We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

1923
[Adventure!] Whitley Styles records in his journals that, as far as he can tell, Maxwell Anderson Mercer vanished into thin air last July. Michael Donighal has cabled him from the Far East, reporting no success and recommending Whit not waste any more of his time.

As we've seen, he found his friend again.

1924
[Adventure!] Whitley Styles records in his journal that Max's idea of the Æon founders spending Christmas together "was perfect. It was like a second family....I even saw Jack crack a smile or three."

Aww...

2001
[Aberrant] Lambert Asani, son of Congo diamond magnate Mente Asani, and his three brothers travel the world meeting with novas who could help Lambert's goal of deposing Congo president Laurent Kabila.

Asani doesn't rate a mention in the Aberrant core rules; he's entirely from Aberrant: Elites.

2002
[Aberrant] Over the next three years, much of the world's copper and fiber-optic cable communications networks are replaced with advanced optic cable, derived from studies of eufiber, and wireless networking. The new hardware, couple with new data-transfer protocols, is dubbed "OpNet." OpNet replaces the Internet, phone systems and cellular networks, allowing for wireless communications from virtually any location. It boasts an initial 700% increase in data speed over previous telecommunications technology.

The expansion of the OpNet is mostly complete by May of this year.

Caestus Pax announces that Team Tomorrow will be splitting into T2M Americas and T2M Europe. Pax himself, along with Lightning, Apollo Kid, Slag, Splash, Uta "Tremor" Stentz and Byron "Saxon" Graham (among others), will be forming T2MEu, based out of Venice, while Montoya-Bernal, Psyche, Jennifer "Slider" Landers, Ana Graça Texeira and Pualani "Pele" Kapunani will comprise the Mexico City-based T2MAm. Ragnarockette and Shadow Artist will remain members-in-training.

You'll be seeing more of those names in times to come.

Project Utopia launches Novation Toys, Games and Comics, its licensing division, to compete with (among other things) the DeVries Agency's entry into the action-figure market. Series I action figures include Slag and the Fireman. The first wave of Novation-produced OpCast series includes Team Tomorrow: Protectors and Slag: Hot Metal Fury.

That last one's a little redundant, but it's in the calendar as written. I may merge it with the other datapoint, actually.

The medium is the massage, as Jon Hickman could have told us.

2004
[Aberrant] Geoffrey Glass [sic], N!'s vice-president of programming, sends an interdepartmental memo to Monique Dufresne, director of programming, stating that the other network veeps were wowed by her program idea "Two Minutes Hate".

As I remarked elsewhere, the Aberrant Storytellers Companion refers, in two N! internal memos appearing within pages of each other, to a Geoffrey Gold and a Geoffrey Glass. Whether these are two different people, or typos for the same person (and, if the latter, which is the proper name), I honestly couldn't say. I can say that "Two Minutes Hate" (giving novas 120 uninterrupted seconds to speak whatever's on their minds) takes off in a pretty big way.

Well, this is a rarity — a Today as distinct from a This Day.

2004
[Aberrant] In a letter to store managers of this date, Novation Editor-in-Chief Jerome Grant regrets to inform his customers that, due to Hiram Goldberg's recent demise at the hands of DeVries elite Klaus "Tötentanz" Kleisner while on assignment in Nigeria, the Slag: Hot Metal Fury™ comic will end with #30 (an accurate retelling of his final mission, to be sold polybagged with a Mature Readers label) and a "Mourning Edition" Slag figure will be included in Series III.

Mourning Edition Slag™ (Series IIIb if you want to get specific) is actually to be a boxed set of three figures: Slag™ with Slag Pile™, Slag™ with Accurate Death Wounds, and Hiram Goldberg in casket with removable lid; these will be the last Slag figures ever. HMF #30 is to have "two full-color covers" (whether they'll be sold together or as separate surprise variants, Grant doesn't say).

Finally, Grant takes a moment to reflect on how Slag's death reminds us all that novas are not immortal four-color superheroes, and sets a precedent. "The road forks here," he writes;

one path leads to a comfortable and changeless mythology, the other leads back to the real world. We at Novation have, after a great deal of debate, chosen to err on the side of realism to illustrate that novas are real people, with real problems and whose choices have real consequences.

Grant means it only as a comment on the static nature of most comics. At the risk of stating the obvious, Kraig Blackwelder presumably also meant it as an observation on the evolving nature of the TU. (Okay, evolving via a somewhat railed metaplot, but evolving nonetheless.)

The original version of this post, the version that was going to be written in character, made only one unsupported interpolation into the Trinity Universe timeline — I arbitrarily stated that Michael Daemon Donighal was born on this date in 1900. Hugh has already written about Donighal's involvement in the Hammersmith Incident and how it turned him into Dr. Primoris. What he didn't write about is what happened after that.

( A terrible angel. )

( So to-night we're gonna party like it's... )

( They say two thousand, zero zero, party over, oops, out of time. )

( Rate of transference. )

( Are you ready for a new sensation? )

What a difference a day makes. And happy real-world new year to all and sundry.