InsaneJournal

[Christine Chapel]
The Entity really does take requests.
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[Medical staff]
It looks like Dr Elliott might have disappeared as well.
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[MCU, James Rogers, Torunn Thorsdottir, adult friends -Rogue]
Some of us will have been here three months on Sunday, which apparently is a good amount of time to figure out that as not fun as actually explaining my timeline is, explaining small things every time they come up in conversation with a new person is actually worse. Thought it would be a good idea to steal a play from James and do a brief primer. No pictures though, sorry.

(Yes, this is the brief version. It's still kind of long. I left out a lot of pretty major events that were too difficult to explain or I didn't have much to do with. The 90s/00s especially there was quite a big of stuff going on globally that occasionally broke out in some kind of violence. If you don't want to read it don't, but don't feel like you need to tell me about it either.)


In roughly chronological order, starting with the background context:

Project Rebirth/Weapon X: the super soldier programs of the US and Canadian governments, respectively, created in response to learning that the Germans were being aided by an alien race called the Chitauri in the lead up to WWII. Weapon X created mutants and maintained a testing facility until probably around the 80s when the subjects broke out. A couple of them went on to found the Brotherhood of Mutants, a mutant supremacist terrorist organisation most active in the early 2000s.

Project Rebirth is sort of personally signifiant to me because when I was first looking for work I was offered a job there. I mentioned it to my grandmother and she filled me in on some of the history that doesn't get included in any of the official documentation. The initial trials right near the start of WWII were performed on an African-American battalion. Very few survived, and most of the ones that did were seriously disfigured. A great-uncle of mine - Thomas Hanlan - served in that battalion and the government lied about what happened to them, but another of the families didn't buy the official line and spent the next two decades or so piecing everything together.

Ever wondered how hard it is to get a job in a field when you're ethically opposed to the absolute by far best funded research area? The answer is 'really hard'.

X-Men: mutant superhero team led by one of the Brotherhood co-founders after he quit, to try to counter the public image created by the Brotherhood. They showed up the first time when the Brotherhood attacked DC.

Ultimates/EDI: The US and European superhero teams. Originally for threats like the Chitauri, but then they started being fielded for international interventions. Obviously that didn't go down well for a lot of countries and eventually led to the Liberators attempting to invade the US with the help of double agents on the inside.

Tunguska: In 2008 a signal started broadcasting on all frequencies. It was... brutal. I won't try to describe it. By the second day reports of mass suicides were coming in. When we finally tracked down the source we found an old Russian facility from their own super soldier program. It had been abandoned during the 90s - the money stopped coming in, so everyone who could leave left and everyone who couldn't was locked inside, everything rigged up with nuclear landmines to keep them from escaping. The program had been grafting pieces of alien technology onto the test subjects. They were getting it from a self-repairing robot that had crashed there a hundred years ago. Its communications systems had finally come back online and the signal was a warning that we were about to be attacked by a technological hivemind that feeds on planets. Instead of a hundred years to prepare, we had a month. I spent the whole thing getting as much information as I could out of Vision and passing it on.

Gah Lak Tus: We didn't beat Gah Lak Tus. No one has ever beaten Gah Lak Tus. Vision had been traveling for thousands and thousands of years collecting data on all the ways people had failed. But we hurt it, and that was enough to scare it away. I don't think it had ever been hurt before. The whole thing was the start of things getting really bad though. I think Vision's signal sent most of the world a little bit insane. Afterwards, she (and I use that mostly for convenience) was supposed to stay for a month to finish repairing, and never quite got around to leaving.

Ultimatum: Everyone thought Magneto was dead after he attacked DC. Turns out Xavier just mind wiped him. Somehow he got past it, remembered who he was, found out his daughter had been killed, and completely lost his shit. He enacted a doomsday plan he'd come up with ages ago, wiping out humanity by shifting the poles of the planet. Tens of millions of people died before one of the X-Men killed him. Even with my wings and Vision's in-atmosphere transport systems we were stuck in Iran for a week, but my family was in New York when it flooded. None of them survived.

After that mutants and special abilities were declared illegal. The government used Sentinels, mutant hunting robots, to track down anyone who didn't turn themselves in to be housed in camps and fitted with collars to suppress their abilities. Eventually it got out that mutants were a creation of the Canadian government, funded by the US, causing riots and massive protests outside Canadian and US embassies. Anti-mutant militias became more prominent, especially after some of the prisoners began revolting and escaping from the camps. The leader of one of them turned out to be a mutant with the power of cyberpathy, and when he was killed his consciousness took over the Sentinels and they went rogue, straight up slaughtering mutants anywhere they found them. They took control of the Southwest which started a cascade of other territories seceding.

Tian: The SEAR took advantage of the situation by releasing a virus that would prevent any new mutants being born, and offering superpowers to anyone who wanted them. They got pretty much instant karma for it when all the new mutants overthrew the government and founded Tian, a mutant nation open to anyone who wanted to join. It was led by a former X-Man who'd defected from SHIELD, an incredibly powerful telepath.

Reed Richards: Meanwhile in Europe, another former superhero had gone completely nuts and decided to create a new race of hyper-evolved humans by building a time bubble. When he brought it down a thousand years had passed inside it and the city was big enough that when he planted it on Germany it wiped out a good portion of West Europe and killed millions of people. The US tried to nuke it. Reed cratered Washington DC. Another half million people. Some no-name congressman or something became President and full civil war broke out in the US. Total death toll unknown. We never got time to tally it up.

Anyone who could be deployed to help put it down was, and when it was over Steve Rogers was elected President. He distributed a cure for mutants and signed over part of Utah for anyone who didn't want to take it, which wasn't many. They called it Utopia, led by a rebel leader from the civil war who'd spearheaded an effort to free the southwest from the Sentinels. Utopia and Tian ended up in some kind of weird rivalry where Tian became obsessed with being the only mutant homeland and basically went to war with them. They lost badly and most of the survivors moved to Utopia. Reed Richards' hyper-evolved humans decided he was a liability and handed him over.

Galactus: The version of Gah Lak Tus from another universe, who apparently decided to deal with it by sending it through an interdimensional portal. Vision detected its presence and went to investigate, but it was much more powerful than anyone could have imagined. She barely managed to get a final message out telling us what she'd learned, that it had come from 616 and we needed Reed Richards to help beat it. We sent him over there to find out what they knew about Galactus and came up with a way to trap it in the Negative Zone.

Incursions: It turns out that sending something like Galactus through an interdimensional portal is a really bad idea for the structure of reality. Rifts started popping up and I joined the Future Foundation, a scientific field team designed to counter them. We did that for nearly a year before we found out that our world and 616 were on a collision course that was going to wipe us out completely.

That was August 2015. From Vision coming online to warn us about Gah Lak Tus to incursion destroying the universe was seven years, and in that time we had at least half a dozen separate 6+ figure death toll events and a civil war, as well as everything in between. Last thing I knew we had hours or days or maybe a week or two before the incursion would happen. It's been three months.

At home, concentration camps as a solution for the problem of mutants existing was the centrist position, and 'politically correct' is a buzzword that fell by the wayside after the 90s. Some people will always try but there wasn't much room for sensitivity. You just dealt with things, because everyone else was dealing with them too. It's not a place where you can survive easily by being soft. The longer I spend here the more I realise the differences go way deeper than just surface events. Sometimes it's easier to just work