And here we are, once again, at the start of a new tale, a new adventure. To those who have read my works before, I thank you for your continued patience and patronage. To those who are just now finding me, welcome aboard!

This story was inspired by a random comment one of my Patrons left on my Patreon. I had just posted a chapter of one of my other books, set in a world where a System Apocalypse event happened, turning our world into a game world. But this patron asked me a simple question.

What would happen if a System Apocalypse happened in a superhero world?

That idea struck a chord in me, especially since I happen to know a couple tabletop RPGs designed for dealing with superheroes and the like. How would the apocalypse change things? Would the System include superpowers, or would they be something outside the System? Would the System block the powers altogether?

So, I decided that I would take up that patron’s challenge, and write a story about a system apocalypse in a superhero world. And then my hard drive decided it didn’t like me, and I had to send the thing off for data recovery. Needless to say, I didn’t get much writing done during that time.

However, with drive restored (and backups made), I now turn my attention back to this idea. For this story, I’ll be using Champions/HERO System 5th Edition rules. All the actions and characters will conform to those rules. There will be actual dice rolls determining the flow of the action. There will be crunchy blue boxes as people try to work around a System that is limiting what they had previously been able to do by instinct and training alone.

I hope you enjoy the ride.

--Stuart Grosse

Prologue – How it All Ended, and Began

I was there when it happened. When the walls of reality came crashing down upon us. When everything changed.

I was there. I watched it happen. There wasn’t anything I could do, of course. When two veritable demigods are fighting to the death, getting caught in between is a great way to end up very dead. Or worse.

Once again, like so many times before, The Master of Paradoxes had struck out against his old rival, his trusted friend, his hated enemy. Once again, he had stolen someone important to them, and put their life at risk. And once again, Doctor of Time had come to stop him.

The smart play, when two demigods, two lords of time, are fighting is to clear away, to get as far away from the fight as possible, and hope that any echoes through time don’t do something unfortunate, like erase you from existence on accident. Oh, sure, the Master had his lasers and his minions, and the Doctor had his sonic probe, and there was certainly danger in getting caught in the crossfire between them, but that wasn’t where the real battle was being waged. The real battle was nestled in the very fabric of reality itself, as the two titans threw the force of years, of centuries, of ages at each other. Distant stars went supernova and were then reborn every time they clashed.

The smart play would have been to stay away. But ‘smart’ and ‘profitable’ were not always the same thing. After all, smart plays often kept you from risking things, but risks typically brought the best rewards. And there were plenty of rewards in what I was doing when the world shifted.

See, even supers need to hang their hat somewhere. Heroes have their bases, and villains have their lairs. Fun fact, these bases and lairs are often full of all kinds of wonderful goodies that can be easily sold or repurposed, if only they could be extracted from their current location. Unfortunately, the fact that heroes and villains tend to have a healthy level of paranoia about people breaking down their door to say ‘hello’ means that they tend to have some rather advanced security systems. Dealing with those security systems is even more of a pain when you are also trying to avoid getting caught by the residents who live there. Engaging in super-battles while trying to bypass deathtraps is NOT a great way to have a long and prosperous career.

But I was not your average sneak-thief. I liked to think of myself as a master thief and assassin, an adventurer and free blade for hire, but the truth was that my skills were relatively average, all told, but my powers and gear made up for a lot of my weaknesses. I was not the strongest super out there, not by a long shot, but a lack of weaknesses meant that I could at least put up a fight, no matter the conditions. Didn’t mean I’d win the fight, but I wasn’t helpless.

That is an important part of being a supervillain, especially one who normally works on his own. Even if we ignore things like vulnerabilities and immunities, where people take more or less damage from certain types of attack, you still have issues with negators. Negators were just what they sounded like on the tin, something or someone that either dampened or negated powers. If you relied too much on your powers, then a negator could shut you down, hard.

But the trick was that unlimited omni-negators, or even unlimited multi-negators, were EXTREMELY rare. Like, there were more people who literally could rewrite the entire universe with a sneeze than there were unlimited multi-negators. Most negators either had a single type of power or power source that they could negate, or there were severe limits on their abilities.

For instance, Firefighter was a hero in Pensylvania that literally negated any fires or fire-based abilities, regardless of source, that were within his area of effect. However, he was limited to JUST fire powers, and there were downsides, like killing off any internal combustion engines, or even cooking fires, in his radius. Since his radius was about fifteen miles, that had some serious problems if he used his powers. Which was why he usually just stayed in a Quaker community most of the time, and only got called out to deal with forest fires or other natural disasters, usually getting a flying hero to air-drop him into the fire.

There was another guy, a gigolo villain called the Powerfucker, who could negate any kind of power he touched with his groin. I never asked how that came about, and I never wanted to know. However, the guy could pelvic thrust his way out of a power blast from literal gods, and grinding up on someone with superpowers would rob them of those powers. He’s dead now, anyways, since he started thinking with his ‘powers’ and tried to take on the Valkyries. Any one of them he could have handled, maybe. But as a group? They’re still finding pieces of him, I’m told.

So, anyway, powers fall into a few basic categories. You have Mutants, Tech, Aliens, and Magic. A negator that can take on Mutants almost never is able to handle Tech, and a Tech Negator sucks against Magic. So on and so on. There’s some grey area, of course, but that’s the basics.

I was a Mutant, blessed (or cursed, depending on your point of view), with ice powers. However, I also had a Tech-based costume, and some Magic gear. No matter what happened, I was pretty certain I at least had SOME kind of response, at least something that would allow me to get the hell out of dodge.

Which is why I was there, when the two Lords of Time collided in their final, climactic battle. Oh, I wasn’t participating in the battle. I was robbing them. Both of them.

See, the Master and the Doctor were tricky, keeping their homes with them. Not a pocket dimension, like some sorcerers, but their homes were actually alien ships that were capable of moving through space and time, and blend in wherever they went. This made robbing them just a bit difficult. Fortunately, both hero and villain had stashed their rides near to the place they were fighting. As in, little more than fifty feet apart, each camouflaged and powered down so that no one noticed.

I had just picked up some of the best items from the Doctor of Time’s place (couldn’t get everything, since it was one of those ‘bigger on the inside’ deals), and was moving on to the Master of Paradox’s lair when it happened. The two titans were fighting just over my head, maybe fifty feet away. It was only because of my stealth and their own issues that they didn’t see me. And the only reason I was safe that close to the fight was the temporal shield emitter I was wearing.

That’s when it happened. Raw time crashed with pure paradox, and the universe itself screamed in torment. Night turned to day turned to yesterday and tomorrow and blue and yellow and whale and petunia, and then it snapped back, all at once, with a thunderous roar that was not heard but felt. And then I saw the blue box for the first time.