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aberrantangels1999
Borin Yeltsin dies, setting off a breakdown of the Russian government. The chaos leads to Russia's total economic collapse. Russia's financial woes spread through already weakened world markets, and cause the world's worst one-day market losses ever. "The Moscow Crash," as it is later termed, plunges the world into a massive recession.
Aberrant: Project Utopia elaborates slightly, noting that what killed Yeltsin was a heart attack, and that he was en route to a meeting with his economic advisors.
Riots broke out at many of the markets crippled by the Crash. According to the Aberrant Players Guide, an OL named Mayumi Morioka erupted during one such riot at the Nikkei, gaining telepathic and telekinetic powers that helped her quell the situation. (Those powers would later earn her a spot on Nippontai, Japan's national superteam, under the name Kô [translated as "Phoenix"].)
Other riots in Namibia — some in the capitol of Windhoek, others at properties of the DeBeers diamond consortium — were quelled by two novas of the recently formed DeVries Agency. According to Aberrant: Elites, those two novas were Anna DeVries herself, the woman who turned her late father's "Executive Action" mercenary corporation into one of the first nova-for-hire agencies, and Joseph "Pursuer" Simms, late of the US army. However, as I noted here, Elites goes on (in the bio section of Pursuer's character description) to have him erupting sometime in the spring of 2000 while saving cadets lost on a wilderness training exercise. But I already gritched about that glitch. (One possible resolution would be to move his eruption back to 1998 and have him as one of the earliest novas.)
Yeltsin was one of a number of important world figures who, in the Trinity Universe, are already dead, arguably from the added stress of having to live in a world that now contains novas. I'll be getting to some others in due time. I'll also be getting to some other aspects (besides Operation Clean Sweep) of Project Utopia's response to the Crash.
