Worthy of their Mettle: a Superhero Timeline

  Yes I failed totally to see the date stamp at the top of the chapter until I read the next one. Duh! 

Buenos Aires
1982

It was a loud and boisterous affair. Esmeralda thought it was gaudy, with the combination of the military music, the tanks and other vehicles on parade, and the rather silly patriotic costume they put her in. They called her the Sun of May, and she was made the ceremonial leader of the other children they had found to indoctrinate to the dictator's cause.

Galtieri, the dictator himself, stood with her, as did Admiral Anaya and many other important people in the government, as did Fernandez, her 'handler.' There was no better word; they were livestock to Galtieri and his ilk.

The dictator bloviated on and on about the glory of the Argentinian victory and how the country now had a superhuman program that rivaled that of the US or the USSR or the British (who he chided for being so weak and not using them in Argentina) or the Chinese or the French or the Indians or certain other countries. It was pure and utter tripe she could tell.

There was nothing glorious about this. She was made to kill, not only British sailors, pilots, and soldiers, but also the political prisoners they used as target practice in her training.

She even had to kill some of the other 'gifted' children.

He went on and on, as did Anaya and several of the other generals. Still self-congratulating drivel.

Then Fernandez spoke about the success of the Argentinean superhuman program and the destruction of the British fleet.

And then, he proclaimed, "and now for some words from the hero of all Argentina, the Sun of May herself!"

She wasn't informed of this. She could just make up some nonsense and be done with it.

But no.

Galtieri and Anaya and the other generals and admirals looked on with anticipation. They wanted a small child to confirm the legitimacy of their regime. They would not get that.

She approached the podium and plainly stated. "I never wanted to be here."

The crowd gasped. The elites were perplexed.

"Soldiers made me kill my family and then forced me to kill many, many people for them. They made me bend metal to kill people. I was their slave."

Her anger only increased.

"I was made to kill people who did nothing, and all for them!" She gestured towards the dictator and his ilk.

As she went on and on, tears beginning to well up, the crowd shrieked in horror as several of the tanks in the parade begun rising upward and crumpling into balls of metal, the screams of their crews dampening as the metal enclosed upon them.

The platform on which Esmeralda stood begun floating towards the masses of metal. She landed on one and kept it afloat as a larger airborne platform, letting the original podium just fall to the ground.

The other tanks floated up into the air, and then crashed onto the ground. The dictator and his cronies were evacuated, and the crowd started to flee. She picked up buses, tanks, APCs, and any other sufficiently large object and began flinging them around with wild abandon. The shrieks and the crashes and the crackle of flame only invigorated her.

After her point was made she made the tank on which she stood fly to the northwest. She could go very quickly.

Fighter jets began pursuing her. She would catch their missiles and ram them into the ground, or into the planes. She could at times force the planes into the ground, but they were hard to catch. She kept going.

Eventually the pursuit subsided, and the planes stopped coming. Her exhaustion was catching up with her anger, and she begun to lower the platform. She breathed, and the tank began to fall quicker and quicker, and then impacted the ground.

She landed in a wet, marshy area. By the direction she had gone she guessed she was in Brazil, or maybe Bolivia. She didn't know. But that didn't matter now.

She was free from the Argentinian government for now.

But eventually she would have some sort of revenge.

Excerpts from a New York Times article, covering the entire front page, from 2011, regarding the 30th anniversary commemoration of the 1981 Miami attacks.


MIAMI - Thousands have gathered in the center of Miami's Memorial Park in commemoration of the 1981 near-destruction of the entirety of south Florida by the supernatural entity styling himself Vucub-Caquix, a bird god of the Maya, and his followers.

[...]

Veterans of the superhero teams who ultimately took down the creature for the time being were recognized in a ceremony hosted by President Rumsfeld himself. He praised their "valor and heroism in saving millions of Americans from a similar fate," both in Miami and in the other attacks during Vucub-Caquix's sustained campaign against the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s.

[...]

Also in attendance were Governor of Florida Jason Dominguez, Mayor of Miami Alejandro Nunez, and Guatemalan President Ephrain Rios Montt, the latter who spoke in support of the "friendship between Guatemala and the United States and the depth of cooperation in fighting supernatural threats."

[...]

David Petrich, the former Captain Electric, the highest ranking survivor of the New Minutemen, the Miami attack, gave a eulogy to the men and women who died stopping the attack. In his words, "they had served their country up to decades in some cases, one even landing in Normandy, and it took a Maya bird-thing to kill them, when the Nazis and the Soviets and the North Koreans and the Chinese and the Vietcong and all the other Communists they had fought could not. That is strength."

[...]

Democratic figures have criticized Rumsfeld for allegedly turning the commemoration into a de facto campaign rally for his re-election bid. Democratic Presidential Frontrunner Harry Reid slammed the President for using the commemoration to "turn this solemn occasion into a defense of the administration's failed Guatemala policy."

[...]

Foreign leaders gave their condolences to Miami. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that "the United States has Miami and Dallas and San Diego, while Britain had the tragedies of Bristol and Birmingham and Portsmouth. We grieve together.

Russian President Boris Nemtsov said that he "grieves for the dead," citing commonality between the Vucub-Caquix conflict and the Second Russian Civil War of the 1990s.

[...]

Criticism came from stalwart enemies of the United States, such as the commandant-general of the Vanguard of the Oppressed terrorist group Esmeralda Ormanni, who proclaimed that the ceremony was a "sideshow" from the crimes against humanity being committed in Guatemala.

Other criticism came from the governments of North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Yugoslavia, among others.

[...]

Mass demonstrations outside of the ceremony were attended by protesters from all over the country, and from at least five other countries including Guatemala. A common theme was the withdrawal of US forces from the country. A protester, who did not give his name, said that the protests were to "end the genocide of the indigenous Maya people by the Military-Industrial Complex that runs this country." Other protesters cited the amount of US service members killed in action and the US airstrike that killed, among other civilians, prominent Guatemalan antigovernment activist Rigoberta Menchu in Alta Verapaz Department.

[...]

A disturbance at a rally against the troop deployment to Guatemala was interrupted by apparent Seven Macaw cultists who attempted to assault police on crowd duty. These cultists proclaimed that they were undertaking these actions "in the name of the true Sun God" and the supposed dawning age of his rule. The Department of Defense and other government agencies have refused to comment on this incident, with the exception of the Miami-Dade County Police saying that "the situation is under control and is being handled in accordance with established procedure."

Several hundred thousand easily, with over a million taken by Miami alone.

  Very true.  Between sheer power and the occasional smart one who develops their powers without being detected and really wants to do damage this world is going to be a very, very dangerous place.  There are a large number of ways of causing serious disruption in modern society, let alone mass deaths.  Think of what happens if someone takes out Aswan or the Three Gorges dams!   Or even more subtle actions which cause says major electronic disruption or even loss of data on computer systems.  [The foul up with British Airways currently is a classic example of a relatively non-destructive way of causing a lot of havoc and that's just incompetence rather than something malicious.  ]  I wouldn't be surprised if the total dead from either rogue supers or supers involved in conflict is in the tens of millions at least.

  Interesting comment.  Re-reading one thing I missed earlier was that it refers to 1981 in Miami as taking out "the creature for the time being" and references to " Vucub-Caquix's sustained campaign against the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s."  This shows that he survived the fighting in Miami and was about until at least the early 90's if not still a potential threat now. I wonder if that's a factor in the US war in Guatemala and possibly he/it relies on support/worship and hence the US feels whatever their doing there is necessary to remove him for good or at least keep him weak.  Which could lead to some very nasty possibilities.

  Also the comment about him killing US supers who the Nazis and assorted communists regimes couldn't might suggest that for whatever reason the latter didn't manage to locate/train/motivate any supers they had and that possibly some of those wars went markedly more in the US's favour.  Also he referred to fighting Russians and Chinese which could mean in proxy conflicts or espionage type clashes or a hot war with Russia at some point?

  Despite the devastation in Florida I note both the state governor and the mayor of Miami sound Latin so whatever else happened it hasn't resulted in a massive wave of distrust/hostility toward Latinos in the US.

  Russia may have been hit very hard by its civil war, something it avoided OTL, albeit possibly narrowly a couple of times.  Since the Russian premier is relating this to supers rather than say nukes or other weapons of mass destruction I get the feeling some [or possibly just one?] very nasty super was active in that conflict.

  Anyway, those are points that come to mind from a 2nd run through but whether any are accurate or not I don't know.  The US and UK have obviously been hurt by attacks/incidents and Russia probably even more but not sure about other nations.  Do notice that China isn't mentioned as either a current enemy or a nation sending condolences so it makes me wonder if something very bad has happened there and there isn't a Chinese government as such, which would be a hell of an impact compared to OTL.

Moscow
1928

Lubomir Nikolayevich Rybalkin was the most worried he had ever been. Not hiding from the Tsar, not fighting the Tsar's army's, all of the experiments done on the orders of the Communist Party itself, none paled in comparison to a visit from the most important man in the Soviet Union himself.

His assistant, Grigory Yakovich Shermanov, had been up for nights printing all the data needed for the dossiers printed for the General Secretary and for the other dignitaries, plus the supersoldiers that had been summoned to visit them. They wanted to know the answer to the pressing question: why were so many anomalously strong humans arising in the Soviet Union?

So many battles against the Whites had been decided by men and women, and sometimes even children, who could wield ice or metal or had other fantastic powers. And so, it was decided that for the first time in human history the revolutionary Soviet government would dedicate significant resources to revolutionary human beings.

Rybalkin had set up the camera to play the cuts from various newsreels, some smuggled in through the West. Shermanov placed the folders with the dossiers at the seats.

There was a knock on the door.

"Come in, comrades!" cried out Rybalkin. The future of Soviet superhuman science hung in the balance.

In walked the morose, grey-faced bodyguards of the Vozhd himself. In walked various party officials and scientists. Rybalkin noticed Trofim Lysenko, that idiot pseudoscientist, among them. Then came in Comrade Slava, the icy hero of many battles, and several other superhumans, one of whom, Comrade Afansy or 'Fanya' was the first superhuman that was created artificially by Rybalkin and his team, not arising from the population. Then came in Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, head of the secret police, and then, with another round of bodyguards, Marshal Joseph Stalin himself.

"Welcome, comrades, welcome!" proclaimed Rybalkin. "Your questions now will have an answer!"

"Get on with it," ordered Stalin. "What are your findings?"

"Comrade," began Rybalkin, "What I have deduced, among with my colleagues here and in hiding abroad, is that there are three types of superhumans. One form rises from sheer random chance; that is the kind you have rumors about in Europe or America or indeed any other part of the world, irrespective of the political or social or any other climate."

Stalin nodded.

"The second type are those created in a laboratory. Comrade Fanya here (he gestured to the hero) being the first of one subtype. That subtype is created by experimentation on living human beings. The other type, as your bodyguards are testament to, are those created by experimentation on corpses. The cognitive ability is lower, as one might expect, but there are less worries about the subject. They each have their uses."

Lysenko interrupted. "We knew about those, Lubomir Nikolayeich, get to your innovation!"

Stalin glared at Lysenko, who rapidly shut up.

"The third is a type whose existence has only come into clear view in the past few years, both here and in one other case."

"What other case?" asked Beria.

Rybalkin began fiddling with the camera. "The devastation in Ireland."

The reels began to play, and Shermanov dimmed the lights. The black and white film, cobbled together from many countries, showed footage from the ongoing war in Ireland.

Across the different clips was a single person, dressed in combat fatigued cobbled together from both Irish and British troops, routing British infantry and destroying British artillery and vehicles. This man could control light, it seemed, and fired bright beams at his enemies. The newsreels said that his name was "The Avenging Croppy."

The reel continued. Then, there was another person, this one dressed in similar cobbled-together fatigues, but with a Union Jack motif. One showed him praying at a Protestant church. He fought the Republicans, and his name was "The Mighty Orangeman."

Then it showed the two of them, flinging cars and chunks of buildings at each other, the Avenging Croppy firing beams of light and the Mighty Orangeman leaping around, lifting things that no human normally could. The city they were in (it was mentioned to be Galway on a title card) was absolutely devastated.

The newsreel ended. "These two may have fallen, but it seems that more of them are still dueling, reducing Irish villages to bombed-out husks," proclaimed Rybalkin. "We believe we have found a reason why these two particular locations, Ireland and the Soviet Union, have so many superhumans."

Stalin looked interested, as did Beria.

"It is a poorly-understood process that the underground researchers in Europe are calling 'memetosynthesis.' The first part is derived from a Greek word meaning 'same.' It is used to describe an idea that transmits itself from person to person, adapting to the cultural context and spreading among the population in a manner similar to the reproduction of genes."

Lysenko shook his head. Rybalkin rolled his eyes.

"'synthesis' is of course creation. What I am proposing, and by extension many superhuman scientists are proposing, is that ideas can manifest themselves in superhumans, who feed off these ideas, which strengthen them."

Beria interjected, "but then why here? And why now? People have believed in things for millennia! Why these past few years?"

Rybalkin responded "the world is now far more literate than it ever was before. We seem to be reaching critical mass, and in Ireland and Russia sectarian tensions are centuries old and exploding with fury. That is why it is Ireland and Russia with so many superhumans: people believe in ideas, and ideas manifest themselves in superhumans. In Ireland, the fervent belief in Republicanism and Catholicism gave them the Avenging Croppy, whereas belief in Protestantism and Unionism gave them the Mighty Orangeman."

"And so belief in Communism is giving us superpowered revolutionaries!" proclaimed Beria. Stalin's eyebrows rose.

"Exactly."

Rybalkin gestured to Shermanov, who brought in a standard radio set. He plopped it on the table and let it sit there.

"It is just a radio set!" blurted out Lysenko. "There is nothing special about it at all!"

"Not yet," uttered Rybalkin. "But now it is being disseminated throughout the Union. Do you not see the implications? The United States, Britain, or Germany all could have armies of superhumans had their silly superstitions and fears not prevented them from pursuing this research."

Stalin looked pleased. Rybalkin was relieved.

"But we dared slip the surly bounds of the human form. It is with an army of superhumans that our revolution will be safeguarded and spread."