Avenger Assembled

Temporal Conqueror The Qajarite Shah is a mystery. To students of Freedom City’s history, his story is a familiar one: God of Gods and King of Kings, the Shah is lord and master of the galaxy in the year 4000! Dissatisfied with the mere mastery of stars and planets, the Shah has set himself the mighty goal of conquering Time! Itself! Again and again, the Shah and his mighty armies of power-suited, genetically engineered warriors have tossed themselves against the heroes of Freedom City. Possessing mighty weapons like plasma cannons, antigrav troop carriers, and warriors wielding everything from flaming swords to whirling chain-swords, the Shah and his armies have been a formidable threat at every appearance: in his powersuit, the Shah was the equal of the Centurion himself (though not, as the Man of Adamant graphically demonstrated to the Shah, his superior), while the mightiest of his personal guard, the Immortals, can fight most superheroes on even terms. The Shah is not a particularly imaginative conqueror: a direct ground invasion was defeated in the 1940s, an attempt to conquer the Earth from space in the early 1960s was subverted by the genius of Alexander Atom, a strike against the Lor defeated by Daedalus in the 1980s, and most recently the time-traveling Freedom League teamed up with the Patriot Regiment to crush the Shah's invasion of the 1860s, Each time he has been outsmarted, outgeneraled, or simply crushed by the weight of superior power. Despite all this, he is a potent threat, particularly since his era (which he describes as simply "the time of LIGHT that came after the time of DARKNESS," focal point for his CRUSADE THROUGH TIME) lies so far beyond the era of even the Freedom Legion that his technology is largely a "black box" even to Freedom's finest scientists. But why hasn't he killed us all yet? It's a logical question: surely someone with regular access to time travel and a galactic empire could simply pour never-ending waves of Space Warriors into the past, burying Freedom's heroes in unstoppable waves of supermen and women from millennia in the future. Why hasn't he dumped a nanite plague in the past to devour people with super-genes, or sent agents back to strangle the Centurion in his rocket, or any number of other simple, logical things that anyone with a time machine and no morals could do if they sought to crush their enemies in the womb? Granted, there have been collapses of civilization between our day and the Shah's, but some records must have survived for him to come this far. Even so, the Shah could surely use his command of time travel to find out something. When directly confronted by these contradictions, he grows visibly enraged, booming that the "WEAK and FEEBLE" minds of the past could never understand a 10th-level intellect such as himself. With his combination of great power and complete lack of strategic forethought, he is a frustrating enigma for hero and villain alike. (Indeed, both Mastermind and Overshadow have sought the Shah out with feelers for an alliance over the decades, planning to steal and subvert his power for their own: the Shah, however, notably does not share his resources with others). Too, that our grandchildren's distant descendants are evidently enslaved by a world-conquering tyrant, and an inept one at that, is certainly a depressing thought for any optimist about the nature of the human condition. The truth about the Shah is at once much better, and much worse, than anyone in Freedom City knows. The Qajarite Shah is no king, no god, particularly in his own era. In an age of universal prosperity and peace, where men, women, and the rest from a thousand different species live together in brotherhood across the Milky Way, the Shah is a freak: socially stunted and given to intellectual obsessions, the Shah lives in the lower dimensional reaches noosphere where he was born, still sharing space with the ancestral members of his birth plurality. Unable to function in "modern" society, he turned his attention to the grim violence of the past, a dark era where there was only conflict and bloodshed! Deciding he could make himself a king in those past worlds, he used cloning banks and nanite fabricators to build himself an army of toy warriors, and again and again has used a temporal generator with access to the past of an alternate dimension (thee are fairly common for household use in the 4000s, given how easy they make waste disposal) to assault the past for the pleasure of his hindbrain. His legion of concubines are synthetic faux-intelligences that are the only members of the opposite sex who have ever shown any interest in him; his armies are so many toys created by the impossible super-science of the future, his "playing" with them making him the subject of scorn and derision by his peers. The Shah of Shahs and King of Kings, like many so-called great conquerors, is ultimately a small, petty man in control of something much larger and more important than himself. If ever he came truly close to victory, the Shah would have no idea what to do with himself. The best lasting way to defeat the Shah near-permanently would be to send agents forward into the future to speak directly to the locals: true, the local authorities would do nothing to help inhabitants of an alternate world's past, but the Shah's embarrassing antics pose a serious problem for his birth-plurality in a culture where social esteem and tolerance are very important: one young man's obsession with violent imagery and conflict makes everyone involved look bad. The evidence for this will be easy to find: the Shah proudly boasts of his 'conquests' to his fellow social deviants, living for their praise and worship being one of the few things that gives his life meaning,. If the heroes can manage the trip to the distant future and navigate the bizarre, alien world of humanity at the cusp of the technological and social Singularity, they can end the Shah's campaign of terror with the man himself near-tears as the elders of his plurality take away his cloning vats and his temporal projector, all the while lamenting to each other about where they went wrong with this one. Oh, he'll storm and fuss about how this isn't over: one day he'll get out of his home noosphere and be his own man, one day he'll get his revenge on the past by leading an unstoppable army of warriors to crush all that lie before him and become a god! But in the end, he'll come up with excuse after excuse not to leave the noosphere, and he'll ultimately sink into the haze of virtual realities and hallucinogens that mark the typical deviants of the world of 4015.

Space Monkey Mafia, 2015 The general public believes that Albert II, the first monkey in space, died on June 14, 1949 after his parachute failed during re-entry. This is a fiction. The truth is that when Albert was recovered alive in his capsule, he looked up at the Air Force guys and thought desperately: "Help meeeeee..." The exposure to unfiltered solar radiation had _changed_ the little rhesus monkey, giving him both sentience and low-level telepathy. The changes to the monkey bred true, and proved easy to duplicate on subsequent rocket launches, and soon the Air Force had itself a colony of sentient, telepathic rhesus monkeys in Nevada. Unfortunately things didn't go that well. The head of the program was a German scientist swept up by Operation Paperclip, a man whose ethics were as weak as his drive to prove himself to his new masters was strong. The little monkeys endured a terrible existence under his rule, subject to horrible experiments at his whim: but though he was a monster, he was more genius than he knew. After over a decade of breeding and multiple experiments, the rhesus colony at White Sands wasn't just sentient and telepathic. It was, when sorely pressed, _one mind_, and a mind far more powerful than its handlers realized. One night in 1961, under the leadership of a rhesus named Albert X, the monkeys escaped their tormentor (after mind-controlling him into performing certain experiments on his own frontal lobe) and fled into the desert. The trip through the Nevada desert was a difficult journey for the little monkeys, many of who died of thirst, exposure, or Ford pickup along the way. Albert himself died on that journey, but his successor Victoria led them to the promised land: a recently abandoned nuclear testing ground near the Utah border. A local oasis and a lack of people meant the monkeys had all the food and drink they wanted, while the altitude gave them the climate and weather they preferred. Under cover of isolation and government secrecy, they grew, and they thrived. Using long-range telepathic probes, they began exploring their world and found a grim situation indeed. Despite the distant civilization of Gorilla Island, the space monkeys were the only sentients of their kind on Earth: their little colony could easily have been stamped out by humans if they so wished it: all their telepathic powers couldn't have stopped an IRBM fired at their settlement, not to mention the ever-growing threat of superheroes. Gradually Victoria and her successors began to send out physical scouts to infiltrate the world of Man. Sentient monkeys good at play-acting were natural agents to infiltrate the simian-happy world of the 1960s and 1970s. Innocent, happy-looking monkeys who appeared on television and movies throughout the era all were secretly reporting back all they saw and heard to their colony back in the desert. After discovery of their Soviet counterparts in the mid-1970s, cautious feelers were sent out to the canine settlements in Siberia, but the two cultures proved ultimately unable to cooperate even in secret, though they remain in quiet contact. As the years went by, and generations of space monkeys grew up "abroad", gradually the leadership of the Nevada colony took a stronger and stronger interest in the world of men. Where once they had been slaves, now they would be masters. Where once they had had nothing, now they would have everything. They began sending out special agents to infiltrate the soft, criminal underbelly of humanity: so what if that gangster had no papers for his monkey, or if his behavior should change suddenly one day? A man like that wouldn't buy an animal legally, and surely it was the drugs who made him change, not the telepathic influence of the curious little monkey running around beneath his feet. Gradually the monkeys of Nevada began sinking their little hands into organized crime across the world: drugs, contraband, fine cars, anything that could be enjoyed in style by a monkey was shipped through dummy corporations to pickup spots in Nevada, where drivers with other hands controlling theirs delivered to the monkeys all they wanted. They made contact with Dr. Simian a few years ago and struck up a cordial working relationship despite his ape nature, and he provides them with super-technology in return for easy access to human organized crime bosses. Anyone who wants to deal with the space monkey mafia had better be prepared for a fight; the monkeys have had many years to place their agents across the United States, and they have been building their secret defense network around their homebase since the day they arrived. Having been taught that human beings want nothing more than to lobotomize their children and cook them for meat, these monkeys will not go down without a fight if it comes down to a battle in the Nevada desert.

The Spiral Villainous telepaths from the future who enjoy playing games with superheroes On September 26, 1960, during the preparations for the first televised Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the Centurion arrived at the Chicago studios where the debates were to be filmed. Wearing a circlet of golden leaves on his head, the Man of Adamant announced that the debates were unnecessary and that he, the Centurion, was now the Imperator of the American Empire! Luckily for the Centurion's reputation, he had a friend there he had never met - Alexander Rhodes, just a few months before his debut as the Scarab, was at the studio after a psychic premonition warned him that a dire threat to the world was in the offing. From his position in the VIP box, Rhodes engaged the being that had displaced Mark Leeds' conscious mind in psychic combat, eventually driving it free and letting the Man of Adamant make his horrified apologies to the bemused executives and VIPs. This had repercussions most people know. The Kennedy administration was always a little cool towards the Centurion (one reason why the new Freedom League never had a government representative) while the Centurion himself realized that perhaps he'd been wrong at the beginning of the decade and that he did need other heroes after all! This was also, unknown to most people, the first encounter that the heroes of Freedom had with the Spiral, enemies who have dogged the 20th and 21st century ever since. We don't know much about them, even now, only accounts gleaned from memories absorbed by psychics who have encountered them like the Scarab, Brainstorm, Chase Atom, and even the reclusive villain Professor Psion - and eyewitness testimony from people like Daedalus, Raven I, and others who have survived having their personalities exchanged with inhabitants of the year 10000 ACE! At least, that's the year they claim it is - there are no written records on the other side. The possible future that is 10000 ACE (so far every encounter has had them in the same year, even decades apart) is a grim one. The Moon is a fiery red in the sky as if recently made molten and the surface of the Earth (around the portholes in the uppermost part of the Spiral's headquarters) is covered in a white, sere desert that on closer inspection is made of tiny shards of broken glass worn down to fragments by prolonged wind and water exposure. The only life visible are various silicate creatures that live in the glassy deserts outside. And the Spiral themselves, of course. if you call that living. They are old beings, very old - they have vague memories of the world above, a desperate flight below, and a last-ditch procedure that granted them survival. But that was all very long ago, and the memories of their fleshy bodies have long since been supplanted by unending centuries of preservation. For you see the Spiral are brains, human brains (albeit greatly enlarged), each floating in a preservation tank that (with robot aid) will keep them alive for uncounted more centuries to come. They have libraries, musical collections, all manner of entertainment, but by now they have seen them all, read them all, felt them all. For all their great psychic power, they cannot directly affect their world - especially not the great desert that is the surface. In a few more centuries, the outside contamination will clear enough for them to make their way onto the Surface again with cloned bodies gathered by their computers' scanners. But for now, they are dreadfully, dreadfully bored. This is a bad thing. Even worse, one of them (Spiral Three, the one who possessed the Centurion and bedeviled him as a prankster until 1993) has recently (by their calendar) learned the art of mental time travel, one that it shared gladly with its fellows as a means of offering them an escape from the unending ennui. The Spiral like to play, and even at the best of times their play is sinister in its amusements. Their most gentle game is to find someone of power in the distant past and switch minds with them for a while - casting said person's consciousness into the distant future while they revel in the sensation and powers of their new form. Sometimes this is simply a great jest (by Spiral standards) and the person (if not discovered) will reawaken in their bodies amid a bacchanalia of amusements that they must now pay for, physically, socially, and financially. Other times the situation is darker still. One may decide that a given hero's life is inadequate and they must be improved, made superior, and so will simply move in for days or weeks at a time, fooling even the most intimate partners into believing that they have done nothing stranger than simply read too much Ayn Rand. All the while, they will turn their host cruel and plotting, a ruthless mockery of the noble being they once were. Other times, their cruelty takes an entirely new face. Spiral Seven, known among those familiar with the Spiral as "The Sadist" has not been seen since the early 1990s, when it was driven out of the body of its most recent host (and cast back into the future, its powers burned out) by the combined efforts of the hero Evening and the villain Hologram (the two most powerful psychics in Freedom City in the early 1990s) - but its body count ranged into the high dozens. (Jack-a-Knives is not a Spiral entity, but it has at times amused a Spiral to pretend to be the Spirit of Murder - just as it has pleased the Spirit of Murder to adopt a new name.) The Spiral has been quiet since the turn of the millenium - perhaps sizing up this new generation of heroes to see exactly what it is they're facing. After all, they don't age and there are plenty of other eras to play with. But none so exciting as our own. And the Spiral do get bored. Oh yes. Spiral-possessed hosts have whatever mental powers the GM thinks will make the adventure interesting, at whatever rank is necessary to make things difficult for the heroes. They are rarely deliberately wicked - but they have no respect for the individual rights of the people of the past and will play with them in whatever way they find the most satisfying. Taunting and boastful when exposed, the only one way to truly terrify one is to injure it psychically and send it back into the future - or far, far worse, find some way to isolate and restrain the mind inside the body. Spiral victims find themselves floating in a sensory deprivation tank in the far future, their neural energies temporarily deposited in a cloned body - breaking out of the tank through whatever means will allow heroes freedom to roam the Spiral complex - but mind the security robots!