This day in Trinity Universe history

[aberrantangels]

It's rare that I have to lead off one of these with a correction, and (as etherlad, at least, will have noticed) rarer still that I make the correction obvious.

1924
[Adventure!] In the aftermath of the previous night's battle with the stalwart mesmerist Fulminatore, Primoris wishes he understood better the mechanism by which the human body receives telluric energy and uses it to become Inspired.

He's understandably convinced that the Hammersmith Incident was the key; in his judgment, claims of such powers prior to 1922 have been unreliable. Fulminatore, for instance, "claimed to be a son of Jove" and to have had his powers (which a later age would classify as electrokinetic) from birth; Donighal dismissed that claim as a delusion, the result of the mesmerist's new powers unhinging his mind.

But many people had become Inspired who'd never been anywhere near Atlas Cross, before or since the Telluric Engine's self-destruction. "It cannot be an evolutionary mechanism....While the pseudoaetheric waves may have an effect on evolution, such an effect cannot be expressed in those already alive, only in those to be born."

But the tools available to science of the day gave him some clues. His cells, under a microscope, didn't look quite like the cells of the unInspired. The concept of "mutants" was only about 20 years old, but Michael Donighal seized on it as applying to him and those like him. He only wished he could study, or even glimpse, the structure of his chromosomes.

Or some stalwart's chromosomes, at least. Regrettably, he knew it would make his Æon colleagues suspicious if he tried to collect tissue samples. (He regretted that Fulminatore had had to be made to self-destruct, as such a sample would have been invaluable.) For the time being, he'd have to study the only posthuman specimen he knew he could trust. (One wonders if the X-ray he considered getting would have shown a small cluster of mutated neurons between his frontal lobes.)

1956
[Aberrant] Mark Anthony Green, American Eagle presidential candidate in 2008, born in Baltimore, MD.

In 2004, he's serving his second term as a US Senator from Maryland; his challenger in the 2002 election claimed he used "Nixonian" legal harassment and espionage against her campaign. Before his Senate term, he spent two years as Director of Competition and Regulation Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which sounds like a relative of real-world think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, a chief promoter of PNAC I subsequently discovered exists in OTL as a separate arm of the right-wing noise machine, alongside such other wholly-owned subsidiaries Fox News, the Moonie Washington Times, the Scaife newspapers and the Republican Party). Sometime before that, during his college years, he interned with the Institute for Historical Review (a group of Holocaust revisionists deniers).