Picks up where the City of Heroes™ game sunsetted in 2012. This was written in 2018, to facilitate a Monster of the Week™ game called The Mystery of the Missing Brother, that I ran in 2019. The game was set in 2029, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our hero, Shannon Harper, and her semi-trusty sidekick, Carmen, were 16 years old.
This content takes lots of liberties with setting and characters from NCSoft’s City of Heroes game. No challenge to their trademark or copyright is intended.
Modern History: A Brief Overview
Knowing that the alien race known as The Battalion was on the way, Earth’s various governments redoubled their efforts to find peace between nations and across dimensions, hoping to present a united front when the time came. Countries across the globe swelled with Praetorian refugees, but as years went by with no sign of an attack, most countries gradually relaxed their footing, despite the continued urging of Prometheus to remain on their guard. The Praetorians were largely assimilated into their new reality’s culture and Portal Corp still vigilantly maintained its watch on the gates that remained active.
Then, in 2016, long range telemetry reported unexpected movement at the outer edges of the galaxy. This was not immediately made public, but those in the know now used the information to gin up renewed interest in preparing for the worst.
In 2017, the Rikti Traditionalist faction and Vanguard, with the backing of the U.N. Security Council, struck a treaty. For their part, the Rikti turned over War God Hro’Dtohz for imprisonment, and gave all humans who had been forcibly converted to Rikti, including Hero 1, the option to return to their former state. Hero 1 underwent partial re-conversion, but chose to retain some Rikti genetic code in order to more effectively act as liaison between the Rikti and humanity. In return, the United States opened the gates of the war zones, granted Rikti protected group status for the purposes of discouraging hate crimes against them and created – along with all the other nations of the Security Council – legal processes by which Rikti could eventually become citizens.
An attempt to reach an accord with Lord Recluse was not as successful; he took the stance that he and his had defended their home this far and would continue to do so against this coming storm. Much to their chagrin, Longbow was pulled out of the Archipelago and ordered back to the mainland in order to build their strength for the expected conflict.
In 2019, The Battalion arrived. Military forces, super-powered Heroes, and many, many brave civilians – both powered and not – joined in the fighting and in the relief efforts that now consumed the world. In the end, even some of the gods fought, and some died.
Many of Earth’s largest population centers – the preferred targets of the enemy – were devastated. But the bulk of the destruction centered on the east coast of the United States and the Etoile Islands. Bermuda was shattered into a series of smaller islands, some of which could more accurately be called rocks. Entire sections of coastline: Part of Nova Scotia, Boston, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, Savannah, and most of eastern Florida sank into the sea, causing tidal waves that traveled miles inland. War Shields, bolstered by Rikti and Praetorian technology, saved Paragon City, Grandville, Washington DC, Atlanta, New York, Montreal, London, Paris, Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Riyadh, and Buenos Aires from the destruction that was wreaked upon many cities that had not been able to fortify their shields, or in a few unfortunate cases, did not have any.
By the end of the year, The Battalion had been forced to retreat. Much lingering resentment among humanity was forgiven when the restored Rikti mothership from the former war zone, manned by a combined Rikti-Human-Meta crew, sacrificed itself by ramming the flagship of the enemy fleet. It’s reported that the blast could be seen over the horizon on the night side of the planet.
In the wake of the war, the earth was not rendered a post-apocalyptic wasteland – although there are certainly areas of that, in the parts where the worst fighting had taken place. But there were areas that were largely untouched and much of the countryside and some cities that were not in the target areas survived. In the hardest hit regions, refugees flocked to the cities that still had functional shielding, leaving large areas of what had previously been rural, but settled, countrysides to return to wilderness. Disease was a problem in the overcrowded surviving cities and enormous resources were poured into medical technologies; everybody with any medical ability at all, from basic first aid to magical healing, was called into service.
And of course, it wasn’t long before the unity that had allowed the world to win the war started to fracture. Much to the surprise of Longbow, this fracturing was not precipitated by Arachnos or any factions associated with it; Lord Recluse had plenty of his own problems to deal with. The Isles even took in refugees from Bermuda and the swamped US coastal states. It was primarily those villainous groups that considered themselves above the mere mortal realm, such as the Circle of Thorns, as well as a variety of more or less mundane thugs and gangs trying to take advantage of the situation and the people in it. Many supers of a martial bent were called upon to aid military and police forces attempting to keep order. Those who were adept at stealth and infiltrating an enemy for purposes of assassination or capture were particularly valued.
Recovery, of course, took years and years. Some areas were never reclaimed. Most that were, were never the same as they’d been before. But eventually, as the years stretched on and the enemy did not return, a new normal was established. Some say it’s a better world. There are still wars between nations, but fewer. There are still sometimes terrorist assaults and hate crimes against the Rikti, but for the most part, they’ve assimilated and spread across the globe. Most people remain reluctant to spread out too far from the sheltering shields though, which makes for some very, very large metropolises, such as the New York-Atlanta-Paragon Axis, sometimes known as the Three Cities or the Tri-City Belt.
Technology and Society in 2029
Just as people tended to group together in the wake of the war, so did entities such as governments and corporations. There are fewer of both now, and those that survived are large, and in some cases, growing larger.
Much technology was lost during the war. In particular, the global teleportation network set up by supergroup, The Sodality, was enormously useful in the beginning of the war, but was ultimately discovered and destroyed by the enemy. Teleportation, other than magical, still requires exorbitantly expensive machinery and most such technology is owned by governments or very large corporations. It’s often used in the wake of disaster – natural or otherwise – to transport military forces and humanitarian relief to the point of need as quickly as possible.
Human cloning is still rare and largely relegated to the secret laboratories of super villains, shadowy government agencies and corporate R&D. Organ cloning, however, is becoming increasingly common. While still only available to the wealthiest, Doctors without Borders is spearheading a global initiative to lower the cost and increase the availability of cloned organs. Some pharmaceutical companies claim that they’re also violating intellectual property rights and patents, but the number of lives the organization saved during the war, and after, has earned them a lot of global good will and lots and lots of pro bono legal work.
Self-driving vehicles are totally a thing. So are jet packs.
Cyborgs had some difficulty in the initial post-war devastation due largely to lack of power, available parts, etc. Those that survived often had to significantly self-modify with whatever was at hand. However, as the world recovered, body modification became increasingly common. It’s not at all unusual for a person to have some kind of augmentation, sometimes for medical reasons, such as to correct poor vision, or for purely cosmetic reasons. Of course, quality and cost vary, and there are a lot of hacks out there only too willing to do a quick and dirty job on some poor sucker who then finds himself losing a limb and gaining an infection.
Formerly hand-held technology is either implantable, as mentioned above, or wearable for those who prefer a more reserved relationship with technology. The latter often include magical practitioners, who sometimes find that devices implanted into their bodies begin to behave in unexpected ways. Computers and laptops are largely a thing of the past, except among Luddites and collectors; rudimentary holographic technology is available even in low end digital devices.
On the subject of collectors, there are large markets, of varying levels of legality, for older technology. Some collectors will pay more for a perfectly mundane computer from the 20th century than they will for a low-level magical item.
Plans for a colony on the moon, and pretty much all universe and multiverse exploration, were significantly set back by the war and the recovery, but interest in such research is beginning to rebound. Public sentiment, however, leans heavily against exploration for the purposes of expansion and towards the creation of a planetary – and perhaps a ‘reality’ or ‘dimensional’ – defense system. While the post-recovery years have, for the most part, been an unprecedented time of peace and unity among people across the Earth, the world has also become smaller and more insular. The Rikti and the early-century waves of Praetorian refugees are now an assimilated and accepted part of the population, but new visitors from other realms are not always welcomed warmly, if their origin is known, and the portals between realities are more closely guarded than ever.
Miscellaneous Notes
- During the war, Scirocco and Ice Mistral were assisted by the Midnight Squad in defecting from Arachnos and gaining asylum with MAGI.
- The Pocket D is gone. Nobody knows where, or even if it still exists. At least, nobody who’s talking.
Friends & Family
- The meta-human community that Thomas and Piper had lived among since 2015 formed their own fortified ‘safe house’, which was really more of a safe zone. Certain metas and a number of human allies, including John McCormick, sat out the war itself to take responsibility for the children and non-combatants. The Harper children, at that time Jamie, Shannon, Carmen and Connor, stayed in the enclave with their grandfather, as well as their great-grandparents, Piper’s aunts, uncles, and cousins, and Ricardo. Their parents and their uncle Amairgin were able to visit them briefly, but only once or twice. Asahar came and went as she pleased.
- The Lady, being a pocket dimension, was able to keep herself and her denizens safe by closing off her portal to Paragon City and opening another one in a more secure location.
- Side Project had released two EPs and one full length album before 2019, when Castile was killed in the war. Since that time, Thomas has collaborated with a few musicians but has not formed another partnership.
- Many other old friends were lost in the fighting, and Thomas and Piper have largely lost contact with those who remain.
- Amairgin’s close friends, Sharon and Julianne, declined his invitation to join the Nevada enclave and opted to stay in London and help as they could with the war effort. After the war, his relationship with Sharon blossomed in a way he hadn’t anticipated (although everybody else had).
- After assisting with war recovery and humanitarian aid for another year, Thomas and Piper decided to make good on their original vision of traveling the world, brood in tow. Daniel Trey was born in New York, in 2021.
- Twins, Keely Tara and Castile Valentine, were born in Tangier, Morocco in 2023.
- In 2029, most of the family is living in Mumbai. Amairgin and Sharon travel quite a bit on their own, either for her career or his, but they’ve stuck closer to the family now that Sharon’s pregnant.
- Bastet and Wadjet are known, at least to the Fellowship and to Bastet’s extended family, to have assisted humanity in the war effort, but never through direct intervention. Both stayed well clear of actual, physical conflict and both survived.