The Great Bear’s terms were simple: they would serve as would any other Russians; they would send their children to Russian schools, like any other; they would speak the Human Language that was sweeping the world; and Russian law would be the highest law, not the law of the Torah.

The Jews even got access to a couple ports on the Black Sea, and exposure to some of the advanced technology of the Russians.

Jewish citizens from across the world poured into the homeland they called New Israel, and began to build something grand for themselves, and for Russia.

When World War II had begun, Japan had already been flexing its muscle in Southeast Asia, completely destabilizing the region. Russia evacuated the Imperial Family from Beijing, and many nobles fled as warlords and revolutionaries alike tore the country apart, resettling in the east of Russia around Lake Baikal. They gave up their Chinese citizenship with remarkable speed and ease, became Russian subjects, and worked on building up their new homeland properly, subject to the same rules as the Jews.

Importantly, no Confucian rules were allowed, and that philosophy was to be treated only as a rigid and limiting set of history to be avoided.

Ergo, no real Taiwan in this world, either. At least, not in the sense I had known, as it was now the home of The Mandarin and his Ten Rings organization, and nobody in China wanted to mess with him.

World War I had seen the emergence of the first heroic figures outside of Russia and the Tribes. Although prized by their peoples, they often ended up in combat against one another, and many perished.

In the years between the two World Wars, the vigilante movement of heroes and detectives rose, while conspiracies flourished across the globe, shadowy organizations grew, and superhumans fought in the shadows as covert operatives of national powers.

In World War II, true superhumans of the West finally came onto the national stage, exemplified by the Patriot, Steve Rogers, transformed by science into the world’s ‘first’ super-soldier, leading a band of Liberators made up of other superhuman beings into Europe to do battle with the Nazis, including the Prince of Atlantis!

It was seeing his name in the histories that had been the final jolt to me. There was no doubt that this was an alternate Marvel-esque universe if Steve Rogers had popped up in the timeline.

I didn’t know what had prompted Briggs and Sama to so forcefully act on history and completely rewrite whole sections of it, but it still hadn’t been able to stop the creation of this world’s Captain America!

A major difference in his origin was that after the assassination attempt on him failed, Dr. Erskine had vanished, and no more super-soldiers were made. They wouldn’t appear until after the war was over.

WW II had ended considerably faster than I remembered. When Germany made the mistake of trusting in its new Weird Science war machines and invaded Russia, the Great Bear had been waiting.

The German Army was completely annihilated, a show of power that stunned the whole world. Russia rolled over Poland and sacked Germany in less than a year. The Allied Powers were barely landing in Europe as the Russian Army steamrolled in from the east, and the panicking, fleeing Germans threw themselves into the arms of the Allies in terror.

It was the first time Primus made a showing on the world stage. His absolute thrashing of Hauptman Axis made all the papers.

There was no division of Germany in this universe; Russia took it all. Then the Great Bear glanced down at all the cowering lands of Eastern Europe that Germany had conquered, and the Russians took them, too.

Streaking jet planes flew over a shocked and terrified Italian population, dropping leaflets in Human that everyone could read despite themselves. It informed them that Russia was watching, and that Mussolini and the members of his government would be disposed of, or the armies of Russia would come and burn Italy to the ground if needed to make that happen.

Mussolini died less than two days later as he attempted to flee, Italy and its armies collapsed, and World War II had ended with a whimper.

Well, almost.

Japan had made the very bad mistake of organizing an attack on Hawaii, which had been admitted to the Tribal Nations and was home to their small Pacific Fleet, the nation having more mercantile power than naval power. Unfortunately, they had not reckoned with the fact that the Tribes had more superhumans than anyone in the world suspected, and after the assault on Pearl Harbor was beaten back by flying warriors who happened to be in residence, those superhumans struck back.

The vaunted samurai traditions of the leaders of Nippon died in blood and fire. The armies and navies in Japan were stunned when they were completely bypassed and Tokyo was laid to waste, the Emperor was captured, and all the generals and admirals in residence, along with all the naval vessels in port, were completely destroyed by Tribal champions. Most of the Japanese officer corps at home was simply expunged, and their home defense forces either surrendered quickly and were demobilized and sent home, or they were annihilated.

Realizing they were probably going to be executed for everything they’d been doing if they returned home, most of the Japanese navy managed to make it to Borneo, where they urgently surrendered to the British and the Australians, rather than go home and face the waiting Tribes ready to kill them.

That was the first published appearance of The Hag, who appeared to be a scarred Inuit woman. She had appeared in the prison camp, unerringly slaughtered the entire complement of Japanese officers, then announced that as long as the Japanese warships were all towed out into deeper waters and sunk, the crews and most of the armies would be allowed to return home.

That is, except for several regiments of Japanese soldiers who had become infamous for their brutality and deeds during their occupations. Those were summarily executed by other Tribal superhumans who had appeared, some from the very countries they had rode roughshod over, and thousands of Japanese did not escape justice with the move.

The British were much less than pleased, but their superhumans numbered only a handful, and they’d seen literally hundreds of beyond-humans at work in the merciless purge of the Japanese commanders. They could only bite their lips and let it go, thankful there had not been any spillover into their own forces.

No atomic bomb had been dropped, but the splashing blow of organized superhumans on that level nevertheless hit the whole world just as hard. The way the first publicly-known Phoenix had taken out multiple battleships in mere minutes terrified every other nation in the world... except for Russia, who had Primus.

At that time, America only had a few Powered: the Patriot, the Human Torch, the Whizzer, and Toro, and one of them wasn’t even human.

Einstein was in New Israel, America’s atomic program had gone nowhere yet... and then the Great Bear invited delegates from every major country in the world to an area in Siberia for an important announcement, and there detonated the world’s first public hydrogen bomb.

Nobody was happy to hear that the Tribal Nations and Russia had this technology... and, they hinted, they weren’t the only ones who did.

---

The United Nations was formed in 1946. It was set in one of the most hotly contested regions of the world, in beautiful Beirut in Lebanon, as a beacon of peace in the often-fractious Middle East. With no Israel there to really stir up the region, however, its establishment, and the weight of the Great Bear behind it, actually helped the stability of the area immensely.

Again, the United States, twenty-four strong, although on the Security Council, were secondary players.

Everyone was utterly shocked when a minor African nation named Wakanda was nominated to the Security Council by the Russians and the Tribal Nations. Furthermore, Atlantis itself was invited to a permanent seat, as its Prince Namor had fought in the World War on the side of the Allies, and plainly was an ancient nation with advanced technology that could benefit the whole world by trading and becoming more involved.

It had also come out that Russia and the Tribes had been fighting against infiltration and raids by Lemuria for literally decades in a shadow war, and had finally dropped atomics on their major population centers in utter frustration at the continued belligerence of the Deviant populations in the Pacific.

The Deviants of Lemuria had not been exterminated, although much of their population had been wiped out. What survivors had survived eked out a living in the shadows of the depths of the waters around Terra, raiding for revenge... and if they were tracked back to their homes, were promptly wiped out, even today. The number of world-threatening things they were believed responsible for was not small...

Importantly, this sidelining and being caught between the Great Bear and the Tribal Nations had prompted a whole world change, especially as Russia began to share certain technologies with other minor nations of the world... and the Tribes helped them evict foreigners who were suppressing them and not helping them.

Gingerly, the United States had broached the subject of alliance and potential consolidation in the future with the Tribes.

The response from the Tribes had been withering. The States’ continued discrimination against non-whites and women, their many broken treaties with the native Tribes, their imperial treatment of their own ‘colonies’ and their natives, and the continuous intelligence games being undertaken against them to steal their technologies had not engendered any sense of trust whatsoever in America to actually hold to its own professed values.

The States had slunk back behind the great river, determined to build themselves up to rival the Tribes and Russia... and somehow, continually falling short.

But that was changing, and some people were trying very hard to make that change.

=========

The Mountain was stripped down to a wife-beater and pants of some material that would be protected by his own invulnerability (did Sama and Briggs invent unstable molecule fabric already?), and was in his bare feet.

[Note: A wife-beater is a reference to an old-style sleeveless and collarless undershirt. The term came about as a result of media coverage of a Detroit man who was found in a bloody undershirt after beating his wife to death. As you might imagine, they aren’t popular in America today, but they’d have no problems in this world. Dyna’s noting it because to her, it stands out.]

He was basically working on his timing issues with his heavyfoot, and how to contain the force of his leg, using his own strength to lift one foot while his power Rooted him, and when he released the Root, sending himself flying.

The timing and control had to be pretty precise, or his foot either slammed back down, or he kicked himself in the face and went for a backflop in doing so. He had to let the rebound lift his whole body at once, not just his foot, and he had to capture as much of the force as possible to get maximum distance.

But he could tell it was working, because he almost timed it right once, and went flying tail over teakettle forty feet into the air as the ground beneath him sort of snapped, shouting wildly as he did so.

He came down pretty heavily and awkwardly, having a lot of momentum and basically curling up into a ball so he didn’t hit too badly.

I didn’t even have time to stroll up when he surged to his feet, howling and laughing in triumph.

“It works! Haw haw haw haw haw haw! It works! Gods damn all you bloody fliers looking down on me! Just you wait until I get this working right! Haw haw haw!” He tossed the sands into the air, letting them fall down on him, and then in an energetic frenzy that rapidly turned into almost motionlessness, he began his seventy-ninth attempt at a proper stance and lift.

I was practicing my flying, of course, keeping a watch over him as I worked at my ‘interactive Repulse gliding’ technique.

There were a considerable amount of nuances to what I was doing, many of which I tied to muscle control to simplify things. Repelling air in the direction you want to fly in is counter-intuitive, after all. Shouldn’t you want to push off against it? Likewise, you’d want to push off the air under you to glide along, right?

No. You let the many tons of air pressure do the work, you didn’t fight it. Me repelling the air to push off it was kind of like trying to emulate a fan or propeller, meaning that it would work, but I’d be doing all the active work, instead of the environment.