Worthy of their Mettle: a Superhero Timeline

[lordroel]

May 30, 2017 19:26:00 GMT spanishspy said:

May 30, 2017 19:01:57 GMT lordroel said:

Okay, than i only can say, keep up the good work.

Thank you very much; I have some more Cold War stuff planned. Any requests as per topic, on anything in the TL? 

Nothing in general, just keep up the good work.

[spanishspy]

May 31, 2017 2:46:39 GMT lordroel said:

May 30, 2017 19:26:00 GMT spanishspy said:

Thank you very much; I have some more Cold War stuff planned. Any requests as per topic, on anything in the TL? 

Nothing in general, just keep up the good work.

Thank you very much. A new update is coming soon. 

[spanishspy]

Excerpts from the memoirs of Lubomir Nikolayevich Rybalkin, published 1975

The limits of using superhumans as a method of spreading the Revolution were found during the first major European crisis after the War. What many among Stalin's general staff wanted to do was to send some of our finest superhumans to Greece to ensure that our bloc was not beset by a Western government on its southern reaches.

However Stalin refused to allow it. He felt that if superhumans were sent to Greece it would be obvious that the Union was backing the Communists under Markos Vafiadis to a point that the West with its industrial superiority could beat back even our superhumans, not even to mention the atomic bomb. He felt that no matter what the result in Greece was, he could profit off of it for realpolitik reasons. Indeed he opposed any intervention in the war in Greece.

[...]

The capitalist Greek government attempted to find superhumans that could channel the powers of their ancient gods, but there weren't any that Papagos could find. There was maybe one or two superhumans in use by the capitalists and none by the communists. Greece fell to the Americans and British, to the chagrin of some in the Soviet political elite.

[...]

However it was the Greek crisis that precipitated the first major superhuman threat to the Soviet Union. During the end of the war, Stalin had instructed me and my colleagues to train scientists in the countries that were becoming part of our sphere of influence in the art of making their own superhumans, although nothing to the point of our most advanced techniques. And so we did; some of the great superhuman scientists of the 50s and 60s were trained during and after the war to ensure that some of the production costs could be siphoned off to the border states.

However, some of the most gifted students of our craft were from what would become Yugoslavia. Dragoslav Zivic, from Novi Sad, was one of the savants. He advanced even on our techniques and pioneered better understanding of memetosynthesis. He made strides in bestowing powers of metal manipulation in particular and telekinesis in general.

[...]

When Tito and Stalin split over the Greek crisis, the Yugoslavian scientists who were still in the Soviet Union fled to Belgrade as fast as they could. Some of the students were detained by secret police and covertly made to work for the Soviet program. However, most of them, led by Zivic, smuggled themselves back to Yugoslavia and began work at behest of Tito, against Stalin. That was the first time the Soviet Union would have to face a hostile power armed with superhumans, and it would not be the last.

[...]

As Stalin got older and frailer he demanded that he be put through a degree of 'enhancement procedures' that would enhance his lifespan for at least a little longer; he confided to me that he wanted to live through the 50s. Feeling that I had no other choice, I put him through a lot the same procedures I used to create Comrade Nikolai or Comrade Vasily or the other great heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Lo and behold, he was sprier, more alert, but also more erratic.

[...]

Stalin became more and more interested in the atomic bomb program, which he was intent on matching the Americans whilst also staying ahead in the superhuman race. He had us devise a combined missile deterrent based both on the rocketry designs of the captured Nazi scientists after the war and our own flying superhumans. He saw that the Americans were gaining ground in superhuman research, albeit not to our stature, and had paid very close attention to the usage of their superhuman program in Korea. He noted that there was no usage of superhumans in the coups the Americans backed in the early 50s for much the same reason we did not use them in Greece, he reckoned.

[...]

As I said, the Vozhd became ever more erratic. What finally convinced me of his incompetence was the way he handled the Hungarian rising of 1956. He had ordered troops into Poland that July to keep the workers in Poznan from doing much of anything; Imre Nagy and his ilk in Hungary were only more convinced of the need to break free from the Soviet yoke. When the protests began, Stalin told the army to mobilize, but not to invade just yet.

[...]

What Stalin wanted was a holocaust, in the sense of a burnt offering and not industrialized genocide, but the result would be something not dissimilar. He demanded two nuclear bombs, two heavy bombers, and one flying hero, Comrade Pavel, a celebrated veteran of Operation Bagration.

The first bomb was used in a terrifying demonstration of both Soviet atomic weaponry and Soviet superhuman might. He ordered one of the bombers to fly right towards Moscow with orders to drop the bomb within blast radius of the city itself, and ordered Comrade Pavel to intercept the bomber. He succeeded, and the bomb fell in the countryside well away from the city. But the blast was spectacular, and the world knew of both weapons.

The second bomb was far more aggressive. Stalin loathed Imre Nagy, the 'Titoist' anti-Soviet leader of Hungary that attempted to break away from his grasp. In a bout of what I to this day feel was insanity, he ordered the other bomb dropped on Nagy's home city of Kaposvar, as an example, far more so than Poznan, that the Soviet Union would keep its puppets to itself. Kaposvar went up in flames, and its inhabitants were vaporized.

[...]

A great many scientists in the Soviet Union were appalled by this and with good reason, as was I. I felt that I could no longer work for what was clearly a menace to the world. At least the Americans were at war with a power that had attacked them before dropping the bombs on Japan. I, and many others in the Soviet superhuman program, decided to take whatever papers we could, burn the rest, and flee to the West.

[...]

We couldn't get all of it, and a lot of the necessary things were duplicated in other cities. Nevertheless, with all the advanced research we could muster, several of my colleagues hopped onto trucks driven sympathizers on a Soviet military convoy and taken to Leningrad, where we covertly smuggled ourselves and our papers to Helsinki. From there, we surrendered ourselves to the US embassy, which then saw to it that we were sent to Washington.

[lordroel]

May 31, 2017 6:57:19 GMT spanishspy said:

Excerpts from the memoirs of Lubomir Nikolayevich Rybalkin, published 1975

The limits of using superhumans as a method of spreading the Revolution were found during the first major European crisis after the War. What many among Stalin's general staff wanted to do was to send some of our finest superhumans to Greece to ensure that our bloc was not beset by a Western government on its southern reaches.

However Stalin refused to allow it. He felt that if superhumans were sent to Greece it would be obvious that the Union was backing the Communists under Markos Vafiadis to a point that the West with its industrial superiority could beat back even our superhumans, not even to mention the atomic bomb. He felt that no matter what the result in Greece was, he could profit off of it for realpolitik reasons. Indeed he opposed any intervention in the war in Greece.

[...]

The capitalist Greek government attempted to find superhumans that could channel the powers of their ancient gods, but there weren't any that Papagos could find. There was maybe one or two superhumans in use by the capitalists and none by the communists. Greece fell to the Americans and British, to the chagrin of some in the Soviet political elite.

[...]

However it was the Greek crisis that precipitated the first major superhuman threat to the Soviet Union. During the end of the war, Stalin had instructed me and my colleagues to train scientists in the countries that were becoming part of our sphere of influence in the art of making their own superhumans, although nothing to the point of our most advanced techniques. And so we did; some of the great superhuman scientists of the 50s and 60s were trained during and after the war to ensure that some of the production costs could be siphoned off to the border states.

However, some of the most gifted students of our craft were from what would become Yugoslavia. Dragoslav Zivic, from Novi Sad, was one of the savants. He advanced even on our techniques and pioneered better understanding of memetosynthesis. He made strides in bestowing powers of metal manipulation in particular and telekinesis in general.

[...]

When Tito and Stalin split over the Greek crisis, the Yugoslavian scientists who were still in the Soviet Union fled to Belgrade as fast as they could. Some of the students were detained by secret police and covertly made to work for the Soviet program. However, most of them, led by Zivic, smuggled themselves back to Yugoslavia and began work at behest of Tito, against Stalin. That was the first time the Soviet Union would have to face a hostile power armed with superhumans, and it would not be the last.

[...]

As Stalin got older and frailer he demanded that he be put through a degree of 'enhancement procedures' that would enhance his lifespan for at least a little longer; he confided to me that he wanted to live through the 50s. Feeling that I had no other choice, I put him through a lot the same procedures I used to create Comrade Nikolai or Comrade Vasily or the other great heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Lo and behold, he was sprier, more alert, but also more erratic.

[...]

Stalin became more and more interested in the atomic bomb program, which he was intent on matching the Americans whilst also staying ahead in the superhuman race. He had us devise a combined missile deterrent based both on the rocketry designs of the captured Nazi scientists after the war and our own flying superhumans. He saw that the Americans were gaining ground in superhuman research, albeit not to our stature, and had paid very close attention to the usage of their superhuman program in Korea. He noted that there was no usage of superhumans in the coups the Americans backed in the early 50s for much the same reason we did not use them in Greece, he reckoned.

[...]

As I said, the Vozhd became ever more erratic. What finally convinced me of his incompetence was the way he handled the Hungarian rising of 1956. He had ordered troops into Poland that July to keep the workers in Poznan from doing much of anything; Imre Nagy and his ilk in Hungary were only more convinced of the need to break free from the Soviet yoke. When the protests began, Stalin told the army to mobilize, but not to invade just yet.

[...]

What Stalin wanted was a holocaust, in the sense of a burnt offering and not industrialized genocide, but the result would be something not dissimilar. He demanded two nuclear bombs, two heavy bombers, and one flying hero, Comrade Pavel, a celebrated veteran of Operation Bagration.

The first bomb was used in a terrifying demonstration of both Soviet atomic weaponry and Soviet superhuman might. He ordered one of the bombers to fly right towards Moscow with orders to drop the bomb within blast radius of the city itself, and ordered Comrade Pavel to intercept the bomber. He succeeded, and the bomb fell in the countryside well away from the city. But the blast was spectacular, and the world knew of both weapons.

The second bomb was far more aggressive. Stalin loathed Imre Nagy, the 'Titoist' anti-Soviet leader of Hungary that attempted to break away from his grasp. In a bout of what I to this day feel was insanity, he ordered the other bomb dropped on Nagy's home city of Kaposvar, as an example, far more so than Poznan, that the Soviet Union would keep its puppets to itself. Kaposvar went up in flames, and its inhabitants were vaporized.

[...]

A great many scientists in the Soviet Union were appalled by this and with good reason, as was I. I felt that I could no longer work for what was clearly a menace to the world. At least the Americans were at war with a power that had attacked them before dropping the bombs on Japan. I, and many others in the Soviet superhuman program, decided to take whatever papers we could, burn the rest, and flee to the West.

[...]

We couldn't get all of it, and a lot of the necessary things were duplicated in other cities. Nevertheless, with all the advanced research we could muster, several of my colleagues hopped onto trucks driven sympathizers on a Soviet military convoy and taken to Leningrad, where we covertly smuggled ourselves and our papers to Helsinki. From there, we surrendered ourselves to the US embassy, which then saw to it that we were sent to Washington.

And when did Stalin die.

[spanishspy]

May 31, 2017 15:16:53 GMT lordroel said:

May 31, 2017 6:57:19 GMT spanishspy said:

Excerpts from the memoirs of Lubomir Nikolayevich Rybalkin, published 1975

The limits of using superhumans as a method of spreading the Revolution were found during the first major European crisis after the War. What many among Stalin's general staff wanted to do was to send some of our finest superhumans to Greece to ensure that our bloc was not beset by a Western government on its southern reaches.

However Stalin refused to allow it. He felt that if superhumans were sent to Greece it would be obvious that the Union was backing the Communists under Markos Vafiadis to a point that the West with its industrial superiority could beat back even our superhumans, not even to mention the atomic bomb. He felt that no matter what the result in Greece was, he could profit off of it for realpolitik reasons. Indeed he opposed any intervention in the war in Greece.

[...]

The capitalist Greek government attempted to find superhumans that could channel the powers of their ancient gods, but there weren't any that Papagos could find. There was maybe one or two superhumans in use by the capitalists and none by the communists. Greece fell to the Americans and British, to the chagrin of some in the Soviet political elite.

[...]

However it was the Greek crisis that precipitated the first major superhuman threat to the Soviet Union. During the end of the war, Stalin had instructed me and my colleagues to train scientists in the countries that were becoming part of our sphere of influence in the art of making their own superhumans, although nothing to the point of our most advanced techniques. And so we did; some of the great superhuman scientists of the 50s and 60s were trained during and after the war to ensure that some of the production costs could be siphoned off to the border states.

However, some of the most gifted students of our craft were from what would become Yugoslavia. Dragoslav Zivic, from Novi Sad, was one of the savants. He advanced even on our techniques and pioneered better understanding of memetosynthesis. He made strides in bestowing powers of metal manipulation in particular and telekinesis in general.

[...]

When Tito and Stalin split over the Greek crisis, the Yugoslavian scientists who were still in the Soviet Union fled to Belgrade as fast as they could. Some of the students were detained by secret police and covertly made to work for the Soviet program. However, most of them, led by Zivic, smuggled themselves back to Yugoslavia and began work at behest of Tito, against Stalin. That was the first time the Soviet Union would have to face a hostile power armed with superhumans, and it would not be the last.

[...]

As Stalin got older and frailer he demanded that he be put through a degree of 'enhancement procedures' that would enhance his lifespan for at least a little longer; he confided to me that he wanted to live through the 50s. Feeling that I had no other choice, I put him through a lot the same procedures I used to create Comrade Nikolai or Comrade Vasily or the other great heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Lo and behold, he was sprier, more alert, but also more erratic.

[...]

Stalin became more and more interested in the atomic bomb program, which he was intent on matching the Americans whilst also staying ahead in the superhuman race. He had us devise a combined missile deterrent based both on the rocketry designs of the captured Nazi scientists after the war and our own flying superhumans. He saw that the Americans were gaining ground in superhuman research, albeit not to our stature, and had paid very close attention to the usage of their superhuman program in Korea. He noted that there was no usage of superhumans in the coups the Americans backed in the early 50s for much the same reason we did not use them in Greece, he reckoned.

[...]

As I said, the Vozhd became ever more erratic. What finally convinced me of his incompetence was the way he handled the Hungarian rising of 1956. He had ordered troops into Poland that July to keep the workers in Poznan from doing much of anything; Imre Nagy and his ilk in Hungary were only more convinced of the need to break free from the Soviet yoke. When the protests began, Stalin told the army to mobilize, but not to invade just yet.

[...]

What Stalin wanted was a holocaust, in the sense of a burnt offering and not industrialized genocide, but the result would be something not dissimilar. He demanded two nuclear bombs, two heavy bombers, and one flying hero, Comrade Pavel, a celebrated veteran of Operation Bagration.

The first bomb was used in a terrifying demonstration of both Soviet atomic weaponry and Soviet superhuman might. He ordered one of the bombers to fly right towards Moscow with orders to drop the bomb within blast radius of the city itself, and ordered Comrade Pavel to intercept the bomber. He succeeded, and the bomb fell in the countryside well away from the city. But the blast was spectacular, and the world knew of both weapons.

The second bomb was far more aggressive. Stalin loathed Imre Nagy, the 'Titoist' anti-Soviet leader of Hungary that attempted to break away from his grasp. In a bout of what I to this day feel was insanity, he ordered the other bomb dropped on Nagy's home city of Kaposvar, as an example, far more so than Poznan, that the Soviet Union would keep its puppets to itself. Kaposvar went up in flames, and its inhabitants were vaporized.

[...]

A great many scientists in the Soviet Union were appalled by this and with good reason, as was I. I felt that I could no longer work for what was clearly a menace to the world. At least the Americans were at war with a power that had attacked them before dropping the bombs on Japan. I, and many others in the Soviet superhuman program, decided to take whatever papers we could, burn the rest, and flee to the West.

[...]

We couldn't get all of it, and a lot of the necessary things were duplicated in other cities. Nevertheless, with all the advanced research we could muster, several of my colleagues hopped onto trucks driven sympathizers on a Soviet military convoy and taken to Leningrad, where we covertly smuggled ourselves and our papers to Helsinki. From there, we surrendered ourselves to the US embassy, which then saw to it that we were sent to Washington.

And when did Stalin die.

I'll cover it in the next update. 

[spanishspy]

Excerpts from the memoirs of Lubomir Nikolayevich Rybalkin, published 1975

They took me and some of the other higher ups, like Bolshov and Shishkanov, to the White House to meet with Eisenhower himself. He seemed very interested; Charles Wilson [the Secretary of Defense] was more hesitant given the military cuts made after the expedition to Korea, but Eisenhower wanted a program equal to that of the Soviet Union. He had sent our papers to the Office of Superhuman Research (OSR), the DoD people in charge of their program. After a talk about many classified things that I cannot state publicly, it was decided that the bulk of us would be sent to Winnemucca, Nevada, where one of the key testing sites for superhuman research was established during the war.

[...]

The American scientists were nowhere far along in their work as the Soviet Union by the time we defected, but they were a hardy and inquisitive bunch. My understanding is that there was a small but vocal lobby in the United States for superhuman research that only got any degree of public or government support when the success of such research was shown during the war on the Eastern Front. These were men who after so long had gotten what they had pined for, and their giddiness showed it.

I found the director of the program himself, Jasper Lefew, to be the most fascinating of them, if only because he paralleled myself in so many ways. When we met, he was ecstatic.

"Mr. Rybalkin!" he exclaimed, shaking my hand vigorously. "An honor to meet you!"

"And the same to you, Mr. Lefew."

We talked a lot about the Soviet Union was so eager to research superhumans. He was thrilled to pick my brain about the Soviet program, and to pore over the documents we had brought over once they were translated (he himself had spoken some Russian in order to read documents acquired by American intelligence). We spent many nights talking about the minutiae of our theories on memetosynthesis and telekinesis and other superhuman abilities, and the potential scientific justification of a directed form of quantum entanglement.

He found me a mirror image of himself, in a way, and I him. He was born in rural Tennessee in the early part of the century and scarcely remembered the Great War; I had fought it in it before joining the Bolsheviks. He found superhuman research a fascinating subject after reading the corpus of texts developed in Europe and the US clandestinely from the Renaissance to the early 20th century. He had found them in Vanderbilt during the 30s whereas I had in the 20s at Moscow State; I was from a peasant family near Smolensk, so he felt the kinship of the lower class as did I.

He was eccentric; he insisted on his regional formalwear, with a bow tie and suspenders instead of a standard necktie and a belt. He was bespectacled and brilliant at mathematics and all the sciences needed for superhuman research. But most of all he had the drive to create enhanced life as I had in my younger years, and as he worked he showed almost childlike wonder.

[...]

The American superhumans were a proud bunch, having served with distinction in Europe, the Pacific, and in Korea, and having received accolades sung to the public by the government. I met the Star-Spangled Man, their first, as well as the Rocket's Red Glare and the Bald Eagle, among several others. They were indoctrinated in state ideology to a degree that reminded me of Stalin, praising the founding ideals as holy and of their founders of the nation as almost gods, and defending their government as sages. There was a personality cult of dead men that they worshiped, at the bidding of the White House's decrees.

[...]

In 1957 I received word from the OSR that Stalin had died, and they interrogated me as to what I thought happened. I didn't know; after the initial procedure I had only token contact with his physical form, leaving it to lower ranking scientists to keep him alive. I explained to them the procedure, and the took note; I had expected him to live into the middle of the 60s at the absolute latest. I expect to this day a rogue member of their program poisoned him in some way.

[...]

That same year I was surprised to see that the OSR had assigned me the chief science officer of a 'superhero team,' as they called it. American doctrine confused me; they wanted to use groups of superhumans operating as small units with a degree of independence from main military deployments, unlike the integrated command that the Soviet Union used. Partially it was for propaganda, and the rest of it was for unit cohesion; those who had special powers understood each other than those without powers or real knowledge thereof.

The particularly interesting bit, from both a propaganda and a cultural standpoint, was that this team was composed of immigrants and refugees from the Eastern Bloc who had superpowers. It was an obvious ploy to incite spite for Communism, but I could hardly disagree with the notion that the Soviet Union had to be stopped. Kosygin, who had wrested power after Stalin's death through shrewd politicking, had shown no signs in stopping the aggression, with the quelling of a labor strike in the Odessa shipyards with the military.

The names in this team are famous now, but one of them stood out to me. Karoly Bakos was a product of the fledgling Hungarian program, who had the fortune of being experimented on in Budapest when his hometown of Kaposvar was obliterated by the atomic bomb. He had fought his way out of confinement and had wrecked a fair bit of a part of Budapest in the process, but he had fought his way to Austria and then made his way to the United States.

He hated Communism with all his might, with particular ire towards Stalin. He found a friend in me in this distant, united in common cause in crossing the Iron Curtain after Kaposvar went up in flames. Indeed, with my blessing, he gave the team the name of 'Curtain Jumpers.'

[lordroel]

Jun 1, 2017 2:11:54 GMT spanishspy said:

In 1957 I received word from the OSR that Stalin had died, and they interrogated me as to what I thought happened. I didn't know; after the initial procedure I had only token contact with his physical form, leaving it to lower ranking scientists to keep him alive. I explained to them the procedure, and the took note; I had expected him to live into the middle of the 60s at the absolute latest. I expect to this day a rogue member of their program poisoned him in some way.

So Stalin manged to defeat death for only 4 more years than in OTL.

[spanishspy]

Text of a flier dispensed by the American Civil Liberties Union in major American cities, 2011


Who or what is Vucub-Caquix?

Vucub-Caquix is a supernatural entity apparently corresponding with an ancient Maya bird god that was defeated by the Hero Twins after attempting to assume the role of a god of the sun.

Why is Vucub-Caquix attacking the US?

Vucub-Caquix attacked major US cities in the eighties and nineties in retaliation for American backing of the Guatemalan government, which he sees as usurping his rightful rule over the territories formerly belonging to the Maya.

Who are Vucub-Caquix's cultists?

Vucub-Caquix's cultists are people of Maya descent, usually those from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and southern Mexico, who are involuntarily coopted by the entity via the use of a certain gene. This gene, according to cultist literature discovered in Guatemala and in American holdouts of his cultists, was apparently a creation of the deity bestowed upon his followers shortly after his defeat; this gene was subsequently spread throughout the Maya population and then to the populations of the nations that would evolve from Spanish colonization.

Does this mean all Hispanics can be controlled by Vucub-Caquix?

No. Only a minority of the population of Guatemala and the surrounding countries has this gene; it is apparently recessive and only shows up in certain individuals under certain circumstances. Due to the admixture of native Maya with Spanish and other populations the gene seems to have entered a dormant state, and only a handful of cultists in the grand scheme of things have ever actually become loyal to him. Additionally, those from areas not inhabited by the Maya in the pre-Columbian period are not susceptible to being hijacked by Vucub-Caquix.

Hate crimes against Hispanics for potentially having this gene are misguided as even those with the gene are not likely to undergo the non-consensual process of becoming a cultist. Those undergoing the process are immediately seized by the proper authorities and if possible can have the process reversed via certain classified procedures developed by the Department of Defense Superhuman Research Division should they be quarantined in time.

What should I do if I am a victim of a hate crime?

Call [number varies by state] for your state's ACLU branch, or email for legal counsel and other options, including possible protective services.

[lordroel]

Jun 1, 2017 23:55:42 GMT spanishspy said:

Text of a flier dispensed by the American Civil Liberties Union in major American cities, 2011

Who or what is Vucub-Caquix?

Never knew that Vucub-Caquix was real until i google it.

[spanishspy]

Jun 2, 2017 5:35:59 GMT lordroel said:

Jun 1, 2017 23:55:42 GMT spanishspy said:

Text of a flier dispensed by the American Civil Liberties Union in major American cities, 2011

Who or what is Vucub-Caquix?

Never knew that Vucub-Caquix was real until i google it.

Both Marvel and DC stole from Greek mythology. Marvel stole from Norse mythology. 

To be different I'm stealing from Maya mythology because to my knowledge nobody has done that. 

[spanishspy]

Somewhere in Alta Verapaz Department, Guatemala
2010

"The US armed forces have superhumans and scout planes and drones and satellites and just about anything they can trying to find this place. Only reason they haven't is because we move it so frequently."

Marina Rubalcaba almost spat on the windshield as the jeep made its way through the Franja Transversal del Norte, the central upland region of the country, where the rebels and the cultists lived. With her was an American journalist, Ellen Gagen, investigating the possibility of war crimes committed by the Guatemalan and American governments.

"I would have reckoned they'd be keeping track of you."

"They're trying. We were lucky to get some ex-Soviet psionic blocking tech from black markets with access to abandoned depots in Kazakhstan. We camouflage it and keep it mobile so that the psionic heroes that the Army has can't find it."

The two of them pulled into a makeshift village of huts constructed of trees and dirt, designed to be withdrawn from easily and left to ruin. Overhead was a signal tower that was draped in vines and leaves and wood to make it look like a tree.

Gagen marveled at the whole thing. "You all are good at this."

All Rubalcaba said was that "they've been trying to exterminate us since the 80s. We had to be good at this or we'd be dead."

She parked the jeep at a checkpoint and led Gagen through the village. There were men, women, and children all doing the things a village needed to be done, with the adults almost universally holding weapons of some type, usually rifles slung over the back. Even so, they made food and worked on machines and sold goods, and children and animals played in the streets.

One hut seemed innocuous, but Rubalcaba gestured in. Gagen entered, and encountered a disheveled Anglo man sitting there with an apprehensive look on his face.

"She is the one we told you about."

"Jeffrey Cole," he said, standing up to meet Gagen. "From Lakewood, Colorado."

"From Boston," replied Gagen.

He reached into his pocket and gave her a flash drive. "I took everything I could from the base in Guatemala City before defecting. I won't say much lest they be bugging us."

"But how would they-"

"They always can be," interrupted Rubalcaba. "That's how they've been doing it for the past ten years or so."

The door was kicked open. In walked a burly Guatemalan, clearly of Maya extraction. He held a long black object in his left hand.

"Speaking of which," the intruder interjected, "we found this under your jeep."

"What is that?" asked Gagen.

"A tracker. They know we're here!" exclaimed Cole. "Get out of here, Ms. Gagen, and take this back to the US! The people need to know!"

Rubalcaba brandished a pistol. "Come with me. I know a way out of here to another encampment, and from there we can make our way back to the capital."

"And what about Cole?"

"My work here is done. If I die here it will be worth it. I can never return home, and I can only hope you succeed in leaking this." He stood up and grabbed the rifle propped against the wall. "They'll never take me alive. Not after releasing this."

As if on cue a thunderous noise erupted from another part of the encampment. "Follow me!" called out Rubalcaba, and Gagen followed her, running. She smelled smoke.

She could see that there was a superhuman of some type standing in the middle, spewing fire from his hands and burning the village in front of him, sparing not one man, woman, or child. They all burned as this superhuman carried out his task. He was in a flight suit with a backpack that suggested there once was a parachute in it. His helmet had a visor, and he seemed to be talking to a command far away.

As the two women ran, they saw Bradley fighting vehicles deploy men, who began firing on anyone running away. There was some resistance, and one BFV went up in smoke when a rocket collided with it.

Gagen had to stifle tears, and focus on running. The massacres that had been rumored to occur were happening right in front of her eyes.

Another Bradley emerged from behind one of the huts right in front of her, and began firing towards other fleeing people off to the side. Rubalcaba halted, and jolted into an alleyway. Gagen followed her.

"Just wait. Let them think they're in the clear."

They waited with bated breath. The Bradley kept firing, and she could hear the men march out. The vehicle fired one of its TOW missiles an an unknown target, and the village continued to burn.

It fired another missile. It zoomed out with a bright light, and blasted towards another target.

However, unlike the other missile, it seemed to stop in midair and reorient itself, and rammed into another Bradley a few blocks away.

Before the first Bradley could respond, jolting, creaking noises came from its location. Gagen and Rubalcaba peered over the wall. The vehicle was floating, and being crushed by seemingly an outside force. It was blasted over several houses, and rammed into another American vehicle. They could smell the smoke and the burning flesh.

The two of them huddled in fear. "I didn't think they were here," uttered Rubalcaba.

From where the Bradley was walked a woman with paler skin than most Guatemalans but darker than the average white American. She wore black combat fatigues with red accents, and had some sort of emblem on her shoulders.

She noticed the resistance fighter and the reporter.

"Who are you?" asked Gagen.

"Perhaps you've heard of me in their propaganda. I am from the Vanguard of the Oppressed. I am their leader, Esmeralda Ormanni."

[lordroel]

Jun 2, 2017 13:38:22 GMT spanishspy said:

Jun 2, 2017 5:35:59 GMT lordroel said:

Never knew that Vucub-Caquix was real until i google it.

Both Marvel and DC stole from Greek mythology. Marvel stole from Norse mythology. 

To be different I'm stealing from Maya mythology because to my knowledge nobody has done that. 

Not to my knowledge, but than again Greek and Norse mythology are more known to the public who read comics than Maya ore even Inca mythology.

[spanishspy]

"You're the Esmeralda Ormanni from the news broadcasts?" asked Gagen.

"The one and only. Conveniently used as a scapegoat for the government's failings, but known nonetheless."

The casualness of the conversation clashed with the slaughter around them. They could still smell the smoke and the charred flesh.

Some smaller jeeps came zipping onto the makeshift streets. Out of them clambered others in the black and red uniform; other members of the Vanguard. They each had their own powers, some flew and some spewed fire and some could phase through walls.

Rubalcaba was stunned. "I thought you were a rumor. Nevertheless, good to have you on our side."

Esmeralda wasted no time. "Do either of you have any truly important operations going on?"

"Other than surviving," quipped Rubalcaba, "Senora Gagen here has a flash drive from an American defector, which she intends to leak to the press."

Esmeralda nodded, and began speaking into the small microphone held via her ear. "Get one of our cars over here. We need two civilians sent to Guatemala City."

Esmeralda continued to fling around buildings and rubble to fight the Americans. Using a wrecked Bradley she smashed approaching infantrymen.

An armored car, painted black, zipped onto the street, and a door popped open. "Get in!" gestured Esmeralda. The guerrilla fighter and the journalist did.

Before the car could get away, as if out of nowhere a human figure manifested itself in front of the car. He wore US Army fatigues with a patch with a person jumping over a wall on it. He was old, with white hair under his helmet, and with some visible wrinkles.

He scanned the situation. "Esmeralda Ormanni!" he proclaimed. "Not the first time I've seen you around here."

"And I will not leave until the American presence in Guatemala is permanently removed."

"And the millions of dead in Miami and elsewhere mean nothing to you." He gestured towards the car.

The car whisked spontaneously to several hundred feet above the ground. Gagen screamed. "I know who this guy is," responded Rubalcaba. "He can teleport objects he can see to places he can see, as well as teleporting himself."

That did not reassure Gagen.

The car fell for some perilous seconds, then gently floated to the ground, a good distance from the fight. "Go!" screamed Esmeralda from the radio, and the driver obliged.

The American supersoldier glared at Esmeralda. She said to him, "Bakos Karoly," she chided him with his native name, "we are so much alike. You grew up in Kaposvar before Stalin burned it. I grew up after the Argentine junta forced me to fight for them. We share a history of being brutalized by authoritarian governments. So why do you fight for the United States?"

Karoly took a deep breath. "Because I know what happens when utopian ideologies become reality. They become tyranny and disorder, which is what you want. And what you want is the deaths of millions at the hands of an angry Mayan god. I have been at the mercy of beings with powers beyond those of normal arms; my hometown's ruin is a testament to that. I will not stand for it again."

"But the country of your allegiance is committing genocide. Does that mean nothing to you?"

"We will save far more lives than we will have to kill. It is a worthy tradeoff."

He used his powers to command several bits of rubble to manifest above Esmeralda. She was hit by some of them before gaining a foothold and deflecting them, shooting them at her opponent.

"I will not see a monster be unleashed upon my adopted homeland!" screamed Karoly. "I did not become a Curtain Jumper to see America destroyed by people of an inclination similar to that of the dictator I escaped!"

"Some would say it already has," replied Esmeralda.

[lordroel]

Jun 4, 2017 6:14:37 GMT spanishspy said:

"You're the Esmeralda Ormanni from the news broadcasts?" asked Gagen.

"The one and only. Conveniently used as a scapegoat for the government's failings, but known nonetheless."

The casualness of the conversation clashed with the slaughter around them. They could still smell the smoke and the charred flesh.

Some smaller jeeps came zipping onto the makeshift streets. Out of them clambered others in the black and red uniform; other members of the Vanguard. They each had their own powers, some flew and some spewed fire and some could phase through walls.

Rubalcaba was stunned. "I thought you were a rumor. Nevertheless, good to have you on our side."

Esmeralda wasted no time. "Do either of you have any truly important operations going on?"

"Other than surviving," quipped Rubalcaba, "Senora Gagen here has a flash drive from an American defector, which she intends to leak to the press."

Esmeralda nodded, and began speaking into the small microphone held via her ear. "Get one of our cars over here. We need two civilians sent to Guatemala City."

Esmeralda continued to fling around buildings and rubble to fight the Americans. Using a wrecked Bradley she smashed approaching infantrymen.

An armored car, painted black, zipped onto the street, and a door popped open. "Get in!" gestured Esmeralda. The guerrilla fighter and the journalist did.

Before the car could get away, as if out of nowhere a human figure manifested itself in front of the car. He wore US Army fatigues with a patch with a person jumping over a wall on it. He was old, with white hair under his helmet, and with some visible wrinkles.

He scanned the situation. "Esmeralda Ormanni!" he proclaimed. "Not the first time I've seen you around here."

"And I will not leave until the American presence in Guatemala is permanently removed."

"And the millions of dead in Miami and elsewhere mean nothing to you." He gestured towards the car.

The car whisked spontaneously to several hundred feet above the ground. Gagen screamed. "I know who this guy is," responded Rubalcaba. "He can teleport objects he can see to places he can see, as well as teleporting himself."

That did not reassure Gagen.

The car fell for some perilous seconds, then gently floated to the ground, a good distance from the fight. "Go!" screamed Esmeralda from the radio, and the driver obliged.

The American supersoldier glared at Esmeralda. She said to him, "Bakos Karoly," she chided him with his native name, "we are so much alike. You grew up in Kaposvar before Stalin burned it. I grew up after the Argentine junta forced me to fight for them. We share a history of being brutalized by authoritarian governments. So why do you fight for the United States?"

Karoly took a deep breath. "Because I know what happens when utopian ideologies become reality. They become tyranny and disorder, which is what you want. And what you want is the deaths of millions at the hands of an angry Mayan god. I have been at the mercy of beings with powers beyond those of normal arms; my hometown's ruin is a testament to that. I will not stand for it again."

"But the country of your allegiance is committing genocide. Does that mean nothing to you?"

"We will save far more lives than we will have to kill. It is a worthy tradeoff."

He used his powers to command several bits of rubble to manifest above Esmeralda. She was hit by some of them before gaining a foothold and deflecting them, shooting them at her opponent.

"I will not see a monster be unleashed upon my adopted homeland!" screamed Karoly. "I did not become a Curtain Jumper to see America destroyed by people of an inclination similar to that of the dictator I escaped!"

"Some would say it already has," replied Esmeralda.

Its seems that Guatemala is a battlefield.

[spanishspy]

Gagen had landed in Washington from Guatemala City after being dropped off in an outlying village and taking the bus to the airport. After several hours of waiting she landed in Dulles International Airport and took a bus, then the Metro, from Loudoun County to the District proper.

She settled in her apartment not far from Farragut Square and began paging through the documents, which she intended to leak. She plugged the flash drive into her laptop and began poring through them.

Military documents. Communiques from Washington and the Pentagon. Videos even. She clicked one, not bothering with the name.

A village, somewhere in the highlands, in the distance. Overhead she heard jet planes.

Then the village started burning, and she heard screams. She checked the file name.

'Napalm'

She had thought that napalm had been phased out in the years after Vietnam. Clearly that was not the case.

She clicked one of the text documents, entitled 'cultists.'

It detailed the nuances of Vucub-Caquix's cults, which had made sporadic attacks after the big war in the 80s. The particular document was dated from 1994.

"Vucub-Caquix's cultists have been activated by the entity for may years now, and raids on their compounds both in Guatemala and the United States have found documents that imply a new surge within the next few years. This seems to be in synchronization with the old Mayan Long Count calendar and heralds a new age, or 'baktun,' and this new 'baktun' is spoken of as the age of the 'true sun god,' which Vucub-Caquix purports to be. Notably, there is nothing in the Popul Vuh or other ancient sources that proclaim this to be the case.

This has seen a steadily increasing rate of cultist activation and seems to increase exponentially into the new millennium. If projections and our interpretations of cultist literature are correct, by 2012 Vucub-Caquix will return with an army of cultists as well as potentially other Maya deities.

In accordance with these facts, combined with the high proliferation of the cultist gene among descendants of the Maya of ancient times, it has been concluded that, in the name of the protection of the citizens of the United States and of the world, that the Maya minority in Guatemala and the surrounding countries must be liquidated."