New story, START!

As most of you will know, I recently ended two of my long-running stories, Rules-Free VRMMO Life and City of Champions Online. Happy to say that I've got another story working now.

This will be a supervillain story (not set in the Frozen Soul world). You guys will get to see everything a week before the people on Royal Road do, because y'all are awesome like that.

Prologue – The Superhuman Control Initiative

The morning of June 30, 1908 started like any other.

At approximately 7:17 local time, Russian settlers and Evenki natives living in the area of Lake Baikal are of Siberia in the backwoods of Russia looked up to the sky, and saw a pillar of bluish light. Bright as the sun, this pillar streaked across the sky, heading to Earth. Ten minutes after it was first spotted, there was a massive flash, and a roar like artillery fire.

The explosion caused seismometers across Europe and Asia to register an earthquake measuring a 5.0 on the Richter scale. Trees for some 2150 square kilometers were flattened by the blast. Air waves from the event could be felt as far away as Washington, D.C. The latest estimates believe that the blast was in the 3-5 megaton range, roughly three hundred times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that would later wipe Hiroshima from the map.

There was no sign of a meteor impact. No scorching from explosives. There was not even any wreckage recovered from the site. To this day, the Tunguska Event (as it came to be called) remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the modern world.

The effects of Tunguska, however, quickly became evident over the next few years. It started with Moskiv Christov Tarasovich. Born on July 3rd, 1908, in the city of Krasnoyarsk, young Christov was born with blue skin. As he grew, he displayed many characteristics that were unusual for a child of his age. He was crawling by two months, and walking by six months. At ten months, he spoke his first word. Over time, he developed even more abilities beyond human capabilities.

The Tunguska Event unleashed something. What it was, scientists still do not know to this day, but they all agree that whatever caused the Tunguska Event, it unleashed something in the world that fateful Russian morning. In 0.01 percent of the population, that event changed something in the human genome, sparking a wave of mutations. The older a person was, the less likely they were to survive the Emergence, as a body made less malleable by age could not handle the strain. However, in children, the changes were rarely visible (unlike Christov), and often did not manifest at all until sometime during puberty, or under extreme stress.

These individuals became known as Superhumans. They displayed powers and abilities that were clearly beyond anything that a normal human could hope to achieve. There was no pattern to these abilities. Some were physical changes, such as having bulletproof skin. Others included increased mental abilities, granting them superhuman intellects. There were people who could create fire out of thin air, or bend the elements to their will. The more scientists attempted to study superhumans and find the patterns, the more they complained that they knew less about superhumans than they had before.

Humanity’s reaction to the emergence of superhumans was predictable. Some groups feared superhumans, and loudly proclaimed that they were going to try and take over the world. Others claimed that they were abominations, an insult to God, or Allah, or whatever religion they followed, and should be cleansed. Some were envious of them, and hatched horrific plots to try and discover the source of their powers, in order to make themselves into supermen.

Other groups were not so filled with fear and hate. There were those who idolized superhumans. In Japan, there was even a cult that grew to worship one superhuman in particular as a ‘living kami’, a god-spirit in the Shinto faith. Business leaders were eager to find ways to use superhumans to boost their productivity and reduce costs. And the military? To say that they had an appreciation of how superhumans could be used in war would be a drastic understatement.

Of course, the reaction of the superhumans themselves was no different. They were, after all, still humans, even if they had abilities beyond the norm. They had all the same strengths, and weaknesses, of character as normal humans did.

Some went into public service, eager to prove their worth to humanity. The potential worth of superhumans proved itself early on, when a 7.3 magnitude earthquake hit the Silakhor Plain in Persia on January 23, 1909. Sohelia Mostofi, a young woman born and raised in Sari, the Qajar capitol of the Mazandaran province, flew to the damaged under her own power. Despite being only fifteen years old, Sohelia quickly earned the name بانوی آهنین or ‘Iron Lady’ for her steadfast determination in aiding (and, in some cases, leading) the rescue efforts immediately after the earthquake.

Of course, there were always going to be those who looked more towards personal gain than the betterment of their fellows. They were, after all, simply human, despite their newfound abilities. The first known use of superpowers by a criminal was criminal called Quickfoot in Dallas, Texas in 1910, when he used his ability of superspeed to engage in several daylight robberies in the Dallas area, making away with almost $20,000 in six weeks, roughly equivalent to half a million dollars today.

Faced early on with the potential benefits and dangers that superhumans offered humanity, governments around the world began to organize responses to these new individuals. Some countries banned them altogether, and anyone who was found to have powers in their territory was exiled, if they were lucky. Others were more permissive (sometimes too permissive, as the French colonial authorities in Madagascar discovered, when Le Suzerain took over the island by force). Everywhere, however, new rules and new regulations were quickly being drafted to deal with the problems superhumans presented to the world.

In the United States, there were several attempts to create a unified agency to handle superhumans. However, the performance of superhumans in the Great War, and in helping to blunt some of the effects of the Depression that followed, put off those concerns, particularly as other groups took center stage, such as the women’s suffrage movement. In 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, a new military agency was created to draft superhumans and organize them ‘to help in the war effort’.

After the war, this agency was turned into an organization like the National Guard. Superhumans would no longer be drafted automatically, but those who signed up would be considered a ready reserve under mixed state and federal jurisdiction to help in situations such as national disasters and superhuman-related incidents. While inclusion in the agency was no longer mandatory, known superhumans who did not join the agency often faced significant problems finding employment due to prejudice and local legislation. This, in turn, led to almost 75% of superhumans in the United States being at least reserve members of the agency, if only to use their placement programs to find work. This agency went through many names, but, in 1967, it received the name that it would carry to this day: the Superhuman Control Initiative.