Penny tour of the wrong future
I just read the Websnark retrospective of Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures. Apparently, Wizards of the Coast made a Facebook application that gave mini reports of how a character fared during a quest. There are communal (virtuous circle) embellishments that doomed the game to a Sisyphusian load that do not interest me. The prospect of a paragraph-long serial struck a chord within me. I am now employing the technique daily to maintain my focus on Psi Chi Analysis. I felt peril within me today: boredom with the story. The feeling actually stemmed from boredom with the intractable plot elements I must resolve. As soon as I return to the parts that I like most strongly, this evaporates. To this end, I will give brief summaries about the external events that have no immediate bearing on the story.
I plan to depict three time periods. The earliest deals with how the protagonist capitalized on helping friends into a therapy career for people with Powers. This will be an alternate 2007, one year after the event that introduces an X-Men type ‘epidemic' onto some of the world's population. Another civilization exists in the Milky Way, a colonizing society. One of its – relatively – slow boat seed ships passed through the solar system perpendicular to the plane. Despite this precaution, it struck an artificial satellite at .3c and ruptured. The debris cloud formed close enough to the Earth and Moon that some fell into orbit around each. Some fell into our atmosphere and burnt up. However, shielded canisters of a mutagenic substance survived and released into the environment.
Before this time, fewer than twenty people worldwide acquired enough power to be what we recognize as superheroes and supervillains. Because of the mutagenic bombardment, the number swelled to several, possibly ten, thousand people. In this sense I mean the phenomenon is like the X-Men. The next set of stories detail events between five and ten years after the explosion. At that point, national governments have recovered some of the wreckage of the vessel and have begun to reverse engineer some of the alien technology. The international hierarchy changes to reflect the distribution of Powered populations and salvaging ability.
The frame story, latest in this timeline, occurs five or ten years after the second crop. The world has integrated all the recoverable technologies and the political equilibrium matured. Except, the aliens investigating the lost ship arrive and all attempt to convince them we did not deliberately destroy it. This period is the least defined in my mind, since I have not projected the consequences that far yet.
Henceforth, I will build a probable narrative of the unfolding global drama in the wake of such a boon.