Worthy of their Mettle: a Superhero Timeline

Somewhere in remote Patagonia
1980

"Mama?" asked Esmeralda to her mother, "When are we going home to Cordoba?"

"I don't know," responded her mother, holding her daughter by putting her right arm around the little one's shoulders. Her father still said nothing.

The road was bumpy and the truck was cold. They had been packed with five or six other families, all with socialist leanings, or at least not sufficiently pro-regime for the liking of those in Buenos Aires.

"But I want to go home!"

"I hope we will. I really do."

After a long time they were stopped at a checkpoint. There was mumbling between the driver and the guards. The truck cruised in.

"Get out! Get out and stand in line!" called out a soldier's voice. They did as they were told.

The only lights were large overhead lights, most likely for aircraft.

They stood in line. The soldier inspected them, calling them by name from a paper roster. "Jimenez! Schiaparelli! Mendez! Bruckner!" And then they came to her father.

Her father stood straight up, defiant in the little way he could be. "Ormanni!"

"Aqui!"

Esmeralda was scared. She saw the gun he poked her father with, the bayonet not stabbing him but grazing him.

She was mad. She did not like it when a man in a uniform poked her father with a bayonet.

She knew that when she was mad she could do things that most people couldn't do.

The soldier felt a twitch in both his hands. His face jolted towards the rifle. It was shaking in his hand, uncontrollably.

He let out a swear. "Esmeralda! No! Not hear!" screamed her father. "You'll have us all killed!"

"But he touched you!" she declared angrily, her young age notwithstanding.

The soldier tried to pull the rifle on her, but it continued shaking.

It collapsed into a pile of parts, ripped asunder by nothing but mind.

"What are you?" the soldier screamed. "Support! I need support!"

More soldiers came running out, guns at the ready.

She did not like them and their guns and how they took her parents and her and stuffed them in a truck and made them sit for hours with no windows as they drove to Patagonia. She did not like how they made her proud father weep at the abuse they put him through to secure him in the truck. She did not like the humiliation and the beatings and the swear words and the kidnapping.

She focused. Controlling too many things at once was hard. She could rip apart their guns one by one but it would take too long.

None of the soldiers expected to see the truck they had been shunted in to go to this place hover into the air and then crash with a terrible noise, impaling many soldiers under its sheer mass. The truck hovered again, crashed again, and repeated this several times.

Now the siren rang out. She did not like the noise. She looked at a barracks of some type, and in her fury was able to rip it from its foundation.

The other barracks did not stay up for much longer, and neither did the soldiers stay alive for too long. Yes, more came, but they fell too.

The fire rose, and Esmeralda kept finding more soldiers and more things to lift up and smash.

They had made her mad and they would not go unpunished.

More fire. She saw a truck with a fluid tank of some sort behind it, unmarked but clearly for a liquid. She smashed it down, and the fire went higher and higher several yards away.

She dispatched of anyone else she could find and continued wandering.

As the attackers fell, she remembered her parents; it was for them after all she had ripped this place asunder.

She looked for them but could not find them. "Mama! Papa! Where are you?"

Her ability to focus diminished and she ran to find them. No more trucks or buildings flew, but the flames grew higher and higher. She screamed for her family.

The stench of the corpses blended with the smell of smoke to form a putrid odor wherever she went. She trampled over body after body, and tried to find them.

Then she found them, victims of her own anger. They lay there dead just like everyone else.

She only then realized what her rage had done. She then knew why her parents had cautioned her not to use her abilities, pleading to her when the police had come to stuff her in the truck.

She cried and cried, since the only real friends she had were gone; nobody else understood her 'gifts,' or so that is what it seemed when her schoolmates were scared of her, but nevertheless kept her abilities unknown from the general public.

She sat there, among her parents' corpses, and wept.

The flames died down amidst a faint hum in the distance. The hum grew louder, but she did not focus. She could not muster the energy or the concentration to rip whatever was coming apart.

There was footsteps and chatter. A hand laid itself on her shoulder.

"Come now, little girl," the man in the uniform said, "Buenos Aires is very interested in you."

Buenos Aires
1982

It was a loud and boisterous affair. Esmeralda thought it was gaudy, with the combination of the military music, the tanks and other vehicles on parade, and the rather silly patriotic costume they put her in. They called her the Sun of May, and she was made the ceremonial leader of the other children they had found to indoctrinate to the dictator's cause.

Galtieri, the dictator himself, stood with her, as did Admiral Anaya and many other important people in the government, as did Fernandez, her 'handler.' There was no better word; they were livestock to Galtieri and his ilk.

The dictator bloviated on and on about the glory of the Argentinian victory and how the country now had a superhuman program that rivaled that of the US or the USSR or the British (who he chided for being so weak and not using them in Argentina) or the Chinese or the French or the Indians or certain other countries. It was pure and utter tripe she could tell.

There was nothing glorious about this. She was made to kill, not only British sailors, pilots, and soldiers, but also the political prisoners they used as target practice in her training.

She even had to kill some of the other 'gifted' children.

He went on and on, as did Anaya and several of the other generals. Still self-congratulating drivel.

Then Fernandez spoke about the success of the Argentinean superhuman program and the destruction of the British fleet.

And then, he proclaimed, "and now for some words from the hero of all Argentina, the Sun of May herself!"

She wasn't informed of this. She could just make up some nonsense and be done with it.

But no.

Galtieri and Anaya and the other generals and admirals looked on with anticipation. They wanted a small child to confirm the legitimacy of their regime. They would not get that.

She approached the podium and plainly stated. "I never wanted to be here."

The crowd gasped. The elites were perplexed.

"Soldiers made me kill my family and then forced me to kill many, many people for them. They made me bend metal to kill people. I was their slave."

Her anger only increased.

"I was made to kill people who did nothing, and all for them!" She gestured towards the dictator and his ilk.

As she went on and on, tears beginning to well up, the crowd shrieked in horror as several of the tanks in the parade begun rising upward and crumpling into balls of metal, the screams of their crews dampening as the metal enclosed upon them.

The platform on which Esmeralda stood begun floating towards the masses of metal. She landed on one and kept it afloat as a larger airborne platform, letting the original podium just fall to the ground.

The other tanks floated up into the air, and then crashed onto the ground. The dictator and his cronies were evacuated, and the crowd started to flee. She picked up buses, tanks, APCs, and any other sufficiently large object and began flinging them around with wild abandon. The shrieks and the crashes and the crackle of flame only invigorated her.

After her point was made she made the tank on which she stood fly to the northwest. She could go very quickly.

Fighter jets began pursuing her. She would catch their missiles and ram them into the ground, or into the planes. She could at times force the planes into the ground, but they were hard to catch. She kept going.

Eventually the pursuit subsided, and the planes stopped coming. Her exhaustion was catching up with her anger, and she begun to lower the platform. She breathed, and the tank began to fall quicker and quicker, and then impacted the ground.

She landed in a wet, marshy area. By the direction she had gone she guessed she was in Brazil, or maybe Bolivia. She didn't know. But that didn't matter now.

She was free from the Argentinian government for now.

But eventually she would have some sort of revenge.

Moscow
1928

Lubomir Nikolayevich Rybalkin was the most worried he had ever been. Not hiding from the Tsar, not fighting the Tsar's army's, all of the experiments done on the orders of the Communist Party itself, none paled in comparison to a visit from the most important man in the Soviet Union himself.

His assistant, Grigory Yakovich Shermanov, had been up for nights printing all the data needed for the dossiers printed for the General Secretary and for the other dignitaries, plus the supersoldiers that had been summoned to visit them. They wanted to know the answer to the pressing question: why were so many anomalously strong humans arising in the Soviet Union?

So many battles against the Whites had been decided by men and women, and sometimes even children, who could wield ice or metal or had other fantastic powers. And so, it was decided that for the first time in human history the revolutionary Soviet government would dedicate significant resources to revolutionary human beings.

Rybalkin had set up the camera to play the cuts from various newsreels, some smuggled in through the West. Shermanov placed the folders with the dossiers at the seats.

There was a knock on the door.

"Come in, comrades!" cried out Rybalkin. The future of Soviet superhuman science hung in the balance.

In walked the morose, grey-faced bodyguards of the Vozhd himself. In walked various party officials and scientists. Rybalkin noticed Trofim Lysenko, that idiot pseudoscientist, among them. Then came in Comrade Slava, the icy hero of many battles, and several other superhumans, one of whom, Comrade Afansy or 'Fanya' was the first superhuman that was created artificially by Rybalkin and his team, not arising from the population. Then came in Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, head of the secret police, and then, with another round of bodyguards, Marshal Joseph Stalin himself.

"Welcome, comrades, welcome!" proclaimed Rybalkin. "Your questions now will have an answer!"

"Get on with it," ordered Stalin. "What are your findings?"

"Comrade," began Rybalkin, "What I have deduced, among with my colleagues here and in hiding abroad, is that there are three types of superhumans. One form rises from sheer random chance; that is the kind you have rumors about in Europe or America or indeed any other part of the world, irrespective of the political or social or any other climate."

Stalin nodded.

"The second type are those created in a laboratory. Comrade Fanya here (he gestured to the hero) being the first of one subtype. That subtype is created by experimentation on living human beings. The other type, as your bodyguards are testament to, are those created by experimentation on corpses. The cognitive ability is lower, as one might expect, but there are less worries about the subject. They each have their uses."

Lysenko interrupted. "We knew about those, Lubomir Nikolayeich, get to your innovation!"

Stalin glared at Lysenko, who rapidly shut up.

"The third is a type whose existence has only come into clear view in the past few years, both here and in one other case."

"What other case?" asked Beria.

Rybalkin began fiddling with the camera. "The devastation in Ireland."

The reels began to play, and Shermanov dimmed the lights. The black and white film, cobbled together from many countries, showed footage from the ongoing war in Ireland.

Across the different clips was a single person, dressed in combat fatigued cobbled together from both Irish and British troops, routing British infantry and destroying British artillery and vehicles. This man could control light, it seemed, and fired bright beams at his enemies. The newsreels said that his name was "The Avenging Croppy."

The reel continued. Then, there was another person, this one dressed in similar cobbled-together fatigues, but with a Union Jack motif. One showed him praying at a Protestant church. He fought the Republicans, and his name was "The Mighty Orangeman."

Then it showed the two of them, flinging cars and chunks of buildings at each other, the Avenging Croppy firing beams of light and the Mighty Orangeman leaping around, lifting things that no human normally could. The city they were in (it was mentioned to be Galway on a title card) was absolutely devastated.

The newsreel ended. "These two may have fallen, but it seems that more of them are still dueling, reducing Irish villages to bombed-out husks," proclaimed Rybalkin. "We believe we have found a reason why these two particular locations, Ireland and the Soviet Union, have so many superhumans."

Stalin looked interested, as did Beria.

"It is a poorly-understood process that the underground researchers in Europe are calling 'memetosynthesis.' The first part is derived from a Greek word meaning 'same.' It is used to describe an idea that transmits itself from person to person, adapting to the cultural context and spreading among the population in a manner similar to the reproduction of genes."

Lysenko shook his head. Rybalkin rolled his eyes.

"'synthesis' is of course creation. What I am proposing, and by extension many superhuman scientists are proposing, is that ideas can manifest themselves in superhumans, who feed off these ideas, which strengthen them."

Beria interjected, "but then why here? And why now? People have believed in things for millennia! Why these past few years?"

Rybalkin responded "the world is now far more literate than it ever was before. We seem to be reaching critical mass, and in Ireland and Russia sectarian tensions are centuries old and exploding with fury. That is why it is Ireland and Russia with so many superhumans: people believe in ideas, and ideas manifest themselves in superhumans. In Ireland, the fervent belief in Republicanism and Catholicism gave them the Avenging Croppy, whereas belief in Protestantism and Unionism gave them the Mighty Orangeman."

"And so belief in Communism is giving us superpowered revolutionaries!" proclaimed Beria. Stalin's eyebrows rose.

"Exactly."

Rybalkin gestured to Shermanov, who brought in a standard radio set. He plopped it on the table and let it sit there.

"It is just a radio set!" blurted out Lysenko. "There is nothing special about it at all!"

"Not yet," uttered Rybalkin. "But now it is being disseminated throughout the Union. Do you not see the implications? The United States, Britain, or Germany all could have armies of superhumans had their silly superstitions and fears not prevented them from pursuing this research."

Stalin looked pleased. Rybalkin was relieved.

"But we dared slip the surly bounds of the human form. It is with an army of superhumans that our revolution will be safeguarded and spread."

Excerpts from the memoirs of Lubomir Nikolayevich Rybalkin, published 1975

The limits of using superhumans as a method of spreading the Revolution were found during the first major European crisis after the War. What many among Stalin's general staff wanted to do was to send some of our finest superhumans to Greece to ensure that our bloc was not beset by a Western government on its southern reaches.

However Stalin refused to allow it. He felt that if superhumans were sent to Greece it would be obvious that the Union was backing the Communists under Markos Vafiadis to a point that the West with its industrial superiority could beat back even our superhumans, not even to mention the atomic bomb. He felt that no matter what the result in Greece was, he could profit off of it for realpolitik reasons. Indeed he opposed any intervention in the war in Greece.

[...]

The capitalist Greek government attempted to find superhumans that could channel the powers of their ancient gods, but there weren't any that Papagos could find. There was maybe one or two superhumans in use by the capitalists and none by the communists. Greece fell to the Americans and British, to the chagrin of some in the Soviet political elite.

[...]

However it was the Greek crisis that precipitated the first major superhuman threat to the Soviet Union. During the end of the war, Stalin had instructed me and my colleagues to train scientists in the countries that were becoming part of our sphere of influence in the art of making their own superhumans, although nothing to the point of our most advanced techniques. And so we did; some of the great superhuman scientists of the 50s and 60s were trained during and after the war to ensure that some of the production costs could be siphoned off to the border states.

However, some of the most gifted students of our craft were from what would become Yugoslavia. Dragoslav Zivic, from Novi Sad, was one of the savants. He advanced even on our techniques and pioneered better understanding of memetosynthesis. He made strides in bestowing powers of metal manipulation in particular and telekinesis in general.

[...]

When Tito and Stalin split over the Greek crisis, the Yugoslavian scientists who were still in the Soviet Union fled to Belgrade as fast as they could. Some of the students were detained by secret police and covertly made to work for the Soviet program. However, most of them, led by Zivic, smuggled themselves back to Yugoslavia and began work at behest of Tito, against Stalin. That was the first time the Soviet Union would have to face a hostile power armed with superhumans, and it would not be the last.

[...]

As Stalin got older and frailer he demanded that he be put through a degree of 'enhancement procedures' that would enhance his lifespan for at least a little longer; he confided to me that he wanted to live through the 50s. Feeling that I had no other choice, I put him through a lot the same procedures I used to create Comrade Nikolai or Comrade Vasily or the other great heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Lo and behold, he was sprier, more alert, but also more erratic.

[...]

Stalin became more and more interested in the atomic bomb program, which he was intent on matching the Americans whilst also staying ahead in the superhuman race. He had us devise a combined missile deterrent based both on the rocketry designs of the captured Nazi scientists after the war and our own flying superhumans. He saw that the Americans were gaining ground in superhuman research, albeit not to our stature, and had paid very close attention to the usage of their superhuman program in Korea. He noted that there was no usage of superhumans in the coups the Americans backed in the early 50s for much the same reason we did not use them in Greece, he reckoned.

[...]

As I said, the Vozhd became ever more erratic. What finally convinced me of his incompetence was the way he handled the Hungarian rising of 1956. He had ordered troops into Poland that July to keep the workers in Poznan from doing much of anything; Imre Nagy and his ilk in Hungary were only more convinced of the need to break free from the Soviet yoke. When the protests began, Stalin told the army to mobilize, but not to invade just yet.

[...]

What Stalin wanted was a holocaust, in the sense of a burnt offering and not industrialized genocide, but the result would be something not dissimilar. He demanded two nuclear bombs, two heavy bombers, and one flying hero, Comrade Pavel, a celebrated veteran of Operation Bagration.

The first bomb was used in a terrifying demonstration of both Soviet atomic weaponry and Soviet superhuman might. He ordered one of the bombers to fly right towards Moscow with orders to drop the bomb within blast radius of the city itself, and ordered Comrade Pavel to intercept the bomber. He succeeded, and the bomb fell in the countryside well away from the city. But the blast was spectacular, and the world knew of both weapons.

The second bomb was far more aggressive. Stalin loathed Imre Nagy, the 'Titoist' anti-Soviet leader of Hungary that attempted to break away from his grasp. In a bout of what I to this day feel was insanity, he ordered the other bomb dropped on Nagy's home city of Kaposvar, as an example, far more so than Poznan, that the Soviet Union would keep its puppets to itself. Kaposvar went up in flames, and its inhabitants were vaporized.

[...]

A great many scientists in the Soviet Union were appalled by this and with good reason, as was I. I felt that I could no longer work for what was clearly a menace to the world. At least the Americans were at war with a power that had attacked them before dropping the bombs on Japan. I, and many others in the Soviet superhuman program, decided to take whatever papers we could, burn the rest, and flee to the West.

[...]

We couldn't get all of it, and a lot of the necessary things were duplicated in other cities. Nevertheless, with all the advanced research we could muster, several of my colleagues hopped onto trucks driven sympathizers on a Soviet military convoy and taken to Leningrad, where we covertly smuggled ourselves and our papers to Helsinki. From there, we surrendered ourselves to the US embassy, which then saw to it that we were sent to Washington.

Text of a flier dispensed by the American Civil Liberties Union in major American cities, 2011


Who or what is Vucub-Caquix?

Vucub-Caquix is a supernatural entity apparently corresponding with an ancient Maya bird god that was defeated by the Hero Twins after attempting to assume the role of a god of the sun.

Why is Vucub-Caquix attacking the US?

Vucub-Caquix attacked major US cities in the eighties and nineties in retaliation for American backing of the Guatemalan government, which he sees as usurping his rightful rule over the territories formerly belonging to the Maya.

Who are Vucub-Caquix's cultists?

Vucub-Caquix's cultists are people of Maya descent, usually those from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and southern Mexico, who are involuntarily coopted by the entity via the use of a certain gene. This gene, according to cultist literature discovered in Guatemala and in American holdouts of his cultists, was apparently a creation of the deity bestowed upon his followers shortly after his defeat; this gene was subsequently spread throughout the Maya population and then to the populations of the nations that would evolve from Spanish colonization.

Does this mean all Hispanics can be controlled by Vucub-Caquix?

No. Only a minority of the population of Guatemala and the surrounding countries has this gene; it is apparently recessive and only shows up in certain individuals under certain circumstances. Due to the admixture of native Maya with Spanish and other populations the gene seems to have entered a dormant state, and only a handful of cultists in the grand scheme of things have ever actually become loyal to him. Additionally, those from areas not inhabited by the Maya in the pre-Columbian period are not susceptible to being hijacked by Vucub-Caquix.

Hate crimes against Hispanics for potentially having this gene are misguided as even those with the gene are not likely to undergo the non-consensual process of becoming a cultist. Those undergoing the process are immediately seized by the proper authorities and if possible can have the process reversed via certain classified procedures developed by the Department of Defense Superhuman Research Division should they be quarantined in time.

What should I do if I am a victim of a hate crime?

Call [number varies by state] for your state's ACLU branch, or email for legal counsel and other options, including possible protective services.

"You're the Esmeralda Ormanni from the news broadcasts?" asked Gagen.

"The one and only. Conveniently used as a scapegoat for the government's failings, but known nonetheless."

The casualness of the conversation clashed with the slaughter around them. They could still smell the smoke and the charred flesh.

Some smaller jeeps came zipping onto the makeshift streets. Out of them clambered others in the black and red uniform; other members of the Vanguard. They each had their own powers, some flew and some spewed fire and some could phase through walls.

Rubalcaba was stunned. "I thought you were a rumor. Nevertheless, good to have you on our side."

Esmeralda wasted no time. "Do either of you have any truly important operations going on?"

"Other than surviving," quipped Rubalcaba, "Senora Gagen here has a flash drive from an American defector, which she intends to leak to the press."

Esmeralda nodded, and began speaking into the small microphone held via her ear. "Get one of our cars over here. We need two civilians sent to Guatemala City."

Esmeralda continued to fling around buildings and rubble to fight the Americans. Using a wrecked Bradley she smashed approaching infantrymen.

An armored car, painted black, zipped onto the street, and a door popped open. "Get in!" gestured Esmeralda. The guerrilla fighter and the journalist did.

Before the car could get away, as if out of nowhere a human figure manifested itself in front of the car. He wore US Army fatigues with a patch with a person jumping over a wall on it. He was old, with white hair under his helmet, and with some visible wrinkles.

He scanned the situation. "Esmeralda Ormanni!" he proclaimed. "Not the first time I've seen you around here."

"And I will not leave until the American presence in Guatemala is permanently removed."

"And the millions of dead in Miami and elsewhere mean nothing to you." He gestured towards the car.

The car whisked spontaneously to several hundred feet above the ground. Gagen screamed. "I know who this guy is," responded Rubalcaba. "He can teleport objects he can see to places he can see, as well as teleporting himself."

That did not reassure Gagen.

The car fell for some perilous seconds, then gently floated to the ground, a good distance from the fight. "Go!" screamed Esmeralda from the radio, and the driver obliged.

The American supersoldier glared at Esmeralda. She said to him, "Bakos Karoly," she chided him with his native name, "we are so much alike. You grew up in Kaposvar before Stalin burned it. I grew up after the Argentine junta forced me to fight for them. We share a history of being brutalized by authoritarian governments. So why do you fight for the United States?"

Karoly took a deep breath. "Because I know what happens when utopian ideologies become reality. They become tyranny and disorder, which is what you want. And what you want is the deaths of millions at the hands of an angry Mayan god. I have been at the mercy of beings with powers beyond those of normal arms; my hometown's ruin is a testament to that. I will not stand for it again."

"But the country of your allegiance is committing genocide. Does that mean nothing to you?"

"We will save far more lives than we will have to kill. It is a worthy tradeoff."

He used his powers to command several bits of rubble to manifest above Esmeralda. She was hit by some of them before gaining a foothold and deflecting them, shooting them at her opponent.

"I will not see a monster be unleashed upon my adopted homeland!" screamed Karoly. "I did not become a Curtain Jumper to see America destroyed by people of an inclination similar to that of the dictator I escaped!"

"Some would say it already has," replied Esmeralda.

Excerpts from an article in the Washington Post Magazine, 2012, in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the war against Vucub-Caquix.

[...]

The prosecution of the war however forced the United States away from commitments to other parts of the world; some lament the deity's attacks on the basis that it drew away attention from other calamities. The 1980s were for a reason a decade of misery and woe, and not only in the United States, they claim, and that American relations with other parts of the world were irrevocably harmed.

[...]

Despite being a US ally, and that his crimes would therefore not be avoided, it is believed that the United States would have at least held a leash on Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran. Massive use of superhumans and chemical weapons in its war led to millions upon millions dead on both sides, the majority civilian. Iraqi superhuman technology, given to it by the United States, was used to break Iranian defenses and smash through a repeat of World War I-era tactics to enable the massive gas bombings of Tehran and Esfahan that depopulated the majority of both cities; said advance marked the only usage of corpse-based enhancements since the 1960s. This is why Iran currently exists as a shadow of its former self, clinging more and more to authoritarian forms of Islamism that sprung from its 1979 revolution.

It is also known that Hussein tried to prolong his life with superhuman enhancements. Like Joseph Stalin, he grew gradually more deranged, which most tragically enabled the continuation of the genocide of the Kurds during the last stages of the war, and continued as the US was preoccupied with Guatemala and Russia. By 1998, Human Rights Watch declared that there was not a single Kurd left alive in Iraq.

[...]

Similarly, as the Vucub-Caquix war died down and the Russian peacekeeping mission began, the United States did not have the will to go after other crimes against humanity. The ugly dissolution of Yugoslavia and its subsequent unification under the superhuman Black George led to the similar near extinction of the Bosnian Muslim population and the significant reduction in the population of Bosnian Croats.

[...]

Yet another forgotten conflict was the genocide in Rwanda, which led to the nigh-extermination of the Tutsi population of the country, with the assistance of native-born superhumans (it is suspected that the leaders of the genocide had access to advanced information on memetosynthesis).

[...]

Other crises that were ignored were flareups with North Korea (which thankfully did not provoke a full-scale war) as well as tensions in Taiwan. The civil war in Sri Lanka was handled by mostly India, with some token support from a China wanting to exercise power in absence of the United States, as well as aid from Australia, which itself was dealing with its own domestic issues.

[...]

The most drastic change to American foreign policy not directly involving Guatemala or Russia was the relationship with the United Kingdom, which remains a shadow of its former self even today. With the eruption of war in the US and in Guatemala, all US troops partaking in the decades-long pacification mission in Ireland were withdrawn, leaving a UK that had to prepare a troop surge to compensate. Indeed, NATO was divided between the two parties, with the US' bludgeon of continued nuclear deterrent plus other forms of aid and funding forcing most of them to support the US in its war over the UK in its own war.

This withdrawal of US troops that had been in Ireland since the end of the Second World War allowed the superhumans on both sides to undertake bolder and bolder attacks on one another, including the near-obliteration of several British cities by Republican superhumans fighting for independence, leading to millions of casualties and, in conjunction with the war in the Falklands, put an end to the Thatcher government in the middle of the 1980s.

Similarly the continued US support of the Argentinean government after the Falklands War, which manifested in Argentinean support in the Guatemalan War. After the destruction of the British fleet in the Falklands the US immediately recognized the islands as part of Argentina, to which the Argentinean government happily reciprocated with further repression of Communist agitation. Today, Argentina remains one of the US-friendly authoritarian states that rule over the majority of Latin America.

This split in NATO prevented an intervention in Yugoslavia or in other countries, and only mending (and even only to a degree then) when the common cause of the Russian and broader former Eastern Bloc peacekeeping missions. European NATO troops currently compose forty percent of the Allied occupational forces in Russia and up to eighty percent in other countries.