Omniverse One

Speaking of which, I need to continue my first prose on those guys. But not before I make another character.

The Cult of Kronos

Despite their claimed origins of existing in Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu, the Cult of Kronos most likely evolved in Ancient Greece as a sort of mystery cult that claimed (and eventually managed to) summon and command the various monsters of Greek Mythology. Over the centuries, it spread to the Roman Republic, its goals mutating over time as the founders died off. It became a kind of terrorist organisation, split off in cells and only occasionally taking orders from a central leader.

These leaders had their own interpretations of the cult's purpose, and their worship of the 'servants of the Blessed Titans' decreased. When Christianity came, the Cult's power waned, but they remained secret in their ancient fortress under Athens. They tried to prop up the Byzantine Empire, but as it fell, the Cult fled to Western Europe, and were one of the more notorious targets of the Inquisition.

They hid themselves as deep as they could, becoming part criminal organisation, part cult of the Titans, but continued to wreak havoc. They were however, most active around the eastern Mediterranean region, their birthplace, and had a secret temple upon Mount Othrys, the former palace of the Titans.

Their propaganda claims that they were responsible for numerous disasters in human history, but this is most likely a lie.

However, the Cult of Kronos does have a hand in more than a few deaths, such as that of Megas Alexandros, the Chosen of Zeus at that time. As for its size, it consists of several thousand members worldwide, lead by its shadowy leader Daniel Timeforth.

The Important People

Automatos

Automatos is a sentient automaton created by the Cult in the days of Ancient Greece. It is used as an assassin, unstoppably determined, with a mind of intricate clockwork gears, nothing less than a marvel of technology and magic with dedicated self-repair systems and a willingness to use modern weapons to achieve its goals.

Daniel Timeforth

Daniel Timeforth is the self-declared Herald of Kronos and the leader of the Cult. The lemniscate symbol tattooed on his forehead in mystical ink gives him the power to control time itself in a small area, enabling him to briefly rewind, stop or slow down time in the area around him. He wields a sickle-shaped sword of Tartarean Iron that can drain the very life from opponents, screaming with the agony of a thousand damned souls, and reputed to contain metal used in Kronos's own blade. He is also known to use the moniker 'NeoKronos'.

Moritas

The shadowy man known as Moritas is a sorcerer specialising in the power of life and death. He can kill with a touch or a word, and bring life to formerly inanimate things. He is also a skilled summoner of dark forces, including the innumerable sea-demons and mythological monsters the Cult can unleash on its enemies. He is Timeforth's lieutenant and commander of the Cult's legions.

At this point it seems a little bit generic and too reminiscent of your other similar attempts at hidden villain terrorist conspiracies with secret armies or weapons or stuff.

EDIT:

It is better than the old article, but the old article was kind of pretty... well... abrupt. What are their goals? What is the organization's features, what does it do, who else is in it, and any other details?

I say that the easiest method of creating a timeline is for everyone to produce one that cover's their own creations, if they are interconnected, and slowly merge them into one complete timeline. I should have one for my creations later on today.

I actually used to have an entire timeline of my characters. But then I made new characters and re-wrote old ones. Hell, Alexander Thaddeus is a timeline all by himself.

A timeline of major events would be really useful, but we also need a guide to all the cities and countries we have inserted into the real world as well. I can start a Google Document online to put everything in, too.

Hot off the presses, and pretty goddamn mad: the Ford Prefect radical interpretation of the Wayward Son. This sort of came up while I was rambling to Vic, so pardon it if it's a little incoherent. Ultimately I think Moby constructed Wayward as a superhero first and rockstar second. However, what if he was conceived as rockstar first, and superhero second?

"Though, this makes me wonder: maybe Wayward really was a coked out of his mind super-artist who threw together the world's most incredible power ballads while on a cocktail of thousand dollar booze and ten thousand dollar designer drugs. Living to the rock star ideal: fast, hard and self-destructive in the extreme."

"But he was also gifted with the limitless Power of Rock. He could sing so well that planets would weep, play that guitar so well it was like Jeff Beck arrived on the scene clothed in the sun. Hendrix animates his fingers. Clapton's hand is on his shoulder. He's not just a rock star, he's a part of the Lineage of Rock that derives through the cross-universal power of Elvis. He was made for something more."

Admittedly I'm putting these guys on a pedestal, but I've been doing that fairly consistently since I first inserted The Power in The Logical World.

"So, maybe, he meets Archwind. Archwind doesn't like him. And Wayward doesn't like Archwind, either. Archwind is a square. Wayward is hip. Archwind is whitebread and apple pie, Wayward is hardcore and ghetto (which is kind of funny because Archwind isn't exactly white, and Wayward is, but I digress). Archwind is the ideal hero - upstanding and incorruptible - while Wayward is the ideal rockstar - corrupt and loving it."

"It is a pretty wild reimagining, but I think it has merit. Instead of Wayward's origin story being about a powerful man born to that power, it would be about a powerful man coming into that power. Sort of analogous for older rockstars cleaning up their act, but with superpowers."

Invictus interjects: "So instead of using The Power of Rock just for self-gratification, he started harnessing it to be a superhero."

I imagine this starts happening because Wayward starts spending more and more time with Patrick. In any case this is just idle bullshit, but I thought i might as well throw it into the public arena.

I like it. Hell, he can probably help Archwind mellow out too and like after an initially rocky relationship they can end up becoming super-bestfriends forever.

Goddamn your sig. Goddamn it!

DESTRUCITY!

Maybe the guy starts losing it after wasting years as a drug-fuelled mean machine, similar to what happened to Steven Tyler and the rest of Aerosmith around 1986. Then he loses touch, crashes, burns down, overdoses spectacularly and in the aftermath is pretty much reduced to a flaming wreck until something pulls him out (could be Archwind, although I'm not sure I like that, if he didn't like the guy there's little reason he'd do so). He cleans up his act, gets his shit together, maybe goes into rehab for a bit, and reforms himself into an emerging rock/superhero.

In the aftermath he'd have to convince the world that he's actually pretty serious about his new career -- I imagine guys like Archwind might not trust him at first. But eventually he'd win their respect and the admiration of an even greater audience than he did as a rock star. Which interestingly enough would mean that perhaps his greatest challenge isn't to defeat super-villains or extraterrestrial invasion forces, but to hold off his craving for coke, booze and groupies. After all, once an addict always an addict, and that should hold true for metahumans as well (and maybe doubly so, for drama's sake).

So he'd be really OLD?

Perhaps in this drugged-out state where he's nearly overdosed himself, he achieves some sort of bizarro out-of-body experience where Elvis comes to him and tells him how drugs are bad, mmmkay, and like Elvis shares to Wayward his own experiences with drugs. Since Nixon gave Elvis that Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge he wanted.

Like, then he can be all "Elvis spoke to me!" and nobody would believe him, even though he uses Elvis as a reason for his reformation. Well, nobody believes him until he starts manifesting his gnarly Powers of Rock.



This can be why he's going around Africa doing all sorts of humanitarian stuff and whacking Mustafa Crimson's head with a guitar.

From drugged out Aerosmith to, like, Bono! As his career shoots back up, he can totally win Nobel Peace Prizes, get knighthoods from Baroness Vicky von Reagan, and all sorts stuff.

Ford and I determined that he was less than a decade or so younger than Archwind, which is still pretty old by rock star standards. And he already manifested the awesome Power of Rock during his early years, granting him performing skills utterly beyond the bounds of nature. Except before his reformation he used his Power for only that - melting faces and scoring chicks instead of helping the world out. It made him bigger than Jesus and almost bigger than Reagan, but as Ford said it also put him on the path to destruction. After he experienced Elvis and corrected his ways, his biggest problem is probably the public questioning his sincerity.


That's a really good idea, actually. Can the Von Reagans actually grant knighthoods?

EDIT: Ford and I didn't really think about the drugs angle. With his Rock-hard (hard-rock?) constitution the young Wayward Son would have resorted to increasingly Slanneshi drugs to get his highs, and that means falling into increasingly unsavory types of debt. Did he ever turn up to sing at Jurgen Baccara's birthday parties?

Hey, she's a baroness and they've got some sort of bizarro pseudo-nobility there that coincides with the local and federal government, so why not?

I'm a bit leery of making Wayward Son a jerkoff drug addict from the get-go. He wasn't big enough in the very beginning to be such a high roller, lifestyle wise. I'm more the mind that he went down the deep end midway through his career- be it the nineties dark age of comics or getting drunk on his own fame, power, and fortune. It works where he actually knows where he needs to reach back to, where the people that used to loom up to him go "hey man, what happened?".

Moreover, it could make for a great Rocky training montage when heavyweights like Damask (really the Twilight Symphony Orchestra) and Deathcore show up. Fawcett is high on life and would very well get his butt handed to him. As Siege said, he's not only working on getting his (very will based) powers back, bit struggling against the mental weight of going back to his former lifestyle and getting everyone to trust him again when he threw their confindence i'm the garbage with all his syringes.

At the end of the day what goes down is you choice Moby. In any case, it doesn'th ave to be from the get-go, but at the same time he doesn't have to be a superhero from the get-go, either. That was basically the driving idea behind my idle musings: what Fawcett would be like if he was conceived as a superhero second.



At the sort of time this 'burn out' would happen it would probably be at the peak of Von Reagan counter-culture, so frankly Archwind would be too busy to really bother than coaching someone back to health. Fawcett isn't exactly helpless, either; they'd probably meet and Patrick would say 'Christ, I don't have time to deal with this, just drag yourself out of that hole'. They're like mega-bro in the modern day, but their friendship could start in really antagonistic territory, though given they're fundamentally decent people there would probably be inklings of their future friendship. Stuff like Fawcett not admitting that he thinks Archwind is a swell guy (though he's still a square) and Patrick thinking that Wayward is wasting what he could be or something.

I was lamenting at Shroom on MSN for changing the base of operations of Crimson Dawn, his internationalist communist conspiratorial organization, from the highly cliched seafloor pressure dome to the far more sensible arrangement of converted Typhoon submarines. But then abandoning the whole "underwater base" thing seemed a shame, because although it's silly it's still pretty popular. And then I thought of a possible way to rehabilitate the idea.

The Legacy of Captain Nemo.

We all know the story. A dispossessed Indian prince to dedicated his life to fight imperialism in all its forms, also a technological genius who designed and built the Nautilus, the most advanced submarine of her time, essentially on a deserted island with scraps. He harried European shipping for years and evaded capture from the likes of the first Supernumerary to the genius-engine Mercatorian. Eventually, he and the Nautilus were destroyed battling a giant monster from an underwater volcano or something suitably apocryphal, but that was not the end.

A few years after his last sighting, rumors emerged that somebody had found a full set of blueprints not just for the Nautilus, but a full set of technology for living an entirely self-sufficient existence underwater. I'm still having trouble justifying why they never fell into the hands of imperial governments at this point, but eventually the blueprints (or at least the idea of them) spread to various Marxist, anarchist and disaffected groups of intellectuals who decried imperialism and the state of the world. Coupled with Nemo's own legendary exploits, the embryo of an anti-imperialist, egalitarian philosophy based on living free in the borderless ocean was quickly born.

I haven't thought much about how these early Nautilans fared, but their creed persisted even as mainstream underwater technology caught up with Nemo's genius. It was the idea that mattered and Nemo himself proved at it was amply possible, and that was all the motivation various people throughout the last few centuries needed to start hammering together their own subs and habitats. The idea was also co-opted by a lot of existing ideological movements - anyone who had beef with the current world order would find it attractive, really - and this included Discordians, Objectivists, certain Japanese revanchists and of course, the Trotskyists from whom the Crimson Dawn descended.

The Nautilus Pirates!



Man. Now all we need is skimmers and fusion nukes and we're all set for the invasion of Alpha Centauri .

I like the idea of a communist city on the bottom of the sea. It's like an inverted version of Rapture!

I think, with this suitable backstory in mind, CRIMSON DAWN can work in this form. After all, it was always a reference to an episode of Sealab 2021 where Captain Murphy goes nuts (as usual) and turns the entire station commie. THE KOMMISSAR!


As the history hitherto of class struggles and modern bourgeoisie society:
class antiganisms, futile something of oppression, surfdom, bourgeoisie,
tattering futile society, and victory - FOR THE PROLETARIAT!

Just a heads up for Magister. I'm planning on putting a Teutonic Knight suit of my own creation in my Shadows of Stalingrad story, and I wanted to see what you think of it. Y'know, in case you disapproved or had ideas.

It'd look something like this, except with a fully-encased armored cockpit and, y'know, generally rougher WWII-ish looking:



Uses a belt-fed, semi-auto mod of this as a rifle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.7_cm_Pak_36

And packs a pair of these on its back. Or maybe one of these. I haven't quite decided yet.

I plan to call it a Von Orseln-class light combat armor suit, after a Grad Master of the real life Teutonic Knights Werner von Orseln. It's role would be urban armor support, as it'd move better through the tangled urban nightmare of Stalingrad than tanks (at least, that's the German rationale for their existence).

I... uhh... also planned on putting Austerlitz' knightmare suits in COLD STEEL CONTACT. Well, there goes the spoilers.

Malachuschus, perhaps the WW2 Germanian version of those Avatar AMP suits can have cockpits that resemble the faces of halftracks? Just like how AT-STs had halftracks for faces?

Hell, Austerlitz could've contracted Mercedes Benz to build parts for his robots.

Alien species ideas:

The Felins of Arcturia. Already mentioned in passing in the Valley Forge article, wherein they granted the men and women of the Forge a letter of marquee. I propose that these guys are a middling-power somewhere in the vicinity of the Orionian-Mogar DMZ which Earth is smack dab in the middle of. These Felins would pretty much be laid-back and cool, with a preference for sub-tropical worlds with lots of beaches (the nearest Felin world could possibly be a bit like Celeste from old SOTS, a waterworld with scattered archipelagos).

Anyway, needless to say, the Felins are space cats and are pretty big in the space trading business - probably perhaps they're the only ones the Mogars and the Orionians can do business with as an intermediary, and probably because they're seen as the most laid back and 'neutral' of the space powers nearby. Thus they've got trade fleets, star galleons, and smugglers sailing the Nine Vectors and their worlds could be trading hubs with bustling multiracial populaces.

A less publicized side would be how they contract space pirates and perhaps bounty hunters to do their messy work for them. So they won't end up pissing off either Mogarians or Orionians, they use these deniable assets and stuff, contracting privateers - up to and including the Americans in their voyages to space - to exact, say, punitive measures if some of Mogar's dicks ends up harassing their trade lines.

The Felins won't be all smiles und sunshine. Underneath all their mew and all their trade, they've got these pirates and their own agenda to profit from the mutual distrust between the Orionians and Mogar. Perhaps the Americans in the Valley Forge actually deal with Felin cartels and smuggle catnip to them.

I have no objections to that. Powered armor (if you can really call my creations that) during WWII are supposed to to big, clunky, and rediculously well-armed and 'mobile' (more or less) for their size. The Von Orseln-class seems to fit the bill for a light armored combat suit: its well armed and armored, but not enough to bog it down in the cityscape.



The existance of the Von Orseln-class pretty much indicates that the Teutonic Knights are a familiy of powered armors, so you pretty much can have your way with designing varients. Austerlitz's personal suit, for example, mirrors that of Goldstein's in terms of performance, while heavy assault versions would also exist for cracking open fortresses. American powered armor, in keeping with their theme, are more of a do-anything kill-everyone type of battlesuit, which would explain why there aren't that many of them until late in the war (I actually envisionsed that the Vindicators and their offspring would be excellent for cracking the hyperfortified islands of Japan, but that's another story).

Perhaps the Martian Tripods are actually relatively light legged walkers of the Martian arsenal. Their heavier variants, as faced by the Mars-pattern Challenger IIIs, would be the Spiders from Mars.

I was thinking if it wouldn't be too bad, and if people would find it not TOO disagreeable or tasteless, if I kicked Reaganism up a notch. Specifically, for the MIDDLE EAST - a place that we've long neglected because of its politicization and its inherent complexities.

I was thinking. Iraq. What if Desert Storm never happened? What if Saddam never invaded Kuwait, and because this never happened, Saddam is still super-best-friends with America? He can shake hands with Donald Rumsfeld some more, and the US government can ignore when Iraqi blows up a few more American commercial ships, and the US can veto a few more UN resolutions decrying Iraq's use of nerve gas on Iranians (because Dubya Em Dees are good when the Iraqis use it on Iranians!).

What if the fall of Iraq is entirely internal? Like, the Comix Middle Eastern nations, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, whatever, in Comix perhaps - as FROD tried to portray with Nadir Hassan - these nations ARE more better off than they are IRL. And what if, seeing America's dickeries and intrusions in the region, they decide to fuck America off? Perhaps with the support of Saint, or the perfidious fucking French, or the snotty imperialist Brits, the Saudis and the Emirates fund an internal revolution that gradually shatters Saddam's Iraq? Tie this in with FROD's proposed Blackwind (his version of Black Adam, an Arabian Archwind) coming in to stomp shit in Baghdad, and a glorious revolution of Iraqi's ousting their tyrant by themselves without the help of Murrica Fuck Yeah?

Without the invasion of Kuwait, there's no reason for American intervention in Desert Storm. And with America continuing to support Saddam's Iraq as a counter to Islamist Iran, maybe we can actually see some of our heroic Iraqi freedom fighters go on and whack some American-sponsored goons or American operatives. For freedom! If we cheer Afghan Mujahadeen shooting down Russian Hind Ds, then why can't we cheer when the freedom fighters blow someone else's oppressive shit?

So this might, somewhat, alter the dynamic of Comix geopolitics a little. But we've got Britain flying skyships and French having the Sun King still in power. So, why not?

Anyway, as Saddam is toppled, the BADASS UNITED NATIONS could come in, and maybe Saudi Arabia and the Emirates could hire Saintly Concerns and Dark Liquid and other PMCs to do their bidding in Iraq as well. Thus, OPERATION PETROLEUM FREEDOM.

With De-Reaganization in place, a lot of these mercenary goons would actually be ex-American military personnel. Perhaps at some point, the Iraqis would end up resentingg Saudi/Emirate dickery in their region AND they might end up fighting these mercenary assholes.

Then, if this happens, Vic suggests that Crimson Dawn and the SIXTH INTERNTIONAL intervene and support the glourious Iraqi revolution. Then we can see them give the Iraqi freedom fighters communist missiles to shoot down Russian Hinds mercenary Apaches and Russian BMPs mercenary Humvees with. Then, fractured Iraq, could become some sort of destabilized hotbed with an ongoing massive UN mission - with contributing nations such as Malaysia, Indonesia, whatever - and with concurrent Saudi/Emirati dickery in the region using Saintly Concerns/Dark Liquid PMC proxies. While at the same time, the local Iraqi revolution could turn ARAB SOCIALIST! Fuck yeah!

This ties in for my plans for an Assassin's Mua'dib, wherein perhaps an Iraqi Republican Guard guy betrays Saddam upon seeing his village gassed or something (taking a cue here from Sayid's backstory in LOST), or maybe after becoming sick of the atrocities in the Iran-Iraq war. In his righteous rage and revolutionary frevor, he starts offing Saddam supporters AND their CIA handlers. Did you know that Germans sold nerve gas ingredients to Iraq? And that the UN was going to condemn Iraq's use of nerve gas in its war against Iran, before the UK abstained from voting and the US vetoed it? Maybe my Assassin's Mua'dib can even chop Donald Rumsfeld's hand off, before/after he shakes hands with Saddam Hussein.

Fair play.

This basically plays into what I'm trying to do with Comix America. While I'm basically fucking around with Russia and am clueless about it, save for some personal stories for the Russkies, and while British and French imperialism makes a resurgence in Europe, I want to portray the rise and fall of American global dickery. After all the Bad Things that happen during Reagan's time, the fallout and the De-Reaganization basically causes a whole reversal of all these negative American trends. All these sponsoring of death squads and foreign regimes, the support of amoral and/or evil assholes throughout the world and the performing of atrocities just for "American foreign interests" and the sugar-coating of all this in the name of bullshit like "freedom" and "democracy" while oppressive dictators like Ferdinand Marcos who rule over shitholes like the Philippines get American support. I want all that shit to basically collapse, in an ugly way, during the cynical GRIMDARK YEARS of the 1980s where action movies were RUTHLESS and where comic books saw the coming of the likes of Alan Moore and FRANK GODDAMN MILLER (WHORES WHORES WHORES).

When the cynical 80s and early 90s end, when Reagan's regime ends, all this negative stuff is basically EXPUNGED and the ensuing time of de-Reaganization, of Clinton's womanizing, and the subsequent DAYS OF THUNDER when former Senator and jazz musician President Billy Lightning takes over, will basically be a metaphor of the redemption of a nation and the actualization of a bright and better future for MURRICA!

PS. Is Billy Lightning an independent or a democrat? I thought he was an independent, but Siege made him out to be a democrat in his Baccara story. But maybe conservative fascist dicks, like Crowtalon's mayor, can't tell the difference.


And, yes. Is this getting too political?

As much as I like the concept of the eighties as a decade of fall and redemption for multiplete facets of the Comix verse, I find the expansion of the Reaganism troubling - America does a good enough job of acting cartoonish at times in its GLOBAL POLICE JOB capacity that stepping something up that was already at eleven seems somewhat ridiculous. The ideas behind uniting the Middle East under Nadir Hassan and bringing peace to a normal tumultuous region is tempting, but it seems somewhat misplaced. What is the status of the crock-up in Israel/Palestine in COMIX? And what of Iran?

What I do like from this idea is the implied craziness of all the PRIVATE MILITARY COMPANIES running around (a la MGS4) - it takes a common feature of twenty minutes into the future stories and places the trope twenty minutes into the past. It's ripe for new characters, as you implied.

I'm just not disposed to making America of the eighties even more ridiculously malevolent than it already is.

I agree that it is a fine balance. While going "Megafortress! USAF space assets! VALLEY FORGE!" and shit is cool, IMO, I do recognize that there is a fine balance between this and overdoing the anti-Americanism. Which is why I'm pitching it here.

Be that as it may, America DID support Saddam Hussein in the past. And supporting these dictatorial regime is something that America has been doing for, like, the last half-century. Is it ridiculously "stepping something up that's already at eleven" or just, like, bringing into attention something ugly that most people would like to ignore/forget?

I know there's a fine line that should be toed, since we don't want things to get too "real" and exploiting hot button topics might not be entirely cool.



It's more of an alliance of convenience, rather than an actual EU/NATO type of unison. But yes, the whole affair is pretty damn complex which is why I'm pitching it here for assessment and/or assistance. FROD seemed to have an agenda for the Mid East with his Nadir and UAE/Dubai/Saudi stuff, so I figured maybe that was something that could be applied to this situation.



Exactly. I want mercenaries and all sorts of glourious ambiguous messes in the region since in the 90s, the de-Reaganization and the Clintons and the Lightnings will basically put an end to American interventionism so today America WON'T be dickish but will NOT have experienced anything like the early-2000s Shrub Years, and instead America will be pretty laid back. There won't BE any Operation XYZ-Freedom led by America, not after the 90s. There might not even be a Desert Storm.

And we needed a place for Saintly Concerns and other private freak mercenary teams to kick ass in.



In real-life they did support Saddam Hussein and did veto a UN resolution meant to condemn the use of Iraqi nerve gas on Iranians. My supposition doesn't really "improve" or "worsen" this.

And after the 80s, I do intend to give the place a new golden era of peace and prosperity. The night is darkest just before the dawn, after all.

EDIT:


Heck. My argument doesn't involve any more American interventionism in the Middle East. Aside from their real-life support of Saddam Hussein, America actually would have little to do in this scenario. In fact, my only change is that America does nothing. America doesn't go into Kuwait, because Iraq doesn't invade, and there's no Gulf War. Instead, Iraq breaks by itself. America doesn't do anything because it's too busy with de-Reaganization and George H.W. Bush is too busy with the shitfest he inherited from Von Reagan (by this point, the American populace would NOT want another war).

I do wonder how Iraq collapses when it had, like, a huge military and some such back in the day. Perhaps the Iran-Iraq war went worser, and the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah's proved more difficult to fight than in real-life. Iraq might've had a harder time against Iran?