Tomorrow: Invasions

With the new alien threat landing in Europe, most of the countries there were forced to fight only on that front. The Americans, applying their massive industrial capability (which remained formidable), began to shove enemy troops out of their country. The aliens were surprised that the humans almost entirely stopped fighting each other to fight them, and initial gains were slow, though Italy and almost all the area around the Mediterranean were captured almost immediately.

The aliens did make one mistake – they had no way to deal with space-based weaponry, which the humans had not fielded up until that point. As such there had been no need for it. However, the Russians were the first, launching their Kometa 1 kinetic bombardment satellites. Though flimsy and with limited uses (the Russians had no way to resupply them once they fired all the projectiles) they gave the USSR the ability to strike with devastating power at any point within enemy lines. As much of the aliens’ gains had been made in Nazi Germany and France, they weren’t concerned with collateral damage in the slightest, allowing for the destruction of important alien, Nazi and French bases at the same time. This resumed war between the human blocs on the Mediterranean, while the aliens turned southward towards the vastly weaker Africa and Middle East.

Kometa 1. Note the four tungsten rods – they were used as kinetic projectiles against ground targets. The Soviets, displaying a remarkable amount of foresight, made sure they developed a reliable way to target where the rods would fall before using the weapon on actual fighting.Japanese forces, having captured Hawaii and southern Alaska early in the war, used that territory to launch an attack on Vancouver and Seattle. With American and Canadian forces concentrated in the south and east, the invaders gained strong beachheads on the West Coast and shipped masses of troops and materiel across the Pacific to North America, having previously annihilated the Soviet Pacific Fleet and Chinese navy in a chain of battles around Korea and Formosa.

Tomorrow: Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse...

Year 1962 - ATL

With virtually every nation of consequence at war with each other, much of the planet was now covered by blasted wastelands, pockmarked with craters and rendered toxic by chemical weapons. Still the belligerent nations refused to back down, continuing the war even though it would almost certainly devastate life for a century or more after the cessation of hostilities.

The civilian populations of the globe (what was left, anyway; attacks on civilian targets had become quite a common practice) were a grim lot, with no hope for relief from the conflict that threatened their every living moment.

But all that was about to get much worse...

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They had long awaited this moment.

Their time had now come to strike.

Their people would once more have a planet to call their own.

Earth.

Centuries ago, a space-faring race had been nearly wiped out by a gamma ray burst that wiped out all life on their planet. With no other choice, they took to the stars in a massive fleet of ships. Since then, parasitic diseases, attacks from hostile races, and the natural hazards of space had whittled their numbers down until they were about half the population of Earth at the time of the Armageddon War, as it was called. When this race found Earth, they immediately, as they had done countless times before, ran a sensor sweep to compare the atmosphere, water levels, etc. with their homeworld. It passed. Excited preparations were quickly made for their conquest of the world; the humans had not gone unnoticed. They were outnumbered two to one, but made up for it with the sheer power and sophistication of their technology. This and their superior intellect would destroy the scatterbrained and impulsive humans.

As their ships descended through the atmosphere over the Mediterranean, the Many prepared to seize this planet for their own.

Now even the home of the human race, its birthplace and its nurturer, was under attack.

Tomorrow: No end in sight

Year 1958 - ATL

The World War was in full swing, dwarfing the Great War [WWI to us] forty years earlier to a mere skirmish. Battles raged across Europe, Asia, and Africa. The worst of it was along the Russio-German border, where great swathes of the landscape had been rendered desolate and unusable. Australia and the Americas were as yet untouched.

But that was soon to change. The USSR was already at war with the United States and it would only be a matter of time before American troops were on their soil. So they decided to enact a preemptive strike against them. The Red Navy was rather short on anything not covered in guns, but a quick overhaul of a few of their battleships turned them into quite excellent troop carriers.

The hammer fell in January of 1959. Red Army amphibious attack units arrived near-simultaneously in California and Alaska, catching the US almost completely off-guard. Germany and the Axis had been pressuring Latin American nations, Mexico in particular, to attack the US to keep them out of the European war. With this bold move by the Soviets, the Mexican government was suddenly much more open to this and accepted a financial contribution from Germany. Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru assisted Mexico with troops and ships and on February 19th they entered the war, catching the Americans off-guard again.

In North Africa and the Middle East, Arab countries rallied to support Turkey against Bulgaria, which had attempted to seize parts of Turkish territory. Shortly thereafter, an incident along their border with the Soviets led them to declare war on the USSR. In Scandinavia, Norway switched sides to the Allies when German subs sank Norwegian merchant ships that had strayed into captured Danish waters. Finland received assistance from the Fascist bloc as they rebelled against Russian rule.

In the Americas, Australia and Canada had sided with the US against the belligerent Latin American nations. Large gains were made by the Soviets into Alaska and Canada, while the Latin troops marched up through Texas and into the Great Plains. However, the United States was soon able to put a stop to their advance and the American front gradually settled into attrition.

With the entire world aflame with war, the future looks quite bleak...

Tomorrow: Thunder and lightning

Year 1955 - ATL (alternate timeline)

As the exchange of threats between China and Japan continued, with each nation poised to invade Burma and start a war, the League of Nations rushed to resolve the conflict before it sparked into violence. The fascist nations pledged their support to Japan, mainly out of hatred for the communists, while the Soviet Union and Korea backed China. The Western powers attempted vainly to restore peace, but Japan issued an ultimatum to China to pull its forces out of Burma or it would attack. China responded scornfully and Japan was quick to declare war.

Of course, the massive array of alliances between the nations quickly brought others into the war. Soviet and Nazi armies smashed together along their border, while Japan and China traded air strikes and substantial assaults along the Burmese front. The now-impotent League of Nations threatened to use British and French forces to break up the fighting, but it was largely ignored by the warring power blocs. When Norway was dragged into the war by a Soviet offensive from former Finland, Sweden [alllied with the Western power bloc] became alarmed that its borders would be violated. These fears proved valid when the fighting spilled over onto Swedish territory. Sweden responded by attacking both sides, earning itself war against both Norway and the USSR. Britain, France, and the US were quick to come to aid Sweden.

The war quickly spread throughout Europe and South and East Asia. The African colonies were forced to develop industry to meet demands for raw materials from their parent country, and also fought wars between each other. Soon Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe were all embroiled in war. American industry helped to support the Allied forces, while the USA built up a strong military force to serve on the European and African fronts.

However, this left the Pacific coast largely undefended, most of the Pacific Fleet having been relocated to the Atlantic to prepare for overseas combat. Japan, China and the Soviets noticed this, but only the Soviets were preparing to act on it...

Character Profile: Sanar

NOTE: The Tier slot refers to the power tier of the character that I use:

Tier 0: your average guy on the street

Tier 1: trained fighter. Highest real-life level and usually the lowest level for an RP character

Tier 2: fairly basic power. Usually only one

Tier 3: multiple 2-worthy powers or one fairly good one, but not as good as a 4

Tier 4: essentially whatever abilities this character has are enough to dominate most fights

Tier 5: deific, omniverse-altering power. At this point you should be running in the opposite direction

Sanar ver4.5

Absolutely not, we can’t let this guy anywhere within 500 feet of plastic explosives.

That’s so awesome it doesn’t matter how stupid it is!

Name: Sanar Arake

Tier: 2

Age: 24

Race: Human

Gender: Male

Occupation: Military engineer and weapons technician

Appearance: Is fairly tall. Has blond, spiky hair and steel gray eyes. Wears dark gray jeans, a black t-shirt, and a lighter gray jacket. In addition to this he has a pair of boots that rather look like they could have been part of the Iron Man suit at one point, and skintight black gloves composed of nanoparticles.

Abilities: Technopathy, or the magical manipulation and creation of technology. Sanar specializes in animation, and also in storing complicated spells in magitech devices for later and more convenient use.

Equipment: His boots, his gloves, a bo staff with about half a billion different gadgets and spells built in, a cloud of nanoparticles that surrounds him at all times, numerous automatons, a number of firearms and directed-energy weapons, and probably a lot of other things I’m forgetting.

Personality: Hyperactive bipolar pyromaniac mechanical genius/wackjob. There you go.

History: Essentially unremarkable, apart from his career in schooling. Got near-perfect grades, but was frequently in trouble for things like animating all of the electrical wiring on campus to “liven things up.” Shortly after graduation he joined a munitions company, where he continues to work to this day [saving all the best stuff for his own personal use, of course.]

Likes: Explosions, FPS video games, pears

Dislikes: Things getting too quiet, boredom, corporate medicine

Alignment: Chaotic Good

Notes: IQ of 207

Tomorrow: A matter of time

With WWII having been postponed, the many nations of the world had plenty of time to peacefully develop technology. The Axis powers and Communists were especially suspicious of one another, spurring a technology war between the two blocs that saw many advances in the fields of land warfare.

Meanwhile, the West was largely ignoring events between the other two major blocs, as they were focusing instead on economic matters. This led to advances in air-based technology, meaning that the air forces of Britain, France, and the United States gradually came to inherit fighters and bombers that were far advanced over those of, say, the Soviets or Nazis. The jet engine was quickly developed into a staple technology, and while the Communist and Fascist nations eventually picked up on it, the West retained a large advantage in this area.

Naval power remained fairly evenly split between the three major blocs, the Arab bloc collapsing fairly soon after its formation, leaving nothing of consequence behind. Italy picked up on a German strategy from the Great War some thirty years earlier, and became experts in the areas of dirigibles, particularly their use in warfare. Nazi and Soviet specialties lay in their tank designs, with Nazi battle strategy also proving ridiculously effective in a border dispute with Communist Poland. Japanese and Spanish power lay largely in their navy, mainly in grand battleships.

By the time 1953 rolled around, the major powers were largely all at the same technology and military power level. The Soviet Union had annexed most of Eastern Europe, with a few notable exceptions such as Greece and Turkey. The Nazis and Soviets frequently got up in arms over border disputes, mainly along the former Polish border, which threw the League of Nations into a frenzied effort to stop the fighting, mainly through threats of economic sanction by the wealthier Western countries.

Eventually, though, Japan and China ran against each other, over Burma. China wanted to spread Communism to Burma, while Japan wanted to establish their own control over the country. Neither nation would back down, despite a trade embargo against Japan by the US.

It was only a matter of time....

Tomorrow: Yesterday

Behind the buzz created by SETI's receipt of their response [actually little more than a duplicate of the original signal with some changes, albeit changes recognizable as intentional modifications], a single scientist, formerly of the UN, worked on his own project. His name was Derek Ramirez, a Mexican American scientist. He had been one of the leading researchers into the paraphysical technology behind the Berlin Project, and his breakthroughs in the science had led to the ultimate creation of the jump drive. However, credit for this was taken by fellow scientist Jacques Letoure, of France, who stole the research and prettied it up as his own. When Ramirez protested, his colleagues accused him of trying to stir up trouble. But he refused to be silenced, and this obstinacy eventually led to his expulsion from the project.

Bitter towards the United Nations for allowing this to happen, Ramirez made use of his considerable talent with computers to siphon a couple hundred million dollars from the budget of this program. Working laboriously day and night for over four years, he finally completed his project in 2114. He had built a time machine.

Ramirez knew that this invention would almost certainly place his name in history books the world over. This goal in mind, he set off back to the year 1936, intending to acquire some artifact from the Third Reich [of which he was an ardent admirer]. However, his utter lack of foresight [hindsight?] resulted in his capture by the SS and subsequently his being worked to death in labor camps the following year.

Of course, this may seem insignificant, but the butterfly effect will now come into play. The startling discovery of a strange flying object [the time machine] in his airspace had decidedly startled Hitler, forcing him to take a more cautious approach to foreign policy. This resulted in the absence of the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland two years later.

Meanwhile, without any bothersome treaties for him to worry about, Stalin began to focus the considerable power of Soviet heavy industry to aid the Communists in China. Over the course of the next couple of years, extending into mid-WWII in our time, the Chinese Nationalists were caught off-guard by Soviet armies pouring over China's border [taking Mongolia in the process] and smashing into them from their rear. At the same time, Mao's Communists launched a vicious assault from the front, catching the Nationalists completely off-guard. Within a few weeks China had gone Communist, Chiang Kai-shek being executed as an "enemy of the state."

These events made nearby Imperial Japan highly suspicious, albeit it did stall their invasion of China, which did not occur in 1937.

In the meantime, Britain went about its business granting India independence, and France badly mismanaged Indochina. Hitler decided to listen to his generals, and switched to wholesale manufacture of Panzer IIIs and IVs instead of the obsolete Is and IIs. Britain also granted Palestine independence, and Jews quickly gained control of the country and renamed it Israel. Britain also granted many of the other states in the area independence, with Syria and Lebanon being forced into conflict with France in order to win self-government. Muslim majorities quickly gained power there and began warring with Israel. However, British vehicles and aircraft enabled the Israelis to utterly demolish the Arabs, resulting in the destruction of much of Egypt and Jordan by Israeli bombers.

Most of the other major powers had information on this, noting the failing points and strengths of the British designs and filing the information away. The year was now 1946, ATL [Alternate timeline]. Four major blocs had been formed, the Western Allies still recognizable, the Axis powers intact and including Franco's Spain, Communists in Russia and China, and the Arabs in the Middle East, smarting badly from their defeat at the hands of Israel and trying hard to refloat themselves.