With the player set so far we have one PC and one team
member (Superman and Flash, respectively) with time travel, one PC and one team
member with immortality (Vigilante and the Hawks, respectively) and one PC as a
legacy hero with heroics going back 90 years in her family (Zatava). This means
I have to give some thought to the timeline and key events both past and
future. So here we go.
Note: many of these plot ideas come from things in the Best
of Fenix anthology, which is just wonderful.
The first rule of time travel is that it’s relatively
easy to get to a period about 512 years ahead or behind of the current day –
this is what 0 AP of Time Travel gets you. Each AP after that lets you get half
again as close to the current day and twice as far away. Superman has 2 AP of
Time Travel, which means he can get as far back as 2048 years from now (or 0 AD
more or less) and as far forward as 4060 AD. He can also get as close as 128
years ago (about the Reconstruction era, as close as 2140 AD. The more powerful
a time traveler you are the closer you can get to the absolute now, which is
where the real power is in possibly being able to effect things. The further
away you are the more likely the time steam will wash over the changes or break
off a separate stream rather than change absolute now.
9 to 23 AD – Wang Mang’s China
The period when Wang Mang was emperor of China, this is
the far edge of how back Superman can go with his time travel. Wang Mang is one
of Superman’s most bitter foes, seeing him as the embodiment of everything that
is not classical China. Once Wang Mang lears of his existence and, by
extension, the events of the next 2000 years he puts into place a two millennia
conspiracy to restore proper culture to the world.
64 AD: Nero’s Rome
When Jimmy Olsen puts Superman in contact with a
historian looking for specific critical information on the early Roman empire
Superman agrees to bring Jimmy back to ‘get the story’ – there they uncover a
plot by ancient Egyptian cult of Ammut, the crocodile god of dreams, to replace
Nero with a homunculus. When Egyptian magic reduces his power Superman is
forced into a gladiatorial bout as Jimmy manages to reveal the faux Nero. The
last remnants of the Ammut cult are destroyed in the fire and the proper Nero
returned to power. Superman recovers his power enough to return Jimmy and
himself to the 21st century.
1174: Between the Second and Third Crusade
In the chaotic period between the second and third
crusades, as the crusader states are intriguing against one another in the wake
of the second crusade and Saladin is gathering his power in the East, a small
group of crusaders following clues from an ancient Chinese scroll accidentally
wake a huge red dragon. One of the survivors of the dragons first attack on a
small crusader unit was Etienne of Navarre, as he and Isabo were travelling to
Jerusalem in hopes that the True Cross could break their curse, and survive
only because a red and blue angel appeared to defeat the dragon. 830 years
later the Hawks relate the story to Superman after their first team up, and the
Man of Steel travels back to fulfill the time loop, barely defeating the
enraged magical beast. He strongly suspects this was a planned assassination
attempt on him by Wang Mang. (Note that the Hawks don’t have their flight gear
yet, as it was Da Vinci’s design)
1770: Revolutionary Dating Triangle
Because part of me adores the old silly stories of
Superman time travelling, there definitely has to be one where Superman travels
back to the pre-revolutionary war period and gets into a romance triangle
between the forceful and passionate Mary Ludwig (future Molly Pitcher) and the
beautiful Elizabeth Phoebe Griscomb (future Betsy Ross). Is this entirely
illogical? Well, no, both women were alive and unmarried in 1770, but other
than that yeah, it’s totally absurd. We are therefore doing it anyway. I think
we tie this to a fictitious precursor event to the revolutionary war (the
Boston Massacre is on March 5, the Golden Hill Incident is January 17, so it’s
right in that time period). Two possible options are that this is a story of
Superman when he was a boy and young Betsy Ross sews the first Superman costume
for him to wear while preventing another massacre, or it’s another one of those
wacky “Jimmy Olsen convinces Superman to time travel and they end up double
dating Molly and Betsy” stories. I could go either way.
1881: Rockets in the West
Nikolai Kibalchich, a Ukranian engineer and anarchist, built
the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II. He later escaped from prison, and then
the Russias, with a solid fuel rocket of his own design. Making his way to the
American west he perfects his designs and tries to use them to foment more
anarchy in the US but is defeated by a team up between Vigilante and the Hawks.
(The Hawks now have their glider wings, but don’t yet have the full flight
capability because they haven’t yet been upgraded by the Wright Brothers.)
1927: Arthur Conan Doyle
Towards the end of his career Doyle became deeply
involved in the Spiritualist movement even as he perfected the art of modern
detective work. He wrote about the latter in his fictitious Sherlock Holmes
stories, and the former in his non-fiction accounts of discussions with his
spirit guide and the completion of final novels by other writers who had passed
on. In 1925 he predicted an enormous upheaval of earthquakes and floods in
1927, but later told people he was wrong because he and his spirit guide were using the wrong calendar! The truth is
that this was the first rumbles of the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012, forestalled by
the combined work of Doyle, Vigilante (who was there learning detective
techniques) and a young Zatara (who was mastering his ability to speak with the
dead).
1931: New York City
The construction of new towers allows the ancient gods
shadowy access to Manhattan, influencing people, manipulating effects, forming
cults and otherwise trying to alter the world. Only the works of Zatara prevent
moldy Babylonian gods from appearing in Central Park West to tear up the city.
2130’s: the Arctic Circle
A series of enormous solar flares has shut down much
electromagnetic technology and communications, and combined with existing
warming trends to melt the polar ice and reveal a whole new landscape to the
North. This is exactly Ken Hite’s “wild west in the future arctic circle”
article from Fenix, it takes place at closest future timeframe Superman can
access and Vigilante is, of course, right in the thick of it because it’s a
Western. A whole arc of the “Vigilante as immortal in other times and places”
comic “Legends of the Vigilante” takes place here.
26th Century
500 years in the future, the only thing I know from here
is that it’s where the Reverse Flash comes from. Yes, we have a Reverse Flash
because shut up Reverse Flash that’s why.
31st century: Legion of Super Heroes
With the conclusion of my X-Men PBEM my next likely play
by email project will be a rebuilt from the ground up Legion of Super Heroes.
If that’s the case they will totally be part of this timeline, explaining part
of where Superman was between developing his powers and going public as
Superman. It’s a full on bright Gernsback future where a group of teenagers use
their non-human powers to emulate the super-heroes of the 21st
century.