Fractured Eras (The Time Walkers)

This was a write-up for a faux-MMO concept I was challenged to make by a friend. His proposal was to "make an MMO where every server was in a different time period of the world, and major events happening in one server would have a ripple effect in others."

This was the second of three concepts I came up with, and while he said I way missed the mark with this one, I still think it was by far the best of the ideas. In hindsight, this would work much better as a Table Top RPG. In fact, I recall I took some influenced from Mage: The Ascension for the magic mechanics and the idea of Paradoxi.

FRACTURED ERAS

Some theorize that time is ultimately just another dimension, akin to distance, depth, and length, that humans interpret as an irreversible linear progression. However, if it were possible to shift one’s perception and see time as merely another measurement of distance, one could theoretically “walk” from one second to the next. Each moment of time would essentially be its own separate reality; in order to time travel, one need only “step” into another dimension. In short: time is an illusion.

Sustra and the Glimpse of Dangling Wires

“Whoever invented Fall deserves to be shot!” proclaimed Dogoro, attempting to spit another errant bit of floral debris out of his face. Being merely a hat, he found the task difficult. However, his dutiful sacrifice at least spared his wearer the inconvenience of tumbling leaves and falling tree nuts smacking into her face.

Sustra said nothing, continuing down the forest path. She rather liked the scenic view of acres of trees splashing autumn colors over the rolling hills.

“Our next mission will be to find the God of Fall, and string her up by her ankles! Try Falling then, you harvest-haired trollop!”

Sustra glanced up at the vocal cloth adorning her head. “Your puns are slacking again.”

Dogoro scoffed. “You’re give me nothing to work with, damn you! Must you always be so silent? This is why everyone says you have no personality!”

S.T.A.R. Corps Retrospective

Prior to Graven, S.T.A.R. Corps is the single largest work that I've ever actually written. Started in 1997 and coming to a close by 2002, the series was my first successful attempt to do exactly the kind of superhero project I’d spent ten years half-assing with the Power Universe: a long-running episodic adventure series with an ensemble cast, set in a world that organically grew into a more complex setting, and actually sticking with one team long enough to let them develop as characters.

The series initially started as a one-shot story I wrote based on a dream, but from this humble beginning, an entire multi-season series of episodic shorts would emerge. Unfortunately, this project would collapse under the weight of multiple revisions, before I finally killed it outright for personal reasons.

Nonetheless, I did actually write close to twenty distinct short stories for this series, on top of rewriting a few of them for later versions. All told, the sheer page count of all the completed shorts adds up to at least one Graven. Add in the full-series outline and encyclopedia, and you’ve got another whole novel on top of that.

This is going to be a fairly massive article, so strap yourselves in.

Power Universe Retrospective: Mutant Force

The Mutant Force is ostensibly one of the most important teams in the Power Universe, but “ostensibly” is the operable word here. After the Fabulous Five, the Mutant Force stories probably informed the majority of the superhero and supervillain community that was to follow. However, in the end, the team itself wasn’t really all that important, as opposed to their greatest nemesis: the mysterious organization known only as “The Company.”

Power Universe Retrospective: The New Force

The New Force was my premier “teen superhero team”, and marked a new era of the Power Universe. Just as the Fabulous Five were the foundation of that setting, the New Force signified a change in direction of actually putting more thought and effort into the characters I was making. The Fabulous Five aside, many of the early Power Universe characters were just walking powersets I would draw in plotless comics.

The New Force came about when I was trying to be more original with my ideas, and actually develop the characters and plan the stories out more. I was nearing High School about this time, and the Power Universe underwent a large overhaul, kicking a lot of the more blatant rip-off characters, going back and revising the more original characters (the Fabulous Five got most of their actual development in this time period), and doing more complicated villain plots. This was also around the time the AEP Multiverse concept started officially coming together.

The New Force was another case of taking pre-existing characters and making a new team with them, something I hadn’t actually done since the Fabulous Five themselves. Several of the characters hence already had a history to bring to the table, and the team’s formation came about in the wake of a large team-up event between the older characters, and several new characters who debuted during the event. As such, I should briefly touch on the two series that came before:

Tabitha's Prologue

My early life was one of adventure. You might think it was worthy of a whole series of exciting memoirs, detailing my many, many adventures battling monsters and demons and dark gods, of helping my fellow champions save the universe time and again. But honestly, looking back, it all blurs together for me. Not to say I’ve forgotten the details, or that I confuse events; not at all. Each adventure is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday.

Power Universe Retrospective: The Fabulous Five

The first real superhero team I ever created, the Fabulous Five would make the first major turning point in my creative direction. Prior to this team, my primary obsession was with monsters and mutants, being largely influenced by 80s cartoons and the toys they were created to shill. At some point, however, I start gravitating towards superheroes, though I knew very little about the genre. You can sort of tell this with the F5, as their design aesthetics were very much still in the monsters and mutants phase; none of them were the spandex and capes types. The Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was as much an inspiration as was the Batman, Superman, and Fantastic Four comics.

Regardless, after the Fabulous Five, my mind would lock very solidly on superheroes. While the F5 were more directly inspired name wise by the Fantastic Four, the team was actually more like the Power Universe’s Avengers and Justice League. Each of the Five was a character I had already created and drew and had come up with solo adventures for prior, and when it came time to pull together a team, they were the best of all the solo heroes I had at the time. Afterwards, I liked the team idea so much, pretty much every superhero idea I had was a team concept from that point on.

Let's Rethink: Marvel's New Warriors

I'm not normally one for fanfiction, but on a lark, I decided to do this as a bit of a writing-planning exercise. There's been a lot of complaining about the, at the time of this writing, new New Warriors (2020) comic, with its, as some might say, "insultingly forced diversity and cringey Zoomer pandering". I'm long done with mainstream comics and the nonsense surrounding their productions over the last few years, but this latest project of theirs is getting so much flack, I'm seeing multiple channels touch on it on my YouTube rec feed. Here's the trailer everyone is whinging on about.

And yes, it is a profoundly silly looking team. Granted, as a Gen X-er who has no stake in all the identity politics and ideological terminology this book is drawing from, I'm not going to sit here and say what would or would not appeal to the Zoomer crowd. Nor am I going to pretend like I'm a superior writer to those who have actually succeeded in making comics their profession.

But sometimes seeing the controversy surrounding this sort of stuff makes my own gears turn. In a way, I see what they are going for thematically with this group, and I don't inherently hate the idea. For the most part, these are at least a group of original characters, not forced replacements for established ones. Yes, they are a new group of New Warriors, but hero teams gain new members all the time, and if they are published long enough, having a whole new generation of characters join the group is perfectly valid.

Do I think this particular group is a good fit for the New Warriors? Honestly, I don't know. New Warriors has been a property that's seen a lot of re-imaginings over the years, usually unsuccessfully. After the original run of pretty damn good comics, the team has been bounced between multiple phases, with most of the original members moving on to other groups. And comics re-use team names for new groups all the time, too. The current Champions team has nothing at all to do with the original short-lived group. So, really, I'm not that hung up on the fact that it’s a "New Warriors" comic. The entire premise is that the old New Warriors are training this new group, because a law was passed that means teen heroes cannot operate without the supervision of older heroes. Sure, whatever.

Anyway, this isn’t really about my opinion on the New Warriors legacy, or the validity of the new group. This is a thought exercise for how I might iterate on this team concept, pitching it as something perhaps a little less cringey, while trying to maintain most of the elements present. Bare in mind that at the time of writing this, the comic still isn't out, and the trailer for it has given us very little information about the characters beyond their powers and the symbolism of their names. Only three of the five characters are given an origin, which consists of a single sentence explanation for how they got their powers. We don’t even know their civilian identities yet. And its really this complete lack of knowledge, I think, that is making this comic so easy for pop-culture pundits to make a big deal about it; they can insert whatever talking points they want and flash the handful of out-of-context, silly-looking pictures as if that’s all they need to prove their theories, because there is literally nothing else of substance to extrapolate from. To be fair, Marvel didn’t do itself any favors with that trailer, but there’s so much pre-release hate for it, it makes me want to give the comic the benefit of the doubt.

Which is, of course, partly why I felt like doing this “pitch.” Frankly, I don’t have much faith, either. I’m fully confident the comic will likely be garbage. But I don’t know yet, because it hasn’t actually come out. Whatever else is going on with the production of this book, who knows, maybe the actual story and characters won’t be that bad. I mean, they probably will. But who knows?

In the meantime, instead of railing on about culture war agendas, I can instead fill that lack of information in with a brainstorm on how I might approach this team concept if I were just given the names, powers, power sources, and pictures to work with, and told to come up with something just from that. And so, here’s my fake, iterative pitch of Vigil, aka, Marvel's New New New New New Warriors. If anything I list below ends up being accurate to the real depiction, well, chalk that up to a very lucky guess.

Bird Girl

1

CRACK!

Hmm. Just past second base.

Toss up… wind back… CRACK!

Bounced on the short-stop position.

Toss up… wind back… CRACK!

Past second again. Much farther this time. Still too low.

Toss up… wind back… CRACK!

What the…? Where did it… THUNK!

“Ow!” I said, more startled than hurt as the baseball whacked me squarely on top of my helmet, knocking it a bit askew. How had I even managed that hit? Must have bounced off the very top of the bat, with the right amount of spin to make it arc back.

I adjusted my helmet and sighed a bit, watching the ball roll off. I reached for another from the wire frame basket, only to realize that was my last one anyway. I sighed again and picked up the basket, walking first to the ball that had just beaned me on the head, then doing a zig-zagging loop across the field to fetch the twenty-nine other balls I’d been hitting back and forth for the past hour. I was really off my game today.

Live With It

She glides over the city like an angel, looking benevolently down on her flock. Nothing seems to be going wrong today, so she’s just doing a few lazy circles overhead, reassuring people with her presence. Despite all the warnings, despite what’s happened to so many other costumed heroes lately, she insists on making herself seen.

I would go on a little inner rant about what a stupid, narcissistic bitch she must be, but I know it isn’t true. She thinks she’s helping. She thinks she’s inspiring hope. She saw some show on television, or read a comic book, or one of those insipid hero vlogs, or god forbid, watched one of the old Team’s press releases, and got inspired. She woke up with powers one day, and because she was already a fan girl for the lifestyle, knew how to get one of those crazy outfits, and that put it in her head that this was meant to be.

I did the research. Flight, laser-beams, x-ray vision, can create force fields, but has to concentrate on it. When she puts up the shield, it creates opaque fields of hard light. That’s how I know she has her guard down right now.

Stupid kid.

Alternate-Earth Productions: My Original Multiverse

I was a creative soul from a very early age, making up stories and drawing comics as far back as I can remember. None of these creative endeavors were ever very good, mind you; I was still a child, I didn’t really build up my skills until much later than I probably should have, and many of my early ideas were just ripping off the things I was inspired by. I basically incorporated my own versions of everything I saw in one way or another. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I finally made a dedicated point to start being more original with my ideas, actually develop the walking power sets I called characters, and actually build the world cohesively.

And yet, despite this attempt to overhaul my creative approach, I couldn’t quite let go of the things I had created before, and I kept wanting to build on that foundation. Thus, I created a grand vision of a multiple-world setting that would manage to canonize nearly everything I had created up to that point. Every story I wrote, every comic I drew, every character idea, every game concept, every setting concept, with extremely few exceptions, was either retroactively incorporated, or would from then on be based in, this grand Multiverse idea.

Power Universe Retrospective: The Power Team

The Power Team is a kid-hero group whom I only made maybe three stories for, including half a comic and one prose story, and an outline for a crossover story, all of which are lost to time. In truth, this is a tiny team barely worth talking about, but the Evolutioneers article reminded me of them, and they are kind of an odd quirk in my Old Multiverse stuff.

CONTINUITY SHENANIGANS

The Power Team occupies a strange place in my old multiverse. Ostensibly a superhero team that should have fit in the Power Universe superhero reality, I believe they actually existed in the Krazy Komix Universe (which is where all my cartoon characters existed). I only surmise this, because the Power Team encountered another group of traveling kid heroes who also existed in the KKU, before they officially crossed over into the Power Universe continuity.

(Yeah, things got complicated as I kept building up this whole little multiverse and tried to cram every project I had into it during this time period. Some characters had connections across multiple settings.)

The Power Team never officially made the transition from obscure Krazy Komix team to official Power Universe hero group. What did happen, though, is that several members of the group got re-imagined as adult versions in the PU. Chalk this up to “alternate timeline versions” I suppose; I never officially declared them the same characters.

Power Universe Retrospective: The Evolutioneers

The Evolutioneers were a particularly eclectic group within the context of the Power Universe. They were both a team of traveling superheroes and a group of scientific and occult explorers, who often uncovered the ancient dangers and secrets of Earth. They often fought mystical threats as much as they encountered lost civilizations and ancient alien remnants. Imagine, if you will, a team that was part Fantastic Four, part X-Men, and part Midnight Sons.

The team also had connections to other groups within the Power Universe, serving to actually tie multiple aspects of the setting together. Despite this, they ended up only really playing a part in one adventure that was a “mega-event” for the Power Universe at the time, before I started overhauling the setting. Said event involved the Evolutioneers stumbling across a temple or stone-carved prophesy that warned of the coming of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As other Power Universe hero teams battled the Horsemen around the world, the Evolutioneers found a way to re-seal the monsters back into Hell. After that, though, I didn’t really have any stories for them other than participating in other events.

This team was also the last to sport a cast of very obvious knock-off characters, before I set the policy for myself to quit doing that. I didn’t even come up with clever names to differentiate them in some cases.

Power Universe Retrospective: The Body Warriors

As with the Fantastic Felines, the Body Warriors were another group of creature-mutants created by the Company, and sent out to combat the Mutant Force. As with the FF, they ended up breaking their programming right away, and becoming yet another superhero team in the Power Universe.

The gimmick of this team was that they were basically body-themed superhumans, as in, they had powers and forms based around a specific body part. I confess the concept was ripped off from a friend of mine at the time, although I did make my own characters for the concept.

In hindsight, this was almost a body-horror themed superhero team, which is kind of an interesting concept.

Power Universe Retrospective: The Fantastic Felines

The Fantastic Felines were originally conceived as a spoof of the Fantastic Four, taking their powers and applying them to some TMNT-style cat mutants. However, I ended up reusing them for something, and liked them enough to make them canon to my Power Universe superhero setting, tweaking their powers so as to not just be a complete knock-off of the original FF. Instead, they were just knock-offs of other existing Marvel characters in cat form.

In their main canon, the Fantastic Felines were creations of the Illuminati-esque genetics corporation known only as “the Company.” The Company primarily battled their own renegade creations, the Mutant Force, and to that end, created several teams of powerful “creature mutants” to combat them, several of whom just ended up going rogue and fighting their creators anyway. Seriously, the Company is probably responsible for like 70% of the Power Universe’s superhero and supervillain characters, because they kept creating them, and they just kept breaking free or deserting their posts or whatever. Really makes you wonder just what exactly the plan or even the goal was.

Pretend

Ryoko sat calmly, listening to the rhythmic, muffled clack of the rails. Her eyes skimmed across the page of her book, but she had more attention on the peripherals of her vision than the words on the page. She took note as a man with a blue longcoat and black hair entered the car. She glanced up as he passed, noting the grey hue of his eyes, and the light stride of his walk, despite his height.

He wasn’t the oddest person to enter the car, but the way he scanned the room and paused for a moment to think of his choice of seat stood out to her. She was mildly surprised when he sat down on the same bench as her, just within arms reach. She kept “reading” her book, turning the page despite failing to remember half the words she’d seen on the previous one. It was one of those nostalgic romance novels, set in the time before the world went away. She wasn’t really a fan of them, but it had been the only choices on the spin rack at the station. This one, at least, had a shirtless hunk on the cover to appreciate.

“Long trip, this.” The man in blue leaned back, crossed one leg at the knee, and draped his arms on the back of the bench, till his hand was almost touching her shoulder.

The Leaping Warriors Final Duel

Long had they awaited this day, the time of their fated final duel. Across the follicle forests and fleshy plains, the two had battled for the Right to Prime Blood. For days, they leaped and kicked and speared at one another, neither able to pierce the other’s armor and inflict the decisive blow. They would fight until exhausted, retreat, and sup on the blood of their Great Host from less desirable wells.

Today, however, would be their final clash. Already, they felt the age in their joints. Their legs held less spring. Their armor plate felt a bit looser. Their tusks had dulled. Prime Blood thrummed through the Great Host right beneath their feet, the most delicious well to be had, stirring their hunger to near madness. But they were not the type to share. Only one could claim this well, and only might could determine that right. And their might was already failing in their age.

Even if neither could strike a true killing blow, they would strike and strike and strike, until one or both could no longer move, their life burned away in one last push to prove their dominance. Whoever could still move enough to pierce the skin of the well could die knowing they were the strongest.

If neither could manage the feat, they could be satisfied knowing that there was only one other who could be their equal. In a way, there would be a comfort in that, a companionship. If only such companionship could have been enjoyed in the sharing of a meal, rather than needing to deprive the other of one. If only they had met before finding this most cherished well, perhaps they could have…

But no. Such was not their way. Such was not their fate. They were what they were, and in the end, only the truly strongest deserved the Right. They tensed their legs, ready to spring. They rasped their claws along their great tusks, preparing the dull blades for a final stabbing. They gave one another a final bow of respect, and then—

And then, the Great Host dragged its claws through the patch. Neither warrior was fast enough to evade their Host’s wrath. This, too, was the risk of their way of life. To eek out a living on a world that by its very nature tried daily to destroy them.

The warriors tried to flee, but they were not fast enough. They leaped, but the Great Host’s claw caught them in the air, slashing with such speed and strength as the dash them clear away. The impact rattled and broke their insides, and they were tossed to the alien landscape of false follicles, too far away to see where each other landed.

A final duel, cut short before they could determine who was strongest. As the life fled from their bodies, they contented themselves with the idea that perhaps this was a sign. That the duel had been unnecessary, for they had proved time and again to be one another’s equal. Perhaps, then, this was a lesson. They should have put aside their pride and split the feed. Surely, the well held enough Prime Blood for them both to have enjoyed.

Ah, well. Perhaps, some day, their children, or their children’s children, would overcome the foolishness of their elders. Provided, of course, that the Great Host did not manage to scour them off itself.

The Great Host, meanwhile, shook itself after its vigorous scratching, and went to pester its own Great Hosts for a walk.

Distant Earths (a multiverse setting)

Another document from the random notes in a dump folder. I don't think I ever had a story for this. I was just interested in the idea of exploring a Multiverse where the differences in alternate timelines were not just obvious things like "what if the Nazi's won WWII". Instead, what if the divergent points in history were so far in the past that the development of the planet, even the solar system, was radically different, creating truly alien worlds that were actually all still Earth.

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2145 A.D. – Dimensional-crossing experimentation is discovered, and believed to be a much more “practical” means of expanding humanity off of Earth, since Faster Than Light technology never developed. Tenuous explorations using probes sent to several alternate universes confirm that habitable versions of Earth do exist, but the typical view of Multiverse Theory involving Infinite Timelines doesn’t seem to hold up. In no other version of Earth thus far found is there any form of humanity, save a couple of worlds where they no longer exist. In fact, most versions of Earth are not even hospitable to Earthly life.

If the more traditional idea of alternate timelines are at play, where all worlds known a branched off from a prime world where all worlds share a common history, then the divergences occur at wildly different eras, which change Earth into what may as well be entirely different planets in these alternate worlds.