Another commission for krinsbez

It was a world much like ours (save for some subtle differences in the laws of physics and Pauley Shore being stopped in time) until 1999, when an inter-dimensional rift in the Himalayas tore open and spilled six terrifying individuals into it. They were six of the most dangerous baddies in a DC Comics type “ridiculously powerful” superhero and supervillain world, and here there were no superheroes or super-science weapons to balance them out. They crushed all serious resistance in a matter of months.

It is now 2024.

North America is the domain of General Horus, who has superman-like speed, super senses, flight, strength and invulnerability (nothing short of a direct hit with a large nuclear device will take him down, and given his speed and super senses, good luck hitting him), plus deadly eye-beams. A military type, he has converted his domain into a virtual “army with a nation”, with everything subordinated to ever-increasing military strength and all aspects of life being as regulated as an army barracks, to a rather literal degree: everyone is in uniform. General Horus is an egalitarian. Men, women, black, white, gay, furry: they’re all soldiers and equal from the age of ten to seventy. Even the disabled serve: there are always behind the lines jobs and office jobs. (Those too badly disabled to work at all, though, are painlessly disposed of.)

In some ways America is lucky: people get enough to eat, the dieoff from the conquest and aftermath wasn’t too bad (in spite of his “smash cities and slaughter armies till they give up” techniques, General Horus has always tried to keep his forces large), the Rules are obeyed, General Horus is always quick to fry those who he catches abusing their positions of authority (he can tell when you’re lying to him), and there are parades and sports festivals and some small luxuries for those who excel (with of course an attached black market, which General Horus ignores as long as it doesn’t lead to serious discipline issues.) Disobedience no longer automatically means death: there is a scale of punishments now, from floggings to building highways in the Siberian islands. Religion is tolerated, as long as the preachers preach obedience and strength and unity and don’t criticize General Horus. There are plenty of jobs for scientists and engineers: there always newer and better weapons to design, and near earth space is filling up with lethal hardware.

Of course, the question arises what all this marching and drilling and occasional lethal live-fire exercises are _for_: the answer is of course further conquest, either of the rest of the world or other worlds. General Horus grows impatient: his army has been whipped into shape (by his standards) by 2014, 2019 at the latest and the fragile détente between the supervillainous rulers of the world grows increasingly shaky.

First on General Horus’s hit list is his neighbor to the south, King Behemoth, ruler of South America and most of the Caribbean. His power is the control of animal life, all animal life within thousands of miles, and he personally possesses the power to turn into any sort of animal that has ever lived, or even combinations thereof (you wouldn’t want to meet the Tryanoctoscorpion, I assure you). Rule is maintained through innumerable animal spies, parrots croaking out the warning Siempre Observando/ Sempre Assistindo

and anyone who makes trouble will soon be attacked by jaguars or eaten by army ants or worse.

He is a pure hedonist, who indulges to the fullest in drugs, food, sex (in which his appetites are quite indiscriminate), bloodsports, luxuries, booze, and generally anything the more decadent Roman emperors would have approved up. He expects to be treated as a living God, and the paeans to his glory would embarrass any of the Kims, although he hasn’t bothered to put an end to Christianity. His huge royal court moves from one ridiculously over the top palace to another, draining the resources of one regional warlord after the next. (The day to day business of government doesn’t interest him, and his domains are ruled by various local strong men and warlords who compete to feed his appetites: if they displease him, they don’t last long.) This wouldn’t be quite so bad if the economic conditions of the multitudes were comparable to before the takeover, but what with corrupt strong man rule, fragmentation of formerly united nation-states, and a collapse of global trade, living standards have plummeted across the region. Local strong men plunder the population not only to please Lord Behemoth but also to create luxurious little courts of their own, and many peasants have been driven off their land to create places for animals to flourish without human interference. (King Behemoth loves his beasts, although he’s fine with people eating cows and chickens and so on. He’s an omnivore himself).

Being made of relatively ordinary flesh and blood, King Behemoth invites assassination attempts, but a seven foot hulk even in his human shape, he has inhuman vitality and healing abilities, and has shrugged off a number of attempted stabbings and shootings and poisonings: he can in fact simply turn into a sort of giant amoeba form which allows him to survive anything short of being blown to bits (and good luck getting high explosives past his many dog servants). He tends to treat such attempts as very humorous, although he still pulls would-be assassins to bits starting with the toes and fingers and working his way in.

Kept close to Behemoth is his

, his right-hand, his grand vizier so to speak, who creates what passes for South America-wide economic and other policy. While a very powerful man indeed if he can get King Behemoth to agree with him,

tend to have an average political life of a little under two years, with their physical lives ending soon afterward. Still, there are plenty still interested in the job, out of the common human delusion “that guy didn’t know what he was doing –

do!”)

Africa and much of the Middle East, plus a European enclave in the Crimea, belongs to Master Munin, master telepath and mind controller with a global range. The locals have been mostly broken through implanted telepathic compulsion over the years, and have limited free will: they are given direction by some millions of “mind-clones” of Master Munin, individuals who have had his own ideas and views so firmly implanted in their brains that they are essentially pale copies of him: they have enough free will to direct the masses, but are incapable of seriously disagreeing with Munin on anything (which doesn’t prevent them from conspiring against each other).

Munin fears no human attack, since no free mind can approach him without attracting his attention and being taken over, but quite human vulnerability to say, rocks from space or killer robots means that he rarely emerges from a couple miles below his fortress city. This does not impede his pleasures, since he can easily take over anyone’s senses even from thousands of miles away. He has made great strides in modernizing and industrializing Africa, although in the process working a large proportion of the population to death (Munin tends to consider human “acceptable waste” the way old-time slave traders did. If a million are marched from a food-deficit area to a food-surplus area and half die on the way, that’s all to the population-control good). Africa and parts of the Middle East are full of shiny new cities (all of which look pretty much alike. Providing art and decoration for the mind-crippled is pointless).

Master Munin longs for control, but also is unhappy with the fact he can’t actually maintain fine control over everyone at once: too much attention-splitting. So he has tamed the population with a variety of ingrained mental compulsions – which makes them somewhat zombie-ish and inflexible in their behavior. He’s always looking for better ways to control people. (He also finds firmly subordinated minds somewhat boring).

Europe out through Siberia is ruled by the witch-queen Queen Endor (absolutely nothing to do with Ewoks), her world’s foremost black magician. Being of the opinion that things started going downhill with the Renaissance, she has banned technology more advanced than that available to Joan of Arc. Combined with the rich variety of magical horrors she unleashed with the conquest, the end of modern industrial agriculture means that the population of Europe has dropped by nearly two thirds since 1999: since she is uninterested in such things as GNP and has little use for normal human troops, this does not concern Queen Endor overmuch. (Mostly she wants normal humans for cringing deference, worship of the Dark Gods and herself, and occasional mass human sacrifices and magically useful body parts) Admittedly Her magical rule means the weather is always predictable, and good for growing things, save when She unleashes horrible curses instead. The forests of Europe have expanded enormously, partly due to human dieback and partly through magic – Queen Endor, like King Behemoth, is a big believer in wildlife preservation, especially of wild magical monsters of all sorts.

Europe is divided into feudal domains ruled over by her Ladies, her disciples in magic she has been training for the last 20 years (with about a 2/3 lethal failure rate), in turn ruling over magically twisted human enforcers known as Dark Knights, ruling over ever-fearful and never secure “squires” ruling over a population mostly reduced to medieval serfdom, although there is a small merchant and artisan class huddling in the ruins of the cities (less important than in our middle ages, since luxuries can just be created by magic. Some prosper as interior designers to the Ladies, although a number of Ladies have created palaces in awesomely bad taste to their own preferences). There are a lot of local variations, admittedly, due to differing styles of rule and the limited cognitional capacities of Black Knights: some Ladies have appointed bound demons as local administrators, which is never a good idea. All religions save worship of the Dark Gods of black magic, of which the Queen is their Eidolon on Earth, have been banned and are relentlessly persecuted.

Elemental familiars patrol land, sea and sky and fearsome armies – of elementals, Black Knights and other sorts of magically twisted humans, monsters of all sizes and shapes, demons and the corpses of the dead – wait to be unleashed on areas of suspect loyalty – or on other lands, since Queen Endor has expansionist ambitions of her own.

Most of Asia is ruled by the Dr. Sivana/old school Lex Luthor type mad scientist Dr. Weyland, who has done pretty well for himself given that he didn’t have much time to pack and came through with only a couple giant robots, a small swarm of Von Neumann machines, and a bare minimum of doomsday devices (but then, he was always the smartest of the Six). He has converted Asia into a virtual giant research institute, in which he and a vast number of “research assistants” perpetually strive to push back the borders of Mad Science. In the immense cities in which he has concentrated the population, endless experiments are pursued in vast laboratory complexes without any silly concerns about “practicality” or “ethics”. The smartest experiment: the less intelligent but still competent do the tasks needed to keep things running that robots haven’t already taken over: and those of lowest intellectual grade are experimented on, exported as slaves to Master Munin’s territory, or just recycled for their useful protoplasm. Sex is allowed as a recreational activity, but not reproduction: family life is being phased out. All women have birth control implants, and the next generation is being grown in vats from the very best genetic material, and raised in state crèches.

The new generation will also last a lot longer: Dr. Weyland has made some useful genetic changes. Eventually, as the older generation dies off there will only be Weyland ™ brand humans within his territory, aside from a few favored scientists whose lives he extends by other means.

Religion and superstition are forbidden, Dr. Weyland’s regime being a thoroughly rationalist and atheistic one: most “humanities” like art or history are no longer taught, being considered a waste of brain cells. Although the lower class humans are usually under tight controls and some degree of hypno-electronic mind control, serious scientists and researchers have a lot more freedom, to the extent that there are occasional rebellions with local top scientists taking control of super-science weapons and trying to overthrow Weyland or at least break loose from his control: Dr. Weyland could tighten his rule to the extent where this would be almost impossible, but in fact he welcomes the occasional rebellion: after all, what good is a supreme intellect if it cannot deal with challenges. Dr. Weyland welcomes dissenting voices: prove the superiority of your theories of rule on the mad science battlefield. Machine and cyborg armies await the call to destroy Weyland’s enemies, unless they have developed an effective counter – in which case Dr. Weyland has some other tricks up his sleeve (Atomic supermen, giant monsters, the Volcano That Walks, etc, etc.) Satellites monitor every inch of his territory, and massive quantum computers track and analyze the movement and actions of every living thing bigger than a beetle. Like General Horus, Dr. Weyland’s domain has a very active space program, although in his case it is as much about scientific exploration as putting mass-driver weapons in orbit and giant lasers on the Moon.

(Both General Horus and Master Munin constantly try to steal tech knowledge from Dr. Weyland’s territory to build bigger and better superweapons of their own. Master Munin can pick any mind not shielded with superscience, but often lacks the context to really understand what he gets, and lacks independent-minded scientists and engineers to interpret and realize: General Horus has to either personally or through agents steal stuff and people, which requires some care to not antagonize Dr. Weyland too much, but at least has a quality reverse engineering institution back home).

The vast Pacific and southern Oceans, island SE Asia and Australasia are the domain of Lord Jove, who was once human but now is essentially an aerial elemental, vast and formless, appearing occasionally as a huge humanoid cloud-shape crowned with lightening, and almost entirely divorced from human affairs: his one true passion is to play with the weather, creating storm and tornado and typhoon and massive lightening storms and worse, ranging freely across the vast areas of his domain and playing madly with air and sea. The locals have suffered greatly from his passion, agriculture in particular being hit hard by the wildly unpredictable weather, causing mass famines and die-backs. (Such things as blizzards in the Javanese summer or months of rain in the Great Victoria Desert are no longer surprising). Through a massive use of greenhouses, indoor farming, intensive fishing, etc. the more developed regions of the area have managed to pull themselves back from the brink, but with the partial exception of New Zealand none of the previous nations has managed to restore unified control over their former territories. Warlordism, cannibalism, and piracy remain endemic.

Still, one benefit of Lord Jove’s basic indifference to his subject’s plight is that he doesn’t care what they get up to: this is the only place on Earth where someone is not actively trying to reshape the human population to their own ends. Those who in one way or another manage to escape from the lands of the five more “involved”

supervillains

gravitate here, while spies and agents for said

supervillains

meet here on what is essentially neutral ground. Some remarkable new cultural exchanges and new flowerings have taken place here, and scientific progress is beginning to ramp up in part due to new technology smuggled out of Dr. Weyland’s territory, often (metaphorically) in people’s heads (or less metaphorically, in their guts: both places spy satellites can’t easily reach.

The tensions between the

supervillains

continue to mount. A major reason things have not yet exploded is that Dr. Weyland has been promising for years to duplicate the accident which originally brought them here, and create stable portals to whole new worlds for them to conquer. The other four’s patience is running out, though. Another reason that they have not yet fought eachother is mutual vulnerability: while General Horus could smash King Behemoth easily enough, he’s vulnerable to magic, Lord Munin could take over his mind if he got too close, and he’s far from sure he could survive some of Dr. Weyland’s more monstrous doomsday devices. Queen Endor’s magic could kill Master Munin by sending some magical monstrosity immune to mind control, and can prevent nukes or bombs from going off, but direct spells lack planetary range, and she really is rather unsure of what Dr. Weyland could do if he really tried, and although she could turn Lord Horus into a frog given a couple seconds to throw a spell, he’s

fast, and she’s not sure if she’d survive if he just threw a big enough rock at her palace,

. Dr. Weyland is always surrounded by awesome defensive technology, but he’s only normal flesh and blood in the end, and he can’t be sure that Queen Endor couldn’t slip some magical attacker in or King Behemoth slip in some deadly insects (his biggest defense is that he’s made it clear he can make sure the world is destroyed in any of a number of ways if he is killed). Nobody is quite sure how to take down Lord Jove.

Master Munin is particularly unhappy. He could control General Horus, but he’d have to leave the center of his power and get close – dangerously close – to do so. None of the others are as vulnerable: Dr. Weyland makes sure he and his top scientists are always behind powerful psi-proof energy screens, magic shields Queen Endor and her Ladies from his abilities (demons are naturally – or unnaturally – immune), and it is very hard to get anywhere with Lord Jove’s vast, cloudy brain, while any control over King Behemoth could be broken simply by his taking on an animal form (Master Munin isn’t very good with non-primate brains, and has always been furiously baffled why King Behemoth remains “himself” even when taking on animal forms lacking anything like a recognizable brain). Also, he is worried about the passage of time: he is growing old, unlike his immortal or near-immortal competitors, and while he has stolen loads of technological information from the brains of unshielded inhabitants of Dr. Weyland’s realm, he has had little success in imitating Dr. Weyland’s life-extension techniques. He needs a war, and victory to extract all the information he can from Dr. Weyland’s regime, or possibly magical knowledge from Queen Endor.

(One of his major projects is to successfully transfer his mind fully into a younger body, but to do that he needs a body with as strong a natural telepathic ability as his own: the project to breed a tame telepath/puppet is proving difficult and slow, and then there are some serious existential challenges in the project in question).

So, he’s been moving pieces into place. He can’t risk attempting to fully _compel_ King Behemoth, but he certainly can plant ideas in his head and manipulate him and his beliefs. Similarly, while Lord Jove’s mind is too fluid and nebulous to establish any firm control over, it can be prodded in the right direction. And while a mass takeover of normal minds in the territories of Dr. Weyland, Endor, Horus, or Behemoth could not be done quickly or secretly enough, a little simple mind-manipulation of many individuals in key positions but below the notice of the rulers, over a period of years? Quite doable. Meanwhile, his military capacities continue to expand with industrialization, and his slaves are also an army – everyone in his realm exercises properly whether they want to or not, and when it comes to be time to go to war they will all line up and fight to the death with no complaint or expression of fear. Of course, he won’t be the one to start the war. He’ll be one of the _victims_, to start with. But he’ll be on top at the end.

Meanwhile, New Zealand scientists, thank to reverse-engineering machinery smuggled out of Dr. Weyland’s territory, have managed to establish contact with what they believe to be the home reality of the

supervillains

. If they were a bit more paranoid, they might wonder how they managed to get ahold of such cutting-edge mad science in the first place. But then, Dr. Weyland has always enjoyed a challenge…