The Story so far (Background)...

Whitehall, London, Present Day*

"Gentlemen. I'm sure you're all busy. Please be seated and make yourselves comfortable. Ah, introductions..." said the man in the suit at the head of the curved room with raised seats around him. "I'm Professor Michael Soames. I'm one of the consultants to the Government and advisor to ..." he glanced at the papers on the desk in front of him, tilting his glasses at the corner. "Superhuman Management Intervention Tactical Enforcement".

He paused and looked up at the shadow draped figures sat in chairs about the room. Some smoked, others sipped from whisky tumblers. A couple were leaning across and whispering to each other. Soames knew some of them - heads of Intelligence, Police, Fire, Anti-Terrorism, Armed forces, Government think tanks and personal advisers to the Prime Minster, amongst others. There were also a number of European representatives, and Soames figured those were the ones ignoring the 'No Smoking' signs.

"SMITE" he stated, looking about. "No doubt dreamt up to give the papers something to get their knickers in a twist over. The Tabloids will trip over themselves trying to rhyme SMITE with other words if we cock up." he chuckled, but let it die when it was met with silence. "Quite. I'll begin."

"Three years ago Professor Albert Watkins, better known by his superheroic codename ADJUTANT, was framed for a crime he did not commit. He cleared his name, but the damage was done. The public trust in superhumans and their ways was shattered, and the press stoked the fire. Something had to be done, and Adjutant did it when he took his mask off on live television. As you may recall, the UKChampions - Adjutants team - picked up the baton and revealed their identities and in so doing sparked the Governments registration program. Every superhuman was required to reveal their identity and register with the Government or be treated as hostile and an enemy of the state."

"It was... less than successful." he coughed, bowing head slightly. "No, scratch that. It was a bloody disaster. One of the Champions, Cut-Lass, found out her family had been kidnapped whilst she was giving an interview on live television. Allies and friends were set at each others throats when a significant number of well respected and experienced superheroes refused to reveal their identities, and the Major Tom situation... Oh right. I'd best explain. Major Tom did the right thing and revealed his Identity, but he also revealed the ID of his partner, Ground Controller. She was arrested, Tom broke her out of prison and handed himself in. Press had a field day, calling Tom a judas and all of a sudden a bad situation had turned nasty. With Heroes battling Heroes in the streets the bad fellows had a field day. By that I mean the Eurotrash, Insidious Inc, The Usurpers, the Five Horsemen, the Chaos Crew and other similarly colourful names given to what are essentially a bunch of psychopaths with superhuman abilities that make a nonsense of anything the Army threw at them."

"Harrumph!" sniffed a man from the shadows.

Soames raised an eyebrow. "Something to add, General Merritt?"

"Get on with it." spat the General.

Soames referred to his notes and continued. "Well, things changed when a new group of superhumans turned up out of the blue. They called themselves the Vanguard and initial Intelligence rated them as Class 3. You know about the classifications of ... no? Alright."

Continued...

*By present Day I mean a few years from now... the game is set in the mid-late teens of the 21st Century.

• Class 1 - Street Level usually classified by people who are skilled, trained individuals who use weapons or gadgets to beat rank and file criminals to a pulp. Many are successful in their own niche, but of course there are exceptions. When the vigilante known as Chimaera was chopped up in a warehouse by a dozen thugs with Uzis the superhero community went barmy, but come on, they must have expected something like that. You can't take on an army of thugs in brightly coloured spandex and expect to last long. Anyway...
  
  
• Class 2 - Low superhuman. These people tend to have a single power, or several low effectiveness powers. They are very effective within a narrow field. For instance Madame Zuzu, despite her ridiculous accent and desire to sell you pegs, has been proven to be an effective psychic. Found that missing heiress last year, though the News of the World expose on her charging an arm and a leg for seances didn't go down too well. Everyone has bills to pay I suppose, but the public expect these people to do what they do for nothing, or some strange sense of duty. Flogging pegs and lucky heather isn't going to pay the gas bill...
  
  
• Class 3 - Your standard rank and file superhuman. Flight, Energy Blast, reasonable level of superhuman strength, speed, intelligence, effectiveness. Unlike the previous two classes we really need to keep an eye on these people. There's no real way to accurately measure what they can do, and some surprise us from time to time. Any time you read in the papers or see on the news about some spandex clad type jumping around saving someone or bashing someones teeth in for the common good generally involves a Class 3. They tend to police themselves thankfully, and there are certain precautions we can take to combat the bad ones. It's a struggle, mind, but they are generally shipped off to the SLAB, the superhuman prison on the outskirts of Brussels. Tomahawk is a Class 3, and so is that nutjob Vengeance.
  
  
• Class 4 - Alright, this is firmly in the region of calling out the Army, Navy, Air Force and anyone with their own tank or Bazooka. If we have a Class 4 incident it costs the taxpayer millions in clean up and dominates headlines for weeks. For example Majestic stopped a hostage situation a year or so ago and the battle lasted all day. Literally. Trashed a square mile of the City, multiple injuries, hell of a job cleaning up and for what - saving a few bankers who probably ripped the country off a few years ago with their dodgy dealing? Papers loved it, Public were so so. Politicians put on a brave face and a few governmental heads lost their jobs. Needless to say Class 4 superhumans are like small armies. If they work for or with us, great. If not? Yes, well, thankfully there aren't that many nut jobs at this level - that we know of.
  
  
• Class 5 - if Class 4 is a 'Delta' level threat, Class 5 are Omega. In Britain only Adjutant is known to be Class 5. There are a couple in Europe - I think one is German, the other French. China *might* have some but it's hard to tell, there's one in Russia and a hippy type in the South American jungle who is best left alone. America, of course, has the most, and their premier Superteam the Ultrahumans has Star Sentinel and Thunder Woman amongst others who nearly match those two. No conventional weaponry will stop a Class 5. Full stop. I'll let that sink in for a moment. And yes, I include the nuclear option. They represent the greatest earth bound threat to humanity that we know of because their power cannot easily be classified. A number of Aliens operate at Class 5 - at the very least - and we should thank ourselves lucky that the majority seem to be on the side of good. We have... no contingency plan for any disaster involving them turning to the 'other side'. Well, I suppose you could hide...

Soames took his glasses off and looked around the darkened room. "The Vanguard were unregistered types who showed up and fought the good fight, battling the nut cases who were until that point making good whilst the Registered and Unregistered heroes kicked each others teeth in and blew things up. We don't know too many details of them. What we DO know is that at some point their power ramped up, off the scale."

"I thought this... Class 5... was the practical limit of these people?" asked Claude Belmont, the minister for Emergency Building Redevelopment and Repair.

Soames cringed. "Yes... and no. Class 5 has no upper limit. We class something a five when we haven't a bloody clue what they can do, and over what area. Adjutant is as analytical as they come and he states, for the record, that this lot, to a man. Actually, there was a woman too if I recall. Anyway, to a person they were 'Five or higher'. And that's coming from one of the ten most powerful beings on this Planet, in terms of sheer destructive power. Thankfully it didn't come to a fight - Adjutant made his peace with them, and they were left to their own - thankfully good - devices."

"What happened?" asked another faceless type from the shadows. 'Minister of making tea?', Soames wondered.

"We're not sure. 18 months ago Adjutant reported a temporal 'ripple'. Ordinary people got on with their lives but a great number of super types got their knickers in a twist over it. We thought them all bonkers until people started coming forward, claiming to speak, read and write fluid German despite never having studied it or even been to Germany. There were... quite a few, enough to let us know something had happened."

"Quite a few? What's that? Five, Ten? Hardly worth a fuss? Strange things happen all the..."

"Eighteen thousand nine hundred and forty seven people at current count. Quite a few... They are the ones we know about. Men, women, young, old. Some family pets would only respond to commands in German. Something happened. We never found out what it was though. Life has gone on. Since the Liberals lost the election, we have a coalition Government whose first act was to amend the Registration Bill. Whilst it is illegal to be an unregistered Vigilante, the law gives them some leeway, providing they don't mess up. It was that or hide whilst the superhumans tossed Buses and Cars about in the streets, and we had enough of that last time. Things are getting better, but there are plenty of bad guys out there, and the Judicial Union Superhuman Taskforce Initiative Continental Europe act (JUSTICE) requires we send out our registered heroes to clean up other peoples mess. Frankly, we need all the help we can get. The UKChampions never really recovered from the Registration debacle and of course it cost a bloody fortune to relocate them and hand them new lives. Most retired. The Cut-Lass disaster still makes me cringe."

Silenced followed his statement. "Right chaps, questions?"

"What happened to these... Vanguard?"

"We don't know. Gone. Vanished. Many are relieved to have beings of that power level out of the picture, I'm not so sure. Anything or anyone that can take power of that magnitude out could certainly destroy the Earth and possibly this Solar System. Whatever happened, wherever they are, if they are alive, something in me tells me we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. No, don't ask me why. Let's just say I'm one of those who can speak German without having learned it, and when I *do* speak the language, I get the strangest feeling that Britain was, or might have been, a very different place to the one we know now..."

"Are there any immediate threats to National or International Security?"

"That we can't deal with? No. We liaise with the Europeans and the Americans all the time, and joint task forces are commonplace, even if the French want to argue with everyone and the Italians are over dramatic. That isn't to say that everything is hunky dory though... A couple of days ago a Farmer came across a crashed aeroplane in his field. An aeroplane dating back to World War II. Except the carbon dating shows that it flew days ago, not decades, and the bullet holes in the thing were recent. More than that, we're not sure quite how it got to a field in Bristol seeing as the wings had been torn off and were nowhere to be found... The metal superstructure has some interesting properties too, if you refer to your briefing pack on page 76 you will see the Metallurgical report and spectral analysis show that..."

OOC See the welcome thread for my follow up to this. Until then, I'll lock this thread to read only...