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It is the best of times, and the worst of times. It a promethean age, in which all seems possible. It is a dark age, where cosmic war threatens and many of Earth’s cities lie in ruin. It is the universe of Superman, Batman, and their many kin.
Superheroes started showing up in the 1930s, and have increased in number ever since, as simultaneously contact began with multiple alien races and ancient mystic forces awoke from their ancient slumber. Today, there are thousands of superheroes: some having gained their powers through extraterrestrial science, either from aliens or human duplication of said technology: some through the intervention of mystical beings: some through being aliens themselves, or by being of partially alien ancestry, most frequently Kerubim, an race which has been intermittently dicking around on Earth for millennia. Some have had their “meta-gene” or “gen-factor” activated, a rare but widespread genetic anomaly of uncertain origin (some say even more ancient aliens, others say time travelers, others say A Wizard Did It.)Others lack superpowers, but possess powerful mystical devices or ancient alien super-tech that more than compensates. Or their superpowers come from their being what in other times would be called a “witch” or “sorceress” or “wizard.” And then some people just get exposed to a radioactive comet.

Those are of course only the “proper” superheroes: there are tens of thousands of non-superpowered Masked Avengers, cyborgs civilian or military, adventurers, talking animals (Uplifted or magical), and civic-minded robots (after all, it just took a theme song, cape, crown and goggles to make a foul-mouthed robot into Super King). Supervillains, evil mad scientists, etc. are equally common, although somewhat less flamboyant nowadays, given the government’s “orbital death-beam them first, question them later” attitude towards anyone showing up atop a giant robot and aggressively monologuing.

Gods and spirits are real, as they always have been (belief + the Spirit Of Man leads to the birth of Gods from the psychic mass unconscious, which although fading with time never die off entirely as long as anyone remembers them) but they prefer to act from behind the scenes rather than visibly interfering in human affairs (for one thing, that might lead to getting their butts whipped by superheroes). The Greek Pantheon is kept ticking over by the Amazons and some Atlanteans, while the ancient Egyptian Pantheon of course has Secret Cultists in Egypt and many other places. (The Norse pantheon hasn’t been seen in a while, possibly eaten).This is somewhat complicated by the fact that some Gods are in fact aliens masquerading as Gods, and some beings are effectively Gods but are unknown to standard mythologies.

Older than Gods and preceding humanity are the Elementals, manifestations of the natural world. The Green engages in its long struggle with the Red, largely beyond the notice of human beings, save when the Green-protected jungles of the Amazon basin and central Africa swallow an illegal timber or mining camp. (You can cut down trees and build things in those areas, but with an eye to ecological balance, and you’d best ask the trees politely first).

Magic is more obscure than super-tech, and less familiar to most. It derives from unseen and other-universal Powers, its users are not in the least interested in having it commercialized, and are quite pro-active in suppressing those who feel “information should be free”. (The Mystic Council, and its sister organizations Shadowpact and the Sentinels of Magic are the magical equivalent of the Justice League, warding the world from supernatural threats. They are more shadowy and unseen groups than the Justice League, and want to keep it that way). Still, there are occasional slip-ups: disaster was narrowly averted after some SOB put the complete text of the Necronomicon on the internet. [0]

WWII went somewhat differently from OTL, with superbeings on both sides. (Not to mention the opening of an inter-dimensional rift in the Pacific, giving access to an alternate universe swarming with super-dinosaurs and other monsters). Although the Nazis and Japanese were able to gather some formidable forces of their own, including the powerful Spear of Destiny and even some petty Gods, in the end the “superpower gap” was too great, and WWII ended early, with rather less dead Jews and an Iron Curtain rather further to the East than OTL. (Admittedly, finishing off the Nazis took rather longer: rooting out the last Nazi flying saucer bases and Hitler clones and mystics with armies of the SS undead on Earth took until the mid-50s, while the Lunar Reich remains a nuisance till today [1]. Some long-lived Nazi supervillains still occasionally crop up to cause trouble today, and
there is still uncertainty if the brain destroyed in ’49 was really Hitler’s after all).

The Cold War was complicated by alien meddling and both sides trying to use superpowered beings to leverage their position: the US and its allies as early as the 1960s was fighting a parallel war to root out the Daemonites, the shape-shifting, body-possessing enemies of the Kherubim (the Soviets tried to play off both sides and their government never quite recovered from the loss of prestige and trust resulting from a Daemonite near-takeover only forestalled by non-Soviet superheroes.)

Twice Earth has suffered from major alien invasions, once at the end of the 1980s by a coalition of alien races hoping to harness humanity’s propensity to superpowers for their own purposes, and again in the 2010s by the forces of the arch-fiend Darkseid, seeking to make Earth’s Powers his tools and slaves. In both cases friendly aliens (the Kherubim, joining the Daxamites in the first conflict and the New Gods in the second) proved vital in beating back the invasion, but left a major legacy of paranoia and a militarization of planetary society. On the more positive side, it has led to a more unified planet. There is no world government, but in the face of alien threats and increasing off-world colonization, there is a tendency for human beings to huddle together. including the establishment of the Terrestrial Space Defense Force, the emergence of the EU as a genuine United States of Europe, and the creation of several major regional economic unions and alliances as part of a general attempt to help develop the planet to face future threats. (MERCOSUR is about as unified as the OTL EU, and the US and a Russian-Chinese alliance of convenience have created their own blocks: the US-led Trans-Pacific Defense System (TPDS) meshes with NATO but extends well beyond it, while the Eurasian Treaty Powers (ETP) recreates the extent of the old Communist Block in a more free-market form). Africa remains a bit of a problem, with still-Apartheid South Africa something of a Pariah state, while the Middle East being a pain is a constant across multiple dimensions. (Superweapons and secret societies and superpowered Jihadists, oh my). Thanks to more Jews surviving WWII, Israel got more Jewish settlement than OTL, leading to the direct annexation of OTL’s Palestinian states – and internal troubles in a 2019 Israel that is nearly 30% Arab. Meanwhile, Iraq, having avoided invasion in this world, has atomic weapons, superpowered mercenaries, and orbital canon, while Saddam has started petting a large white cat in television appearances.

Relationships with the Kherubim are…complicated. The Kherubim empire is divided between multiple Lords as independent as Irish kinglets under the High King or German Princes under the emperor of the HRE, and are hardly easily brought to heel (as in One Piece, power=authority in the Kherubim, and the Lords have the buffest superpowers), while there are multiple ideological factions, some associated with one or more Lords, others existing almost independently of their authority if not in downright opposition. Some want Earth as an ally, some want it directly absorbed into the empire by means fair or foul (many think this will be for the Earth’s own good, and the general genetic betterment of (currently) non-super humans), and some think Earth is frankly best left alone. Currently the Kherubim (or most of them) are uneasy allies, meddling in Earth affairs taking a back seat to avoiding full-on warfare with Apokolips, which even the Kherumbim fear.

Besides the Daemonites, Kherubim, and Green Martians, Earth has diplomatic contacts with over two dozen more alien races (and as many more have contacts with individual governments or even private individuals, often in secrecy) and wondrous new technology is everywhere, if somewhat unevenly distributed.

The Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90s, although it was a rather different process than OTL (it involved more giant robot battles) and it was triggered as much by the Soviet government’s poor response to the ’89 invasion as to economic problems and poorly planned political reforms. Russia today holds more territory than OTL, and thanks to the generally more advanced level of technology is richer, but is still relatively a good deal less powerful than it was in the Soviet glory days, and as OTL Russians resent the fact, although the political situation is dominated by right-wing parties than a single authoritarian figure such as Putin. (Being a bit too obviously an arch-villain is something of a political liability in this world). Russia frequently exports out of work, badly designed and often worse for wear [2]Soviet-era “enhanced individuals”, not to any great joy abroad.

China reached World’s Largest Economy status already, although it is still substantially poorer on a per capita basis than the US. The current autocratic rulers are fond of the notion of a unified Earth better able to stand up to powerful alien races – with China at the helm, of course. Currently, China takes Meddling with Powers that Should Not be Meddled with further than any other nation, which will probably come back to bite them in the ass someday, although at least nowadays they have moved their more dangerous projects off-planet.

The US is the most superbeing-rich state on the planet, which has both benefits and perils (more superbeing battles, for one thing: the insurance industry is in perpetual disarray). It is even more urbanized than OTL, with a number of cities of over a million people existing that don’t in our timeline, and the Boston-Washington corridor is even denser. There are a multitude of new religions and cults (some with actual supernatural powers), three major soda brands (Coke, Pepsi, and Zesti), and a burgeoning robot rights movement, along with a great deal of heated talk about alien immigrants which is actually about aliens from space.

New generations of superheroes arose over the years, and new super-teams formed (and occasionally dissolved). Some were descendants of heroes, taking up the mantles of their parents and grandparents, while others arose as the result of a sort of semi-secret “superhero arms race” as various secretive societies, government agencies, mad scientists, etc. sought to find new ways to empower superhumans and creating newer and more powerful living weapons. (With widely varying levels of success. The mad scientists who were hired to create a superhero for Ethiopia delivered a nearly brain-dead imperfect cyborg clone of Haile Selassie whose atomic power source went critical on his first mission, and one of them had the gall to tweet that it was about all that could be expected given their budget).

Of the Supers of the 1930s and earlier, the genuine immortals or near immortals, such as Wonder woman or Plastic Man, are still mostly around, while Superman at 108 has a few wrinkles about his eyes and a little grey in his hair, but after a century of soaking up sunlight is if anything stronger than ever, not to mention the vast arsenal of super-gadgets and super-science tricks he’s picked up over the years (Superman would still be one of Earth’s strongest supers if he lost his powers tomorrow. He’s also known halfway across the galaxy, having saved multiple planets and civilizations on various space-missions).

Most of the “merely” human heroes of his early days – the original Flash, the original Green Lantern, the original Star Man, Liberty Belle, Hourman – are dead or retired. Many of the supervillains, too, are gone, those not dead of old age killed by other villains, blown up by their own doomsday machines, or eliminated by national government sick of their crap. Batman (still alive thanks to some not entirely legal biotech and cybernetics) has long passed on the mantle of the Bat to his heirs and no longer fights crime in person (although he does accomplish a lot by remote control), and Superman worries about Lois Lane, who at this point is mostly cloned organs, synthetics, and cybernetics (she refuses any upgrades not available to the general public as a matter of principle).

Superman and Supergirl had kids (not with eachother, you pervs), who had kids in turn, etc. Not all inherited superpowers and none of the later generations who manifested Kryptonian abilities did so as strongly as the first generation, although thanks to intermarriage with non-Kryptonian supers and other of extraterrestrial origin, some have other kinds of superpowers. And of course the “House of El” includes those superpowered or otherwise who have married into it.
Earth’s citizens of Kryptonian heritage do not form a single “team”, fighting evil either as individuals or various super-teams. This is not so much the case with the “Bat-Family” (traditional recruiting more by adoption or simply showing up looking for job than by direct inheritance), which tends to mutually support each other in their crime-fighting efforts and remain centered in and near Gotham, which is essentially the world’s largest gated community, an electronic Panopticon which, depending on who you ask, is either a paranoid nightmare or a paradise on earth.

Aside from such self-governing groups as the Justice League, the Teen Titans, The Outsiders, the Doom Patrol, Infinity Inc., etc., governments formed special agencies of their own, such as the internationally backed United Nations task force Stormwatch, the Soviet People’s Heroes and Soyuz, US government teams The Suicide Squad, Team Zero and Team Seven, and China’s Great Ten. The 1990s saw a new burst of superteam creation and new heroes, such as the Authority, young Justice, The Sovereign Seven, Gen13, and the WildCATS. Short-lived superhero teams continue to frequently assemble and disperse to this day.

(Newer and older teams, with differing agendas, don’t always get along. Still, it’s not like they automatically fight when they first run into each other, and the Authority, for instance, has somewhat warmed up to the Justice League since Superman helped them take down an evil version of themselves from another dimension (the Elite were such a bunch of wankers).

Along with the currently Moon-based Justice League, there are also currently Justice League Europe, Justice League International, Justice League Detroit, Justice League Skartaris, and Justice League Africa.

Military defense budgets remain high, given the continued presence of Apokolips forces on Earth. In the armistice (there was no peace treaty: Darkseid doesn’t do peace), it was agreed that certain areas would remain under Apokolips control for twenty years before being returned (not that anyone really expects this to happen) as guarantees against “terrestrial sneak attacks on Apokolips.” Essentially the inhabitants of these areas are hostages: Darkseid’s negotiators have made it clear that if humanity plans to retake these areas, the Apokoliptian forces present will fight a brutal charred earth campaign with absolutely no concern for local civilian populations (the areas held were not lightly chosen: they are all relatively densely populated, poor, not particularly rich in resources with few if any important super-champions, well away from the borders of local major powers, and with few strong defenders in the international community. Areas which the international community would be unenthusiastic about shedding much blood for in the first place).

For now, Apokolips continues to hold these territories, and in fact are indoctrinating the latest generation of youth in the principles of Anti-life, loyalty to Darkseid, and hostility to other terrestrial nations, which “abandoned them”.
If, it seems, there will always be a Batman (Batperson. Whatever), it seems there always will be a Joker. The aging original accidentally killed himself in 1969 when it turned out he had made a serious boner with his latest anti-Batman deathtrap, but by 1973 a new white-faced psychopath was making trouble in Gotham. The latest, an utter loony who wore his own sliced-off face as a mask, was killed by supervigilante Midnighter (who ran over him with a station wagon. Multiple times), but of late there have been rumors of a female mad scientist type in clown makeup who claims she will bring laughter back to the “unhappy citizens of Gotham” and that she’s “utterly unserious.” [3] (The current Dr. Fate suspects that the Jokers may be human avatars of the Lords of Chaos, and therefore impossible to ultimately get rid of, but he keeps this theory to himself – he doesn’t want the Bat-family to take it as a challenge).

The Moon belongs to the Earth – at least, it is in theory international territory. (Aside from those darn Moon Nazis, which still hold about a fifth of it). In practice, this has led to a bit of a Moon Scramble, as anti-gravity has made access to space relatively easy, and the Moon is a short enough trip that you can make the trip by teleporter once a foothold has been established. Over two dozen nations and a number of private firms have established bases on the Moon, some of which are growing into actual cities. There are of course various supervillain and superhero hideouts, although in some cases a change of quarters is being considered. The Moon, having the surface area of almost 15 million square miles, is in no way crowded as yet, but the chances of someone stumbling across your hidden base dug into the regolith are a hell of a lot better than they were twenty years ago. And individual heroes and villains aren’t the only ones worried: the main base of the Justice League (now staffed by a third generation of heroes) is located on the Moon, and there is an international agreement for nobody to build within a couple hundred miles of it, but there is still increased concern over security issues.

Beyond the Moon, there are human colonies on Mars, Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and in a couple of nearby star systems. (The last are a bitch to re-supply, since star drives are horribly energy-expensive - antimatter power sources aren’t safe, and quantum flux power sources are _expensive_ to build and maintain. Lex Luthor developed his own star drive back in the 50’s, but since it was powered by robbing the earth of a measurable part of its angular momentum, it hasn’t caught on).

Mercury is hot (duh) and has native life consisting of superheated plasma, which combine to discourage human settlement.

Venus is toxic jungles, strange drugs, an extraordinary variety of monsters, weird, dangerous ruins of a cyclopean, Lovecraftian sort, plus an Atlantean (pre-submergence) colony whose royal family is peculiarly married into the villainous Sivana family line. It also used to be the home of a race of evil worm-people, but they are now extinct (although one is rumored to survive).

Mars is an old world. (Many civilizations had come and gone already before the White and Green Martians and their battles for supremacy). It is bitterly cold, it’s small, shallow hyper-saline seas frozen over through most of the year: the ice is over a mile thick over the north Polar sea. Most of the rest is desert. The air is thin, too thin for most humans save for a few deep depressions and canyons, but the winds can be terrible, and the sandstorms are worse. Still, there remain a variety of highly specialized life forms, adapted for the harsh conditions of the little world: some, to survive, have evolved strange powers and abilities possessed by no terrestrial life forms. And now, once again, there are the Green Martians, telepathic shape-shifters one and all, after an absence of millennia. They departed after the last White-Green war, in which most of Mars’s remaining cities had been wrecked and the remnants of the immemorially ancient canal system put out of operation: the survivors fled to the stars. Now they have returned, and with the aid of the nations of Earth, a planet remarkable in its abundance of superpowered beings, they hope to restore some of its ancient glories. Of course, further negotiations will have to be made with respect to the status of the squatters.

While the native Martians were gone, various alien races came to Mars, some to study, others in hopes of loot. Some learned much, some died horribly (some did both), and some settled in and stayed. By the time of the Green Martian return, there were three major settlements of extra-solar races on Mars. First in importance are the “other green Martians”, the Gleps, a green-skinned humanoid race with little antenna-like nubs on their heads: peaceful isolationists, they live in extensive underground complexes near the northern ice cap, and until recently were quite thoroughly concealed from other races of the solar system. Relationships with the Green Martians, which they greatly outnumber, are uncomfortable at best, since getting them to leave is unlikely to be easy either morally or practically. Their original home planet is unknown (the Gleps can shield themselves technologically from Green and White Martian telepathy), making it hard to get a proper “Go back to _” campaign going.

Then there are the so called “Blue Martians” (their actual name for themselves is unpronounceable, although for a while they went by the name of “Solazis”), a race of short and physically rather puny blue-skinned, big-headed humanoids. Descended from refugees fleeing an ancient and now mostly forgotten conflict, they settled on Mars, too few and too timid at the time to attempt an invasion of Pleistocene Earth, and cobbled a civilization together out of what technology they brought with them and scraps of salvaged Green and White Martian technology. Over time they rebuilt part of the old canal system and built up a considerable civilization, although a certain superstitious fear of some ancient Martian ruins and a credulous nature keeping them from spreading out too widely over the planet (they never discovered the Gleps). In the 1920s they detected terrestrial radio broadcasts, leading to an enthusiasm for terrestrial culture and entertainment that they have never lost (leading to a brief and unfortunate episode in which a demagogue managed to make himself a Martian Hitler, bedazzling his followers with visions of greatness and conquest of the marvelous terrestrial planet. Superman shortly fixed his little red wagon). Modern Blue Martian territory is a weird amalgamation of bits and pieces of terrestrial culture, and their politicians model themselves on terrestrial figures from Churchill to Obama (a little behind the scenes manipulation is carried out by the Green Martians and terrestrial superheroes to prevent those who model themselves after the less democratic terrestrial politicians don’t get any traction.

Then there are the Kriglo, a race resembling ten foot tall spiders with humanoid faces. Although originally interstellar travelers, they had lost spaceflight and much of their old technology, their weapons being mostly repurposed old Martian technology. The hostile and aggressive Kriglo were strong enough to hold the generally timid Blue Martians at bay, if not conquer them, but proved no match for the returning Green Martians. They have been driven out of much territory they had formerly controlled, and confined within the core lands of their old domain, dwelling in weird cities resembling gigantic spider webs. There has been talk of driving them off Mars altogether, although communications with space-travelling races has indicated that the Kriglo’s off-planet relatives, due to a tendency to pick the wrong side in interstellar conflicts (or just being the wrong side) are downright endangered as a species, eliciting some sympathy.

And then there are the insect-beings which occupy a single buried city in the southern Martian deserts. There has been limited telepathic communication between them and the Green Martians: they have apparently been stranded on Mars for a long time, and are willing to relocate – if a planet suitable for their needs can be found. It is generally recommended visitors to Mars leave them strictly alone – they are a collective species, and find it difficult to understand single members of alien races having rights as individuals rather than being as disposable as fingernails.

Besides Martians, native or naturalized, there are a number of terrestrial bases on Mars, established by Earth’s leading nations and blocks. These are, at least in theory, temporary bases for research and study of the Red Planet (and there is a lot to learn: the Martians themselves, with their wars and long exile, have forgotten much). Mars, after all, belongs to the Martians: the Green Martians are allied to Earth through various international institutions, and almost all terrestrial nations recognize them as the rightful proprietors of Mars (although not to the extent of helping them kick out the Greps and the Blue Martians). However, there are a number of secret and not-so-secret groups in government and elsewhere that think a secure foothold on Mars may be useful in the future, and after all, it’s not like there are enough Green Martians to settle the whole planet, after all. The number of terrestrials on Mars is still small, but some Martians are beginning to worry about the possibility of filibustering taking place.

Jupiter’s inhabitants are metallic, cold and live under conditions of such pressure that they would explode under terrestrial pressure conditions.

Further out, the various native races of Saturn are weird to the point of incomprehensibility, but mostly harmless to visitors and uninterested in spreading beyond the Rings. Part of the vast planet is inhabited by a sub-race of the Green Martians, from which they have diverged considerably over the millennia. Titan is off-limits to human settlement, a small population of superpowered humans under Daxamite protection already residing there.

Aside from outer space, Earth has some interest in other dimensions and timelines, although exploration here is more cautious. There’s some weird scary stuff out there, and Earth governments don’t want to be drawn into any extra-dimensional conflicts (the whole Sliding Albion thing was a real mess, although a coalition of heroes headed by the Justice League managed to relocate the Blue to a deserted planet before they could do any more damage to that version of the Earth. )Aside from timeline-tunnel tech and other products of alien or mad science, there are various places on Earth where dimensional rifts and weak points exist, most notably the Bermuda Triangle (mostly mapped and carefully avoided nowadays), the Pacific Anomaly, and the North Polar Rifts.

The Pacific Anomaly came into exist early in WWII, and there are contenting theories – there is some evidence of Japanese super-science experiments in the Pacific, in cooperation with Reich scientists (who felt the forces involved were best tampered with at least ten thousand miles away from the Reich), but also that Daemonites were investigating interdimensional travel at the same time, perhaps to bring allies to Earth from somewhere else. Whoever did mess up, mess up they did, creating a vast area of shifting space-time, in which allied (and Japanese) forces kept stumbling on extensive islands inhabited by extra economy large sized dinosaurs and other monsters, greatly complicating combat for both sides. Investigation of the “Primal World” on the other side of the Anomaly (which can be accessed if your ship or plane is in the right place at the right time) is ongoing, while in spite of the risk of giant monster attack various government-backed concerns seek the unique resources of the Anomaly, including a strange crystal whose radiations can somehow upgrade crude computer intelligence to true AI – and are therefore almost priceless. (Illegal operations by mad scientists, alien pirates, etc. must constantly be combated). The borders of the vast area are patrolled by rotating shifts of superheroes, Atlanteans, national navies, etc., to keep any of the vaster marine monsters from leaving the area and establishing a breeding population in Earth’s Oceans.

The North Polar rift zone gives access to the weird, inside-out world of Skartaris. Initially believed to be inside a hollow Earth, Skartaris is now believed to exist in an alternate dimension with somewhat different laws of physics. Skartaris is a world with a negative curvature, surrounding a vast open space in the middle of which a tiny sun floats perpetually directly overhead. At its “Poles”, openings lead to an outside darkness, with strange life of its own. Apparently Skartaris once was accessible from much more of Earth’s surface, since along with a unique flora and fauna of its own there exists a wide variety of life from all different periods of terrestrial life (including a shitload of dinosaurs). It was once extensively colonized by Atlanteans, much of whose technology remains, although there has been a general collapse into barbarism and near-barbarism, and understanding of the technology has largely been lost. All in all, Skartaris is a pulp adventure Conanesque world, where those without power or powerful protectors are always at risk of deadly force, human or otherwise.

The main political organization of Skartaris is the League of Cities, an alliance of ten cities closely linked by trade, created by the Warlord of Shamballah and his son (with a few wars, a couple revolutions, and a couple particularly egregious tyrants overthrown) with varying levels of political participation and still-functional Atlantean technology. (It has recently obtained UN representation, while relations with most other states in Skartaris remain a bit spotty. ) Each city state has an extensive sphere of influence over a network of smaller cities states vassalized in various ways, farming villages with high rammed-earth walls and networks of ropes across the roofs to keep off human raiders and dinosaurs terrestrial and flying, and fortified trading carvanaserais. Merchants tend to travel in large well armed caravans with monster-killing specialists and a wizard or two if they can get them.

(With the introduction of modern weapons, the giant monster population is dropping rapidly, so rapidly as to cause unease among Earth ecologists. Local peasants are just pleased at the decreased odds of their cattle being munched by tyrannosaurs or giant pterodactyls flying off with their children).

Aside from humans, Skartaris includes a variety of intelligent and semi-intelligent species: bat-men, mutant lizard men (a relatively recently evolved species, as result of a now non-existent city state’s tampering with old Atlantean superweapons), tree-dwelling dwarfs (like more Metal Hokas), centaurs, giants, cyclopes, a lost (post-sinkage) Atlantean colony of mer-people, Titans (not nearly as large as the Greek myths suggest), goblins, and ape-men at various stages of evolution.

Magic is much more widely practiced and used in Skartaris than on the surface world: the local mages tends to practice cruder forms of magic than the rather better informed mages of the surface, but there are a _lot_ of them, along with a variety of supernatural beings that have been summoned up but never dismissed (for various reasons, including “summoner eaten”): in olden times Skartaris was known as “The Wizard World.” (Really, the only reason the whole place isn’t run by mages is because getting wizards to work together is a serious job of cat-herding).

Due to the north Polar location of the dimensional rifts, bases by terrestrial nations in Skartaris are most US or Russians, and a few from the EU, with allies coming along for the ride. (Canada is well placed geographically, but isn’t really interested in spending the money to build and defend bases in a land full of insanely tough warrior peoples and monsters). The Skartarians are starting to get a little alarmed by their increased presence in unclaimed lands, especially since they’ve started getting ahold of recordings of terrestrial Talking Heads going on about how all that land and resources they’re not doing anything with.

“Economic reform” doesn’t really work as OTL in this world, since scientific progress has been much faster: government economic controls and technology controls are universal, because the Markets are always being disrupted by some new “wonder” technology which then has to be somehow fit into the preexisting setup. China has gone from a desperately poor peasant country eighty years ago to a country filled with towering skyscraper cities, fusion power plants, super fast levitating monorails, and bases on other planets - and hideous pollution, cyborg brute squads, and hundreds of millions of poor peasants crowded into vast vertical slums, which have not yet been educated and trained up to this new world, and consequently do a lot of shit jobs that in rich countries are now increasingly being done by robots. Much of Africa is still impoverished even if the ruling classes have cybernetic implants, flying cars and genetically upgraded pets.

Scientific advancement is similarly unevenly distributed world-wide. There are flying cars, but a distinct lack of food replicators. Virtual-reality addiction is a serious problem in many advanced countries: the Illegal Alien Tech department of the FBI and similar organizations abroad rivals the Drug Enforcement division. Those born today theoretically could see their third century, but the really fancy stuff is too expensive for Blue Cross, with the “practical” life expectancy for most terrestrials not being much more than a century. People loudly grumble about the government/secret societies/the superheroes suppressing superior life-extension tech: this is in fact entirely correct, alien technology exists that _could_ give people cheap immortality, and the Justice League and the Mystic council suppress knowledge of it. (Both quantum computer analysis and mystical divination indicate that introducing immortality to humanity at this point in their development would be disastrously bad.)

At least cancer, heart disease, and senility are now easily curable. (Although alien diseases still kill thousands every year, and if it weren’t for the secret presence on Earth of the Regulus Purple Circle (think the Red Cross, Iiin Spaaace) epidemics could kill billions).

Robots are common as dirt, and illegal celebrity cloning is passe. Cyborg “a la Anime” armor is now fairly standard issue in the armies of major powers, and even grunts in India or Brazil now at least tote death rays. (Lasers and ion beams bounce off Superman’s chest just as harmlessly as bullets used to, though). Biotech is not quite as advanced - the application of alien biotech to the evolutionary Rube Goldberg device which is the human body is still tricky. This world’s version of Stephen Hawking, as the result of a too early effort to cure his nervous degeneration, is now a grotesque, twisted purple-skinned parody of a human being – who, on the plus side, Is strong enough to pluck the heads off undergraduates like daisy petals. (And he gets the chicks, too: this is, after all, a world full of freaky looking people, aliens, intelligent machines, and various sorts of Undead, not to mention cybernetics fetishists, bio-modified “furries”, and even creepier stuff. Women tend to have broader standards).

Some adjustments have been made due to the problem of the occasional super villain rampage or alien attack: quite a few people have gone in for living underground (sub-New York extends down for miles, and meets the Mole Man kingdom going up), others just move to the ‘burbs, even more widespread than OTL, while flying, relocatable houses are popular for those who can afford the insurance rates. For those who still live in city centers, the shiny skyscrapers of the great metropolises are made with ultra-strong synthetics and complex basket-work skeletons so massive energy blasts and invulnerable bodies flying at several thousand miles an hour just punch holes through without collapsing the building. (Burning jet fuel really won’t do it). The free market preys on those seeking protection for themselves, from heavy and cumbersome anti-mind-control helmets to heavy, cumbersome fire-electricity-chemical weapons proof personal protective suits for those super street battles to foyers with anti-alien sensors, death rays and trap doors (illegal in the US outside Texas due to obvious possibilities for misuse).

There is a lot of “superpower envy.” Few people have the money to become powerful cyborgs or get cutting-edge power armor, few have the time and the fearsome mental discipline needed for the really powerful martial arts, and for those who actually have the meta-gene there currently aren’t any legal activating serums on the market (even the most tolerant of government don’t want to deal with literally millions of super-powered assholes), and those available on the black market are likelier to kill you than give you superpowers. Even fewer can find a wizard or sorceress willing to take them on as an apprentice, or know how to find an actual Grimoire. Still, people try: a great many every year die from exposing themselves to exotic radiations, get lost in the jungle trying to find the secret city of X or Y, and get admitted to hospitals with bad infections arising from the implants of on-the-fly cyberneticists. Quack “become a superhero” courses abound, and the few which _aren’t_ fakes are either horribly expensive or horribly dangerous, or both.

As mentioned earlier, governments for some time have been pursuing a “superhero arms race” with various degrees of secrecy. Up until the 1980s it was mostly an outgrowth of the cold war, but after the Coalition invasion and even more so after the Apokolips invasion, it has been directed outwards at non-human threats. (There also, admittedly, has been all along a secondary agenda of counterbalancing the threat of Supers turning on normal people: governments simply don’t like it when they lack a monopoly on (potentially) lethal force). If it weren’t for the existence of immensely powerful independent super-actors with an iron ethical commitment such as the Specter, Dr. Fate, Superman, and the Green Lanterns, many speculate that things might have degenerated into a bloody free-for-all with superheroes used as weapons of mass destruction and large-scale government brute force suppression of destabilizing technology and superpowered individuals, with superheroes forced to fight back with lethal force in a wild storm of destruction. Fortunately, such checks do exist.

The most extreme case so far of a government weaponizing supers was Gammorra Island, whose eponymous ruler had secretly managed to create a facility for mass cloning and speed-growing humans spliced with high-end Kherubim DNA, creating an army of essentially Kryptonians Lite. The scale of this project was revealed during the Apokoliptian invasion, in which Gammorra island was able to pump out super-soldiers as fast as Apokoliptian forces could destroy them, which only ended when Apokoliptian forces boom-tubed onto the island and blew the cloning facility to bits. Under international and Justice League pressure Kaizen Gammorra has avoided rebuilding his facilities – supposedly. There are, after all, other planets and other dimensions, and Kaizen Gammorra known perfectly well the concept of “outsourcing.”

The death penalty is pretty much universal with respect to the use of superpowers to murder. It only took a couple of wrecked cities before even the most liberal accepted the reality of the situation. The reason Lex Luthor hasn’t been seen on Earth since his attempt to murder Stormwatch’s chief [4] (unsuccessfully: like any good scientist, Henry Bendix knew the value of backing up his data) is that he knows the stakes now if he fails (he tried conquest by proxy with a cybernetically controlled clone and a brain-washed duplicate from a parallel world (both died). He is currently building up his forces on a distant high-tech world he rules as a near-God, and working on a new body for himself (his aging brain has been heavily enhanced with implants both biological and cybernetic, and no longer fits in a regular body). He plans to return to Earth and conquer it eventually, as a pre-requisite for galactic empire, but he wants to make sure that for once he has all his ducks in a row.

A few countries here and there are run by mad scientists, supervillains, or secret societies. Weak ones get overthrown in short order, but with the high end ones the potential for Mass Destruction inherent in driving such people into a corner is such that they generally exist on a basis of “don’t try to take over the world and we won’t send in the superheroes”, (besides, especially in Africa, they often do a better job than the governments they replaced). Some of these are actual countries (the Congo), others states carved off from pre-existing states (the Red Colossus’s Shan Free State) or ones that do not exist at all in our world (such as Gamorra Island, near China, or the more extensive Sinai housing Black Adam’s state). There is also a republic of Transylvania.

Super-battles and the plots of mad scientists are an ongoing problem, but it doesn’t kill any more people than are killed in automobile accidents in our world, and most people are relatively unflappable about it: rather more people are worried about alien invaders. (The existence of the soul has been scientifically demonstrated, which makes people a little less fearful about death to begin with). Given that superpowers can happen to anyone, in spite of the aforementioned “superpower envy”, there isn’t too much hostility to the super-powered, which are in many cases considered “lottery winners.” Religion has been _complicated_ by the reveal that the Greek Gods, etc. exist (not to mention Cthulhu) – it hasn’t made people irreligious, not exactly, but it has made for a much more fragmented religious community, doubling down on fundamentalism among already hardcore religions, and a great scramble for answers from sages terrestrial or alien, and a vast new industry in those catering to such impulses. It’s hard for countries where religious tolerance is the norm, but there are religions that governments really want to discourage – worship of Darkseid, for instance, or the various extra-dimensional cosmic horrors known of.

Monotheists have been reassured by words from the horses Specter’s mouth that there is a singular supreme God and creator – and infuriated by his refusal to go into any detail.

Speaking of cults and cult-like organizations, secret societies and government agencies remain a problem. Multiple secret federal organizations sprung up in the US, UK, and USSR during the cold war, and some have gone rogue over time. In some cases they have been rooted out by superheroes, in other cases by more conventional government agencies (FBI, CIA, MI5), in some cases by other secret government agencies created for that purpose - a couple of which have gone rogue in turn. It’s an ongoing problem, not helped by the existence of and their frequent connections with such older groups as the League of Assassins, the Court of Owls, or the Order of St. Dumas. Worse still are the various actors backed by off-planet forces: the organization headed by the Four and backed by unknown aliens was hard enough to root out, but the growing influence of Apokolips on Earth, which funds and arms criminal organizations, terrorists, and rogue government agencies alike, seems to be growing like mold spreading through a loaf of bread…

[0] Yes, Cthulhu is real and used to be worshipped by Hawkwoman’s people, but inhabits an utterly alien space-time geometry rather than a crypt at the bottom the sea.

[1] Although nowadays they are post-humanists rather than old-fashioned German racists, and don’t think the Jewish Conspiracy is anywhere near as dangerous as the Apokoliptian Conspiracy
[2] As in “not particularly sane” or “dripping radioactive goo” worse for wear.
[3] It’s not clear what role she might have played in the death of the latest person calling herself “The Joker’s Daughter”, but observers did say it was the funniest tuba-related death they’d ever seen.
[4] Mad scientists, like wizards, don’t play well together: Luther and Bendix had been intellectual rivals since way back.

Description
And here's writeup!

It is the best of times, and the worst of times. It a promethean age, in which all seems possible. It is a dark age, where cosmic war threatens and many of Earth’s cities lie in ruin. It is the universe of Superman, Batman, and their many kin.
Superheroes started showing up in the 1930s, and have increased in number ever since, as simultaneously contact began with multiple alien races and ancient mystic forces awoke from their ancient slumber. Today, there are thousands of superheroes: some having gained their powers through extraterrestrial science, either from aliens or human duplication of said technology: some through the intervention of mystical beings: some through being aliens themselves, or by being of partially alien ancestry, most frequently Kerubim, an race which has been intermittently dicking around on Earth for millennia. Some have had their “meta-gene” or “gen-factor” activated, a rare but widespread genetic anomaly of uncertain origin (some say even more ancient aliens, others say time travelers, others say A Wizard Did It.)Others lack superpowers, but possess powerful mystical devices or ancient alien super-tech that more than compensates. Or their superpowers come from their being what in other times would be called a “witch” or “sorceress” or “wizard.” And then some people just get exposed to a radioactive comet.

Those are of course only the “proper” superheroes: there are tens of thousands of non-superpowered Masked Avengers, cyborgs civilian or military, adventurers, talking animals (Uplifted or magical), and civic-minded robots (after all, it just took a theme song, cape, crown and goggles to make a foul-mouthed robot into Super King). Supervillains, evil mad scientists, etc. are equally common, although somewhat less flamboyant nowadays, given the government’s “orbital death-beam them first, question them later” attitude towards anyone showing up atop a giant robot and aggressively monologuing.

Gods and spirits are real, as they always have been (belief + the Spirit Of Man leads to the birth of Gods from the psychic mass unconscious, which although fading with time never die off entirely as long as anyone remembers them) but they prefer to act from behind the scenes rather than visibly interfering in human affairs (for one thing, that might lead to getting their butts whipped by superheroes). The Greek Pantheon is kept ticking over by the Amazons and some Atlanteans, while the ancient Egyptian Pantheon of course has Secret Cultists in Egypt and many other places. (The Norse pantheon hasn’t been seen in a while, possibly eaten).This is somewhat complicated by the fact that some Gods are in fact aliens masquerading as Gods, and some beings are effectively Gods but are unknown to standard mythologies.

Older than Gods and preceding humanity are the Elementals, manifestations of the natural world. The Green engages in its long struggle with the Red, largely beyond the notice of human beings, save when the Green-protected jungles of the Amazon basin and central Africa swallow an illegal timber or mining camp. (You can cut down trees and build things in those areas, but with an eye to ecological balance, and you’d best ask the trees politely first).

Magic is more obscure than super-tech, and less familiar to most. It derives from unseen and other-universal Powers, its users are not in the least interested in having it commercialized, and are quite pro-active in suppressing those who feel “information should be free”. (The Mystic Council, and its sister organizations Shadowpact and the Sentinels of Magic are the magical equivalent of the Justice League, warding the world from supernatural threats. They are more shadowy and unseen groups than the Justice League, and want to keep it that way). Still, there are occasional slip-ups: disaster was narrowly averted after some SOB put the complete text of the Necronomicon on the internet. [0]

WWII went somewhat differently from OTL, with superbeings on both sides. (Not to mention the opening of an inter-dimensional rift in the Pacific, giving access to an alternate universe swarming with super-dinosaurs and other monsters). Although the Nazis and Japanese were able to gather some formidable forces of their own, including the powerful Spear of Destiny and even some petty Gods, in the end the “superpower gap” was too great, and WWII ended early, with rather less dead Jews and an Iron Curtain rather further to the East than OTL. (Admittedly, finishing off the Nazis took rather longer: rooting out the last Nazi flying saucer bases and Hitler clones and mystics with armies of the SS undead on Earth took until the mid-50s, while the Lunar Reich remains a nuisance till today [1]. Some long-lived Nazi supervillains still occasionally crop up to cause trouble today, and
there is still uncertainty if the brain destroyed in ’49 was really Hitler’s after all).

The Cold War was complicated by alien meddling and both sides trying to use superpowered beings to leverage their position: the US and its allies as early as the 1960s was fighting a parallel war to root out the Daemonites, the shape-shifting, body-possessing enemies of the Kherubim (the Soviets tried to play off both sides and their government never quite recovered from the loss of prestige and trust resulting from a Daemonite near-takeover only forestalled by non-Soviet superheroes.)

Twice Earth has suffered from major alien invasions, once at the end of the 1980s by a coalition of alien races hoping to harness humanity’s propensity to superpowers for their own purposes, and again in the 2010s by the forces of the arch-fiend Darkseid, seeking to make Earth’s Powers his tools and slaves. In both cases friendly aliens (the Kherubim, joining the Daxamites in the first conflict and the New Gods in the second) proved vital in beating back the invasion, but left a major legacy of paranoia and a militarization of planetary society. On the more positive side, it has led to a more unified planet. There is no world government, but in the face of alien threats and increasing off-world colonization, there is a tendency for human beings to huddle together. including the establishment of the Terrestrial Space Defense Force, the emergence of the EU as a genuine United States of Europe, and the creation of several major regional economic unions and alliances as part of a general attempt to help develop the planet to face future threats. (MERCOSUR is about as unified as the OTL EU, and the US and a Russian-Chinese alliance of convenience have created their own blocks: the US-led Trans-Pacific Defense System (TPDS) meshes with NATO but extends well beyond it, while the Eurasian Treaty Powers (ETP) recreates the extent of the old Communist Block in a more free-market form). Africa remains a bit of a problem, with still-Apartheid South Africa something of a Pariah state, while the Middle East being a pain is a constant across multiple dimensions. (Superweapons and secret societies and superpowered Jihadists, oh my). Thanks to more Jews surviving WWII, Israel got more Jewish settlement than OTL, leading to the direct annexation of OTL’s Palestinian states – and internal troubles in a 2019 Israel that is nearly 30% Arab. Meanwhile, Iraq, having avoided invasion in this world, has atomic weapons, superpowered mercenaries, and orbital canon, while Saddam has started petting a large white cat in television appearances.

Relationships with the Kherubim are…complicated. The Kherubim empire is divided between multiple Lords as independent as Irish kinglets under the High King or German Princes under the emperor of the HRE, and are hardly easily brought to heel (as in One Piece, power=authority in the Kherubim, and the Lords have the buffest superpowers), while there are multiple ideological factions, some associated with one or more Lords, others existing almost independently of their authority if not in downright opposition. Some want Earth as an ally, some want it directly absorbed into the empire by means fair or foul (many think this will be for the Earth’s own good, and the general genetic betterment of (currently) non-super humans), and some think Earth is frankly best left alone. Currently the Kherubim (or most of them) are uneasy allies, meddling in Earth affairs taking a back seat to avoiding full-on warfare with Apokolips, which even the Kherumbim fear.

Besides the Daemonites, Kherubim, and Green Martians, Earth has diplomatic contacts with over two dozen more alien races (and as many more have contacts with individual governments or even private individuals, often in secrecy) and wondrous new technology is everywhere, if somewhat unevenly distributed.

The Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90s, although it was a rather different process than OTL (it involved more giant robot battles) and it was triggered as much by the Soviet government’s poor response to the ’89 invasion as to economic problems and poorly planned political reforms. Russia today holds more territory than OTL, and thanks to the generally more advanced level of technology is richer, but is still relatively a good deal less powerful than it was in the Soviet glory days, and as OTL Russians resent the fact, although the political situation is dominated by right-wing parties than a single authoritarian figure such as Putin. (Being a bit too obviously an arch-villain is something of a political liability in this world). Russia frequently exports out of work, badly designed and often worse for wear [2]Soviet-era “enhanced individuals”, not to any great joy abroad.

China reached World’s Largest Economy status already, although it is still substantially poorer on a per capita basis than the US. The current autocratic rulers are fond of the notion of a unified Earth better able to stand up to powerful alien races – with China at the helm, of course. Currently, China takes Meddling with Powers that Should Not be Meddled with further than any other nation, which will probably come back to bite them in the ass someday, although at least nowadays they have moved their more dangerous projects off-planet.

The US is the most superbeing-rich state on the planet, which has both benefits and perils (more superbeing battles, for one thing: the insurance industry is in perpetual disarray). It is even more urbanized than OTL, with a number of cities of over a million people existing that don’t in our timeline, and the Boston-Washington corridor is even denser. There are a multitude of new religions and cults (some with actual supernatural powers), three major soda brands (Coke, Pepsi, and Zesti), and a burgeoning robot rights movement, along with a great deal of heated talk about alien immigrants which is actually about aliens from space.

New generations of superheroes arose over the years, and new super-teams formed (and occasionally dissolved). Some were descendants of heroes, taking up the mantles of their parents and grandparents, while others arose as the result of a sort of semi-secret “superhero arms race” as various secretive societies, government agencies, mad scientists, etc. sought to find new ways to empower superhumans and creating newer and more powerful living weapons. (With widely varying levels of success. The mad scientists who were hired to create a superhero for Ethiopia delivered a nearly brain-dead imperfect cyborg clone of Haile Selassie whose atomic power source went critical on his first mission, and one of them had the gall to tweet that it was about all that could be expected given their budget).

Of the Supers of the 1930s and earlier, the genuine immortals or near immortals, such as Wonder woman or Plastic Man, are still mostly around, while Superman at 108 has a few wrinkles about his eyes and a little grey in his hair, but after a century of soaking up sunlight is if anything stronger than ever, not to mention the vast arsenal of super-gadgets and super-science tricks he’s picked up over the years (Superman would still be one of Earth’s strongest supers if he lost his powers tomorrow. He’s also known halfway across the galaxy, having saved multiple planets and civilizations on various space-missions).

Most of the “merely” human heroes of his early days – the original Flash, the original Green Lantern, the original Star Man, Liberty Belle, Hourman – are dead or retired. Many of the supervillains, too, are gone, those not dead of old age killed by other villains, blown up by their own doomsday machines, or eliminated by national government sick of their crap. Batman (still alive thanks to some not entirely legal biotech and cybernetics) has long passed on the mantle of the Bat to his heirs and no longer fights crime in person (although he does accomplish a lot by remote control), and Superman worries about Lois Lane, who at this point is mostly cloned organs, synthetics, and cybernetics (she refuses any upgrades not available to the general public as a matter of principle).

Superman and Supergirl had kids (not with eachother, you pervs), who had kids in turn, etc. Not all inherited superpowers and none of the later generations who manifested Kryptonian abilities did so as strongly as the first generation, although thanks to intermarriage with non-Kryptonian supers and other of extraterrestrial origin, some have other kinds of superpowers. And of course the “House of El” includes those superpowered or otherwise who have married into it.
Earth’s citizens of Kryptonian heritage do not form a single “team”, fighting evil either as individuals or various super-teams. This is not so much the case with the “Bat-Family” (traditional recruiting more by adoption or simply showing up looking for job than by direct inheritance), which tends to mutually support each other in their crime-fighting efforts and remain centered in and near Gotham, which is essentially the world’s largest gated community, an electronic Panopticon which, depending on who you ask, is either a paranoid nightmare or a paradise on earth.

Aside from such self-governing groups as the Justice League, the Teen Titans, The Outsiders, the Doom Patrol, Infinity Inc., etc., governments formed special agencies of their own, such as the internationally backed United Nations task force Stormwatch, the Soviet People’s Heroes and Soyuz, US government teams The Suicide Squad, Team Zero and Team Seven, and China’s Great Ten. The 1990s saw a new burst of superteam creation and new heroes, such as the Authority, young Justice, The Sovereign Seven, Gen13, and the WildCATS. Short-lived superhero teams continue to frequently assemble and disperse to this day.

(Newer and older teams, with differing agendas, don’t always get along. Still, it’s not like they automatically fight when they first run into each other, and the Authority, for instance, has somewhat warmed up to the Justice League since Superman helped them take down an evil version of themselves from another dimension (the Elite were such a bunch of wankers).

Along with the currently Moon-based Justice League, there are also currently Justice League Europe, Justice League International, Justice League Detroit, Justice League Skartaris, and Justice League Africa.

Military defense budgets remain high, given the continued presence of Apokolips forces on Earth. In the armistice (there was no peace treaty: Darkseid doesn’t do peace), it was agreed that certain areas would remain under Apokolips control for twenty years before being returned (not that anyone really expects this to happen) as guarantees against “terrestrial sneak attacks on Apokolips.” Essentially the inhabitants of these areas are hostages: Darkseid’s negotiators have made it clear that if humanity plans to retake these areas, the Apokoliptian forces present will fight a brutal charred earth campaign with absolutely no concern for local civilian populations (the areas held were not lightly chosen: they are all relatively densely populated, poor, not particularly rich in resources with few if any important super-champions, well away from the borders of local major powers, and with few strong defenders in the international community. Areas which the international community would be unenthusiastic about shedding much blood for in the first place).

For now, Apokolips continues to hold these territories, and in fact are indoctrinating the latest generation of youth in the principles of Anti-life, loyalty to Darkseid, and hostility to other terrestrial nations, which “abandoned them”.
If, it seems, there will always be a Batman (Batperson. Whatever), it seems there always will be a Joker. The aging original accidentally killed himself in 1969 when it turned out he had made a serious boner with his latest anti-Batman deathtrap, but by 1973 a new white-faced psychopath was making trouble in Gotham. The latest, an utter loony who wore his own sliced-off face as a mask, was killed by supervigilante Midnighter (who ran over him with a station wagon. Multiple times), but of late there have been rumors of a female mad scientist type in clown makeup who claims she will bring laughter back to the “unhappy citizens of Gotham” and that she’s “utterly unserious.” [3] (The current Dr. Fate suspects that the Jokers may be human avatars of the Lords of Chaos, and therefore impossible to ultimately get rid of, but he keeps this theory to himself – he doesn’t want the Bat-family to take it as a challenge).

The Moon belongs to the Earth – at least, it is in theory international territory. (Aside from those darn Moon Nazis, which still hold about a fifth of it). In practice, this has led to a bit of a Moon Scramble, as anti-gravity has made access to space relatively easy, and the Moon is a short enough trip that you can make the trip by teleporter once a foothold has been established. Over two dozen nations and a number of private firms have established bases on the Moon, some of which are growing into actual cities. There are of course various supervillain and superhero hideouts, although in some cases a change of quarters is being considered. The Moon, having the surface area of almost 15 million square miles, is in no way crowded as yet, but the chances of someone stumbling across your hidden base dug into the regolith are a hell of a lot better than they were twenty years ago. And individual heroes and villains aren’t the only ones worried: the main base of the Justice League (now staffed by a third generation of heroes) is located on the Moon, and there is an international agreement for nobody to build within a couple hundred miles of it, but there is still increased concern over security issues.

Beyond the Moon, there are human colonies on Mars, Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and in a couple of nearby star systems. (The last are a bitch to re-supply, since star drives are horribly energy-expensive - antimatter power sources aren’t safe, and quantum flux power sources are _expensive_ to build and maintain. Lex Luthor developed his own star drive back in the 50’s, but since it was powered by robbing the earth of a measurable part of its angular momentum, it hasn’t caught on).

Mercury is hot (duh) and has native life consisting of superheated plasma, which combine to discourage human settlement.

Venus is toxic jungles, strange drugs, an extraordinary variety of monsters, weird, dangerous ruins of a cyclopean, Lovecraftian sort, plus an Atlantean (pre-submergence) colony whose royal family is peculiarly married into the villainous Sivana family line. It also used to be the home of a race of evil worm-people, but they are now extinct (although one is rumored to survive).

Mars is an old world. (Many civilizations had come and gone already before the White and Green Martians and their battles for supremacy). It is bitterly cold, it’s small, shallow hyper-saline seas frozen over through most of the year: the ice is over a mile thick over the north Polar sea. Most of the rest is desert. The air is thin, too thin for most humans save for a few deep depressions and canyons, but the winds can be terrible, and the sandstorms are worse. Still, there remain a variety of highly specialized life forms, adapted for the harsh conditions of the little world: some, to survive, have evolved strange powers and abilities possessed by no terrestrial life forms. And now, once again, there are the Green Martians, telepathic shape-shifters one and all, after an absence of millennia. They departed after the last White-Green war, in which most of Mars’s remaining cities had been wrecked and the remnants of the immemorially ancient canal system put out of operation: the survivors fled to the stars. Now they have returned, and with the aid of the nations of Earth, a planet remarkable in its abundance of superpowered beings, they hope to restore some of its ancient glories. Of course, further negotiations will have to be made with respect to the status of the squatters.

While the native Martians were gone, various alien races came to Mars, some to study, others in hopes of loot. Some learned much, some died horribly (some did both), and some settled in and stayed. By the time of the Green Martian return, there were three major settlements of extra-solar races on Mars. First in importance are the “other green Martians”, the Gleps, a green-skinned humanoid race with little antenna-like nubs on their heads: peaceful isolationists, they live in extensive underground complexes near the northern ice cap, and until recently were quite thoroughly concealed from other races of the solar system. Relationships with the Green Martians, which they greatly outnumber, are uncomfortable at best, since getting them to leave is unlikely to be easy either morally or practically. Their original home planet is unknown (the Gleps can shield themselves technologically from Green and White Martian telepathy), making it hard to get a proper “Go back to _” campaign going.

Then there are the so called “Blue Martians” (their actual name for themselves is unpronounceable, although for a while they went by the name of “Solazis”), a race of short and physically rather puny blue-skinned, big-headed humanoids. Descended from refugees fleeing an ancient and now mostly forgotten conflict, they settled on Mars, too few and too timid at the time to attempt an invasion of Pleistocene Earth, and cobbled a civilization together out of what technology they brought with them and scraps of salvaged Green and White Martian technology. Over time they rebuilt part of the old canal system and built up a considerable civilization, although a certain superstitious fear of some ancient Martian ruins and a credulous nature keeping them from spreading out too widely over the planet (they never discovered the Gleps). In the 1920s they detected terrestrial radio broadcasts, leading to an enthusiasm for terrestrial culture and entertainment that they have never lost (leading to a brief and unfortunate episode in which a demagogue managed to make himself a Martian Hitler, bedazzling his followers with visions of greatness and conquest of the marvelous terrestrial planet. Superman shortly fixed his little red wagon). Modern Blue Martian territory is a weird amalgamation of bits and pieces of terrestrial culture, and their politicians model themselves on terrestrial figures from Churchill to Obama (a little behind the scenes manipulation is carried out by the Green Martians and terrestrial superheroes to prevent those who model themselves after the less democratic terrestrial politicians don’t get any traction.

Then there are the Kriglo, a race resembling ten foot tall spiders with humanoid faces. Although originally interstellar travelers, they had lost spaceflight and much of their old technology, their weapons being mostly repurposed old Martian technology. The hostile and aggressive Kriglo were strong enough to hold the generally timid Blue Martians at bay, if not conquer them, but proved no match for the returning Green Martians. They have been driven out of much territory they had formerly controlled, and confined within the core lands of their old domain, dwelling in weird cities resembling gigantic spider webs. There has been talk of driving them off Mars altogether, although communications with space-travelling races has indicated that the Kriglo’s off-planet relatives, due to a tendency to pick the wrong side in interstellar conflicts (or just being the wrong side) are downright endangered as a species, eliciting some sympathy.

And then there are the insect-beings which occupy a single buried city in the southern Martian deserts. There has been limited telepathic communication between them and the Green Martians: they have apparently been stranded on Mars for a long time, and are willing to relocate – if a planet suitable for their needs can be found. It is generally recommended visitors to Mars leave them strictly alone – they are a collective species, and find it difficult to understand single members of alien races having rights as individuals rather than being as disposable as fingernails.

Besides Martians, native or naturalized, there are a number of terrestrial bases on Mars, established by Earth’s leading nations and blocks. These are, at least in theory, temporary bases for research and study of the Red Planet (and there is a lot to learn: the Martians themselves, with their wars and long exile, have forgotten much). Mars, after all, belongs to the Martians: the Green Martians are allied to Earth through various international institutions, and almost all terrestrial nations recognize them as the rightful proprietors of Mars (although not to the extent of helping them kick out the Greps and the Blue Martians). However, there are a number of secret and not-so-secret groups in government and elsewhere that think a secure foothold on Mars may be useful in the future, and after all, it’s not like there are enough Green Martians to settle the whole planet, after all. The number of terrestrials on Mars is still small, but some Martians are beginning to worry about the possibility of filibustering taking place.

Jupiter’s inhabitants are metallic, cold and live under conditions of such pressure that they would explode under terrestrial pressure conditions.

Further out, the various native races of Saturn are weird to the point of incomprehensibility, but mostly harmless to visitors and uninterested in spreading beyond the Rings. Part of the vast planet is inhabited by a sub-race of the Green Martians, from which they have diverged considerably over the millennia. Titan is off-limits to human settlement, a small population of superpowered humans under Daxamite protection already residing there.

Aside from outer space, Earth has some interest in other dimensions and timelines, although exploration here is more cautious. There’s some weird scary stuff out there, and Earth governments don’t want to be drawn into any extra-dimensional conflicts (the whole Sliding Albion thing was a real mess, although a coalition of heroes headed by the Justice League managed to relocate the Blue to a deserted planet before they could do any more damage to that version of the Earth. )Aside from timeline-tunnel tech and other products of alien or mad science, there are various places on Earth where dimensional rifts and weak points exist, most notably the Bermuda Triangle (mostly mapped and carefully avoided nowadays), the Pacific Anomaly, and the North Polar Rifts.

The Pacific Anomaly came into exist early in WWII, and there are contenting theories – there is some evidence of Japanese super-science experiments in the Pacific, in cooperation with Reich scientists (who felt the forces involved were best tampered with at least ten thousand miles away from the Reich), but also that Daemonites were investigating interdimensional travel at the same time, perhaps to bring allies to Earth from somewhere else. Whoever did mess up, mess up they did, creating a vast area of shifting space-time, in which allied (and Japanese) forces kept stumbling on extensive islands inhabited by extra economy large sized dinosaurs and other monsters, greatly complicating combat for both sides. Investigation of the “Primal World” on the other side of the Anomaly (which can be accessed if your ship or plane is in the right place at the right time) is ongoing, while in spite of the risk of giant monster attack various government-backed concerns seek the unique resources of the Anomaly, including a strange crystal whose radiations can somehow upgrade crude computer intelligence to true AI – and are therefore almost priceless. (Illegal operations by mad scientists, alien pirates, etc. must constantly be combated). The borders of the vast area are patrolled by rotating shifts of superheroes, Atlanteans, national navies, etc., to keep any of the vaster marine monsters from leaving the area and establishing a breeding population in Earth’s Oceans.

The North Polar rift zone gives access to the weird, inside-out world of Skartaris. Initially believed to be inside a hollow Earth, Skartaris is now believed to exist in an alternate dimension with somewhat different laws of physics. Skartaris is a world with a negative curvature, surrounding a vast open space in the middle of which a tiny sun floats perpetually directly overhead. At its “Poles”, openings lead to an outside darkness, with strange life of its own. Apparently Skartaris once was accessible from much more of Earth’s surface, since along with a unique flora and fauna of its own there exists a wide variety of life from all different periods of terrestrial life (including a shitload of dinosaurs). It was once extensively colonized by Atlanteans, much of whose technology remains, although there has been a general collapse into barbarism and near-barbarism, and understanding of the technology has largely been lost. All in all, Skartaris is a pulp adventure Conanesque world, where those without power or powerful protectors are always at risk of deadly force, human or otherwise.

The main political organization of Skartaris is the League of Cities, an alliance of ten cities closely linked by trade, created by the Warlord of Shamballah and his son (with a few wars, a couple revolutions, and a couple particularly egregious tyrants overthrown) with varying levels of political participation and still-functional Atlantean technology. (It has recently obtained UN representation, while relations with most other states in Skartaris remain a bit spotty. ) Each city state has an extensive sphere of influence over a network of smaller cities states vassalized in various ways, farming villages with high rammed-earth walls and networks of ropes across the roofs to keep off human raiders and dinosaurs terrestrial and flying, and fortified trading carvanaserais. Merchants tend to travel in large well armed caravans with monster-killing specialists and a wizard or two if they can get them.

(With the introduction of modern weapons, the giant monster population is dropping rapidly, so rapidly as to cause unease among Earth ecologists. Local peasants are just pleased at the decreased odds of their cattle being munched by tyrannosaurs or giant pterodactyls flying off with their children).

Aside from humans, Skartaris includes a variety of intelligent and semi-intelligent species: bat-men, mutant lizard men (a relatively recently evolved species, as result of a now non-existent city state’s tampering with old Atlantean superweapons), tree-dwelling dwarfs (like more Metal Hokas), centaurs, giants, cyclopes, a lost (post-sinkage) Atlantean colony of mer-people, Titans (not nearly as large as the Greek myths suggest), goblins, and ape-men at various stages of evolution.

Magic is much more widely practiced and used in Skartaris than on the surface world: the local mages tends to practice cruder forms of magic than the rather better informed mages of the surface, but there are a _lot_ of them, along with a variety of supernatural beings that have been summoned up but never dismissed (for various reasons, including “summoner eaten”): in olden times Skartaris was known as “The Wizard World.” (Really, the only reason the whole place isn’t run by mages is because getting wizards to work together is a serious job of cat-herding).

Due to the north Polar location of the dimensional rifts, bases by terrestrial nations in Skartaris are most US or Russians, and a few from the EU, with allies coming along for the ride. (Canada is well placed geographically, but isn’t really interested in spending the money to build and defend bases in a land full of insanely tough warrior peoples and monsters). The Skartarians are starting to get a little alarmed by their increased presence in unclaimed lands, especially since they’ve started getting ahold of recordings of terrestrial Talking Heads going on about how all that land and resources they’re not doing anything with.

“Economic reform” doesn’t really work as OTL in this world, since scientific progress has been much faster: government economic controls and technology controls are universal, because the Markets are always being disrupted by some new “wonder” technology which then has to be somehow fit into the preexisting setup. China has gone from a desperately poor peasant country eighty years ago to a country filled with towering skyscraper cities, fusion power plants, super fast levitating monorails, and bases on other planets - and hideous pollution, cyborg brute squads, and hundreds of millions of poor peasants crowded into vast vertical slums, which have not yet been educated and trained up to this new world, and consequently do a lot of shit jobs that in rich countries are now increasingly being done by robots. Much of Africa is still impoverished even if the ruling classes have cybernetic implants, flying cars and genetically upgraded pets.

Scientific advancement is similarly unevenly distributed world-wide. There are flying cars, but a distinct lack of food replicators. Virtual-reality addiction is a serious problem in many advanced countries: the Illegal Alien Tech department of the FBI and similar organizations abroad rivals the Drug Enforcement division. Those born today theoretically could see their third century, but the really fancy stuff is too expensive for Blue Cross, with the “practical” life expectancy for most terrestrials not being much more than a century. People loudly grumble about the government/secret societies/the superheroes suppressing superior life-extension tech: this is in fact entirely correct, alien technology exists that _could_ give people cheap immortality, and the Justice League and the Mystic council suppress knowledge of it. (Both quantum computer analysis and mystical divination indicate that introducing immortality to humanity at this point in their development would be disastrously bad.)

At least cancer, heart disease, and senility are now easily curable. (Although alien diseases still kill thousands every year, and if it weren’t for the secret presence on Earth of the Regulus Purple Circle (think the Red Cross, Iiin Spaaace) epidemics could kill billions).

Robots are common as dirt, and illegal celebrity cloning is passe. Cyborg “a la Anime” armor is now fairly standard issue in the armies of major powers, and even grunts in India or Brazil now at least tote death rays. (Lasers and ion beams bounce off Superman’s chest just as harmlessly as bullets used to, though). Biotech is not quite as advanced - the application of alien biotech to the evolutionary Rube Goldberg device which is the human body is still tricky. This world’s version of Stephen Hawking, as the result of a too early effort to cure his nervous degeneration, is now a grotesque, twisted purple-skinned parody of a human being – who, on the plus side, Is strong enough to pluck the heads off undergraduates like daisy petals. (And he gets the chicks, too: this is, after all, a world full of freaky looking people, aliens, intelligent machines, and various sorts of Undead, not to mention cybernetics fetishists, bio-modified “furries”, and even creepier stuff. Women tend to have broader standards).

Some adjustments have been made due to the problem of the occasional super villain rampage or alien attack: quite a few people have gone in for living underground (sub-New York extends down for miles, and meets the Mole Man kingdom going up), others just move to the ‘burbs, even more widespread than OTL, while flying, relocatable houses are popular for those who can afford the insurance rates. For those who still live in city centers, the shiny skyscrapers of the great metropolises are made with ultra-strong synthetics and complex basket-work skeletons so massive energy blasts and invulnerable bodies flying at several thousand miles an hour just punch holes through without collapsing the building. (Burning jet fuel really won’t do it). The free market preys on those seeking protection for themselves, from heavy and cumbersome anti-mind-control helmets to heavy, cumbersome fire-electricity-chemical weapons proof personal protective suits for those super street battles to foyers with anti-alien sensors, death rays and trap doors (illegal in the US outside Texas due to obvious possibilities for misuse).

There is a lot of “superpower envy.” Few people have the money to become powerful cyborgs or get cutting-edge power armor, few have the time and the fearsome mental discipline needed for the really powerful martial arts, and for those who actually have the meta-gene there currently aren’t any legal activating serums on the market (even the most tolerant of government don’t want to deal with literally millions of super-powered assholes), and those available on the black market are likelier to kill you than give you superpowers. Even fewer can find a wizard or sorceress willing to take them on as an apprentice, or know how to find an actual Grimoire. Still, people try: a great many every year die from exposing themselves to exotic radiations, get lost in the jungle trying to find the secret city of X or Y, and get admitted to hospitals with bad infections arising from the implants of on-the-fly cyberneticists. Quack “become a superhero” courses abound, and the few which _aren’t_ fakes are either horribly expensive or horribly dangerous, or both.

As mentioned earlier, governments for some time have been pursuing a “superhero arms race” with various degrees of secrecy. Up until the 1980s it was mostly an outgrowth of the cold war, but after the Coalition invasion and even more so after the Apokolips invasion, it has been directed outwards at non-human threats. (There also, admittedly, has been all along a secondary agenda of counterbalancing the threat of Supers turning on normal people: governments simply don’t like it when they lack a monopoly on (potentially) lethal force). If it weren’t for the existence of immensely powerful independent super-actors with an iron ethical commitment such as the Specter, Dr. Fate, Superman, and the Green Lanterns, many speculate that things might have degenerated into a bloody free-for-all with superheroes used as weapons of mass destruction and large-scale government brute force suppression of destabilizing technology and superpowered individuals, with superheroes forced to fight back with lethal force in a wild storm of destruction. Fortunately, such checks do exist.

The most extreme case so far of a government weaponizing supers was Gammorra Island, whose eponymous ruler had secretly managed to create a facility for mass cloning and speed-growing humans spliced with high-end Kherubim DNA, creating an army of essentially Kryptonians Lite. The scale of this project was revealed during the Apokoliptian invasion, in which Gammorra island was able to pump out super-soldiers as fast as Apokoliptian forces could destroy them, which only ended when Apokoliptian forces boom-tubed onto the island and blew the cloning facility to bits. Under international and Justice League pressure Kaizen Gammorra has avoided rebuilding his facilities – supposedly. There are, after all, other planets and other dimensions, and Kaizen Gammorra known perfectly well the concept of “outsourcing.”

The death penalty is pretty much universal with respect to the use of superpowers to murder. It only took a couple of wrecked cities before even the most liberal accepted the reality of the situation. The reason Lex Luthor hasn’t been seen on Earth since his attempt to murder Stormwatch’s chief [4] (unsuccessfully: like any good scientist, Henry Bendix knew the value of backing up his data) is that he knows the stakes now if he fails (he tried conquest by proxy with a cybernetically controlled clone and a brain-washed duplicate from a parallel world (both died). He is currently building up his forces on a distant high-tech world he rules as a near-God, and working on a new body for himself (his aging brain has been heavily enhanced with implants both biological and cybernetic, and no longer fits in a regular body). He plans to return to Earth and conquer it eventually, as a pre-requisite for galactic empire, but he wants to make sure that for once he has all his ducks in a row.

A few countries here and there are run by mad scientists, supervillains, or secret societies. Weak ones get overthrown in short order, but with the high end ones the potential for Mass Destruction inherent in driving such people into a corner is such that they generally exist on a basis of “don’t try to take over the world and we won’t send in the superheroes”, (besides, especially in Africa, they often do a better job than the governments they replaced). Some of these are actual countries (the Congo), others states carved off from pre-existing states (the Red Colossus’s Shan Free State) or ones that do not exist at all in our world (such as Gamorra Island, near China, or the more extensive Sinai housing Black Adam’s state). There is also a republic of Transylvania.

Super-battles and the plots of mad scientists are an ongoing problem, but it doesn’t kill any more people than are killed in automobile accidents in our world, and most people are relatively unflappable about it: rather more people are worried about alien invaders. (The existence of the soul has been scientifically demonstrated, which makes people a little less fearful about death to begin with). Given that superpowers can happen to anyone, in spite of the aforementioned “superpower envy”, there isn’t too much hostility to the super-powered, which are in many cases considered “lottery winners.” Religion has been _complicated_ by the reveal that the Greek Gods, etc. exist (not to mention Cthulhu) – it hasn’t made people irreligious, not exactly, but it has made for a much more fragmented religious community, doubling down on fundamentalism among already hardcore religions, and a great scramble for answers from sages terrestrial or alien, and a vast new industry in those catering to such impulses. It’s hard for countries where religious tolerance is the norm, but there are religions that governments really want to discourage – worship of Darkseid, for instance, or the various extra-dimensional cosmic horrors known of.

Monotheists have been reassured by words from the horses Specter’s mouth that there is a singular supreme God and creator – and infuriated by his refusal to go into any detail.

Speaking of cults and cult-like organizations, secret societies and government agencies remain a problem. Multiple secret federal organizations sprung up in the US, UK, and USSR during the cold war, and some have gone rogue over time. In some cases they have been rooted out by superheroes, in other cases by more conventional government agencies (FBI, CIA, MI5), in some cases by other secret government agencies created for that purpose - a couple of which have gone rogue in turn. It’s an ongoing problem, not helped by the existence of and their frequent connections with such older groups as the League of Assassins, the Court of Owls, or the Order of St. Dumas. Worse still are the various actors backed by off-planet forces: the organization headed by the Four and backed by unknown aliens was hard enough to root out, but the growing influence of Apokolips on Earth, which funds and arms criminal organizations, terrorists, and rogue government agencies alike, seems to be growing like mold spreading through a loaf of bread…

[0] Yes, Cthulhu is real and used to be worshipped by Hawkwoman’s people, but inhabits an utterly alien space-time geometry rather than a crypt at the bottom the sea.

[1] Although nowadays they are post-humanists rather than old-fashioned German racists, and don’t think the Jewish Conspiracy is anywhere near as dangerous as the Apokoliptian Conspiracy
[2] As in “not particularly sane” or “dripping radioactive goo” worse for wear.
[3] It’s not clear what role she might have played in the death of the latest person calling herself “The Joker’s Daughter”, but observers did say it was the funniest tuba-related death they’d ever seen.
[4] Mad scientists, like wizards, don’t play well together: Luther and Bendix had been intellectual rivals since way back.