[Pre-1859] scattered reports and urban legends throughout the world, blah blah
[1859] Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species, a text which explored evolution and suggested, for the first time, that humans may also be rapidly evolving.
[1859- 1901] For the rest of the Victorian era, new legends of "monsters" seemed to increase, with a few people suggesting that these weren't hallucinations and hysteria but were, in fact, living examples of what Darwin was proposing in his book.
[1901-1914] At the beginning of the 20th century, the number of instances of so-called "subhumans" increased dramatically. Still greatly outnumbered by the general population, many found themselves most at home in nomadic communities, where they were free to move place to place to avoid persecution. Despite the increase in subhuman births, the subject was still something that was rarely spoken of in polite company. Though superstitious people believed they existed, most people outwardly denied that belief. Subhumans, for their part, nearly always chose to keep themselves hidden.
[1914-1918] World War I brought about a lot of change in the world, and as troops moved across Europe, many of the smaller communities of subhumans were wiped out. In the turmoil, many were captured and taken to medical facilities, both private and government-owned, in hopes of studying them and discovering more about what exactly they were.
[1918-1939] Following World War I, secret experimentation on captured "aberrations" continued, leading to a decrease in the number of reported births. Through the experimentation, it was discovered that there were ways to reverse some of the genetic abnormalities present in the aberrations, and some governments instituted mandatory vaccinations. These vaccinations were proven to be very effective at first, but ultimately failed due to the expense and difficulty of enforcing mandatory booster doses.
[1939-1945] World War II again tore apart a great deal of the European continent. By the end of the war, thousands of aberrations were unaccounted for, many of them having fallen victim to Josef Mengele's experiments. Mengele wasn't the only person using the chaos of war to conduct experiments, though, and through the studies conducted by various scientists, a new method of vaccination was discovered - an oral medication that could be dissolved in water.
[1945-1955] Following the war, governments across the world began to use the new vaccination methods to secretly dose their populations, hoping to completely eradicate what they now accepted were indeed mutations in the human genome. It took them a very long time to work out the exact dosage, and for a number of years, new mutants continued to manifest, though on the whole the mutations were not nearly as extreme as in earlier years.
[1955-1989] Thanks to the dosing of the world's processed water supplies, the population was fairly well controlled, with only a handful of documented instances of higher level mutations somehow still slipping through. In nearly all of those documented instances, the individuals in question mysteriously disappeared.
[1989] Professor Charles F. Xavier, a government scientist, retired from his post and opens a school on his family's rather substantial property. To the outside world, the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning was simply an elite science academy, with a very secretive admissions process. In reality, the school functioned as a safe haven and training facility for mutants who, thanks to the property's water filtration system, were able to properly manifest their powers.
[1989-2000] With the secret water dosing having been in use for well over a generation, mutants were widely considered to be nothing more than an urban legend. Though people had heard stories of individuals who suddenly manifested some sort of abnormal ability or physical appearance, nobody seemed to personally know anyone who had. While on the whole, the dosing had been effective, some individuals began to show signs of resistance to it, perhaps due to overexposure.
Mutants who manifested were very quickly located by the government and taken away. A lot of the disappearances were reported as runaways, and few if any of the disappeared mutants' families and friends even knew that the person had been a mutant in the first place. Further complicating the matter, a number of private sector companies, some with government contracts, also began abducting mutants for their own purposes.
Charles Xavier also took advantage of the new immunity and, using the technology at his disposal, was able to locate quite a few mutants just as their powers first spiked.
[2000-2015] Over the next twenty years, the vaccination was re-worked and a new version of it was introduced into the water supply, again dramatically decreasing instances of manifestation. Individuals with higher power levels still sometimes manifested, but even then they never manifested at their true potential. The only exceptions came from secluded communities with limited access to treated water. Most of the time, the people in those communities knew well enough that they should keep the manifestations quiet.
The new version of the vaccine complicated things a bit for the Xavier Institute. Though there were already a few students in residence, it was becoming increasingly more difficult for Charles Xavier to find and recruit new students. Those who were recruited were trained not only in their powers, but also in many forms of martial arts, technology, and military strategy. Their primary objectives became not only to locate and provide support for mutants, but also to find a way to put an end to the dosing and abductions.
[2015] Game start
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