//|| //^^\\ || || .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED PRESENTS // || \\ || || --X--------------------------------------------- //======================= '|` ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES // || \\ || || Causality Wars FAQ: Updated 12/1/98 // || \\__// || || Copyright 1997 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________ The Causality War, specifically the 1998 battle front, is the Big MacGuffin driving a good deal of society as seen in the ASH Universe in the 2020s. The specifics of what it was and how it went down are largely covered in Academy #0 (available both at the RACC eyrie.org archive and on the ASH page at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~dvandom/ASH), but that really only scratches the surface. Especially for anyone interested in writing an ASH story. So here's a short FAQ (Frequently Anticipated Questions) on the matter. 1. Okay, I don't wanna go read Academy #0 yet. What's the deal in a nutshell? 2. Who all knows about this? 3. Right, so almost no one knows the term "Causality Wars." How do regular people refer to the events of July 6, 1998? 4. Wait, you keep referring to the Church of Tym. What's the deal here? 5. Ha! Caught ya! There's mention of the Causality Wars in a 2021 encyclopedia quoted in an issue of Academy! How do ya explain that? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Okay, I don't wanna go read Academy #0 yet. What's the deal in a nutshell? About 10,000 BC, humanity developed magical skills. In fact, almost all of humanity had magic to some extent. By 9,000 BC, the world was in a sort of "Golden Age," where a small number of godlike people ruled the world together. Then the trouble started. Being able to transcend time and space, these "Fullbloods" started to attack the origins of their opponents, wiping out or changing huge chunks of history. By the time the wars retreated out of normal space, there was virtually no sign remaining of that golden age. Over the millenia, the struggle has popped back into reality every so often, with these godlike beings representing themselves as gods to the normal humans and gaining power from their worship. Legends of the Great Flood stem from the most recent previous major incursion of the "Causality War" as it bounces about in time. In 1997, the Fullbloods started drawing support from worshippers again, using modern marketing tactics to lure in the faithful. A few mages were able to discover the facts behind this, but had little time to prepare, and on July 6, 1998, the gods called in their "markers," bodily absorbing worshippers at a frightening rate. Before they could move on to wiping out humanity entirely, a coalition of superheroes and supervillains linked all living paranormals into a huge power circuit and created the Barrier, blocking off their dimension from all outside interference by the gods, at the cost of the lives of all paranormals on Earth. 2. Who all knows about this? Very few know the whole story...most of those who knew were paranormals and died in erecting the Barrier. Everyone knows about *what* happened: two-thirds of humanity died either that day or in the years of social breakdown that followed. And most assume the pagan gods had something to do with it, and that the paranormals did, since both went away completely. Maybe a few thousand people in the entire world even know the term "Causality Wars," and most of them are high-ranking North American Combine officials. Graduates of the Academy are also told the truth. The Church of Tym's doctrines are disturbingly close to the real story, but no one outside the Church knows how they got their information. General backlash against non-mainstream religion in the 21st Century has kept the Church of Tym small, but the Combine fears that revelation of the truth could turn the church into a major religion and trigger serious social instability. 3. Right, so almost no one knows the term "Causality Wars." How do regular people refer to the events of July 6, 1998? For the most part, they *don't*. A collective shock to humanity that makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem puny by comparison, July 6th is rarely spoken about in most parts of the world. 25 years later, the psychic scars still haven't fully healed for those who lived through it, and it's considered rude to directly refer to it in conversation. Some communities have memorial holidays on July 6th, and the Tymmytes have it as their highest holy day, but attempts at a national day of memorial have been blocked repeatedly in both the Combine and the Eurasian Union. Most people refer to the whole troubled period from July 1998 until around 2002 as "The Turn of the Century," with decidedly more ominous overtones than used by those in the 20th Century referring to 1898-1902. Often people who remember those times will pause before saying the phrase, and even drop their voice to a hushed near-whisper. If the specific day must be mentioned, it's usually as "THAT day," with a knowing look. How people privately think about the day isn't known, because no one has dared try to poll people on such a sensitive topic. Among the new generation, born in the 21st Century, it's referred to a little more irreverently, although usually not within earshot of one's parents. Terms for July 6, 1998 include "The Big One," "Apocalypse Then," and oddly enough, "The Day The Music Died." The reason for the last is the major retro-90s music movement which hit in the 2010s, because so many major entertainers of the 90s died that day. Aside from these generalities, how a person refers to that day depends on religious affiliation and location. By Religion: For a while, Christians called July 6th the Apocalypse or Armageddon, on the grounds that perhaps they (as the meek) had inherited the Earth. Some religious scholars seriously advanced the idea that stories of the Rapture had been altered over time, and really referred to those *not* faithful being bodily assumed into the afterlife. However, as the years passed and it became apparent that the Earth was still inhabited by sinners as well as the faithful, this idea lost currency, and only a few diehards hold it. A linguistic leftover, however, is that many of the more religious Christians refer to the events of July 6th as the breaking of the seventh seal (the climax of the apocalypse in Revelations). Moslems, especially those in the politically-charged Moslem Coalition, celebrate the massive die-off as a sign from Allah, who reached out His hand and purged the world of a great many unbelievers. Devout moslems consider all the gods of the Godmarket to have been demons sent to tempt mankind, and the deaths are simply the fate of those who were tempted. Unlike most of the world, citizens of the Moslem Coalition freely discuss "that day" in reverent tones, with a new holy day based around it. Due to the lunar calendar used for religious purposes in the Moslem world, the day rarely actually falls on July 6th, but the very fact they celebrate it continues to be a minor source of friction between the Coalition and the rest of the world. Buddhists don't have any special reverence or fear of the day, beyond the normal reaction one has to a day on which billions died. Taoists generally consider the whole matter to have been a case of the balance being reset, and the Hindi see it as part of the cycle of creation and destruction. Those still holding to Confucist philosophy, however, are quite disturbed, because while China suffered less losses than most countries, the idea of having one's elders not simply die but disappear and leave no earthly remains was unsettling. After all, how does one pay respects at an ancestor's grave if there's no grave? By Region: China and countries under the influence of the People's Republic do not officially acknowledge that any citizen of the PROC died that day, and as mentioned above, not as many died as in other nations. China was already becoming more and more isolationist in the 1990s, due to events in the ASH Universe not matched in the real world, and the Godmarket helped push Chinese leadership into a seriously isolationist position. The majority of Chinese citizens in 2023 don't even know that the rest of the world was so badly hit in 1998. However, the Premier (later killed in 2023) was not without a sense of humor, black as it might have been, and China celebrates July 6th as a minor holiday, remembering the decision of the People's Republic to leave the international community and become fully self-sufficient (not that it was, mind you, they simply turned to secret trade and deals with the Pranir). The areas which escaped relatively unscathed often refer to the two years from July 1998 until late 2000 as the "Millenial Riots," since much of the unrest in those countries could be accurately characterized as a series of riots. Riots against supernormals. Riots for food. Riots to riot. The term is also useful when the speaker doesn't want to mention the exact date but still really means July 6, 1998. New York City and much of the Tri-State area call that day "Ragnarok," after the Norse "twilight of the gods." The Norse gods had established a major presence in Manhattan and had caused their own die-off before July 6th. Thing is, this one left bodies behind. Some speculate that the total vanishing resulting on the 6th was due to one of the gods deciding to improve on Odin's idea, and then everyone else following his lead. On the island of Cyprus, home to the Israeli Government-in-exile, the actual disappearances of July 6th aren't as important to the residents as the war which followed. The limited nuclear exchange and subsequent evacuation of Palestine are seen as some of the darkest times in the history of Israel. But they rarely talk about the day when they started to lose their home, rather they talk about the future, when somehow they'll get it all back. In Khadam, July 6th is Remembrance Day. Khadam's high percentage of paranormals and their dependance on supertech made that day a major blow to them, and it's amazing to many that the nation held together at all. But since so few of the current residents were born there or even spend more than a few months at a time there, there's no real national "mood" on the subject. Obviously, this section will be expanded on as stories reach into other parts of the world. 4. Wait, you keep referring to the Church of Tym. What's the deal here? The Church of Tym has been mentioned here and there, mainly in passing, but here's the straight dope, since this is perhaps the only religion to have been born out of the Causality Wars and survived the intervening 25 years. Tymythy Twystyd [created by Mark Friedman (aka Netlurker to LNH readers)] was one of the more powerful true mages (those able to manipulate any sort of supernatural energy) as of 1998, and one of the few not to worship any of the gods. After being used as a part of cosmic locus in Dvandom Force #42 (LNH crossover into multiple universes, including ASH), Tym gained greater understanding of the nature of reality, and was instrumental in the last-ditch effort to raise the Barrier against the gods. Because Tym was something of a pop-culture icon at the time (mostly on college campuses), somehow someone found out about his role in saving the world, and started a religion with Tym as the savior figure. It's still a very small religion in 2023, more of a cult with good press, but it has a strong following among the countercultural crowd. With the colleges, traditional hotbeds of Tymmysm (replacing vowels with the letter y is an affectation of theirs), filling up with minor paranormals in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the church is starting to grow. The Department of Superhuman Affairs continues to crack down on the power-enhancing meditations and medications used by the Tymmytes, but has to step carefully to avoid scandals...a number of current officials were Tymmytes in their college days, much like many politicians of the 1990s had drug use in their pasts. The Church of Tym celebrates that day in much the same way Christians observe Easter, although with a streak of weirdness. Solemnity is not a Tymmyte trait. A few sensitives within the Church noticed the weakening of the Barrier in July 2023. Since they know something of how it came to be, there's a debate working through the Church over whether this means Tym's return to the material plane is imminent. 5. Why are the Causality Wars mentioned by name in some publicly-accessible sources? Oops. It wasn't until I started having to clarify guidelines for other writers that I realized I'd committed a few errors of my own (of course, I also spelled Cyprus as "Cypress" in those issues). But, like the errors in date attribution, I'm not going to hunt them all down and change them, just be aware that they *are* errors, and that this document takes precedence.