The World's End
The year is 2024. It has been almost 12 years since the event that the Mayans referred to as “the World’s End”. Well, the world may not have ended per se, but it sure got a hell of a lot weirder.
It all started at midnight on December 21, 2012. The “Freak Wave” as people are calling it now hit everywhere on the planet all at once. Some places, like Australia and Russia got hit the worst, 8.2 on the Richter scale. A few other places had quakes as high as 6.9 but the majority of places suffered only a few collapsed buildings and fewer casualties. The aftershocks continued for a week afterwards. Seismologists tried tracking the Wave’s source only to find that it had none. It was like the entire planet had just…shuddered. And then there were the Lights.
Visible from miles away, beams of Light were confirmed by governments around the world. As the last of the aftershocks receded, they faded away. Each appeared to point straight into the sky, piercing the clouds. To date, only two of the Light’s sources have been discovered. One originated from the Great Pyramid in Egypt. The other source came from the Chichen Itza temple in Yucatan, Mexico. Investigators reported that the interior layouts at both locations had been rearranged revealing previously unexplored additions…and dangers.
After several archaeologists failed to return from the first exploratory mission into the depths of the Great Pyramid, investigations at both locales have been slow-moving. The Mexican government is reluctant to allow any investigation of the Mayan temples but has had limited success keeping trespassers away due to the vast number of Mayan sites populating Mexico’s southern regions.
And that’s when the really weird stuff started. Slowly at first but in ever-increasing numbers, people worldwide would wake up to find they had…changed. Meta-humans, or “supers”, have been around since World War II, but never had such a large number of them discovered their powers so quickly. For some their powers were easy to accept and be accepted. Some were not so lucky. After twelve Michigan police officers and several civilians were incinerated during a shootout with a deranged pre-adolescent that developed pyro-kinesis, many began siding with the usually ignored Factor X anti-mutant group.
Not all norms would come to think like Factor X though. Maximum City was built as a safe haven for supers and norms alike, and is the US’s fastest growing metropolis. The city teems with citizens intent to prove that supers and norms can live together as equals.
