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Description
A commission, trying to create a semi-consistent world setting for the Brendan Fraser mummy movies.
The first publically noted sign of the new era was in 1925, when a somewhat anemic version of the traditional Plagues of Egypt struck Cairo (sun being blocked out for a day, city water supply going all bloody, boils, and rains of fireballs, but a comparative shortage of frogs and locusts and lice, and the firstborn no worse off than anyone else), inspiring a lot of apocalyptic sermonizing, but there had been less obvious signs and portents before for those who knew how to look, in odd colors at sunset, in the ways the grass moved out of sequence with the wind, in the drums sounding in the deep of the sea. Places previously hidden were coming into light, and old spirits and powers blinked in the light as they stirred from their sleep.
Grasping the situation, mystics and would be sorcerers, from Haitian Houngans to carefully groomed British antiquities professors worldwide turned their attention to Egypt, Tibet and other places where traditionally weird forces were handy. Most wouldn’t have much luck, but some served as catalysts for new and further weird happenings. A great many of them ended up simply and non-mystically shot, strangled, or pushed out of windows: a number of ancient societies, from the Medjai of Egypt to the Hand of the Yellow Emperor, had noted the tenor of the times and set about their historical task of murdering the heck out of people who meddle with Things Man Was Not Meant to Meddle With. Hardly had the Mummy departed Cairo and took the plagues with him when the Brotherhood of the Cleansing Flame of Allah showed up, looking for any secret followers of the ancient Egyptians gods and Unclean Things to purge, and ended up making things rather hard for the Medjai, who although concerned with keeping Unclean Things down themselves were only superficially Muslims…
The leadership of the Third Reich was highly enthusiastic about magical forces and their use to blast the untermensch, although they almost always interpreted the historical record through their own racist lens. Early efforts tended to have somewhat spotty results, with the Berserker Battalion dying out rather rapidly due to their tendency to run straight into enemy gunfire, the reanimated dead being rather flimsy, and efforts to bring back the old German Gods, given that that only the stones remembered them, just resulted in a low level rash of bits of geology coming to life as rapacious trolls (although one bitter German necromantic theorist always claimed he could have done it if Hitler had only given him time and a couple million human sacrifices), while an attempt to harness an ancient middle eastern artifact only led to a bunch of face-meltings.
The stalemate at Stalingrad led to final disaster when one professor Heinrich Merkwürdigliebe was given the resources he claimed were needed to “open a gate” between Germany and the besieged city, using the source of “Vril Energy” that the third Antarctic expedition had brought back. A gate was indeed opened, but not to Stalingrad: instead black, writhing living goo poured unstoppably from the hole in space, filling and bursting the lab building in seconds, and spreading in all directions across the German landscape, hideously warping and then consuming all it encountered. It covered an area of over forty thousand square miles by the time the combined resources of US, Soviet, British and Rhineland industries were finally able to deliver large enough amounts of high power incendiaries to the slowly expanding edges of the blot to stop further growth, but it was not finally eliminated until professor Mukund Dath of the University of Bombay was dropped in by parachute and managed to seal the dimensional hole with the Discus of Vishnu, for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. Cut off from its source, the Blot crumbled into today’s German Barrens, which remains toxic enough to vegetation to be considered unfit for human settlement. (Not helped by a number of corporations and Communist Industrial Collectives deciding it was a great place to dump toxic waste where it wouldn’t disturb anyone.)
Although various mystics attempted to use the ancient magics of Egypt for their own ends, the most successful (and most disastrous) was Nasser’s effort to harness the power of the old Gods to defeat Israel once and for all. Alas, the Egyptian Pantheon by this time was largely dead, dwelling in the dark underworld under the rule of Osiris and his right-hand dog-man Anubis, and were not agreeable to the orders of the living, no matter what Nasser’s various sorcerers-for-hire told him: forces were released that could not be controlled, and only the superior nature of modern firepower and a strategically deployed Soviet atomic bomb put a stop to the unnatural hordes. This could not prevent a 200-mile stretch of the Nile from collapsing into an abyss: the Nile river now sinks into a seemingly bottomless hole near Luxor only to emerge again in an icy cold and lifeless lake between Asyut and El Minya, splitting Egypt in two. Attempts to find out through excavation what happened to the population along that stretch of river have been discouraging, to say the least. Nasser (who ended his days torn apart at the hands of an enraged Islamicist mob) really should have known better.
The Andean countries are still recovering from the results of Luminous Road revolutionary movement’s effort to summon a proletarian God using ancient Inca artifacts and a group of wrathful Inca mummies: the Sacred Mountain did come to life, but it tended to stomp on urban centers without much concern as to the proletarian spirit or lack of it among its inhabitants, and the Luminous Road turning into a crazed blood cult didn’t help things either. At least after its metallic brains were melted with atomic fire, the silver and gold veined corpse of the mountain god is proving a bonanza for Ecuadorian miners (leading to protests from Bolivian miners, who complain that it was their mountain before it went walkies).
A less extreme case was the Second Ghost Dance, brought about by some well-meaning extremists (many of them white) infuriated by the continued mistreatment of native Americans (this was, after all, an era in which huge numbers of native American children were still being separated from their parents by the state and given over to white families for assimilation). The hoped for return of the buffalo and the blowing back of white Americans to Europe did not take place, but Middle America suffered from a rather bad case of angry native spirits, cannibal ghosts/Wendigo, aggressive flying heads, and other stuff to entirely spoil your Church all-casserole potluck for a while before things were brought under control, and things got rather worse for a while for native Americans, rounded up Japanese-in-WWII-style in concentration camps, before they got better. In the end, part of the northern plains around the Black Hills was established as a sort of reservation for native ghosts and spirits (things like giants and flying heads mostly having been just shot to pieces) and native Americans were rather energetically encouraged to follow them (surprisingly few did: it’s one thing to revere your ancestors, it’s another to have them floating around your tent complaining about People These Days). In the long run, it did actually help boost the confidence of a Native American cultural revival, having after all scared the crap out of half of White America, and put a finger in the eye of Christian claims that native faiths were false and childish.
The Chinese civil war was longer and bloodier than OTL, the earlier fall of Japan (with Germany essentially a done deal by 1943, the US was able to concentrate resources on Japan, which went down in a storm of fire and poison gas in 1944) having left the ROC in better shape. It finally dragged to an end in 1952, and the Chinese communists took little time to arrange an invasion of Tibet: with the events in Egypt and former Germany (not to mention the “Great Proletarian Battle for the Liberation of the Worker and Peasant builders of the Great Wall”) even the most committed Marxist atheist had to admit that there were things out there which at least _acted_ like they were supernatural, although a rational explanation would one day be coming, no doubt. The meantime the rumors of “waters of immortality” somewhere in Tibet were definitely something worth looking into. It took quite a few years, and a lot of dead troops (the Yeti had a lot of fun with avalanches), but the Chinese government had men to burn, so to speak, and essentially went over western Tibet with a fine-toothed combs (the Yeti probably should have let them alone rather than finish convincing them there was something to find).
For a brief, shining moment the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic held a monopoly on immortality, and the world beat a path to their door looking for concessions. The Soviets gave Mongolia essentially as a gift to the Chinese in exchange for a little sip for their Politburo elders. The US offered trade concessions and dropped recognition of the ROC like a hot potato. Chinese agents collected foreign politicians willing to sell out their nations for a few extra decades like playing cards. There was some secret US and Soviet plotting to invade Tibet, but the Chinese made it clear they had mined the caves of Shangri-La with atomic bombs (which they had developed during the years of searching) and invaders would get squat.
Unfortunately for their plans, continued intrusion of the Red Army ever deeper into the caves of Shangri-La brought them into the true inhabitants of Shangri-La, the immortal sages, who were not at all pleased at the intrusion from the corrupted outer world, and proceeded to make the “spoiler” nukes achieve their purpose. In spite of half a century of desperate digging which has by this point removed half the mountain, no sign of the magic pools or the caves or even signs that they ever existed have been found. It is said among the mystics that a new path to the land exists for true seekers of wisdom, but the worldly will not find it again.
Only an actual dip with the waters of Shangri-La brings immortality, drinking it just gives you a few extra decades per swig, so the limited supply of bottled water the PRC government has is jealously guarded and only used when maximum effect is achievable. A handful of soldiers and the 1967 Inner Party (known nowadays as “the Secretariat”) are the only existing PRC immortals, and as increasingly dotty God-kings they continue to rule with an iron grip, old-style revolutionaries too fixed in their ways to seek any radical reform, trading secret bribes of extended life for power and advantage. The most likely scenario for regime change is that they will eventually all kill each other off, which has already happened to a number of them in internal power struggles: it’s not easy to kill an immortal, but dissolution in acid seems to work (at least, no angry vengeful puddles have returned from being washed into the Yellow River.) Nearly a third of them died in the late 70s, when Mao decided he was the one and only immortal God-King China needed, and nearly succeeded. Party rumors hold that he was not dissolved in acid, but still exists in some horribly tortured and usually much-fractioned (there are many variants to the story) form in the Secretariat’s innermost sanctum.
Relentless PRC persecution means most Yeti have moved to Nepal or Bhutan, but some still hang on in the most remote areas. Traveling by night or under cloud cover along dizzyingly high mountain trails visible only by satellite, they do a little business sneaking people and items out of - and into – the People’s Republic.
While many Gods and Spirits of myth were much unlike imagined, are largely departed from this plane of reality, or have faded and died off, the influence of the Greek deities still persists. Some, like Pan, have perished, others, like Dionysus (nowadays a heavy-drinking retired sea captain with a face like a mummified monkey) have aged badly, but others, like Zeus, Hermes, or Aphrodite remain Powers, hiding out among humanity or in the wild places of the world, still toying with and manipulating mankind, feeding off their adoration or madness. Possessed of enormous wealth and secret influence, they have been rather put out in fact by the new age of supernatural scrutiny, which has made much of the world rather “hot” for them and dismantled much of the secret cultic or simply influence networks of support they had built. Several highly popular female pop stars were “outed” as actually all being manifestations of one entity (Aphrodite) and there was considerable outrage in the US when the influence of Hermes in the stock market, along with most of the country’s illegal organizations, were uncovered.
Some of the lesser Greek entities adopted to the new situation, accepting heavy monitoring and limitations on the use of their powers. The Minotaur, for instance, has his own talk show. But the majority of those still with some real strength have no desire to be “domesticated”, although after millennia of keeping it on the low-down they aren’t really up to carving out states of their own with brute force methods. Instead, they have “perfectly legally” taken control over a country of their own: Kiribati, where the locals have gladly accepted Poseidon as their president-for-life in exchange for keeping the rising global-warming seas from rising and swallowing them. (The Greeks are fond of the Pacific isles: a number of them hung out here for a while after the Roman Empire Christianized and before the Polynesians reached them). A tremendous number of “off the books” economic activities are now taking place here, bringing in a shitload of money, and all sorts of odd supernaturals and people who deal with them have island bungalows nowadays. The various international supernatural control agencies are understandably pissed about this, but as a sovereign nation Kiribati has the right to elect whoever they wish, and Poseidon _does_ seem to be keeping the seas (locally) from rising any further. And unlike most other ancient and moldy Gods and spirits, the Greeks have a _lot_ of media savvy.
Both the US and the Soviet Union made it a practice to find and secure away from the hands of adventurous mystics anything even remotely mystical in nature or reportedly so, with very little concern for things like “national sovereignty” or “rightful owners” and keep a close eye on things harder to move (there are British Special Forces permanently stationed at Stonehenge to make sure nobody gets up to anything mystical around them - well, anything not government approved). This often has led to conflicts with ancient Secret Societies which felt they had been doing a perfectly good job of keeping Mystical McGuffins under wraps on their own. (Many blame the Medjai for making secret societies look bad: I mean, letting Imhotep get loose twice?) With the cooling (or perhaps mellowing has more accurate connotations) of the Cold War in the 1970s, and the events of the previous decade indicating rather strongly that mystical disasters weren’t just for Nazis, the US, Soviet Union and several other powers cautiously drew together to move from unilateral methods of control to form an international organization to prevent traffic in dangerous mystical artifacts, isolate and contain locations of dangerous supernatural activity, and suppress cults.
The International Bureau of Paranormal Phenomena Control and Management (IBPPCM) would not take full form until after the Soviet Civil War of the 1980s, in which one side decided to break into the Soviet “arsenal” of poorly understood supernatural collectibles, leaving the eventual victors little choice but to cede a large chunk of Siberia to the undead hordes of Koschei the Deathless. By rather underlining the risks of meddling with the unknown, it helped convert the IBPPCM into the powerful global organization it is today, with bureaus in over a hundred nations.
Notable major power non-participants are, unsurprisingly, the totalitarian Chinese regime, and more worrisomely, Great Britain, where the New Coalition (which has been the Party of Government since the 1950s and held the Prime Minister spot for forty-nine of the last sixty-two years ) is widely believed to work hand in glove with the Esoteric Order of the Rosy Dawn. Britain certainly manages to command a degree of international influence well beyond what would could be expected of a country with its known industry and population (and deep, deep racism), and the intensive use of black magic (mostly stolen, in the British fashion, from other countries) and psychic little old ladies is widely believed to explain this. (David Icke’s alternative theories are hotly denied by all known tribes of lizard-people).
Not that the IBPPCM is the only organization at work to keep Old Gods and the angry dead from getting up to shenanigans. A variety of ancient secret societies, unable to keep properly hidden without the aid of governments in the face of modern state systems of control, have come out in the open, with the Cleansing Flame of Allah having taken outright control over the Holy Cities, proclaiming that the House of Saud was Not Worthy in all sorts of ways, including some of the Royal family getting up to shenanigans with ancient texts which really should have been burned to ashes long ago (and the ashes shot into the sun). This has pleased a lot of people, but it has displeased a lot of others, the US and Israel for obvious reasons, various Islamic groups for others: the Iranians because they are mostly Sunnis, and various Salafist groups because they are fairly orthodox by, say, third century After Hejira standards – in other words, a bunch of tolerant softies who won’t even put Yazidis to the sword and think the Apocalypse will come in Allah’s own good time.
The few remaining members of the ancient Chinese kung fu fighting/element bending/demon-fighting secret societies (mostly suppressed by former Chinese Emperors, since they often fought corrupt officials as well as demons, and the State doesn’t want any such independent-minded exceptions to its monopoly of force) have mostly quietly moved abroad, mainly to ROC territory, while the more narrowly murder-and-demon-trapping focused Yellow Emperor’s Hand have been suborned by the PRC’s increasingly neo-imperial rule . The Medjai have also been mostly forced to flee a hyperislamicist and paranoidally vigilant split Egypt and have recreated themselves as an international Whatsit-fighting mercenary organization, although the buzz on the psychic grapevine is that that some have also established themselves in Under-Egypt, where they are working to reform the System from within, so to speak.
Most impactive has been the emergence of the various secret “demon” fighting and unnatural knowledge-suppressing branches of the Catholic Church, which has done a bangup job of presenting itself as the Thin Yellow-and-White Line between Christian civilization and demon-and-zombie-swarm-overrun madness, aided by the calculated (and so far, non-disastrous) deployment of various mystical artifacts of the Church collected and studied over centuries. The result of this is the formation of the Catholic Brotherhood [1], a block of Catholic, anti-secular-but-also-viciously-anti-wrong-sort-of-sacred, conservative yet-with-strong-social-safety-nets countries through which a revived Papacy exerts a degree of influence which leads to Protestant hardliners to mutter about the Great Beast and the Whore of Babylon. (The split between Catholic Brotherhood nations and more secular states on a number of legal issues is one reason why this world’s European Union is unlikely to turn into anything like a United States of Europe anytime soon).
Many Protestant fundamentalists want something similar for Protestant nations, but have been frustrated by the rather secular nature of most Protestant nations. Ground zero of these disputes has been the US, where the Religious Right has been for some time calling for a more “holy” government to deal with the various supernatural forces lurking about, an end to IBCCPM cooperation with “ungodly” regimes, laws against Polytheism, and the destruction rather than study and containment of supernatural forces and entities, and the forcible “liberation” of the Black Hills Treaty Indigenous Spirit Reservation. Recent election of a President with Hindu Indian ancestry (never mind his current Presbyterianism) combined with the outbreak of the Ramayan War in India provoked an outbreak of religious hysteria which has since grown to an outbreak of wide-spread rioting, civil disobedience, “non-cooperation” and attacks on “Polytheists” and “Witches” across much of Baptist America, as well as some parts of the midwest. As yet none of the state governors have followed the calls for “neutralization” or even “secession”, but there have been rumblings from both Texas and Florida.
And this could not come at a worse time, since the situation in India is really quite nasty, with Hinduveta extremists leading a revolt against a secular government, aided by powerful “Vedic weapons” of unknown origin: there have been rumors of gods and demons of Hindu myth appearing in northern cities. Muslims are being expelled en masse, stressing Bengal badly and quite exceeding the capacity of Pakistan to handle. Reports suggest that the south will fall in time if it doesn’t receive enough foreign support, but with the world’s greatest power currently occupied at home, nobody is in a hurry to step up to the plate. On the other hand, the IBCCPM signatories certainly don’t want the horrendous precedent of a war won with the aid of large-scale supernatural intervention, even if the usual disastrous results are avoided. And people are _really_ worried that the Chinese might decide to intervene…
The world is a bit less technologically advanced than OTL, quite a lot of research funding having gone into studies of supernatural issues rather than say computer intelligence or gene sequencing. Religious issues, are to say the least, confusing and hotly debated. “Polytheism” is looked upon with a great deal of suspicion, given the rather destructively lively presence of various ancient pantheons to a greater or lesser extent, while other groups (atheists, agnostics, and some of those polytheists) turn it around and use this as an argument against the existence of the monotheist deities. Both the Catholics and the Islamic secret societies have various mystical artifacts, books of ancient spells, etc. that have proven effective in fighting supernatural menaces, but outsiders are skeptical of the claims that these were given to them/blessed by God/Jesus/Allah. Protestant groups, generally lacking supernatural McGuffins of their own, tend to angry defensiveness when people note the general lack of effectiveness of simple faith against angry mummies, liches, or Oni. Although US support for Israel remains a severe sticking point with the Islamic world, there is less hostility to Islam in the West, in the face of what seems a common supernatural menace. Hindus, Buddhists, and other “pagans” have a hard time of it. (There are some “pagan magic” groups emerging from the same roots as Wicca OTL, but they have taken rather different forms in a world where “consorting with the devil” or “murder through magic” carries the death penalty in a number of countries).
The existence of reincarnation seems to be confirmed, with certain ancient spells allowing access to the memories of former lives. On the other hand, these spells often don’t work, and it remains quite unclear what happens between reincarnations or immediately after death: it remains a matter of controversy whether what the Girard-Torres experiment is measuring is actually the soul [2] or another entirely unrelated supernatural phenomenon. Many Christians (and atheists) deny the objective validity of the “former life memories” experience in the first place, while Buddhists and Hindus are bothered by the fact that there are no examples of memories of memories of animal or other nonhuman lives (well, there are, but it’s pretty clear that these are cases of people bullshitting) or evidence of karma being carried from one life to another. And of course there are the Restless Dead of various sorts, which clearly haven’t gone anywhere.
History and archeology are lively subjects, and not only due to the risks of uncovering the restless dead or possibly cursed supernatural artifacts. New investigations are overthrowing many previously accepted verities: there were older civilizations even before the Sumerians and the ancient Egyptians, destroyed in supernatural conflicts older than the first brick baked in Jericho, so thoroughly that only the occasional suspicious stone remains. The Akkadians actually took their name from an even older people, mostly extinct before the founding of First Dynasty Egypt. A tiny Flores Island like “hobbit” people, not the Byaka, were the true origin of the Greek myth of crane-fighting pygmies. There actually were dragons in the east once upon a time: their remains are just hard to find because so many of their bones have been ground up by the Chinese for magical penis-medicine. Atlantis actually was a place.
The IBPPCM sensibly has avoided thawing out any of those seven foot tall jet-black fanged corpses they dug out of that million year old ruin in Antarctica. At least since that first one starting moving and everyone’s head began to hurt until the onsite Emergency Action Officer elephant gunned its brain to bits.
Aside from users of ancient books of spells and magical artifacts, some people with inherent “weird powers” have been discovered by modern research and investigation. There are some actual precognitives with a limited ability to see the future (eagerly sought by all governments), people with healing powers (rich, terribly overworked, or both) and the occasional psychic sensitive, although usually only to the point where they can say “this temple has very bad vibes” which you could have probably guessed yourself from all the hideous soapstone carvings of unspeakable octopus-headed Gods. Some people seem to possess abnormal knowledge (say, reading Mysterious Hieroglyphics) carried over from former lives, although this rarely shows up in normal life. And there are the occasional Dangerous Mesmerists. (Usually recognizable from their Burning Eyes, and usually male ones have beards).
As mentioned, aside from the revelations of the first half of the twentieth century, supernatural forces seem to continue to be on a rise, although the Twinkie is still smaller than a bus. Of late Daniel Katz, grad student and general dogsbody at an archeological dig in the Israeli Negev (Hitler’s Germany went down earlier, but he had already killed enough Jews by that point to make getting out of Europe seem rather imperative) has been having bad dreams. Wheels within wheels, claws, eyes, wings, spirals of fire, shapes with no clear shape or continuity in space, but at the same time extending to infinity in all directions. [3] And last night, words like lines of fire forming in his brain: THE DAY OF WRATH COMES.
Daniel Katz really hopes he isn’t going to become a Prophet: his thesis advisor will never buy it.
[1] Inspired by this scenario silas-coldwine.deviantart.com/…
[2] We won’t even get into the Egyptian-influenced “multiple souls” theories.
[3] Apologies to Vongrief. castlegreifenghast.deviantart.…
The first publically noted sign of the new era was in 1925, when a somewhat anemic version of the traditional Plagues of Egypt struck Cairo (sun being blocked out for a day, city water supply going all bloody, boils, and rains of fireballs, but a comparative shortage of frogs and locusts and lice, and the firstborn no worse off than anyone else), inspiring a lot of apocalyptic sermonizing, but there had been less obvious signs and portents before for those who knew how to look, in odd colors at sunset, in the ways the grass moved out of sequence with the wind, in the drums sounding in the deep of the sea. Places previously hidden were coming into light, and old spirits and powers blinked in the light as they stirred from their sleep.
Grasping the situation, mystics and would be sorcerers, from Haitian Houngans to carefully groomed British antiquities professors worldwide turned their attention to Egypt, Tibet and other places where traditionally weird forces were handy. Most wouldn’t have much luck, but some served as catalysts for new and further weird happenings. A great many of them ended up simply and non-mystically shot, strangled, or pushed out of windows: a number of ancient societies, from the Medjai of Egypt to the Hand of the Yellow Emperor, had noted the tenor of the times and set about their historical task of murdering the heck out of people who meddle with Things Man Was Not Meant to Meddle With. Hardly had the Mummy departed Cairo and took the plagues with him when the Brotherhood of the Cleansing Flame of Allah showed up, looking for any secret followers of the ancient Egyptians gods and Unclean Things to purge, and ended up making things rather hard for the Medjai, who although concerned with keeping Unclean Things down themselves were only superficially Muslims…
The leadership of the Third Reich was highly enthusiastic about magical forces and their use to blast the untermensch, although they almost always interpreted the historical record through their own racist lens. Early efforts tended to have somewhat spotty results, with the Berserker Battalion dying out rather rapidly due to their tendency to run straight into enemy gunfire, the reanimated dead being rather flimsy, and efforts to bring back the old German Gods, given that that only the stones remembered them, just resulted in a low level rash of bits of geology coming to life as rapacious trolls (although one bitter German necromantic theorist always claimed he could have done it if Hitler had only given him time and a couple million human sacrifices), while an attempt to harness an ancient middle eastern artifact only led to a bunch of face-meltings.
The stalemate at Stalingrad led to final disaster when one professor Heinrich Merkwürdigliebe was given the resources he claimed were needed to “open a gate” between Germany and the besieged city, using the source of “Vril Energy” that the third Antarctic expedition had brought back. A gate was indeed opened, but not to Stalingrad: instead black, writhing living goo poured unstoppably from the hole in space, filling and bursting the lab building in seconds, and spreading in all directions across the German landscape, hideously warping and then consuming all it encountered. It covered an area of over forty thousand square miles by the time the combined resources of US, Soviet, British and Rhineland industries were finally able to deliver large enough amounts of high power incendiaries to the slowly expanding edges of the blot to stop further growth, but it was not finally eliminated until professor Mukund Dath of the University of Bombay was dropped in by parachute and managed to seal the dimensional hole with the Discus of Vishnu, for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. Cut off from its source, the Blot crumbled into today’s German Barrens, which remains toxic enough to vegetation to be considered unfit for human settlement. (Not helped by a number of corporations and Communist Industrial Collectives deciding it was a great place to dump toxic waste where it wouldn’t disturb anyone.)
Although various mystics attempted to use the ancient magics of Egypt for their own ends, the most successful (and most disastrous) was Nasser’s effort to harness the power of the old Gods to defeat Israel once and for all. Alas, the Egyptian Pantheon by this time was largely dead, dwelling in the dark underworld under the rule of Osiris and his right-hand dog-man Anubis, and were not agreeable to the orders of the living, no matter what Nasser’s various sorcerers-for-hire told him: forces were released that could not be controlled, and only the superior nature of modern firepower and a strategically deployed Soviet atomic bomb put a stop to the unnatural hordes. This could not prevent a 200-mile stretch of the Nile from collapsing into an abyss: the Nile river now sinks into a seemingly bottomless hole near Luxor only to emerge again in an icy cold and lifeless lake between Asyut and El Minya, splitting Egypt in two. Attempts to find out through excavation what happened to the population along that stretch of river have been discouraging, to say the least. Nasser (who ended his days torn apart at the hands of an enraged Islamicist mob) really should have known better.
The Andean countries are still recovering from the results of Luminous Road revolutionary movement’s effort to summon a proletarian God using ancient Inca artifacts and a group of wrathful Inca mummies: the Sacred Mountain did come to life, but it tended to stomp on urban centers without much concern as to the proletarian spirit or lack of it among its inhabitants, and the Luminous Road turning into a crazed blood cult didn’t help things either. At least after its metallic brains were melted with atomic fire, the silver and gold veined corpse of the mountain god is proving a bonanza for Ecuadorian miners (leading to protests from Bolivian miners, who complain that it was their mountain before it went walkies).
A less extreme case was the Second Ghost Dance, brought about by some well-meaning extremists (many of them white) infuriated by the continued mistreatment of native Americans (this was, after all, an era in which huge numbers of native American children were still being separated from their parents by the state and given over to white families for assimilation). The hoped for return of the buffalo and the blowing back of white Americans to Europe did not take place, but Middle America suffered from a rather bad case of angry native spirits, cannibal ghosts/Wendigo, aggressive flying heads, and other stuff to entirely spoil your Church all-casserole potluck for a while before things were brought under control, and things got rather worse for a while for native Americans, rounded up Japanese-in-WWII-style in concentration camps, before they got better. In the end, part of the northern plains around the Black Hills was established as a sort of reservation for native ghosts and spirits (things like giants and flying heads mostly having been just shot to pieces) and native Americans were rather energetically encouraged to follow them (surprisingly few did: it’s one thing to revere your ancestors, it’s another to have them floating around your tent complaining about People These Days). In the long run, it did actually help boost the confidence of a Native American cultural revival, having after all scared the crap out of half of White America, and put a finger in the eye of Christian claims that native faiths were false and childish.
The Chinese civil war was longer and bloodier than OTL, the earlier fall of Japan (with Germany essentially a done deal by 1943, the US was able to concentrate resources on Japan, which went down in a storm of fire and poison gas in 1944) having left the ROC in better shape. It finally dragged to an end in 1952, and the Chinese communists took little time to arrange an invasion of Tibet: with the events in Egypt and former Germany (not to mention the “Great Proletarian Battle for the Liberation of the Worker and Peasant builders of the Great Wall”) even the most committed Marxist atheist had to admit that there were things out there which at least _acted_ like they were supernatural, although a rational explanation would one day be coming, no doubt. The meantime the rumors of “waters of immortality” somewhere in Tibet were definitely something worth looking into. It took quite a few years, and a lot of dead troops (the Yeti had a lot of fun with avalanches), but the Chinese government had men to burn, so to speak, and essentially went over western Tibet with a fine-toothed combs (the Yeti probably should have let them alone rather than finish convincing them there was something to find).
For a brief, shining moment the Communist Party of the Chinese People’s Republic held a monopoly on immortality, and the world beat a path to their door looking for concessions. The Soviets gave Mongolia essentially as a gift to the Chinese in exchange for a little sip for their Politburo elders. The US offered trade concessions and dropped recognition of the ROC like a hot potato. Chinese agents collected foreign politicians willing to sell out their nations for a few extra decades like playing cards. There was some secret US and Soviet plotting to invade Tibet, but the Chinese made it clear they had mined the caves of Shangri-La with atomic bombs (which they had developed during the years of searching) and invaders would get squat.
Unfortunately for their plans, continued intrusion of the Red Army ever deeper into the caves of Shangri-La brought them into the true inhabitants of Shangri-La, the immortal sages, who were not at all pleased at the intrusion from the corrupted outer world, and proceeded to make the “spoiler” nukes achieve their purpose. In spite of half a century of desperate digging which has by this point removed half the mountain, no sign of the magic pools or the caves or even signs that they ever existed have been found. It is said among the mystics that a new path to the land exists for true seekers of wisdom, but the worldly will not find it again.
Only an actual dip with the waters of Shangri-La brings immortality, drinking it just gives you a few extra decades per swig, so the limited supply of bottled water the PRC government has is jealously guarded and only used when maximum effect is achievable. A handful of soldiers and the 1967 Inner Party (known nowadays as “the Secretariat”) are the only existing PRC immortals, and as increasingly dotty God-kings they continue to rule with an iron grip, old-style revolutionaries too fixed in their ways to seek any radical reform, trading secret bribes of extended life for power and advantage. The most likely scenario for regime change is that they will eventually all kill each other off, which has already happened to a number of them in internal power struggles: it’s not easy to kill an immortal, but dissolution in acid seems to work (at least, no angry vengeful puddles have returned from being washed into the Yellow River.) Nearly a third of them died in the late 70s, when Mao decided he was the one and only immortal God-King China needed, and nearly succeeded. Party rumors hold that he was not dissolved in acid, but still exists in some horribly tortured and usually much-fractioned (there are many variants to the story) form in the Secretariat’s innermost sanctum.
Relentless PRC persecution means most Yeti have moved to Nepal or Bhutan, but some still hang on in the most remote areas. Traveling by night or under cloud cover along dizzyingly high mountain trails visible only by satellite, they do a little business sneaking people and items out of - and into – the People’s Republic.
While many Gods and Spirits of myth were much unlike imagined, are largely departed from this plane of reality, or have faded and died off, the influence of the Greek deities still persists. Some, like Pan, have perished, others, like Dionysus (nowadays a heavy-drinking retired sea captain with a face like a mummified monkey) have aged badly, but others, like Zeus, Hermes, or Aphrodite remain Powers, hiding out among humanity or in the wild places of the world, still toying with and manipulating mankind, feeding off their adoration or madness. Possessed of enormous wealth and secret influence, they have been rather put out in fact by the new age of supernatural scrutiny, which has made much of the world rather “hot” for them and dismantled much of the secret cultic or simply influence networks of support they had built. Several highly popular female pop stars were “outed” as actually all being manifestations of one entity (Aphrodite) and there was considerable outrage in the US when the influence of Hermes in the stock market, along with most of the country’s illegal organizations, were uncovered.
Some of the lesser Greek entities adopted to the new situation, accepting heavy monitoring and limitations on the use of their powers. The Minotaur, for instance, has his own talk show. But the majority of those still with some real strength have no desire to be “domesticated”, although after millennia of keeping it on the low-down they aren’t really up to carving out states of their own with brute force methods. Instead, they have “perfectly legally” taken control over a country of their own: Kiribati, where the locals have gladly accepted Poseidon as their president-for-life in exchange for keeping the rising global-warming seas from rising and swallowing them. (The Greeks are fond of the Pacific isles: a number of them hung out here for a while after the Roman Empire Christianized and before the Polynesians reached them). A tremendous number of “off the books” economic activities are now taking place here, bringing in a shitload of money, and all sorts of odd supernaturals and people who deal with them have island bungalows nowadays. The various international supernatural control agencies are understandably pissed about this, but as a sovereign nation Kiribati has the right to elect whoever they wish, and Poseidon _does_ seem to be keeping the seas (locally) from rising any further. And unlike most other ancient and moldy Gods and spirits, the Greeks have a _lot_ of media savvy.
Both the US and the Soviet Union made it a practice to find and secure away from the hands of adventurous mystics anything even remotely mystical in nature or reportedly so, with very little concern for things like “national sovereignty” or “rightful owners” and keep a close eye on things harder to move (there are British Special Forces permanently stationed at Stonehenge to make sure nobody gets up to anything mystical around them - well, anything not government approved). This often has led to conflicts with ancient Secret Societies which felt they had been doing a perfectly good job of keeping Mystical McGuffins under wraps on their own. (Many blame the Medjai for making secret societies look bad: I mean, letting Imhotep get loose twice?) With the cooling (or perhaps mellowing has more accurate connotations) of the Cold War in the 1970s, and the events of the previous decade indicating rather strongly that mystical disasters weren’t just for Nazis, the US, Soviet Union and several other powers cautiously drew together to move from unilateral methods of control to form an international organization to prevent traffic in dangerous mystical artifacts, isolate and contain locations of dangerous supernatural activity, and suppress cults.
The International Bureau of Paranormal Phenomena Control and Management (IBPPCM) would not take full form until after the Soviet Civil War of the 1980s, in which one side decided to break into the Soviet “arsenal” of poorly understood supernatural collectibles, leaving the eventual victors little choice but to cede a large chunk of Siberia to the undead hordes of Koschei the Deathless. By rather underlining the risks of meddling with the unknown, it helped convert the IBPPCM into the powerful global organization it is today, with bureaus in over a hundred nations.
Notable major power non-participants are, unsurprisingly, the totalitarian Chinese regime, and more worrisomely, Great Britain, where the New Coalition (which has been the Party of Government since the 1950s and held the Prime Minister spot for forty-nine of the last sixty-two years ) is widely believed to work hand in glove with the Esoteric Order of the Rosy Dawn. Britain certainly manages to command a degree of international influence well beyond what would could be expected of a country with its known industry and population (and deep, deep racism), and the intensive use of black magic (mostly stolen, in the British fashion, from other countries) and psychic little old ladies is widely believed to explain this. (David Icke’s alternative theories are hotly denied by all known tribes of lizard-people).
Not that the IBPPCM is the only organization at work to keep Old Gods and the angry dead from getting up to shenanigans. A variety of ancient secret societies, unable to keep properly hidden without the aid of governments in the face of modern state systems of control, have come out in the open, with the Cleansing Flame of Allah having taken outright control over the Holy Cities, proclaiming that the House of Saud was Not Worthy in all sorts of ways, including some of the Royal family getting up to shenanigans with ancient texts which really should have been burned to ashes long ago (and the ashes shot into the sun). This has pleased a lot of people, but it has displeased a lot of others, the US and Israel for obvious reasons, various Islamic groups for others: the Iranians because they are mostly Sunnis, and various Salafist groups because they are fairly orthodox by, say, third century After Hejira standards – in other words, a bunch of tolerant softies who won’t even put Yazidis to the sword and think the Apocalypse will come in Allah’s own good time.
The few remaining members of the ancient Chinese kung fu fighting/element bending/demon-fighting secret societies (mostly suppressed by former Chinese Emperors, since they often fought corrupt officials as well as demons, and the State doesn’t want any such independent-minded exceptions to its monopoly of force) have mostly quietly moved abroad, mainly to ROC territory, while the more narrowly murder-and-demon-trapping focused Yellow Emperor’s Hand have been suborned by the PRC’s increasingly neo-imperial rule . The Medjai have also been mostly forced to flee a hyperislamicist and paranoidally vigilant split Egypt and have recreated themselves as an international Whatsit-fighting mercenary organization, although the buzz on the psychic grapevine is that that some have also established themselves in Under-Egypt, where they are working to reform the System from within, so to speak.
Most impactive has been the emergence of the various secret “demon” fighting and unnatural knowledge-suppressing branches of the Catholic Church, which has done a bangup job of presenting itself as the Thin Yellow-and-White Line between Christian civilization and demon-and-zombie-swarm-overrun madness, aided by the calculated (and so far, non-disastrous) deployment of various mystical artifacts of the Church collected and studied over centuries. The result of this is the formation of the Catholic Brotherhood [1], a block of Catholic, anti-secular-but-also-viciously-anti-wrong-sort-of-sacred, conservative yet-with-strong-social-safety-nets countries through which a revived Papacy exerts a degree of influence which leads to Protestant hardliners to mutter about the Great Beast and the Whore of Babylon. (The split between Catholic Brotherhood nations and more secular states on a number of legal issues is one reason why this world’s European Union is unlikely to turn into anything like a United States of Europe anytime soon).
Many Protestant fundamentalists want something similar for Protestant nations, but have been frustrated by the rather secular nature of most Protestant nations. Ground zero of these disputes has been the US, where the Religious Right has been for some time calling for a more “holy” government to deal with the various supernatural forces lurking about, an end to IBCCPM cooperation with “ungodly” regimes, laws against Polytheism, and the destruction rather than study and containment of supernatural forces and entities, and the forcible “liberation” of the Black Hills Treaty Indigenous Spirit Reservation. Recent election of a President with Hindu Indian ancestry (never mind his current Presbyterianism) combined with the outbreak of the Ramayan War in India provoked an outbreak of religious hysteria which has since grown to an outbreak of wide-spread rioting, civil disobedience, “non-cooperation” and attacks on “Polytheists” and “Witches” across much of Baptist America, as well as some parts of the midwest. As yet none of the state governors have followed the calls for “neutralization” or even “secession”, but there have been rumblings from both Texas and Florida.
And this could not come at a worse time, since the situation in India is really quite nasty, with Hinduveta extremists leading a revolt against a secular government, aided by powerful “Vedic weapons” of unknown origin: there have been rumors of gods and demons of Hindu myth appearing in northern cities. Muslims are being expelled en masse, stressing Bengal badly and quite exceeding the capacity of Pakistan to handle. Reports suggest that the south will fall in time if it doesn’t receive enough foreign support, but with the world’s greatest power currently occupied at home, nobody is in a hurry to step up to the plate. On the other hand, the IBCCPM signatories certainly don’t want the horrendous precedent of a war won with the aid of large-scale supernatural intervention, even if the usual disastrous results are avoided. And people are _really_ worried that the Chinese might decide to intervene…
The world is a bit less technologically advanced than OTL, quite a lot of research funding having gone into studies of supernatural issues rather than say computer intelligence or gene sequencing. Religious issues, are to say the least, confusing and hotly debated. “Polytheism” is looked upon with a great deal of suspicion, given the rather destructively lively presence of various ancient pantheons to a greater or lesser extent, while other groups (atheists, agnostics, and some of those polytheists) turn it around and use this as an argument against the existence of the monotheist deities. Both the Catholics and the Islamic secret societies have various mystical artifacts, books of ancient spells, etc. that have proven effective in fighting supernatural menaces, but outsiders are skeptical of the claims that these were given to them/blessed by God/Jesus/Allah. Protestant groups, generally lacking supernatural McGuffins of their own, tend to angry defensiveness when people note the general lack of effectiveness of simple faith against angry mummies, liches, or Oni. Although US support for Israel remains a severe sticking point with the Islamic world, there is less hostility to Islam in the West, in the face of what seems a common supernatural menace. Hindus, Buddhists, and other “pagans” have a hard time of it. (There are some “pagan magic” groups emerging from the same roots as Wicca OTL, but they have taken rather different forms in a world where “consorting with the devil” or “murder through magic” carries the death penalty in a number of countries).
The existence of reincarnation seems to be confirmed, with certain ancient spells allowing access to the memories of former lives. On the other hand, these spells often don’t work, and it remains quite unclear what happens between reincarnations or immediately after death: it remains a matter of controversy whether what the Girard-Torres experiment is measuring is actually the soul [2] or another entirely unrelated supernatural phenomenon. Many Christians (and atheists) deny the objective validity of the “former life memories” experience in the first place, while Buddhists and Hindus are bothered by the fact that there are no examples of memories of memories of animal or other nonhuman lives (well, there are, but it’s pretty clear that these are cases of people bullshitting) or evidence of karma being carried from one life to another. And of course there are the Restless Dead of various sorts, which clearly haven’t gone anywhere.
History and archeology are lively subjects, and not only due to the risks of uncovering the restless dead or possibly cursed supernatural artifacts. New investigations are overthrowing many previously accepted verities: there were older civilizations even before the Sumerians and the ancient Egyptians, destroyed in supernatural conflicts older than the first brick baked in Jericho, so thoroughly that only the occasional suspicious stone remains. The Akkadians actually took their name from an even older people, mostly extinct before the founding of First Dynasty Egypt. A tiny Flores Island like “hobbit” people, not the Byaka, were the true origin of the Greek myth of crane-fighting pygmies. There actually were dragons in the east once upon a time: their remains are just hard to find because so many of their bones have been ground up by the Chinese for magical penis-medicine. Atlantis actually was a place.
The IBPPCM sensibly has avoided thawing out any of those seven foot tall jet-black fanged corpses they dug out of that million year old ruin in Antarctica. At least since that first one starting moving and everyone’s head began to hurt until the onsite Emergency Action Officer elephant gunned its brain to bits.
Aside from users of ancient books of spells and magical artifacts, some people with inherent “weird powers” have been discovered by modern research and investigation. There are some actual precognitives with a limited ability to see the future (eagerly sought by all governments), people with healing powers (rich, terribly overworked, or both) and the occasional psychic sensitive, although usually only to the point where they can say “this temple has very bad vibes” which you could have probably guessed yourself from all the hideous soapstone carvings of unspeakable octopus-headed Gods. Some people seem to possess abnormal knowledge (say, reading Mysterious Hieroglyphics) carried over from former lives, although this rarely shows up in normal life. And there are the occasional Dangerous Mesmerists. (Usually recognizable from their Burning Eyes, and usually male ones have beards).
As mentioned, aside from the revelations of the first half of the twentieth century, supernatural forces seem to continue to be on a rise, although the Twinkie is still smaller than a bus. Of late Daniel Katz, grad student and general dogsbody at an archeological dig in the Israeli Negev (Hitler’s Germany went down earlier, but he had already killed enough Jews by that point to make getting out of Europe seem rather imperative) has been having bad dreams. Wheels within wheels, claws, eyes, wings, spirals of fire, shapes with no clear shape or continuity in space, but at the same time extending to infinity in all directions. [3] And last night, words like lines of fire forming in his brain: THE DAY OF WRATH COMES.
Daniel Katz really hopes he isn’t going to become a Prophet: his thesis advisor will never buy it.
[1] Inspired by this scenario silas-coldwine.deviantart.com/…
[2] We won’t even get into the Egyptian-influenced “multiple souls” theories.
[3] Apologies to Vongrief. castlegreifenghast.deviantart.…
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Nice! I love it when someone takes a movie and makes a realistic scenario based upon how the movie's plot would affect the world.