History of the invasion

[Morphling]

The Silver Wolf Files

I don't know if anyone will read this blog-Internet access is getting spottier, and the Beaks are cracking down on "subversive materials." But I thought it was important to document what I know about the past and the present. Just in case I'm taken too. Other people-you-need to know these things.

My name is Kasey Parker, but you probably know me as the Silver Wolf. I'm a superhero, no matter what they say, no matter how many people think that word doesn't have meaning anymore. Hell, I take the HUAC wanted posters with my face on them as a sign that I'm even more of a hero.

But let me start at the beginning.

Zero Hour

In the early twentieth century, a new breed of people emerged, people with fantastic and terrible powers. Starting with Flying Freedom, those with powers like time manipulation, flight, super strength, precognition, and teleportation (to name a few) became more common. Some of them used their powers selfishly, robbing banks, stealing art, generally going on rampaging sprees.

But also, we had heroes, and they made the world brighter.

Over the years three generations of superheroes arose. The Gold Generation from the 20s to 40s, which created for itself the notion of the modern superhero. The Silver Generation from the 50s to 60s, which grew in power and largely abandoned mundane struggles to defeat world-ending threats. The Bronze Generation, which rebelled against the Silver Generation's struggle to maintain power and broadened the definition of what a superhero was. Along with A.E.G.I.S., the Advanced Expert Group for Intervention and Safety, kept Halcyon City and the rest of the world safe.

First Contact

It was hard to be afraid when the aliens first appeared in Halcyon City. After all, we lived in the greatest city in the world. Full of all kinds of weirdness. And nothing had destroyed us yet. We had our heroes to protect us. I remember the feeling in those days-an odd sense of invincibility. We might get into trouble, but we'd always be bailed out. Always.

Simpler times, I guess.

The first signs of trouble were reports of strange, birdlike creatures with rust colored feathers. People saw them first in the outskirts of town, among the rolling farmlands, then closer. Someone claimed they'd seen a creature perched in a steeple, or on top of a library, or at a school, and the claims were filed away with the rest of the weirdness around Halcyon.

Weeks went by before someone caught one on camera, even in the age of ubiquitous cell phone cameras. The grainy image appeared all over Halcyon's news outlets: a vulture-like head with ruddy brownish feathers over its wings, grasping claws at the joint of the wing, sharp talons on its feet. It wore no clothing to speak of, but was adorned with a circlet on its head and what appeared to be a bandolier holding a long, spear-like object to its back.

But it was Halcyon City. This could be anything. A mythological beast, an alternate form of humanity, a time traveler. Whatever. Nobody thought it was a real threat yet. (We were sharing the picture with #bigbird). After all, there was the Dread Queen and her latest ploy to claim Halcyon as Vyortovian territory to worry about. There was the Farlander, rocketing around the city, madly, in a new hammer-shaped spacecraft, and some resurrected ancient weather god that had spat a blizzard on Halcyon Harbor in the middle of summer. We would worry about these bird creatures when something actually happened.

People continued to spot the same type of creature, closer and closer to the center of the city, still perching and watching. On the rare instances when someone got close to one, it flew off and disappeared before any real contact happened. Even supers who tried using their abilities to make first contact were foiled-seemed like the aliens were so shy they were willing to deploy cloaking devices, mindshields, or teleporters just to remain inaccessible.

Eventually, A.E.G.I.S. and other government authorities began beaming messages on all frequencies, throughout the city and into the skies, thinking that there might be cloaked ships somewhere nearby. They sent messages of welcome and peace in every human language, even flashing pictographs on the screens at the drive-ins and on the jumbotrons at the stadium, all to no avail. Nobody paid it much mind-Halcyon had encountered aliens before, and while these ones seemed particularly shy, most of this happened without anyone even caring. I know I didn't hear about the messages until years later.

Then, as quickly as the birds arrived, they disappeared. No one reported any more sightings of the strange creatures. Everyone assumed that whatever they were, whatever they wanted...they must have gotten it and gone home.

We were wrong.

 

Second Coming

A decade later they returned. They came in a single huge ship, rust red, matte, and shaped like a manta ray, large enough to darken the skies over Halcyon City like a gathering storm. Needless to say, we all paid attention now.

No longer content to just sit and watch from afar, they sent ambassadors down to speak to the governing bodies. Some of the talks were televised and live-tweeted and dissected endlessly in the news and by think tanks. Others were behind closed doors-I only know about what happened there by piecing together reports from others.

We learned a few things from these initial talks. They call themselves the Tangee, their word for "people" in their dominant language. Their home is Arrys, orbiting the star Helvetios, in the central portion of the Pegasus constellation. Arrys is much like earth, the yellow sun providing warmth and light enough for agriculture. The planet is mostly covered by a vast orchard and forests, once wild, but now carefully cultivated outside their few cities. The ocean surrounding them is fresh, not salt, with saltwater occurring in only a few lakes. The Tangee are an omnivorous people, describing things much like our fish and fruit and grains in discussions with our scientists, with farming practices much more efficient than our own. They are better conservationists, horrified by our climate change issues and pollution.

With a single, large supercontinent on their relatively small planet, a few cultures ultimately joined into a single civilization ruled by a bureaucracy. Their leader: Paragon of the Sky, named Enaw of the Storm Expanse (The Beaks' naming conventions were always this elaborate mix of "Title + individual name + home/birth region." It makes talking about them kind of obnoxious). Enaw's right to rule came from years and years of wending through the Tangee's bureaucracy, to rise to its summit.

The Tangee value scholarship and research above all else, and only a few decades prior had discovered the technology to peer into the future and past, based on algorithmic extrapolation of current particle states. There are heavy limits on this technology-any Observer (their name for the device) requires tremendous amounts of power and could only look into particular space-time coordinates based on its own location. Curator of Knowing Scerri of the Emerald Fields and Prime of Spies Sceeh of the Everday Valley sent small squadrons carrying the necessary reactor cores and Observers to explore the surrounding galaxies, with permission to gaze as far forward into time as they deemed necessary to assess the future.

One of these teams found evidence of a cataclysmic event, tearing through the space-time continuum, originating at some point in what we call the future. They tracked it down as best they could, until finally they pinpointed what they thought was the epicenter-Earth.

Prime of Spies Sceeh of the Everday Valley immediately dispatched agents to observe this blue-green planet. The ones we spotted a decade previous were those spies. Herald of Arrows Geiww of the Thunder Territories and their mate, Tribune of Bows Sqraberet of the Calm Plains were together assigned to watch Terra, our Earth. They were to assess our planet and come to an evaluation of its potential threat and its relationship to the future cataclysm, using their own Observer and the reactor core of their ship.

Geiww and Sqraberet ultimately returned to Arrys with a nearly burned out reactor and the absolute belief that our superhumans threatened the universe. Their Observer confirmed the timequake began in Earth's future, they claimed, specifically originating in Halcyon City.  Furthermore, the two Tangee theorized that the collapse came from the use of some time travelling technology or power. They claimed that when human powers acquired and implemented time travel, those humans had tried to alter the timeline, spinning paradox after paradox that ripped a hole in the very fabric of the universe too large to repair. Unable to pinpoint who or what, exactly, caused the cataclysm, Geiww and Sqraberet recommended capturing or destroying all of Halcyon's superhumans.

However, further projections and examination of the problem suggested that such a solution would ultimately fail. The Tangee discovered through further usage of the Observers that Earth's superhumans played a crucial role in too many events throughout the universe. Without the heroes of Halcyon, all of existence would be torn asunder many times over. So simply eliminating the superhumans was not an option, nor was capturing them and holding them indefinitely.

Instead they would have to take the time to discover the real source of the problem, root it out, and eliminate it.

The Tangee had sent this expeditionary force to fulfill the task given to them by the Paragon of the Sky. All they demanded of us was that all superhumans be placed under Tangee jurisdiction. The Tangee would need to perform more tests and evaluations, but would eventually determine which superhumans were likely the source of such dangerous technology in the future. And the Tangee would simply expunge those superhumans from the world, and return the rest to us.

To them, the request was eminently reasonable. To us and our leaders, it was madness. There was no way we were turning over all of our superhumans to these aliens. We weren't even prepared to turn over all the villains we'd incarcerated at the Spike and other such facilities-not before we knew more ourselves, or had explored other options. Our leaders put out lots of broadcasts about how we would not sacrifice humans to these aliens, and we would find another way of handling the problem, first. I remember how it felt-that we were united in opposition-that we would find another way. We always did. It was kind of exhilarating, as Halcyon's human leaders came together in their rhetoric.

The Tangee seemed to take our refusal in stride. They continued to speak to us for some time, to argue their point, to present their evidence. We continued to refuse their plan, offering up other ideas. The Tangee always turned us down-theirs was the only way. They had done the research. Run the numbers. This was the only option.

Eventually, the Tangee decided the time for reason was over. They sent a message back home to Arrys, and even while they continued to speak to us publicly, they hatched a new plan.

While all eyes were on the continued human-Tangee peace summits, the aliens broke into the A.E.G.I.S prison, the Spike. They abducted as many of the prisoners as they could and brought them back to the Tangee ship using instantaneous transportation. Those extraordinarily powerful villains, who could have been the source of the time quake, the Tangee imprisoned for further study or simply executed. Those who were not so dangerous, the Beaks offered to release in exchange for their help overcoming the rest of Halcyon City's defenses. Most agreed readily, eager to get revenge on those who had thrown them in jail in the first place. The few who didn't, like poor Benny Diction (whose only real power was convincing oratory), were imprisoned or executed.

The Battle of Halcyon followed and broke us. Whole city blocks were destroyed as villains like tectonic-shifting Earthshatter, moth-winged Mammoth Swallowtail, and mad scientist Doctor Titanium worked together with the Tangee. Glass from the skyscrapers rained down on the populace as the Beaks used their energy weapons to immobilize and capture heroes like the Misty Swordsman and White Cheetah. Other heroes like Nightwave, manipulator of shadows, and Timeline, a precog, were seemingly killed outright, their bodies vanishing in a flash of Tangee weaponry.

No one has yet been able to figure out what criteria the Tangee used to decide who to capture versus who to immediately put down. The best guess is that they targeted those they felt could be responsible for the future cataclysm, those whose powers most match the aftermath-although some say they only capture those they deem guilty, not kill them. After all, Nightwave and Timeline disappeared entirely, leaving behind no evidence, not even ash, and we know they have instantaneous transportation technologies. But we didn't have time to speculate-we were losing the fight, despite all our heroes, despite A.E.G.I.S.'s fortitude, despite our best efforts.

Watching the Battle of Halcyon from the sidelines was the worst thing I had ever experienced-especially because it wasn't happening directly to me. I was just a bystander, unable to do anything as our heroes fell. Our greatest city became a ruin, a battleground, a target, and a prize. The combatants included our greatest heroes, our worst villains, and the Beaks themselves, swooping around like terrible angels. Many Halcyonites had been through terrible fights-but none like this. It wasn't just a fight we were watching, it was a war. One we were losing. Badly.

The rest of the world largely stayed out of the fight, hoping that if they didn't put up resistance, if they didn't catch the Beaks' attention, then they wouldn't become targets.

And then, the rest of the Tangee arrived. When they sent their message back to Arrys at the beginning of the Battle of Halcyon, their leadership responded by sending their entire military wing to defuse the universal threat. Thirty massive ships and nearly a million soldiers now stood in the skies above Halcyon City. Led by Eminence of the Fleet Kheit of the Infernal Territory, they came to ensure that the Paragon of the Sky's orders were carried out. That the threat of the timequake was ended, once and for all.

And just like that, we were occupied.

 

Third Wave

It's been a few years, and the Tangee still want us to believe that it wasn't an invasion, that we aren't occupied-that we remain in charge. They left the Halcyon government in place, albeit with new Tangee "advisers." Normal life restarted and still runs like it did before. After all, what were the people of Halcyon going to do? They don't want to fight an implacable foe with endless resources. As long as no one came for them, or their loved ones, well...they could live with it. Pretend that everything is normal.

But those ships are still there, floating in the skies. People get dragged from their homes in the night. The holding facilities shine their spotlights all day, every day. The Tangee have at least one Observer, their time-viewing device, set up within our city so it can judge whether or not the timequake has been averted. Every time it turns on we have brownouts throughout the city. They claim that as soon as the Observer shows them a future without cataclysm, they'll go home-but who knows if that will ever happen.

And the ruins of the initial invasion still sit in broken, ash-covered rubble. In a city that prides itself on rebuilding after every superhuman battle, those ruins are an unspoken monument to our loss and defeat. For some, they are a reminder of the cost of resistance. For others, they remind us that we must resist.

A.E.G.I.S. has all but abandoned the older heroes to their fates. Under Director Addison Jordan, A.E.G.I.S. has essentially made a truce with the Beaks. They try to shield the remaining Halcyon population from further harm through diplomacy with the Beaks, while filling in the role of the now-captured superheroes in defending Halcyon from the homegrown villains of Earth. As long as A.E.G.I.S. doesn't directly oppose the Tangee, they allow it to operate and fulfill its function to protect the people of Halcyon and the world.

The freed villains still roam the city. A.E.G.I.S. managed to apprehend a few, but its premiere prison facility, the Spike, is too damaged to hold anyone. While A.E.G.I.S. scrambles to build a new facility, they can only hold a few of the least dangerous, least powerful prisoners. Anyone more powerful is able to escape all too quickly-Knightmare has escaped from recapture five times so far.

The Human Blade, a veritable ninja, and Miss Fortune, another precog, seem to be leading the villains, liaising with the Tangee to hunt heroes and just "having fun" causing general mayhem around Halcyon City. It's an uneasy alliance between the Beaks and the villains, though. The Tangee had no problem exterminating or taking captive any villain that they found a threat. The Beaks aren't taking any chances about the source of the cataclysm-but beyond that, the Tangee have claimed villains a "human problem." After all, the laws the villains break are human laws, not Tangee laws.

A few older heroes remain free...if you can call living as fugitives free. They move a lot, trying to stay one step ahead of snatchers. Some help when and where they can. But even they rarely take risks anymore; they're convinced that the little they can do from the shadows is more than they can do dead or captured. And some are likely still scared that the Beaks were right, and they may play a role in a temporal cataclysm.

Our generation has suffered its own losses, comrades and friends missing or dead. The academies we once attended were in the first wave of targets, and the Tangee snatchers are still out there. It's terrifying when the beaks are after you, gliding in on owl-queit wings and grabbing you in their talons. Or lying in wait to pounce from the shadows, catching you in their nets and trundling you back to their ships.

And they're not alone-there are human collaborators. They call themselves Humans United Against Chaos. Whether or not the acronym was an homage to McCarthy-era witch hunts, HUAC is as ruthless as McCarthy himself. They're led by a former televangelist-Blair Zeal. His church had always been a hotbed of hatred for those with superpowers, calling them "abominations."

But others assist people like us. Logan Shields founded Citizens Looking Out for Aliens and Keeping Supers Safe (CLOAKSS), dedicated to protecting the remaining supers. They set up a system of secret safe houses. The Digital Allied Gropu Gathering Reconnaissance (DAGGR), started by Aaren Locke and Shannon Keyes, focuses on hacking. DAGGR has been especially effective at infiltrating Beak databases, stealing blueprints and other data.

With CLOAKSS and DAGGR helping, with A.E.G.I.S. keeping people safe, with older heroes in the shadows... we have a chance. A slim chance, but still. We can win this. We can free our people, our city. We can be heroes again. I've been fighting the good fight, and you can too.

Now isn't the time to hide. Now is the time to act. Make contact with others like you. Put on your mask. And go be heroes. We need them now, more than ever.