Welcome to Earth, but not the one you grew up on. Until 1971 it was β same Cold War, same Vietnam, same moon landing. Then Apollo 14 cracked a pocket of lunar rock it shouldn't have, and the timeline split.
That crack is the whole world you're about to play in.
The Night Everything Changed: The Emergence (1971)
February 1971. The Apollo 14 return capsule comes home dusty in a way telemetry didn't predict. Inside that dust is Lunite β an ancient, irradiated mineral. Refined, it becomes Aetherium, the self-sustaining battery that will end the oil age. Breathed, it binds to one gene in every ten thousand people: the Spark-gene.
By summer, people are flying.
The first decade is called Wonder & Terror for a reason. Cults around the first flying man. Governments asking Soviet bioweapon or American mutation? No answer, just more of them every month. Every superpower in this world traces back to that dust β biological, not mystical. If you have a power, the registry files you under one of five letters for what it is:
M β Mutate (Spark) Β· T β Tech / Augmented Β· X β Xenomorph (Alien) Β· H β Hybrid (born, never made) Β· A β Anomaly. Your how strong is a different ruler β Tiers 1β6. Also not a level.
| Tier | What it means | One person can threaten... |
|---|
| 1 β Baseline | Ordinary human. The floor. | β |
| 2 β Elite | Peak human β Olympian, spec-ops ceiling | A district |
| 3 β Enhanced | 2β50 tons, Mach 3, small-arms proof | A city |
| 4 β High-Tier | 100β2,000 tons, near-light, artillery proof | A country |
| 5 β World-Class | Megatons, survives reentry | The planet |
| 6 β God / Cosmic | No upper bound. Physics obeys them. | Existence itself |
Two people can have the same power at different tiers. A Tier 3 speedster and a Tier 5 speedster both run fast β one outruns cars, the other outruns light. Your Tier is physics β set at origin by ancestry and hardlocked. Your Level (1β20) is mastery within that physics β training, proficiency, reputation. Level never raises Tier. Only a story event that rewrites what you are can.
The full ladder, every power scaled T2βT6: Powers, Tiers & Classes β What You Are (next chapter) and the deep vault Superpowers & Power Tiers. The gene behind it: The Catalyst & The First Standard Bearer. The number law: Level vs Tier β Core Progression Law.
The Scar: Berlin, 1983
The Cold War didn't end with a treaty. It ended with a hole in the map.
A rogue Soviet seismic Meta lost control at the Berlin Wall. The quake swallowed the city and left a flooded crater the size of a region. Today it's the Sinking Zone β lawless, black-market, ruled by nobody, mined for Chalk that can stop a Tier 4 blast.
The West answered with law. The East answered with concrete.
The Law: The Vanguard Accords (1991)
Written in the crater's shadow. The UN learned you cannot force compliance from people who level blocks, so it offered a deal called Mutual Sovereignty: high-tier Metas are treated like nuclear-armed micro-nations, not soldiers.
Three things you will hear every session:
- The Good Samaritan License β A registered Meta can act without clearance to save lives. Good-faith rescue is immune from civil liability, even if a building comes down. Vigilante is a dirty word; Emergency Civil Intervention is the clean one.
- The Voluntary Registry β The blood test at sixteen is medical, not police. The Threat Index (that Tier 1β5 number) is classified β emergency services use it to know who to call, not who to jail. A high-tier isn't locked up; they're courted with money and diplomatic immunity.
- The Sovereignty Pact β The red line was never broken windows. It's coups, conquest, or mass murder. Cross it and human police don't come. Other heroes do. That's Peer Enforcement, and it's why the world's biggest heroes are also its jailers.
For the full legal spine β including SEAS/NCHE for aliens and the Chrome Insurgent laws for illegal augments β the Accords live in-world as Earth History & Superhero Laws.
The Shield: Five Factions Hold the Line
Because no law holds without muscle, five blocs rose to deter the gods they bargained with. You'll meet them in the first hour:
| Faction | Seat | What they field | Philosophy |
|---|
| Project Aegis | Washington, D.C. | Equalizer Mk-IV exo-suits, dampener drones | Cold, utilitarian β national security over heroism |
| Red Star Directorate | Beijing | Bio-cloned Enforcers that siphon energy | Authoritarian β the state owns the gene |
| Chronos Heavy Industries | Tokyo | Gravity-nulling Sentinels, a private containment island | Corporate safety net β sells defense, keeps the lethal toys |
| Vanguard Oversight Coalition (VOC) | Geneva | The registry, the trackers, the titans it pays to police themselves | Diplomacy + soft power |
| Iron Bastion / Red Archive | Ural Mountains | Cryo-thaw shock troops, Siberian Perimeter towers, Dead Hand geo-weapon | Bunker paranoia β never again another Berlin |
Tokyo is Chronos town β if you start there, the Sentinels are already watching. Full profiles live in-world as World Factions & World Defense.
The Present: 54 AE (Today)
You're in Year 54 AE β After Emergence. Calendar says 2025, street says the Grid hum β the Kinetic Redirection Grid built from studying the first hero, Apex (Jonathan Vance, Nov 8 1972), now lines every skyscraper and dumps punch-energy into the power net. Hard-light walls, gravity drives, Regen-Gel β that's The Tech Divide: no microchip arc, just clean atomic power and alien salvage from the 2015 Cosmic Trickle.
Three facts define the year:
1. The Great Divide. Purists want mandatory dampener implants for every powered citizen. Sympathizers buy black-market Spark-serums to trigger their own gene and go mad trying. Anti-power rallies and serum dens share the same block.
2. The Trickle. Since 2015, alien Drifters (refugees seeking SEAS asylum), Outlaws (hiding in the Zone), and lone Stalkers hunting Tier 4/5 trophies have been leaking in. No invasion β a slow leak. Most sightings were Bigfoot-tier until a Stalker leveled a stadium.
3. The Arcane Shock. Magic is real and nobody prepared for it. In 1986, Chernobyl's meltdown over Lunite soil wrote a geometric scar into the Aetherium field. It sat under Project Sarcophagus for forty years β until the KRG grid made it executable. Now a baseline with the right geometry can cast. Every faction's countermeasure is wrong for it. And the grid is the spellbook.
What You Actually Do Here
You're not the main character. You're a person with a Tier, a Class letter, a neighborhood, and a clock. On June 14, 54 AE, 08:05 the Neon-Neo spill above Tokyo is already humming β mag-lev spine overhead, Siphon patrol logging tithes two blocks down.
- In New York you'll hear celebrity hero bookings over insurance-clause arguments.
- In Tokyo you'll log Grid tithes under a Sentinel shadow.
- In Lagos you'll mediate a street that hasn't burned yet β while the 12% tithe shortfall Nia Okafor needs routed before Trickle Night is already being shorted on Aetheris futures.
- On the Sinking Zone salvage pontoons you'll haggle Chalk off a Soviet scar.
The Grid hums before anyone speaks. You've got a registry card, a reputation that travels wrong, and somebody wants something from somebody else whether or not you're in the room. That's the game.
Next: Powers, Tiers & Classes β What You Are β the registry on one page. Then 2 Β· Getting In β which chat to open and what to type. If you want the one-page version to keep open while you play, jump to 13 Β· Quick Reference. Everything else can wait until you've walked one block.
