Interlude: The Internationals

Metahuman proliferation and WWII

Commander Valor

Handsome and charismatic, Commander Valor was the poster-boy for the Allies and the founding member of the Allied Justice Task Force. Though he served in the military for a time, he soon was relegated to a diplomatic role, meeting with Russian heroes Hammer and Sickle as a show of solidarity.

Hammer

Found in an orphanage by the KGB and raised to be the perfect hero to represent Russia alongside his supposed sister, Sickle, Hammer could generate non-organic materials in nearly any form.

Sickle

Found in the same orphanage as Hammer and raised alongside him. Initially, the KGB claimed that she was Hammer’s sister, however as the intimate nature of their relationship came into the public light, they quickly changed their story.

Franklin Gruber

A Nazi tinker who specialized in bacteria and caused an epidemic scare across the world, causing countless deaths among those whom he considered to have inferior genetics. Later executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity in an international court.

Atomic

Ended WWII single-handedly at a very young age, and then refused to ever use his powers again.

The Cold War

Red Star

Son of Hammer and Sickle and founding member of the People’s Defense Core after his parents and Commander Valor, once friends, came to blows over the Berlin Blockade. Red Star can reshape matter at a short range. Though the PDC has been disbanded, he still holds a grudge against the United States for the deaths of his parents, and occasionally appears to attempt to overthrow the “corrupted Russian government.”

Comanche

Metahuman Olympic athlete who accidentally killed another Olympian when he lost control of his powers, thereby cancelling the Olympic games until 1980, when participating countries finally agreed to exclude metahumans from competing. The Olympic sports have had a massive drop in popularity, however, as the athletes no longer represent the peak of human potential.

Joseph Dusk

An advocate who was against the increased weaponization and government control of metahumans, whose manifesto effectively ended the metahuman draft. Defrauded when it was revealed by his political rival, Pierce Honnete that he had arranged the asassinations of influential metahumans on both sides of the Cold War, including Commander Valor, Hammer, and Sickle. Incarcerated for conspiracy to commit murder, and killed in prison by an unknown assailant.

Catalyst

An anti-war terrorist who murdered Commandor Valor at the behest of Joseph Dusk, blaming his fight with Hammer and Sickle for instigating the Cold War. Catalyst could force various chemical reactions to occur at a distance, and was later captured and incarcerated by the Washington DC superhero team when he tried to kill Pierce Honnete at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Put on death row after his trial found him unquestionably guilty of many counts of premeditated murder, but was killed by heroes during an escape attempt after killing several inmates and prison guards.

Post Cold War

The International Threat Assessment Bureau

The International Threat Assessment Bureau was created in 1989 as an international response to the first official Nightmare-class event several years prior. While it was originally chartered by the UN as a standards commission to create an international system for Metahuman classification and response, it soon branched out into consolidation of Metahuman research due to the difficulty of creating a unilateral system of measurement. This lead to the creation of the Kill Scale, which was standard for some time until Monitor joined. During this time, the ITAB helped to create the Holbert-Days treaty of 1993, which outlawed most Metahuman experimentation as a violation of human rights.

Bastille, a French tinker whose official designation is now ‘Architect,’ joined the ITAB the next year, drawn by their success. She is a tinker specializing in containment- given time, she can construct a prison to hold nearly any metahuman or to counter nearly any ability. To this day, the Bastille is used to hold criminal metahumans who can be captured without being killed.

Monitor, also French, was the second official metahuman member of the ITAB, joined in 2000. Monitor is able to sense uses of Metahuman abilities across the entire world, but is unable to see or speak. With his help, the ITAB was able to objectively classify metahumans for the first time, and now is able to keep an eye out for major events on a global scale, coordinating with national governments to respond to major or Nightmare-class threats.

Translocator and Interdiction joined a few years later. Forming the core of the ITAB response team. Translocator is able to teleport himself and others anywhere in the world, though he has physical limits to how often he can use his power, requiring time to recuperate after each jump. Interdiction is a Trump power, one of the few, able to nullify or dampen Metahuman abilities at a distance, and is immune to most metahuman effects.

Since then, a few other Metahuman agents have joined, but none of them serve as regularly as the first, who are responding to threats nearly constantly, thanks to modifications to their bodies by a tinker that allow them all to go long stretches of time without sleep.