"We're not heroes. Heroes change the world. We're just preserving the powers that be."
- Lucky Jim (1988-2019), 2005
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2002 - The whole Boston thing. No one remembers how it really ended, excepting Seer, who can't forget things. All that's recalled is that Master J and Jesa died stopping some.. Thing, and Bloodnhoud vanished. No one's sure who hired that construction crew that helped begin rebuilding Boston, but they show up from time to time over the world.
Moscow was rebuilt with UN funding. The President had the white house rebuilt, but insisted D.C. be left as ruins - both as a warning and a promise. It does good tourism business.
Most of the worlds economy is left reeling. Seer's predictions begin to come true...
"The world stock market will collapse. The rioting will destroy New York more than any foreigners ever could. The same with Hong Kong. China's army's will march. Already the market closes. It's been seen, what happened here. Intent and consequence. The orders have been given in China. In Japan, they rejoice to see the Americans tasting their own medicine, but already are beginning to get people to help, remembering. Israel, bereft of it's ally, prepares for war with the middle east. Europe is in shock. They're killing the heroes. Africa is dying. The heroes are dying, and being asked to save them. Save us, they're saying to their newly named gods even as they crucify us all."
Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet are brutally overthrown by China in a desperate bid to prevent inner war. Most super humans are killed there, and there are routine and bloody purging to this day. Israel holds it own against invaders by recruiting super humans who later get thrown into what amounts to ghettos and concentration camps. Africa begins to slide downhill in spite of - or because of - Eugenics attempts to rule it.
2003 - The former PCs try and help the world and deal with their weakened powers. Most people just try ad rebuild the world, because they know how close it came to being destroyed. There is a lot of anti-super human resentment and quite a few messy killings on both sides, but somehow anarchy is averted, largely though unstinting efforts by the PeaceMakers.
The peacemakers are: Mimic (leader), Starchild, Void, Bender, Weaponsmith, Lucky Jim and Skipper.
By 2004 the government had got it's act together and a lot of laws got past, many of them extremely restrictive. While they did little to curb superhuman excesses, they did give the police a lot of justification in gunning down said superhumans. The law tended to use the heavy stick approach, in the hopes that dangerous sentences would deter superhumans from committing crimes. Surprisingly, it seems to have worked for a time, probably because the ones who could get caught were easy to enforce laws on.
Haven was planned and bean the same year, with lots of superhumans helping and eventually making it their home.
The PeaceMakers were given an official charter, making them the first Sanctioned team to operate publicly. The government learned all their identities during this, save for the Skipper, who left the team by walking into a TV set and vanishing.
The PeaceMaker charter basically says no killing civilians, no killing villains (unless it's unavoidable) and minimal property damage because you can get sued. It was very restrictive, and some of the team (notably Starchild) disliked working under such conditions, but it was better than working alone, and they got a lot more accomplished due to government approval.
In November, Bender talked to Congress (which laughed at it) and then the UN about the creation of it's kind. The UN basically ignore the allegations, at least officially. Russia did not like the fact that most of the scientists Bender could recall had spoken Russian and flatly refuted the idea of cloning people as early as 1980. The next day, Bender simply vanished, leaving behind a note to the others saying that it was going to find and help its people, and knew they couldn't due to the charter.
Much of 2005 and 2006 were spent stopping people from thinking their powers made them superior to everyone one and recruiting. Bolt, a young girl who could fly very, very fast and control sound and her brother - Sightseer - a young man with the ability to distort spatial relations ("Guess what? You're now part of the space between the sun and alpha centauri. Have fun.") joined the team. They did a lot of good in America but rarely got permission to act abroad. As Lucky Jim pointed out once "We're not heroes. Heroes change the world. We're just preserving the powers that be." But they did it well.
2007 was a lot of the same, except two new members (Cloud, who could command the wind and Logrus, who could cause chaos anywhere) joined the team, to lighten the load on the others.
On August 23rd, Elrond Windchaser is shot and killed by a Humans First sniper while in Haven due to his views that people should get together and work things out. The PeaceMakers quite simply destroy the organisation very quickly and very, very brutally over the next week, leading to allegations of violating their charter as Starchild and Void were reported in Indonesia hunting survivors down as last as October.
On November 5th, a group of terrorists tried to blow up the white house using 36 barrels filled with dynamite. They're stopped by Stars and Stripes, American Flag, and Patriot. They become the presidents own heroes and the "true American Heroes".
2008 was the year of Destroyer. A powerful superhuman, he claimed to be an alien bent on conquering this world and simply began. He decimated a good section of Haven, defeating even the Sentinels, before ending up in Boston due to a trick by the mad genius Dr. Filth, who teleported Destroyer there because Destroyer had, well, destroyed his home. (Actually, he'd been aiming the teleport for the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but somehow it didn't work.) The PeaceMakers attacked, and were beaten back. Easily. The American Heroes joined in, found themselves outclassed, and were asked by Mimic to get civilians out of the way. To evacuate the city, in fact. They tried their best.
In the ensuing three hours central Boston was pulverized and Destroyer still kept coming. A Dog appeared on the scene and, somehow, began to weaken Destroyer. It wasn't enough. Destroyer was ranting about the power of shadows without end and spikards (whatever they were) when Mimc decided to mimic him. He managed to blast Destroyer once before disintegrating as he was consumed by the power he'd tried to duplicate. As he'd once duplicated both Void and Starchild to see if he could, everyone was horrified. Lucky Jim managed to get an arm and leg broken trying to save Mimic, which had never happened before, and it began to dawn on the heroes that they were well and truly screwed.
Starchild flew into the sun, and came back with enough power to melt cities . .Destroyer just got sunburned when she unleashed it all into him, then broke her body in quite a few places and tossed her aside like a rag doll. Most of the unaligned heroes were dead or dying. Bolt died trying to fly through Destroyer, Sightseer tried to make Destroyer part of a massive perceptual illusion and fried his own brain. Destroyer liked it. Cloud managed to survive, but Logrus was killed as well. Void - the only member left in anything resembling reasonable shape - got Weaponsmith to distract Destroyer with a few meteors and reached for all the energy he could.
What happened then was only explained later by Dog, but Void burned with power and seven terrible forces lashed out of him into Destroyer, annihilating Void and leaving a strange, dark hole where he'd been. Destroyer began to get back up and WeaponSmith snapped and unleashed everything he could, annihilating a good 20 city blocks and killing Destroyer. Hopefully. No one ever found a body.
WeaponSmith was put in trial, but once Congress realized the sheer magnitude of Destroyer, was given life in prison instead of a death sentence. The surviving PeaceMakers were absolved of responsibility for his actions.
Appearing before the Committee of Unamerican Activities, Dog save a very delightful speech that didn't go over well.
In 2009 the PeaceMakers tried to recover, but few people wanted to join and there was talk of them being "Banished from Boston". (Demonstration organiser Lucy Fairchilds said that other cities at least got demolished on a less regular basis and that the PeaceMakers had become the Disneyland of American - grandiose, overcrowded, and a blight on the surrounding area.
Even the "Home of Starchild" sign was almost taken down. The backlash against the PeaceMakers was ugly enough that there were riots in Boston (again) and early in 2012 they had their international status revoked. A lot of fundamentalist protesters found out Starchild was a lesbian and "Superdyke is corrupting our children!" became a rather ugly rallying cry against the PeaceMakers as a whole.
For the most part, 2010 and 2011 were spent in damage control. A girl with flying powers took the name of Bolt II and, combined with Lucky Jim, Cloud, Seer, and Starchild, represented the total amount of PeaceMakers. Well if you discount the rumours of Void being spotted practically everywhere, rumours the team explained to the press as having to do with a "factory of voids" the press knew of as an urban legend and the PeaceMakers couldn't - or wouldn't - give the real answer.
On October 27th, a young girl fell into the "Void Hole", somehow evading the protections the UN and PeaceMakers had set up around it. An attempt to recover her was made by some UN special ops, the Terranauts, who were able to survive in any environment. Nothing was heard from them after they entered and no one has returned. Two other missions wee planned (2012 and 2017) but neither was actually attempted.
2012 saw the official stripping of international sanction from the PeaceMakers. Bender was reportedly seen in Boston, but none of the PeaceMakers claim it visited them, a claim that both the press and government find difficult to believe. There were also rumours of strange operatives seen with Bender, creatures like it, and well trained. Rumours of paramilitary and terrorist activities were rampant though none of them were ever proven.
Perhaps because of this or the fundamentalists, Starchild resigned from active service with the PeaceMakers. Seer followed later that year, after a close run-in with some superpowered nut cases who'd been part of Focus on the Family.
(For the curious, they were: Working Dad, a super with enhanced strength and toughness; Kitchen Mom, a woman with the ability to control and command household appliances and the ability to literally make people stay at home; & two children, known as the Nuclear Twins, who could create tremendous explosions when they worked together on it.)
In 2013 the anti-human riot in Jerusalem had a lot of supers treading carefully and the PeaceMakers even got accused of trying to start said riots in Boston at least once, but nothing ever actually happened. A man called Psycho (a telekinetic with very small scale manipulative powers) went on a killing spree near the end of the year but was stopped by Lucky Jim and Psycho's sister, who eventually joined the PeaceMakers under the name Teek.
In 2014 the whole "Disarm your heroes" incident served to keep Starchild on reserve status. A man known as Diamondskin and a woman known as Mindwipe joined the PeaceMakers. They seem to have known each other for some time and were possibly married once, but neither of them admits to that. The LJR clashed with the PeaceMakers over some old issues (like nukes) but come to a live and let live agreement that really pisses Starchild off. She effectively left the team at this point, under a cloud of controversy over her breaking some laws and flying to the moon, or something like that.
In 2015 a man known as Breaker joined the PeaceMakers, making the team: Lucky Jim, Cloud, Diamondskin, Breaker, Bolt II, Mindwipe and Teek.
2018 was mostly unremarkable except that Seer left even reserve status and quit the PeaceMakers entirely, but refused to say why. Some people claim it's because she saw Destroyer returning to deal with the PeaceMakers, but Seer flatly denied this. She also moved to Haven and works part-time at the Windchaser Memorial Building part of SuperU.
In 2019 Lucky Jim died in a freak accident at the PeaceMakers HQ in Boston. The exact details are still considered classified, but a really big hole had been shot through his chest. Diamondskin took over the PeaceMakers and continues as the interim leader until the authorities finish their investigation.
- If anyone can think of stuff to add, let me know -
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~ Campaign ~ The World ~ Contact & Updates ~