Seraphim66 - Timeline

2092 The world sucks. The Sahara Desert has grown to encompass India, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe. China's subterranean and atmospheric nuclear testing has wrecked much of the Eastern hemisphere’s ecosystem, and only atomic powered desalinization plants and their conquest of Japan and Australia allows them to support their dwindling population at a subsistence level. Western Europe and Britain continue to survive, barely, on Canadian food and uranium shipments. Atomic desalinization plants along the eastern Atlantic seaboard keep Europe alive, but steadily poison the surrounding ecosystem with poorly disposed of wastes. In North America, the Arctic pipeline has kept the population steadily supplied with potable drinking water, allowing them to continue to squander and pollute at levels the rest of the world can only dream of. Yet a cabal of the seven most powerful beings in the world has reached the conclusion that the Earth's resources are nearly used up... at best, the present level of North American civilization can only last another twenty years.

Fortunately, these beings have technology beyond the wildest dreams of most human scientists, stolen and extrapolated from several crashed alien space ships that have been covertly studied by their carefully controlled military-industrial-media complex since the late 19th Century.They have already used this technology to radically extend their own lifespans, to amplify their own natural psychic abilities, to grant them economic dominance over the entire globe, to systematically erase any and all mention of their identities or even existences from the knowledge of mankind. Now, having finally drained the planet, they decide to launch themselves backwards in time to the mid 19th Century, which they will carve up into separate feudal territories and rule as gods. Implicit in this plan is an assumption that this time, they will be more ecologically aware, and thus avoid the nightmarish present they are now fleeing. Their mission is thus not a cowardly retreat from the inevitable consequences of their own self-serving actions, but a noble and heroic quest to save the entire planet and all life on it from the follies of short-sighted greed.

1864 The seven arrive in the American Midwest and adopt local identities by replacing influential businessman and political figures in their chosen spheres of geographic dominance. Using their detailed knowledge of the immediate future, their advanced technology, and their amplified psychic abilities, they begin to build shadowy networks of covert economic, political, and military power, swiftly coming to utterly dominate world events.

1915 By now the seven are well entrenched, each in their own sphere of influence - Woden rules Europe, J’jjjtt runs Great Britain and Canada, Sin-Sun has China and Japan, Immanuel holds the Middle East, Ikona has control of the Russian Imperium, Old Crow has the United States, and Ahriman is in charge of Central and South America. They meet infrequently to work out the course of world affairs. It's decided that the United States will stay out of what is being called the World War for its first few years, until the potential for profit from the international arms trade has reached its maximum.

1924 The seven immortals meet again. America has enjoyed great prosperity following the World War; to balance this, a time of economic downturn is decreed. This will eventually be reversed by the advent of the Second World War, but America is once again to stay out of it until the market is ready for her entry.

1938 Woden rebels against the cabal's dictate that his sphere of dominion will lose yet another World War, and begins using advanced technology to create superweapons for the German Reich. He also guides the Third Reich's fumbling genetic research onto more fruitful paths. He convinces his putative ally in the conflict, Sin-Sun, to do the same. In late 1938, eight SS soldiers with the ability to hurl lightning bolts from their outstretched hands (Team Donar, popularly known as 'Fritzkrieg') take the field on the Western Front. Rumors of Asian genetic experiments along the same lines are born out when Japan inadventently creates, and after a brief rampage through Tokyo, quickly destroys, a gigantic sauroid monster through the atomic mutation of the genes of a Gekko lizard . The other five immortals are stunned by this treason, and must scramble to arm the governments in their own spheres of influence with similar weaponry and super-operatives.

1940 An exhaustive period of covert and haphazard genetic engineering and secret Allied goverment experimentation with incomprehensibly advanced technology culminates in one success, Captain Liberty. This is quickly followed by other successes, including Storm Spirit, Doughboy, Dr. Sage, the Domino Twins, Triple Agent, Thunder Bette, the Bombshell, Flying Fortress, V-Day and the Little Victories, and several others. Woden and Sin-Sun continue to aid their own thrall-goverments with advanced rockets, energy rays, and more haphazard genetic manipulation, resulting in dozens of Axis superhumans joining the fray as well. In the United States, Japan, and Central Europe, cancer rates quadruple during this time period, and the infant mortality rate doubles, although these figures are easily concealed from a wartime populace used to censorship and propaganda.

1945 The war ends roughly as planned, with the defeat of the Axis powers, although it has taken three years longer and millions more lives than originally scheduled to bring about this result. Sin-Sun, seeing the writing on the wall in late 1944, has Japan surrender nearly a full year earlier than Woden’s puppet Third Reich and then sets about rebuilding Japan into an eventual economic giant. Of the hundreds of superhumans more or less specifically created for the War, only about four dozen survive through Germany's final surrender in July of 1945. Woden vanishes into obscurity barely a full step ahead of the combined forces of the other immortals. The remaining immortals feel that the surviving superhumans are a dangerously chaotic rogue element in world politics, and make plans to liquidate them. The Axis operatives are simply captured and executed as war criminals, but the Allied operatives are regarded as heroes by most of the world population and must be dealt with more delicately.

1948 A covert campaign is mounted against the remaining superhumans: first, they are encouraged to join one all encompassing agency, where they can be gathered into one spot and dealt with all at once. Those few that refuse are dealt with separately; Brenda Domino, for example, is shot by "Mafia hitmen" who are actually covert FBI operatives. Most of the President's Peacetime Patrol are killed in late 1948 when, attempting to capture a group of Soviet spies in the tunnels of the subterranean testing grounds at Yucca Flats, they are 'accidentally' caught in an underground H-bomb explosion. The remaining superhumans are gradually picked off, until, by 1953, virtually all of them are dead and the few who still survive are deep in hiding. It becomes obvious to the ruling immortals during this period that rampant and widespread genetic tampering during the war has led to a permanently heightened mutation rate in human germ plasm throughout the world.

1962 The immortals’ shared supercomputer, Retrograde, makes a flat prediction that at least .01% of the current population possesses the potential for superhuman abilities, and as mutated genes recombine in each succeeding generation, this percentage will increase geometrically. When asked to predict future social consequences of this, Retrograde flatly states that by 1997, the superhuman population will be large enough to effectively make the world population unpredictable and ungovernable by any known means available to a small handful of secret rulers. The only possible way to avert this trend is to gain overt military control of at least 90% of the world’s population by 1974 and enforce drastic global population control measures.

1972 - The enigmatic entity known as Seraphim66 begins to covertly assemble a small group of the few remaining superhumans in existence. This entity's goal, apparently, is the destruction of the immortals, although the purpose for doing so remains obscure. Seraphim66 eventually gathers together Lazarus, Simone Runstrom, Kelsey Abbot, Michael McCauley and Dodey M'fenka. First they must keep the renegade immortal, Woden, from destroying the other immortals (and much of the world in the process). Then they must defeat the remaing immortals. If they manage to do all that, they then must defeat the most dangerous opponent of all...