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.

And once again, I almost run out of month.

1922
[Adventure!] Whitley Styles records in his journal that Michael Donighal has called, asking if Whit has had any better luck finding Max Mercer (whom neither of them has seen since the Hammersmith Incident). Whit resolves to catch the next boat to London: "Mrs. Austin will be disappointed, but her jewels can wait."

I've already spoiled the ending of this movie.

1923
[Adventure!] Whitley Styles records in his journal that Max Mercer has returned from Macao, conveniently at a time when the other six Æon founders were in Chicago, and almost the first words out of his mouth were "We're not the police, but we've got to do something with the people we stop." Jake Stefokowski wondered why these Inspired malefactors can't just be turned over to the police; Whit pointed out that most jurisdictions don't actually have laws against building "death rays". Professor Dixon suggested setting up a psychiatric facility; Jack Tallon offered some of his secluded African/Arabian holdings to the purpose. In the end, Mercer agreed to the project: "it's not enough to understand the wonders of our world; we must understand the people who experience them." Max has also suggested that the Æon core membership spend Christmas together.

It may be that this decision led directly to Bahrain. At the very least, it provided precedent.

2001
[Aberrant] The DeVries Agency announces the formation of a new arm, DeVries National Tactical Solutions. While the Agency does not apologize for its role in the Equatorial Wars, it transfers the management of its combat Elites™ to DVNTS.

I'm afraid I don't have much to add to that.

2002
[Aberrant] In the wake of Utopia's being granted oversight of Kashmir, Covert Action News reports on "Utopia's Real Agenda Revisited". The monitoring facilities in Kashmir would allow Utopia to watch India and China — the two largest armies, and largest official nova military forces, on the planet — and the southern parts of the RusCon. The article's author even speculates that Utopia may have manipulated China into taking an interest in Kashmir (which they never had before).

The original article on "Utopia's Real Agenda" appeared in April, but I don't seem to have written an entry about it at the time. *^^* It was to do with the negotiations that led to the London Peace Accord.

An old codger's grumbling.

1977
[Adventure!/Aberrant] In his private journal, Whitley Styles, the last founding member of Æon still active with the Society, waxes philosophical about what Max Mercer had in mind when he founded Æon versus what the Society's new guard are turning it into.

He mentions Mercer's general awareness of the future, but (knowing that this is going into his beloved Babel Dossier) refuses to give the details. He also admits, reluctantly, that Mercer's knowledge is not always as specific as could be hoped. Mercer is, after all, only human (though he and their "old friend" Mike Donighal come "a damn sight closer to it than most of us").

And he speaks of all the dreams Mercer had for Æon that aren't being fulfilled. Max wanted Æon to "help humanity reach a higher state — of individuality, technology, culture, society — the whole ball of wax." But once the human race matured to the point where it was taking those steps on its own, and Æon was no longer necessary, the Society was supposed to go away. ("Any man who is doing a job is working to make himself obsolete..." — William S. Burroughs, Nova Express)

( 'Top Secret. Classified. For the Board, the Elite, the Initiates.' Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of the Earth? )

Pulp pulp pulp.

1922
[Adventure!] In the late hours of the night, the body of Roland Broomfield is recovered from the Thames, his pockets full of bricks but no sign of violence on his person.

And so ends yet another attempt to investigate the "King of the World". I'm told that this individual remains an active force in the underworld into the Trinity Era, or at least resembles a character who appears in that capacity in Luna Rising. I wonder what this individual is up to in the Nova Age. Probably an assistant to one of the Megasyndicate's heads, dropping the occasional right word into the right ear...

Back to the pulp era.

1922
[Adventure!] Roland Broomfield, an Irregular of the International Detective Agency, sends a memo to the Old Man expressing the intent to track down the so-called "King of the World".

The IDA is based out of London and staffed by "Irregulars", and each branch (like the main office) is headed up by "the Old Man". I think the inference I make from that is the one the authors of the Adventure! rulebook wanted me to make. (I'll assume you can guess what it is unless you specifically comment to tell me you can't.) Whether it's an accurate one, only they know.

The King of the World is connected, through the Condotierri, to the Order of Murder. How this connection runs, I'll leave for a later stage of the discussion.

Back to the Inspiration Age!

1923
[Adventure!] An explosion rocks Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, destroying the main floor of Mercer Manor.

Neither the Storyteller nor the d20 version of Adventure! says if Æon ever found who was responsible. The most important enemy the Society'd managed to accumulate in its month-and-change of existence was Baron Saturday, so he's a major candidate. On the other hand, Dr. Zorbo might have already started carrying over his vendetta against Danger Ace onto Stefokowski's colleagues. (I actually think the latter is a little more likely, more compatible with Jackson Harley's presented image as a Robin Hood of the Caribbean.)

( Menschheit! Zum Himmel! )

Something of a turning point of the Inspiration Age.

( And so it begins. )

( Meetings with remarkable men. )

( Works of genius. )

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).

It's happened before, and it will happen again.

1923
[Adventure!] "General" E.W. Caldwell's Manifest Destiny Infantry seizes Bikini Atoll, a small unremarkable Pacific island.

( Then conquer we must when our cause it is just... )

Oh, and I can't forget this. Particularly since the first event has to take place today.

1923
[Adventure!] Whitley Styles reports in his journal: "Max is back." Mercer appears to have been recovering for the last few months under the care of Dr. Primoris (who seems familiar to Whit, but whom Whit does not immediately recognize as Michael Donighal) and claims not to remember how he got into Primoris' care. They resolve to go out for a steak dinner over which Max will explain his new venture and invite Whit to join it.

The excerpts from Whit's journal in the Adventure! rulebook only list the month in which each entry was made, but when I see an entry dated in June and the (implicitly) next day's entry dates from July, I can do the math easily enough.

1998
[Aberrant] The UN overwhelmingly passes the Zurich Accord, a document declaring novas to be human beings, with all the rights and responsibilities thereof. A few fundamentalist Islamic nations and dictatorial regimes, all countries with poor human-rights records, protest the resolution.

Those people thought the Accord went too far. Others would later decide it didn't go far enough. Or, at least, that its enforcement was somewhat selective, and was failing to target what they saw as Utopia's attempt to turn novas into the indentured servants of baselines.