter them across history, but mainstream paleontologists such as Ross Geller and Eva Jain have concluded dinosaurs arose first in the Triassic period circa 252 million years ago. Throughout the Mesozoic era, dinosaurs dominated the ecosystem alongside similar species of marine reptiles, pterosaurs and the earliest proto-dragons (whom often engaged in predation of the dinosaurs, especially the slower, lumbering species of semi-aquatic sauropods and hadrosaurs). Some dinosaurs were largely peaceful herbivores while others were vicious and at times voracious hunters. The exact form dinosaurs could take varied wildly, even among many who through fossils were labeled identically. Some dinosaurs were slow-moving, lumbering behemothic lizards, slow-witted and inefficient. Other dinosaurs, however, were swifter, more agile and intelligent. In the Jurassic period, a subspecies of Ornitholestes developed Stone Age-level technology and intelligence. While this sentient species of dinosaurs did not make it to the end of the period, by the Cretaceous period, some dinosaurs had managed to develop sentience and various forms of society. This includes one that curiously mirrored the human society that would exist millions of years later and another with a level of scientific knowledge that enabled them to develop multiple time machines including one that operated as a train that traversed the Mesozoic era. It is theorized these sentient dinosaurs were uplifted by the time traveler Captain Neweyes.
The Mesozoic era is, of course, most famous for its vicious end. One factor behind the Cretaceous extinction was time travel. The Trans-Time corporation sought to farm dinosaurs for meat and, despite several containment breaches, was able to inflict a severe dent in the dinosaur population. A powerful superweapon developed by a cult leader was sent back in time by a group of scientist-adventurers led by Benton Quest, which further devastated the planet. Alien incursions also battered the dinosaur population. The Predators hunted dinosaurs for sport and the Nesk flung a meteorite at the planet to deal with a rival species known as the Mecora. The Achuultani also flung several asteroids into the planet, wrecking the environment. These two causes linked when the Brainspawn visited Earth and proceeded to ravage the dinosaur population. Beyond outside forces, sentient dinosaurs also inflicted severe damage themselves by triggering large-scale climate catastrophe. Dragons also ravaged sentient dinosaur populations after evolving past the so-called ‘Prehistoric Dragon’ form. A small portion of intelligent dinosaurs were able to evacuate Earth and set up colonies beyond the Solar System, while non-sentient dinosaurs were preserved in an ark created by the Silurians. Despite the seeming extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth, however, in fact many dinosaurs managed to avoid extinction.
The migration of numerous dinosaurs to a ‘great valley’ in the south where a microclimate protected against the worst climate effects of the Cretaceous disasters and its hidden location guarded against intelligent species targeting the dinosaurs protected some of them. Other dinosaurs were able to survive in deep caves underground, accessible only through passages into Earth’s interior. A few dinosaurs emerged from these underground caverns during the Ice Age, leading to brief periods where dinosaurs coexisted with later megafauna such as mammoths and sabertooths, as well as with ancient humans. Prehistoric man, naturally, tended to greatly fear dinosaurs that they shared the planet with for the most part. However, at various points early humans were able to forge cooperative relationships with dinosaurs. The ancient society known as Bedrock is known to have domesticated numerous species of dinosaurs, keeping some as pets and making use of others as beasts of burden or sources of meat. The contemporary society of Lem also had a cooperative relationship with dinosaurs. Elsewhere, depictions of a caveman who could ride a Tyrannosaurus rex and fought other dinosaurs, humans and various monstrosities have been documented on multiple cave paintings found in Europe. However, conflict did continue more commonly. The alien Yargonians, who attempted to invade Earth nearly 1 million years ago, weaponized dinosaurs against primitive man. Eventually, the large-scale dinosaur presence alongside prehistoric humanity would end amidst a deeper Ice Age freeze, once again relegating dinosaurs to the ‘great valley’ (whose climate remained suitable for dinosaurs despite the general drop in global temperatures) and underground refuges.
As the Ice Age concluded, rapid continental drift occurred. This had significant consequences for the ‘great valley’ that was the last bastion of dinosaurs above ground. The region split apart and drifted into many areas. Much of the valley would become islands later labeled ‘lost worlds’ by observers. The Skull Archipelago, Caprona, Dinosaur Island and Yaanapalu all would be formed in this time. The islands would also enable the formation of other ‘lost worlds’ thanks to the frequent appearance of temporal anomalies on them. It is believed dinosaurs arrived in the Savage Land, Maple White Land, Gwangi Valley and various regions of the Congo thanks to anomalies opening up. Despite dinosaurs’ presence for much of human history, humanity at larve only really took notice of the lost worlds in the late 19th century, on the heels of advances in paleontology. The ‘bone wars’ between Cope and Marsh and Bolt and Cartland helped fuel numerous waves of fossil discovery as well as public captivating, especially as the likes of William Johnson and Deborah MacGuiness added fuel to the wave of fossil-driven dinomania. Dinosaur fossils were used by Stephen Maturin to justify the theory of evolution, an argument picked up by Charles Darwin and other subsequent advocates of the theory. It is likely this that laid the groundwork for adventurous explorers to seek out remnant dinosaur populations.
While the earlier Lidenbrock expedition had encountered dinosaurs in Earth’s interior, it was the Challenger expedition of the 1890’s that was the first to prove dinosaurs still existed. This in turn sparked a wave of exploitation-some dinosaurs were captured and placed in circuses for entertainment beginning with the famed Gertie, a trained Brontosaurus who toured globally for nearly 20 years. Ambitious big game hunters would seek dinosaurs as quarry, a key factor in nearly wiping out the Mokele Mbembe species of carnivorous sauropod native to the Congo. The realm of Dinotopia, inhabited by sentient dinosaurs coexisting alongside humans, was wiped out by Nazi forces in 1937 as part of their attempt to capture and weaponize dinosaurs ahead of World War II. The mass extermination inflicted forced the Nazis to make use of crude cloning techniques in their haphazard attempt to use dinosaurs against the D-Day invaders. By the late 20th century, dinosaurs were reduced to the status of a critically endangered species. Poachers, vengeful hunters, climate change and introduced diseases wiped out most known lost worlds, with only very isolated realms like the Savage Land being left intact. The war against the Dinosaur Empire left many habitats in the subterranean world inhabited by extinct fauna desolated. The biggest subterranean ecosystem to survive was in Canada and would not be discovered until several surprisingly intelligent dinosaurs emerged from it in 2007. Dinosaurs were not technically extinct but as far as everyday people were concerned they might as well be. However, a new solution emerged: cloning. The first large scale attempt at cloning dinosaurs in the postwar era was carried out by Darren Penward in 1979, which led to his creation of a small private zoo of dinosaurs by 1984. Penward’s death at the hands of his clones would not be the end of this, as his research was acquired by operatives hired by InGen CEO John Hammond who envisioned creating a large scale zoological centering on dinosaurs. Hammond set up what he dubbed Jurassic Park on Isla Nublar off the Costa Rican coast, but disaster struck in 1992 before it could open when a disgruntled employee shut down electricity which unleashed many ravenous dinosaurs from containment, killing at least a dozen. Hammond, despite his reputation as a cold capitalist, was shaken by the peril his two grandchildren ended up in during this event as well as his own near-death at the hands of a group of Compsognathus and abandoned the planned park.
However this would just be the beginning of a push to establish dinosaurs in captivity. Hammond’s nephew Peter Ludlow would oust him as CEO and attempt to reopen Jurassic Park in San Diego only for the plan to fail when a Tyrannosaurus escaped and rampages through the city, eventually consuming Ludlow himself. This led to Isla Sorna, InGen’s so-called Site B, being declared a nature reserve by the reinstated Hammond and the Costa Rican government. But the push for dinosaurs as attractions would not end there. Gerry Harding, former veterinarian at Jurassic Park, had made copious note of the healthcare needs of dinosaurs, making the prospect of raising them in zoos more feasible than it had been. This sparked a boom in ‘dinomania’ as dinosaur-centered parks like Enoshima Dinoland and Jurassic World (set up on the same island as the original attempted Jurassic Park) would arise over the next decade. Smaller scale education-centered facilities such as Prehistoric Park would also set up during this period, the latter earning a great deal of attention for its use of temporal travel (based on technology developed by Britain’s Anomaly Research Center) and the documentary series set at it starring Nigel Marven, whom had used the same technology to make similar documentaries on prehistoric life earlier on. Marven’s program would temporarily be handed off to Drew Luczynski after Marven disappeared through an anomaly, thought to be eaten by a Giganotosaurus until reappearing alive almost a decade later, just as the park he built began to franchise out under the name Prehistoric Kingdom.
From 2003 on, many zoos that were not specifically dinosaur-centered would begin to open dinosaur exhibits as the cost of care for dinosaurs dropped. This had a number of causes-the Shiawise decision helping weaken liability risks, the spread of clean energy technology pioneered by the Future Foundation and a general zoo boom prompted by animal-centered reality shows such as The Wild Thornberrys and V.V. Argost’s Weird World increasing earnings for zoos enough to make having a handful of dinosaurs a plausible option. This caused heavy competition for dinosaur-centered parks, especially the aforementioned Jurassic World which was increasingly forced to rely on corporate sponsorship and a luxurious resort experience to remain profitable. It is likely due to this competition that the park resorted to trying to create new hybrid dinosaur species, which in turn led to the disaster of 2015 that saw the park closed down for good. An attempt to evacuate dinosaurs from Isla Nublar during a subsequent volcanic eruption led to a large dinosaur population becoming invasive to California, causing widespread panic and calls from some to render dinosaurs genuinely extinct. For now, those calls have been resisted as moves have been made to get feral dinosaurs out of populated areas and into either captivity or the Isla Sorna and Savage Land reserves.


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Susan Calvin
Susan Calvin (December 2, 1982-April 6, 2064) was an American engineer and psychologist best known for pioneering the field of robopsychology. Calvin was born Susan Derkins in Empire Bay, Massachusetts, where she spent much of her early childhood. Calvin—surprisingly given her later life–was a rather hotheaded child and prone to getting into conflict with neighboring kids, in particular a young Calvin Durden, whom would go on later in life to form Project Mayhem. In 1988, Calvin’s father Andrew Derkins passed away and her mother would remarry James Calvin in 1990, with the young Susan taking his surname. The Calvins would end up leaving Empire Bay in 1991 in favor of the Pacific Northwest, taking up residence in Arcadia Bay. Calvin cites the isolation she felt at being so thoroughly uprooted as a crucial component in her own upbringing and developing a fascination with various sciences, especially engineering and psychology. Her impressive high school grades allowed her to be offered admission to Columbia University at the age of 17, which she accepted and began attending in 1999.

As a student at Columbia University, Calvin initially focused on studying psychology. Unusually for a Columbia University psychology student, Calvin held a disdainful view of the field of parapsychology despite the roles of former Columbia professors John Montague and Peter Venkman in pioneering that field. Calvin instead was drawn to the ideas of noted skeptic Richard Strand, who held that most paranormal phenomena was illusory or scientific phenomena not properly explained yet. Calvin was interested in the psychology of violence and crime, attending both lectures given by FBI profiler Clarice Starling and initially planning to write her thesis on Johan Liebert. However, Calvin’s interests would shift towards robotics and cybernetics. She had always had a passing interest in the topic–even writing a peer-reviewed article at age 16 about the practical aspects of robotics–but she soon came to center this topic in her area of interest. One factor shaping this was the 1999 MegaTech incident where a number of robots whom had been used to replace teachers in high-crime school districts reverted to a militaristic programming that claimed hundreds of lives nationwide. Calvin was thus drawn to the idea of what the proper limits of robotics ought to be. She ended up writing as her thesis ‘Integration of Ethics in Artificial Intelligence’, where she cited the WOPR and Colossus incidents of 1983 and the 2001 Discovery 1 disaster to argue that as AI advances, it will become increasingly necessary to construct programming that binds them to a code of ethics, especially as it merges with the field of robotics.

In her last two years at Columbia, Calvin pursued both psychology and engineering degrees. She would intern briefly at Cyberdyne in 2001 before leaving owing to the belief that management was unwilling to consider the questions of what limits should be placed on robots. Calvin would pursue a graduate degree in cybernetics and psychology at Miskatonic University, completing her thesis which coined the term ‘robopsychology’ under Professor Velma Dinkley. She was subsequently hired by US Robotics and Mechanical Men, Incorporated, which was intrigued by her ideas of robopsychology. Despite her later reputation, it is worth noting that Dr. Calvin was largely considered a fringe figure among artificial intelligence researchers and robotics engineers in this era. Figures like Nathan Bateman and Robert Ford belittled Calvin’s view that these constraints were necessary, instead arguing no machine could fully match a human mind and that, as mechanical devices, they would always remain under human control. At this time, these concerns were still considered largely theoretical as robotics and AI proved slower to integrate into wider human life compared to the expectations of earlier eras.

Calvin’s application of psychology to robotics was not her only contribution to the former field, however. In 2008, following the debut of the synthetic blood substitute TruBlood, the world’s vampire population revealed their existence. Immediately, opinions were polarized-many human supremacist groups found themselves in uneasy alliances with organizations dedicated to controlling the supernatural like the Watcher’s Council and Hellsing claiming they were a danger to humanity but vampires themselves and a number of human sympathizers argued, diet aside, they were no different from humanity and deserved the same rights. Calvin approached vampires with an impressive level of objectivity, seeking to understand the psychology of vampires. She interviewed over 200 vampires in the process of compiling her 2011 paper The Psychology of Undeath: Inside the Minds of Vampires. Calvin broke vampire frames of mind into multiple categories. On one extreme, she identified what she called the reluctant. This category of vampires viewed what they were naturally predisposed to be with revulsion and sought to make up for it. She cited Vladimir Tod, Louis de Pointe du Lac and the Cullen family as examples of this category, seeking to stave off their hunger or satiate it in other ways even pre-TruBlood. On the other extreme she identified the ‘monster mindset’, which views vampirism as a gift and the predation on humanity as a feature rather than a bug. These vampires, Calvin said, would likely try to feed even with TruBlood being available. Most vampires, she argued, fell in between-the likes of Klaus Mikaelson, Laszlo Cravensworth and Michael Morbius having some degree of ethics and morality tempered, but not wholly eliminated by, the need to feed. Calvin dismissed claims that vampires were inherently soulless monsters as superstition but did acknowledge that most vampires have significantly reduced empathy compared to the average human-but argued at the closing such a thing was ‘a byproduct of natural selection for what is, at the end of the day, a predator of humanity by nature now given an off-ramp.’

Calvin’s work on vampire psychology thus concluded, she would resume a focus on robotics. She would work with Tak Mashido to design models of robots capable of engaging in boxing, which would nearly eliminate the industry altogether after one of their robots bested boxing champion Adonis Creed in a 2019 match. Calvin also helped develop blueprints for the Jaegers used by the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, modeling them on the Japanese EVA units deployed against the ‘angels’ attacking Japan at the same time. Calvin would move to California in 2015 to pursue further consulting jobs. In addition to her ongoing robotics work, Calvin was paid by tech billionaire Peter Gregory to come up with a method for uploading a human brain into cyberspace as a way of achieving immortality and was one of the first members of Amaya’s quantum computer team and contributed heavily to the engineering behind their primary project. Calvin viewed these projects with interest, but was never especially passionate about most of her work, pursuing it with a clinical interest. It is likely for this reason her one romantic entanglement in this time was with the similarly clinical Paul Redeker, a political consultant infamous for past work for the apartheid regime in South Africa whom had subsequently worked for the US government to aid in postwar reconstruction of Iraq, Adjikastsn and Afghanistan. The relationship did not last long, as Redeker and Calvin lacked significant shared interests, but has been viewed as indicative of Calvin’s normal disposition. Calvin is also known as one of the leading critics of the creation of ‘Replicants,’ arguing their purpose could equally be filled by robots with the ability to ensure perfect programming being more possible on a machine than a human brain. Calvin was criticized by some for the clinical detachment involved in this criticism, which also included citing the actions of the Rossum Corporation and their failures as an argument against Replicants, though it is generally accepted Calvin couched her criticism this was as part of a broader belief expressing the depth of her true emotions on the topic would be useless.

One of Calvin’s most important consulting jobs, however, involved her work on the MULTIVAC network embedded in a wide range of technology, but notably a key part in voting machines launched starting in the 2012 election. This network not only would ultimately gain sentience, but was a key element leading to Calvin becoming a political target. During the 2020 presidential election, Republican nominee David Jefferson Adams claimed the MULTIVAC network would be used to rig the vote in favor of his Democratic opponent Jonathan Lincoln Duncan. After Duncan’s victory, Adams’ supporters continued to denounce this network and after the President’s Day Massacre of 2022, Adams’ Attorney General Michael Seaver would announce the designers of MULTIVAC, including Calvin, would be charged with electoral interference and treason. As the Adams administration was actively restricting and rolling back rights, Calvin was only allowed to use the legal services of Jimmy McGill, himself an inmate in New Mexico who was notorious for his role aiding various drug kingpins. However, in a blow to Seaver and Adams, McGill proved an adroit defense attorney and managed to help Calvin escape imprisonment. After getting off, Calvin was involved in anti-Adams activities, participating in protests against the disqualification of Democratic nominee Georgina Hobart from the 2024 election due to allegations of treason and using her professional network to help sabotage technology used in the Adams administration’s efforts to suppress the Gabriel Bell riots and Equisapiens attacks on facilities operated by the Adams aligned WorryFree corporation.

Calvin would rise to increased prominence following the Inauguration Day bombings and subsequent outbreak of the Second American Civil War. She was in California at the time, a region which quickly devolved into chaos as the conflict ignited. Originally, the state government under Governor Hobart declared itself independent. However, Hobart was ousted from power in a coup organized by a number of corporate leaders operating in Silicon Valley, led by the billionaire tech moguls Steve Lift and Peter Isherwall, who installed Zach Morris as Governor. The group’s goal was to bring California into the fold of the Allied States of America, a corporate-driven regime purged of the fundamentalism of Adam’s more fanatical backers. However, shortly after the ASA was formed, its attempt to strike the Greater Korean Republic, who it framed for the bombings, led to the GKR invading the West Coast, occupying a large swath of California. Moreover, the AI Skynet would unleash an army of Terminator units on the state, massacring thousands and imprisoning some in simulations intended to harvest their body heat to power itself. California’s resistance to the ASA, GKR and Skynet organized under the leadership of John Connor, who made Calvin a key member of his inner circle. Calvin helped develop a number of computer viruses that enabled the breakdown of Skynet’s ‘Matrix’ system and helped prevent a GKR advance to the Rocky Mountains. Connor’s Californian resistance group received aid from many other North American factions fighting the Second American Civil War, including the NAN, the United Canadian and American States (a coalition formed in Columbus by the leading claimant to the mantle of the old US and Canada’s government after losing Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta to secessionists) and even the theocratic Republic of Gilead that occupied much of the Deep South.

This unlikely coalition, aimed at the existential threat of Skynet and the GKR as well as the traitors heading the ASA, likely is what made the ceasefire and formation of the Organization of North American Nations in 2028 possible. Calvin, following this, would become a figure in the independent Californian government, working for President Connor as his leading technology advisor. Calvin helped negotiate terms for Japan to send a large amount of the technology dubbed the ‘Japanese Miracle’ to the badly-battered California, enabling rapid reconstruction of devastated cities in the state. Calvin also, in this capacity, developed a series of protocols all sentient machines manufactured in California were obligated to follow: the Three Laws of Robotics, which prevented robots from harming humans or allowing humans to come to harm, ordered preservation of human life except in conflict with the First Law and ordered robot self-preservation save for in instances conflicting with the first two laws. While eventually hailed as a groundbreaking framework, many technology firms scoffed at Calvin’s protocols. The ONAN’s Congress blocked an attempt by ONAN President Lisa Simpson to mandate the Three Laws in the whole ONAN and when Senator Andrew Steele Jarrett, an acolyte of Gilead’s Prophet Steve Jordan, won the 2032 ONAN election, he outright targeted Calvin both for these laws and her public scorn for the politics of Gilead Jarrett made an attempt to enforce nationally. When protests and riots forced Jarrett out in 2035 (sparked by a mix of his heavyhanded push for continent-wide theocracy and his poor handling of the Green Flu pandemic that ravaged his native Gilead and sparked the regime’s collapse to a large-scale revolt a few years later), his successor Elizabeth Winters halted efforts to target Calvin, but continued to resist making the Three Laws mandatory owing to her own efforts to weaponize robots. Opinion on the Three Laws, however, would turn drastically following the CyberLife android revolt in Detroit in 2038 and the rise of the city-state of Zero One in Qumar two years later. In the 2040 ONAN election, the independent ex-Republican Robert McAlistair, who ultimately won, openly endorsed the mandating of Three Laws compliance in all sentient machines, which came into effect in his first year as President.

Calvin continued to work as a psychologist of both humans and robots despite her general fame. In 2029, Calvin made her first visit offworld to Hyper Base, a facility set up on an asteroid by the ONAN military. At various times, Calvin was called in to evaluate US Robotics and Mechanical Men-manufactured robots experiencing malfunction, but also was consulted by a number of other companies and figures as well. The Kwan Do family, who ran Mars’ third largest settlement, hired her to evaluate their drones’ effectiveness and verify their compliance with the Three Laws. Calvin was also contacted by Metaverse Enterprise Solutions to investigate if a simulated character they had created had actually been deleted from existence or not. Calvin’s findings were officially inconclusive but rumors persist that she verified the character did in fact survive, but refused to disclose this information to her creators. The billionaire Cosmo Spacely hired Calvin to help design his ‘Levittowers’ that began cropping up in the 2050’s and 2060’s. Calvin was a prominent opponent of the ONAN’s adoption of the ‘Precrime’ system of predicting crimes before they happened and warned that it coupled with the rise of the ‘street judge’ system would end in the total elimination of civil liberties. Calvin’s role in the public eye would conclude in 2058, with her retirement. After giving a final interview covering thoughts on current events and technology, Calvin would remain a recluse until her death of natural causes in 2064. Calvin would leave a long-lasting legacy, as robotics manufacturing remained heavily influenced by her, though the lead-up to the Great War increased the number of Three Laws-violating robots in existence greatly.
Susan Calvin.png

References
Asimov’s Robots Series, Calvin and Hobbes, Fight Club, Life is Strange, Haunting of Hill House, Ghostbusters, The Black Tapes, Silence of the Lambs, Monster, Class of 1999, WarGames, Colossus: The Forbin Project, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator, Cthulhu Mythos, Scooby Doo, Ex Machina, Westworld, True Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellsing, Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, Interview With a Vampire, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, What We Do in the Shadows, Marvel Comics, Real Steel, Rocky, Pacific Rim, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Silicon Valley, Devs, World War Z, SOCOM: US Navy SEALS, Blade Runner, Dollhouse, Franchise, Shattered Union, The President is Missing, Growing Pains, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Politician, Star Trek, Sorry to Bother You, Jericho, Don’t Look Up, Saved by the Bell, Homefront, The Matrix, Shadowrun, The Handmaid’s Tale, Infinite Jest, Ghost in the Shell, The Simpsons, Parable of the Talents, Christian Nation, Left 4 Dead, Vanquish, Detroit: Become Human, The Animatrix, Jack and Bobby, Empire Earth, Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, The Jetsons, Minority Report, Judge Dredd, Fallout
 
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Not sure what's my favourite crossover here--incorporating the Calvin and Tyler theory, accidental hero of civil liberties Saul Goodman, or the poor engineer who had to adapt the EVAs into a non-womb-based giant robot.

The idea of the Three Laws being a common robotics safety reform people keep not implementing so they can save money feels very realistic.
 
Here's the rare real-world figure who exists in the crossover timeline:
Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English occultist and magician. Even with centuries of prominent magicians arising and asserting themselves—from John Constantine to Saruman to Stephen Strange to Merlin to Heinrich Kemmler—Crowley nonetheless manages to stand out in the history of magic. This is not due to being among the more powerful magicians—indeed compared to many wizards, witches, sorcerers and mages he was rather weak. Nor was he exceptional in his alignment. While he claimed to speak with many entities of a darker note such as the Great Old Ones, the Lords in Black and various demons, he did not appear to direct much of his energies into working to bring about the destruction of the old world even as he did genuinely seek a new Aeon. On the other hand, Crowley was not exceptionally good either. A number of his acolytes would go on to do quite awful things citing his ideals as inspiration even if Crowley himself steered clear of such things. His knowledge of the principles of occultism was solid, but far from universal. Perhaps the main thing that makes Crowley stand out was his own sense of flamboyance and willingness to be known as a magician.

Crowley was born to an upper-class family in Britain in 1875. From a young age, Crowley was fascinated by more supernatural aspects of the world. He was supposedly a childhood friend of Cecil Phantomhive and claimed to have met Phantomhive’s rumored demonic servant on several occasions. Crowley as a child also reported an encounter with the infamous Mr. Hyde as a child. Hyde, in a state between sizes, chased young Crowley for several blocks but ultimately did not harm the child. Crowley also bore witness to the ‘Autumn of Death’ in 1886 and claimed to never have believed the claims of London authorities that sightings of the undead in this time were the result of illness-induced hallucinations. These childhood encounters helped establish Crowley’s early fascination with esoteric topics and hidden knowledge, as did the various murders of Jack the Ripper and Count Dracula that occurred around the same time. Crowley tended to be drawn to the darker side of the occult in particular, but was also fascinated by the Kabbalah and various legends of ancient gods from Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia.

Crowley would seek out a number of groups in the 1890’s. He was involved in forming the Guild of Calamitous Intent in 1897 alongside a number of other notable figures. Crowley would be removed from the group, however, as a result of attempting to use the powers of a mystical orb for himself. An embittered Crowley would next seek initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose, a highly powerful secretive magical order. However, Crowley failed the vetting process and was as a result not allowed to fully initiate, with his mind wiped so he could cause no trouble for the group. The group Crowley ultimately would stick with the longest in this time frame would be the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn was far less powerful than the Blue Rose and its members were not as strong, but Crowley would remain involved in the group until 1901. In 1901, while visiting Egypt, Crowley would come into contact with a number of divine beings. The goddess Nuit and the gods Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Kut spoke to him, dictating the text of a document he later titled The Book of the Law, which proclaimed a number of genuine esoteric secrets alongside the titular Law, being “Do what thou wilt, that is the whole of the law.” Crowley recorded this text in three days with help from his wife Rose and additionally came into contact with the goddess Babalon and the entity Aiwass, who provided guidance in how the Book ought to be written.

Following this, friction soon arose within the Golden Dawn. Crowley’s longtime partners SRMD and Arthwaite would turn on Crowley over forming this new doctrine as the two secretly intended to use the Golden Dawn to advance the agenda of the Black Lodge and viewed Crowley’s ideas as threats to this goal. An undeterred Crowley would chose to break off from the Golden Dawn and form his own group, the Ordo Templi Orientis. The OTO drew a number of major figures over the years, not all of whom remained within the group. The occultist Albion Crawley, who operated largely independently for many years, was an early member, as was Roderick Burgess before he broke off to form his own less successful group. The poet Shelley Arabin, the doctor John Taverner, and the defrocked ex-priest Damien Morcata all were early members of the OTO. The OTO practiced a number of rituals that seemed odd to outsiders and Crowley often bragged about engaging in depravity. He also claimed to communicate with evil forces and called himself ‘the Great Beast 666.’ However, as he eventually expelled Morcata over attempting human sacrifice, it appears this was primarily for show rather than genuine black magic.

Crowley was quite active in the period from after World War I to 1947. He had a residence called Bolskine. He earned quite a reputation as a flamboyant character, but set himself apart from other magicians by his deliberate pursuit of a high profile. Crowley’s prominence led to him being consulted as an expert on occult phenomenon by outsiders such as Professor Edward P. Dunning, American detective Nero Wolfe and criminal mastermind Harry Lime. Crowley also made the acquaintance of American rocket scientist Jack Parsons and encouraged his study of the occult—encouragement which led Parsons ultimately to ill-fated interactions with L. Keith Winton and the ruining of Parsons’ personal life (Crowley himself worked with Parsons and Winton on a lunar expedition in the early postwar era that led to his face being carved into the dark side of the Moon). While most of those who came to Crowley were people who lacked any genuine knowledge of the occult, Crowley did encounter genuine supernatural entities and had some talent.. The magician Oliver Haddo had a number of contacts with Crowley and is generally accepted as the root source of many of Crowley’s deeper magical practices that possessed unambiguous and genuine power. He met the immortal woman Mara at one point and used her experiences to further shape his skill in that side of things. An encounter with a changeling who conformed to others’ desires was another encounter Crowley had that risked great consequences, as Crowley wanted the changeling to be a harbinger of the New Aeon. Crowley himself is considered responsible for creating the Unsound, a cursed audio form that can, if heard in totality, kill one within a year of hearing it. Crowley also formed the sect known as the Hymn of One, which remained active until relatively recently.

In the postwar era, the aged Crowley engaged in a number of pursuits intending to allow him to live for far longer. Crowley had, in his younger years, made a pact with a demon for increased sexual prowess and feared torment in Hell. As a result, he sought to avoid death by any means necessary. Crowley carried out a ritual based on ancient alchemy and texts obtained from a parallel world dominated by alchemists to produce a new body for his soul to inhabit, but the replica he produced of himself (a younger, long-haired version of himself but who possessed his memories) fled rather than complied, ultimately rejecting occultism in favor of hyper-advanced science in exile in Japan. Crowley, on his deathbed, carried out a ritual intending to ensure he was reborn. This ritual succeeded in part, but unfortunately trapped his soul in a realm inspired in shows made by Toon actors conforming to many of the rules of that world. Meanwhile, Crowley’s body would be found by a vampire, who converted him into one. This vampiric body would go on to dub himself Black Sabbath and carry out many atrocities. A portion of Crowley’s soul had been left behind in his body before the vampire attack and this portion was consigned to Hell as agreed. Eventually, this shard of Crowley’s soul would become a demon using Crowley as his name. This demon would eventually become ruler of Hell—something that doubtless the original Crowley could not help but envy.

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Khan Noonien Singh
Khan Noonien Singh (August 15th, 1947-disappeared June 4, 1996) was an Indian activist, politician and dictator best known for his rule as Prime Minister of the Republic of India from 1984 to 1991 and as Khan of the Great Khanate of India from 1991 to 1996. Singh was born in 1947 to Adhar Singh and Hira Dakkar on the very date India officially became independent. Dakkar, notably, was the granddaughter of the famed Indian pirate/revolutionary and member of Britain’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Prince Chhatrasal Dakkar, better known as Captain Nemo. He was one of several hundred ‘midnight children’ born at the very moment India gained independence and like many of them was a metahuman. Singh, in particular, possessed latent psychic abilities that enabled him to quickly understand the emotions and intentions of those around him, a tool which greatly enabled him both as a child and into adulthood. Singh, owing to these abilities, would be discovered, kidnapped and forcibly recruited into the Chrysalis Project, a program intended to develop superior humans. The Chrysalis Project was the brainchild of the post-World War II incarnation of Hydra and was overseen by Wilhelm Strasse, a Nazi scientist smuggled out as part of Operation Paperclip who remained loyal to the ideals of that system. Singh’s treatment at the hands of the Chrysalis Project, which de facto raised him from 1950 to 1958, was extraordinarily mixed as was the case with many metahumans part of the project. On one hand, they were idealized as incarnations of a new super-race that would one day rule the world by the Hydra scientists running the program. On the other hand, the fact that so many Chrysalis subjects were not in line with Hydra’s Nazi racial ideals meant many were subject to physical violence and abuse and the project often tasked the metahuman children with a wide array of dangerous tasks.

Singh in particular was put in a number of heavily perilous situations at the behest of the Chrysalis Project. He was tasked with obtaining Kanamit technology during the brief lull between their departure from Earth and the world’s governments seizing their technology. Singh managed to pilfer only a single device, which was nonetheless enough to allow the Chrysalis Project to rapidly analyze human DNA. Singh was also sent to the underwater city of Rapture in 1959 to obtain plasmids, managing to sneak both in and out undetected thanks to playing off different factions within the city against each other. Hydra viewed the plasmids as a potential tool to augment their own ranks and avoid the need for the likes of Singh to directly father children. Singh also was tasked with carrying out contact with various other large criminal and terrorist cells to offer Hydra’s covert support to the likes of SPECTRE, THRUSH and KAOS as part of efforts to provoke global instability. By the time he reached age 13, Singh had already had dozens upon dozens of brushes with death and killed over 30 people personally. However, at this age, Singh finally came to question the Chrysalis Project’s intentions, recognizing the contradictions that his youth had caused him to ignore before. Singh would lead a small insurrection against Hydra in India, burning down the local Chrysalis Project facility and murdering several of those he knew were operating on Hydra’s behalf within India, most notably the mad scientist Dr. Cyclops. In the years that followed, Singh was somewhat aimless and unsure of what to do next, absent other direction. In other circumstances, he might have become a superhero and he initially did hold the likes of Superman in high esteem. However, in the early 1960’s, the emergence of the mutant community helped push him in a different direction.

The global backlash towards mutants was largely sparked by a belief that being born with superpowers was a result of literally mutation at birth. To many who hated them, mutants were as abominable as any kaiju and for similar reasons. The hostility to metahumans in general was pervasive, but there was a sense that for those who had become superhuman there was some attachment to baseline humanity left. However, mutants did not have to have that attachment and thus, in the view of anti-mutant activists, a distinct threat. In response to this backlash came the rise of Erik Lensherr, known better as Magneto. Magneto advocated a doctrine that mutants were the next stage of human evolution and should seek to take their rightful place as dominant over the rest of humanity, echoing the beliefs of John Wainwright. Singh would quickly come to embrace this mindset, though he welded it with unique elements of his own country’s circumstances. Seeing the destitution and poverty so many experienced in India firsthand–himself having lived through it after fleeing the Chrysalis Project–Singh came to believe that a part of why mutants should dominate was out of a sense of duty to uplift ‘lower’ humanity’s station. In this sense, Singh’s Augment ideology can be understood as a spiritual successor to Gellert Grindelwald’s perspective of wizard supremacy for the good of wizards and non-wizards alike as well as the even earlier conception of ‘white man’s burden’ that was popular in the 19th century. Singh wrote a series of letters to Lensherr outlining his beliefs of this sort and, while Lensherr never formally replied, a number of his later attitudes reflected heavy similarities to Singh’s thought and were a blueprint for his governorship of Genosha in the 1980’s.
Singh was able to lie low until the late 1970’s, when like many other Indian metahumans he was designated an enemy of the state by Prime Minister Priya Duryodhani. Duryodhani, seeking to seize dictatorial power for herself, used fear of civil unrest and metahumans as a tool to justify taking on emergency powers that enabled her to suspend elections and quash dissent by force. Most relevant to Singh, however, were the efforts of Duryodhani’s government to eliminate the Midnight Children and other metahumans. Hundreds of them were taken into government custody and subjected to abusive medical procedures that left most of them depowered and sterile. Singh himself was imprisoned and subject to this horrendous treatment, but managed to escape with some portion of his powers remaining. Singh was reportedly hidden by a man named Raghaven, who due to a psychotic break perceived Singh as his own son Raghu whom had been a victim of police violence during the Emergency. Eventually, the Emergency ended in 1977 and Duryodhani was removed from power in subsequent elections, but an embittered Singh vowed vengeance. He concluded the only way to protect metahumans in India was for them to seize control of the state apparatus. Singh over the next several years worked to build a power base, making contact with outside metahumans such as the Tomorrow People and Lensherr’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in a bid to gain support for his plans to seize political power. Within India, Singh recruited the bulk of surviving Midnight Children to his side and additionally built support among opposition to the regime, in particular focusing on dissenting government officials like Indu Sarkar and Vikram Malhotra (whom Singh gained the loyalty of by having a mutant ally of his heal a series of physical and mental injuries inflicted upon him by police).
Singh himself, meanwhile, used his charm to infiltrate the Kaurava Party and get close to Duryodhani. By the time of her 1980 return to power, Singh was a part of Duryodhani’s personal guard. By repeatedly halting (staged) assassination attempts, Singh has made himself seem a loyal supporter of Duryodhani. Singh continued to bide his time and build a covert power base of mutants and baseline humans alike within India while waiting for the opportune moment to claim full power. That moment would arrive in 1984, when World War III broke out after, in the wake of most American-based superheroes being abducted by the otherworldly beings known as the Beyonder or the Monitor, President Cyclops/Webster made a poorly-timed joke that convinced the Soviets to activate Project Koschei and invade large swathes of Europe and North America. While the rest of the world was distracted by trying to use Gojira to contain Cthulhu, the ongoing fighting in Germany, Hawaii and the Rockies and British Prime Minister Jim Jasper’s proclamation of a fascist ‘English Socialist’ regime in Britain after usurping Joan Carpenter, Singh had a perfect opening to organize the assassination of Duryodhani and her followers. Singh personally struck down the Prime Minister and allies embedded throughout India made quick work of fellow Kaurava Party members. Not only Kaurava Party leaders were targeted, Singh also eliminated a number of key opposition figures, high-ranking figures within the Indian military and even prominent businessmen and actors whom he deemed a threat to his rule. Singh’s proclamation of taking power in India occurred only after well over 1,000 men and women whom could have stood in his way were eliminated by his followers. The official story Singh provided was that Soviet operatives had sought to decapitate the Indian government as they had already done in neighboring China, which already was beginning to collapse into civil war. Singh’s assumption of the role of Prime Minister of India was thus framed as an effort to maintain stability.

Singh’s swift action and prepared excuses were crucial to giving his regime the legitimacy it needed early on. In the name of anti-communism, Singh was able to continue to purge potential threats to his rule. Singh did not, however, only have an iron fist to offer the people of India. He also pursued investment in infrastructure, education, healthcare and entertainment for the public, something that was both a logical outgrowth of his philosophy and a crucial act to wooing an uncertain public to his side. Singh spent the first three years of his reign largely focused on this consolidation of power, but after the 1986 general election allowed Singh loyalists to sweep Parliament, Singh felt comfortable enough to begin looking outward once more. His first priority was India’s large neighbor: China. Chinese-Indian relations had long been frosty, with a number of border skirmishes being fought with the country under their previous leader Chairman Peng Guoliang. But now Peng was dead, a victim of a Soviet first strike on Beijing, and a country with hundreds of millions was in the middle of a bloody struggle for power not seen since the 1930’s. Chinese refugees fled into Southeast Asia and India alike and Singh was easily able to make the case that intervention to restore order in China was a matter of India’s national interest. Both the Soviets and the United States also viewed restoring stability in China as important, but even after World War III formally ended in 1985, neither side was willing to trust the other in the country. India, in a sense, would be a nice, neutral compromise in the minds of American and Soviet leaders who agreed to Singh’s plan. Singh selected the warlord Wu Qinghua as the ideal candidate to manage China, ostensibly due to her ties to the old government coupled with a reformist bent. However, in reality, there was another reason for choosing her. Wu Qinghua was closely aligned with the Chinese criminal masterminds Fu Manchu, Shen Yu, and Zhang Tong–all three of whom were closely tied to the supernatural elements of Chinese history. The three figures were de facto immortal and possessed a number of heightened physical and mental abilities. Singh viewed them as natural allies to his own belief system and, as it turned out, they agreed.

By 1989, Indian support and the supernatural arsenal of the 3 ‘hidden hands’ behind Chairwoman Wu enabled China to once again be under one government (outside of Taiwan and Zheng Fa, which stubbornly clung to independence). With an ally/de facto puppet state secured in the North, Singh next sought to recruit additional allies across the globe. His vision had cleared considerably thanks to learning more of the supernatural world from Zhang–the Augment world would not only be run by mutants and superhumans, but by wizards, witches, cyborgs, vampires and any others whom had, by birth or by growth, transcended the domain of ‘normal’ humans. Singh invested a lot of time drawing former subjects to psychic research programs like the Athena Plan, Project Firestarter and the Zener Project to India, offering not only protection but a chance for vengeance. Singh also engaged in overtures to supernatural beings he considered potential allies, to mixed success. Lucius Malfoy and other remnant Death Eaters in Britain cordially received his overtures, but did not sincerely plan to taking much action to align with him. Queen Beryl’s Dark Kingdom comparatively was more open to such an arrangement, though Beryl herself harbored ambitions to rule the world on her own and viewed Singh as disposable. On the other hand, the ancient vampire known as Sariel who held those he fed upon in an unusually strong thrall, rejected the prospect of any alliance outright, vowing to conquer the world on his own. Singh quickly realized he could not solely rely on unusual humans as allies and by the time he officially proclaimed the Great Khanate of India he was ready to form alliances of convenience with mundane humans.
One of Singh’s first mundane allies was Kazakh dictator Ivan Radek, who infamously helped orchestrate the hijacking of Air Force One in 1991 while President James Marshall was aboard it. The extent to which Singh was in favor of such an action remains uncertain, but it is known Singh publicly condemned the hijacking and cut off Radek with little fanfare. He had his other allies Zateb Kazim and Heinrich Krull act with more discretion moving forward. The formal beginning of the conflicts dubbed the Eugenics Wars would only begin in 1992 following the assumption of power by ultranationalists in Japan. Japan’s existing pro-American government had been badly weakened by the destruction of Tokyo by the entity known as Akira in 1989 and order was restored largely at gunpoint by ultranationalist General Ryoichi Yoshi, who was deeply nostalgic for Japan’s imperial past. Singh viewed Yoshi as a potential ally and privately urged him to form a military regime, but Yoshi instead stood aside in favor of Mogataru Koga. However, an economic crisis allowed the collapse of his government and the ascension of Hiroshi Goto as Prime Minister, who began implementing Yoshi’s far-right policies including responding to rising violence in schools (demonstrated primarily by 1989’s Akademi High School murders) by forcing teenagers into deathmatches. For the Goto government, the United States was a particular enemy and, with Singh’s support, Japan launched an open war on the United States in 1992. The war was brief, owing to Japan’s comparatively weak military footing. Most of the potential aces in the hole–the use of mechas, weaponization of Monsterland kaiju or large-scale intervention by Japanese superheroes–were stymied by antiwar sentiment on the part of those whom could have introduced them. In the end, Japan was defeated and the Singh-aligned government collapsed (though not before killing US President Florentyna Kane in an attack on the US Capitol).

Singh was undeterred by the failure of his Japanese allies. Indeed, he ramped up the Great Khanate’s support to sympathetic factions across the globe. When South Africa collapsed into civil war amidst a coup by hardliner Karl Voster, Singh made sure to provide Vorster with large amounts of weapons and even some metahuman support. Singh also provided manpower and weapons to M. Bison’s regime in Panau as it began invading neighboring island nations such as Banoi, Lilliput and Patusan. Genosha proved to be a natural ally of Singh’s government, acting as a hub from which Indian-made weapons and volunteers provided by Singh could flow to various allies of convenience. The terrorist organization Cobra also partnered with Singh out of convenience, ramping up the threat posed by the group considerably since the denting given to it by 1980’s counterterrorism efforts. Cobra was Singh’s preferred proxy for installing Khanate-friendly governments in Southeast Asia, which succeeded in Sarkhan and Laos even as it drew Vietnam, Vietmahl, Cambodia and Thailand to unite against them. Even ostensible opponents of metahumans were willing to form alliances of convenience with Singh’s government. When Ayatollah Daryaei’s Iran annexed Iraq, proclaimed the formation of the United Islamic Republic and invaded Kuwait, Qumar and Asran simultaneously, India and their puppet government in China were the nations who blocked a resolution condemning their actions at the United Nations and funneled heavy amounts of aid to the country. The period from 1992 to 1994 was characterized by these small-scale proxy conflicts.
It was 1995 that would see the conflict really ramp up in intensity thanks to the crashing of a meteor near the Tiber River carrying the element Tiberium. Singh, wishing to seize the material for his own use, convinced his ally Hank Scorpio to mount a coup in the United States. Scorpio was able to temporarily seize the Eastern Seaboard and forced President Jack Stanton to resign in favor of his Vice President Bud Hammond. In Russia, a coup was likewise attempted by Ivan Tretiak, a Russian hardliner seeking to restore the USSR by ousting Russian President Sergei Karpov. While these coups were ultimately repelled, they delayed the securing of Tiberium. Singh would form a common cause with the Brotherhood of Nod, whom under the command of their enigmatic leader Kane wanted to seize Tiberium as well. Singh’s support for Scorpio, Tretiak and Nod would at last force the world’s hands, with Russia and the US agreeing to implement crippling sanctions on India and China. China’s government yielded first, with Wu Qinghua being forced to stand down in favor of Lian Ma. Meanwhile, Singh’s hold in India, for the first time in a dozen years, faced dissent. Strikes and protests that could have been crushed with little backlash in previous years now escalated to riots, the people of India no longer believing in Singh’s promises of a brighter future for India. Singh still resisted launching outright war until 1996, when the Global Defense Initiative announced an intervention into India to remove a Brotherhood of Nod cell within the country. Singh ordered the Indian Armed Forces to resist the intervention, which they did for a time but the outcome was never in doubt. Singh vanished from New Delhi alongside his closest allies and followers on June 4th. Lakshmi Rupavathy, the leader of Singh’s previously-impotent opposition, would become Prime Minister of what was now once again the Republic of India.

The fact Singh disappeared has led to no shortage of theories about what became of him. Some believe Singh, much like the earlier would-be conqueror Adenoid Hynkel, committed suicide after realizing his failure to fulfill his ambitions. However, the additional disappearance of so many of his core allies–many of whom were also well-known figures–has meant many are dissatisfied with that explanation (though something like the Jamestown mass suicide is theoretically possible, it would be difficult to destroy all the bodies involved). Some claim Singh and the Brotherhood of Nod’s leader Kane had in fact been the same person and Singh had simply gone to join the Brotherhood in full as his rule in India collapsed. Due to the lack of resemblance between Kane and Singh, this theory is largely the provenance of cranks. Some claim that Singh escaped back in time or to a parallel reality–with declassified documents indicating Singh had made contact with a parallel world dominated by a nation calling itself the Domination of Draka serving as fuel for this belief. This is a theory that, while possible, has little other evidence going for it. One of the most popular theories is that Singh and his followers escaped to outer space, either to find another planet to settle upon or simply to wait to return to Earth. Many who believe this theory claim that Singh and his followers may have been responsible for directing the Harvester fleet towards Earth or launching the Wolf-Biederman asteroid (sometimes also known as ‘Dottie’) at the planet, citing that the meteor appeared to change trajectories before heading towards the planet, unlike the previous near-miss of the Hamner-Brown comet. Despite doubts about the veracity of that claim, declassified documents from Singh’s rule do indicate a robust investment in space travel technology. Of all theories, this may prove to be the most credible, but remains unconfirmed to this day. Despite the frequent brutality of Singh’s rule, a number of people in India actually hold Khan Noonien Singh in high regard, owing to his investments in public services and his efforts to increase India’s international standing. A cult venerating Singh as a living god has a shockingly high following in India, with it being estimated the vanished dictator is worshiped by just under 1 million people.
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Star Trek, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Midnight’s Children, Marvel Comics (Captain America, X-Men, Secret Wars, Iron Man), Wolfenstein: The New Order, To Serve Man, Bioshock, James Bond, The Man From UNCLE, Get Smart, Shikari (1963 film), DC Comics (Superman, Crisis on Infinite Earths), Odd John, Harry Potter, The Great Indian Novel, Piravi, The Tomorrow People, Indu Sarkar, Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi, Whoops Apocalypse!, Murder in the White House, A Colder War, Red Storm Rising, Red Dawn, Hotline Miami 2, 1984, The Devil’s Alternative, The Shoes of the Fisherman, The Red Detachment of Women, The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu, Evil Genius, Phoenix Wright, Terror in Resonance, Firestarter, Second Sight, Sailor Moon, The Strain, Air Force One, Sahara, The Simpsons (Cape Feare, You Only Move Twice), Akira, I Was Born But…, Jack Ryan Series (Debt of Honor, Executive Orders), Yandere Simulator, Battle Royale, Godzilla, The Prodigal Daughter, Vortex, Mortal Combat, Just Cause, Dead Island, Gulliver’s Travels, Lord Jim, GI Joe, The Ugly American, Destroy All Humans!, The West Wing, Full Metal Panic!, Command & Conquer, Primary Colors, Political Animals, The Saint, Maanagara Kaaval, The Great Dictator, The A-Team (Children of Jamestown), The Domination Series, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Lucifer’s Hammer
 
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When Joe Manchin announced he would not seek re-election, Democrats were scared their shot at keeping the majority was doomed. There was no obvious alternative whom could win West Virginia-at least until a local Democrat suggested finding a candidate with high name recognition and favorability. The choice was unconventional-a reclusive political novice who many viewed as a relic, but facing little alternative the pick was nominated. Running on a platform that, while shockingly liberal for an R+42 state, mostly emphasized strengthening local infrastructure and reinvigorating West Virginian culture. The Democrats’ unorthodox choice paid off when they, in a shocking upset, held the seat even as Trump won the state by a 50 point margin. The seat was saved and history was made.
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Did something different for one of my megacrossover timeline updates' formats. Still has a wikibox though.
Egregiupsaltes
“EGREGIUPSALTES-He is an infernal Duke of immense power and appeareth akin to a man with red skin and horns extending from his ears and chin. He causeth all who surround the summoner to engage in song, dance and other such merriment for as long as the summoner can bindeth him and provides inspiration and talent in the arts of musical composition and stage performance. He is capable of pushing men to reveal hidden secrets that they would otherwise keep concealed. He governeth 20 Legions of Spirits and is summoned by a seal imprinted upon a talisman. Knoweth this should ye summon him: Egregiupsaltes, while oft of good humor, demandeth burnt offerings. If they are not received any personages around thee may be compelled to dance until they burn. Egregiupsaltes also doth from time to time demand a bride, whom he shalt take to his realm if he is given one.”

-Excerpt from De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn, 1269

“NEW YORK, NEW YORK-NYPD sources have confirmed that popular nightclub singer Reno Sweeney was found dead in her apartment this morning at the age of 42. Sweeney, a former evangelist and ex-fiancé of British Lord Evelyn Oakleigh, was found burned to death. The circumstances of Sweeney’s death closely mirror the circumstances surrounding the demise of champion gambler Sky Masterston two years ago, though the cause of Masterton’s death likewise remains a mystery. Sweeney’s funeral is scheduled for next Sunday.”

-Obituary for Reno Sweeney found in the Daily Bugle, April 17th, 1939

“Yes folks, you’ve got trouble! Right here in River City! And that trouble is Satanism! I have found proof—definitive proof—that members of this town have been consorting with dark forces! I want to assure you fine folks that I will work tirelessly to uncover who is responsible for unleashing dark forces on your fair community, so long as I draw breath!”

-Excerpt from a sermon by Reverend Elmer Gantry, 1921

“Blue Rose Case #046-Localized Musical Phenomenon. Seem to manifest in close proximity to teenaged populations (see Rydell High School and Jets-Sharks incidents files). Potential ties to the music of Conrad Birdie under investigation but remain unconfirmed. Known impact on Agent Everett Scott in course of 1959 investigation into alien phenomena. Dr. Scott’s opinion is that aliens in question may venerate a particular infernal entity possessing the ability to create this.”

-Excerpt from a briefing memo sent by UIU Agent Kent Mansley to FBI Director J. Henry Lux, 1961

“The immolation of the gigantic Triffid responsible for terrorizing New York is still under active investigation by authorities. As of this time, police and federal officials remain uncertain as to how it was that the entity formerly known as Audrey II met its demise. Initial rumors that the Justice League was responsible for doing so have been debunked.

Speaking of which, as the Triffid invasion seems to be cast into memory alongside the Mollusc, Kanamit and Furon attacks, we are continuing our efforts to encourage people to help people find missing loved ones. If you are in the Baltimore area and see this woman—Penny Lou Pingleton—please contact the number you see before you…”

-Broadcast by Howard Beale on UBS Evening News, March 16, 1962

“My father’s papers have concealed within them some most foul and infernal documents. I have chosen to destroy them rather than let future generations be forced to confront his mistakes. The ring he had given Anna…was that a token of affection or a curse he sought to pass off? Either way I have ordered it buried in a remote part of Indochina. Hopefully it stays buried.”

-Excerpt from the diary of Thai King Chulalongkorn, written in December of 1868

“No, please, I can get you more sacrifices! I was able to give you a busload before, remember? NOOOO!! AGGGH!”

-Last words of Cory Radison, 2011

“SCP-7172 is not solely responsible for localized musical phenomena. It is estimated that at least 40% of LMPs occur due to the radiation of dimensional energies from the Land of Oz in areas where the boundaries between worlds wear thin for instance. However, SCP-7172 is responsible for a very high number of instances of LMPs including documented instances in:

-Albuquerque, New Mexico, centered on East High School. No casualties documented.

-Salt Lake City, Utah-Centered on the Latter-Day Saints Church Missionary Training Center, effects followed several elders on missions to Uganda, Japan and Norway. 3 casualties documented (2 in Norway, 1 in Japan)

-Cladwell, New Mexico-Effects were felt by the entirety of town. Notably SCP-7172’s impacts were indirectly responsible for the Water Riots of 2011 and the subsequent destruction of the town. Direct casualties: 6 Indirect Casualties: 732.”

-Excerpt from SCP-7172’s file, declassified 2038

“Hehehe, Ol’ Jack hasn’t got anything on me. My sweet muse, my sweet aide, he accepts my blood offerings as good as the fire. And he helps me stay clear of Mr. Noose—more’n he did for Mr. Todd, eh?

Warmest regards,

Mack the Knife.”

-Letter from Mack the Knife to London Police, sent 1890
Egregiupsaltes.png


Assassins, kitties, prophets—I’ve got range

I made Romans indulge in styles quite strange.

Even if they don’t know all the arts,

Everyone has a song in their hearts.

Theatre troupes, AIDs patients, naval ships,

Revolutionaries, newsboys, even SQUIPS.

I strip away every shred of their doubt

Take that energy, and let it all out.

Egregiupsaltes-My potential true name for the demon Sweet from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Once More, With Feeling, whose presence caused people to sing and dance uncontrollably. The name is Latin for ‘sweet singer.’

De Vermis Mysteriis-Fictional occult text originally created by Robert Bloch and sometimes used by H.P. Lovecraft. The text style I wrote in is modeled after the text of the real-world Goetia.

Reno Sweeney-One of the main cast of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes.

Sky Masterston-One of the main characters in Guys and Dolls.

Daily Bugle-Newspaper that employs Spider-Man in Marvel Comics

River City-Setting of The Music Man.

Reverend Elmer Gantry-The central character from the novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis. Gantry is a corrupt con artist in the source material—but he happens to be onto something this time.

Blue Rose Case-Blue Rose cases are cases involving anomalous phenomena the US government looked into in Twin Peaks.

Rydell High School-Setting of Grease

Jets-Sharks incident-A reference to the plot of West Side Story.

Conrad Birdie-Elvis Presley-like musician in Bye Bye Birdie…which is a musical. The part about potential ties to the music is either A) a hint Birdie is summoning demons on the side or B) a reference to how people used to freak out about rock and roll music. You can be the judge.

Everett Scott-Dr. Scott is a character in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

UIU-Unusual Incidents Unit. FBI division specializing in anomalies in the SCP Foundation canons. Here the UIU is also the X-Files division from The X-Files.

Kent Mansley-US government agent in The Iron Giant. Here works for the UIU

J. Henry Lux-Our J. Edgar Hoover analogue. Henry Lux is from the film The President’s Analyst.

Triffid-Alien race from Day of the Triffids.

Audrey II-The central villain of the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Here Audrey II is a kind of Triffid whose efforts in the show to spread more of his kind around and consume the world are to advance the Triffid invasion.

Justice League-From DC Comics. The ‘initial rumors’ part is in reference to how the Triffid invasion was dealt with by Superman in my original iteration of Worlds We Weave.

Mollusc-Another name for the Martians in War of the Worlds, used to indicate they are not truly from Mars.

Kanamit-Alien race that pretends to be benevolent but really plans to consume humanity in To Serve Man, a standalone story and an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Furon-Alien race from Destroy All Humans! Many of the earlier games involve them attacking in the 1950’s.

Penny Lou Pingleton-Best friend of the heroine in Hairspray. Her disappearance may be because of the Triffids or…

Howard Beale, UBS-The central character in the film Network. UBS is the network that employs him canonically.

Anna-The heroine of the musical The King and I. Chulalongkorn is a real-world figure who is fictionalized in the same show.

Buried in a remote part of Indochina-OK this is a bit of a stretch, but I was hoping this could be an allusion to Miss Saigon.

Cory Radison-Glee club head in the Community episode Regional Holiday Music. He canonically killed the original glee club in a bus crash, which here has even more sinister reasons than in the canon

SCP-7172-Made-up SCP from the SCP Foundation

Land of Oz-Setting of The Wizard of Oz

40% due to Oz-A justification for not having literally ALL musicals be due to Sweet

East High School-Setting of High School Musical

Salt Lake City, Utah-This is a reference to the events of The Book of Mormon. Notably Sweet’s worst effects here didn’t impact our main cast.

Cladwell, New Mexico-Made-up name for the town depicted in Urinetown.

Ol’ Jack-Meant to be Jack the Ripper.

Mr. Todd-Meant to be Sweeney Todd. The implication is that Sweeney tried to make a deal with Sweet only for it to not really work out.

Mack the Knife-Murderer from The Threepenny Opera

Assassins-A reference to the musical Assassins

Kitties-A reference to the musical Cats

Prophets-A reference to Jesus Christ: Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Romans indulge in styles quite strange-Refers to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Theatre troupes-Refers specifically to Kiss Me Kate

AIDs patients-A dual reference to Angels in America and RENT

Naval ships-Refers specifically to the HMS Pinafore

Revolutionaries-Refers to Les Miserables

Newsboys-A reference to Newsies

Even SQUIPS-SQUIPS are from Be More Chill

Pokotho-An entity with the epithet ‘the Singular Voice’ which comes to us by way of the Hatchetfield series plays created by Team Starkid. Pokotho is one of the Lords in Black and according to the lore ‘hates every voice but his own.’ Pokotho’s debut seems to have been in The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals, where a seemingly-alien plague that appears to be a manifestation of Pokotho makes people join a hive mind that makes them sing and dance as though in a musical. The parallels to Once More, With Feeling inspired the connection.
 
you are a fucking genius

I have so many questions. Is Egregiupsaltes the Proprieter from Assassins, or the Balladeer? Did he help drive Teyve out of his village? Was he a courtier to Hades of Hadestown, or summoned by J Wellington Wells, or a contempory of Beetlejuice? Did Evan Hansen sacrifice Connor to Egregiupsaltes for fame, which is why everyone liked that musical even though it was crap?

(These are all rhetorical questions, I'm just trying to express my giddy awe. Except the bit about Dear Evan Hansen that's canon now)

This is the exact kind of nuthouse canon-melding megacrossovers should be about.
 
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