The Atomic Thunderbolt Universe

 

(Based on comics by Regor Company)

 

Other Appellations:

 

The Thriving Wasteland

 

Fox Harmonic:

 

Resh-Eta-Gamma

 

Astral Connection:

 

L0 D0

 

This universe does not have an Astral connection. Telepaths and thaumaturgists may find their standard powers and abilities disrupted in this universe.

 

Caution Rating: 

 

1

 

The only note of caution for this world is its incredibly high level of radioactivity, though its nothing to be concerned over with the proper precautions.

 

Multiverse Activity:

 

Seldom

 

The people of this universe have been conditioned and bred to be satisfied with very, very little. They eat the sun’s light through their skin, though they only feel it filtered through their tinted windows. They don’t want to see the outside. There’s nothing pretty outside. There’s nothing interesting outside. The only thing that matters to them are the digital wonderlands projected inside their domed houses. In them, nothing grows, nothing hurts, and nothing changes.

 

The multiverse, with its mystery and danger, is something the people of this world would rather not interact with. Besides, they can make a thousand multiverses on their computers.

 

Though the Atomic Thunderbolt journeys across the multiverse in search of things to grow in his destroyed world, he journeys alone, simply because no one cares about anything beyond their pleasure domes.

 

Keywords:

 

Protective Dominion, Analog, Quantum

 

Description:

The Dawning Thunder

 

 

A hyperstatic climacteric, the point at which superhumans become the principle guiding force in human history, sometimes comes in the form of an entire generation of superhumans. For most universes in the Protective Dominion, superhumans have a sporadic presence throughout history, sometimes showing up as legendary heroes such as Hercules and Gilgamesh. Their hyperstatic climacteric is like a dam bursting and a flood of colorful superheroes springing forth to submerge the world. But some worlds only produce a single superhuman, and sometimes this is enough to change the entire world, for better or worse.

 

For this universe, that superhuman was William Burns, known to the men that fished him out of the wreckage of his patrol boat as Private Burns, known to the dockworkers that threw bottles at him as “Willy the Wharf Rat,” known to the church workers that poured hot soup in his bowl as poor William, and known to the world at large as the Atomic Thunderbolt.

 

William Burns was not born with superpowers. His powers were the result of artificial means, what we call secondary hyperstatis. A combination of radiation and drugs made him a superhuman, the very kind of man dreamed of by the treatment’s creator, Dr. Josiah Rhonne.

 

Like many scientists, Josiah was deeply troubled by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All his life Josiah wanted to find some way to mitigate the effects of aging, or perhaps even reverse them, but in the shadow of the mushroom cloud he feared that even if he succeeded it would mean nothing. What did it matter if one could escape death by old age when death by global thermonuclear war loomed?

 

Desperation gave Josiah a mad, brilliant idea–the bomb could not hurt Superman.

 

If Superman was real, he wouldn’t be worried global thermonuclear war. And if all men were Superman, then no one would never be a reason to have nuclear weapons at all.

 

If he could create some way to turn mankind into superhumans…if he could make it so that an atomic fireball was nothing but a sparkler to a man and radiation nothing but a strange light…

 

It was a crazy sci-fi idea, but was the atomic bomb not a crazy sci-fi idea? Did it not become real? Why not this idea, this far more noble idea, this one last chance to save humanity from itself?

And certainly there would be other benefits to a world full of superhumans. It would be a world where small groups of men with machine guns wouldn’t be able to herd crowds into boxcars. It would be a more savage world, a world where the fist was the most powerful weapon available to man, but also a more honorable, chivalrous world.

 

It would be a good world if everyone was Superman.

 

Josiah had resources. He was, to his everlasting guilt, one of the men that worked on the Manhattan project, and he had patents across the energy field. He could afford to lock himself in a well-furnished laboratory and experiment. He could afford to do anything. His friends and family begged him to stop draining his affluence, but eventually they learned that he would not answer knocking at his door.

 

He was saving the world. All obligations familial or otherwise were secondary.

 

In 1946, just a year after the bombs fell, Josiah thought he had a way to make superhumans.

 

He only needed someone to test his treatment on. There was some success with animal testing, though he deeply regretted it. He had to drug the animal and drown it, it was the only thing that could be done after it shredded its metal cage like paper. There needed to be a human trial, but who would volunteer to be the Guinea pig of a scientist on the outs with the scientific community.

 

Enter William Burns, who had drifted like a ghost through the world ever since the patrol boat. Shell shocked was the phrase people used to describe him. Had he been born in later decades, they would have said he had post-traumatic stress disorder. He couldn’t work, didn’t feel like work, didn’t feel like anything. His whole life was spent in the quest of finding someplace warm to lie down in and wait…wait for something he couldn’t quite name. Death, probably. Waiting was miserable work, tiring work. Sometimes he would see himself in the dock waters and cry. His teeth were rotten. His face a bush of hair. He hated the man he saw. That was the burden he carried every day. Waiting for nothing was tiring work, but it was the only work he was good for.

Future historians, eager to blame the world’s woes on an easy target, would say that Dr. Rhonne took advantage of William Burns. William never say it like that. He thought it was a great deal. He lived, and he became the first of a superhumanity. He died, and well, he died, and that didn’t bother him like it did most people.

 

But he was never in any danger of death. The one who was in danger was, ironically, Dr. Rhonne himself. He assembled his device with the laser-focused intent for it to impart bioreactive energies. The effect was cellular destruction and rampant growth–cancer, in the same way a rockslide was a sculpture or a spilled bucket of paint a masterpiece. He thought only of putting energy into the patient body and reformatting his body into something mythological. He gravely underestimated several factors–not least of which was the force of recoil.

 

A slight warping of metal support structures under the pressure of atomic micro-explosions led to a failure cascade across the device. The ultimate result was a full-scale atomic explosion. It was very fortunate that Dr. Rhonne’s laboratory was miles from the nearest town, otherwise the birth of the Atomic Thunderbolt would have been accompanied by many other deaths.

 

Dr. Rhonne was vaporized before he realized the mistake he had made. But William survived. He was, after all, made to do just that against an atomic blast.

 

He was solar powered, like a plant. So long as he had enough sunlight, his cells would produce energy. He no longer had to eat, drink, or sleep. He was always warm, which he found wonderful, and had a resting body temperature of 100 degrees, far more if he exerted himself. He could fry an egg in his hands after a jog. He was invincible. Nuclear arms meant nothing to him, let alone bullets and knives. Radiation didn’t hurt him. The only thing that could theoretically kill him was darkness, and that would take a long time.

 

He was strong. His muscles were like machines, they produced enough force to propel him for miles when he jumped, enough force to smash through buildings, enough force to make him move faster than a jet, and enough force to, if he punched with all his might, create shockwaves that dwarfed those of the atom bombs.

 

Standing over the wreckage, William Burns vowed to carry on Dr. Josiah Rhonne’s work and save mankind from itself. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, he didn’t understand any of the science behind the Rhonne treatment, but he was sure there were men out there just as smart as Rhonne that could pick up from where he left off. Until then, he had to do something.

 

Dr. Rhonne told him that he was turning everyone in the world into Superman, so William decided to be Superman. He made himself a colorful costume and too the name Atomic Thunderbolt because he could move as fast as a thunderbolt–it was by far his favorite power. He could race the lightning, see the lightning, touch the lightning. He would go out into the country while the sky thundered and leap among the hills. He would touch the lightning and feel it tickle his skin, and the wet coolness of the air and the smell of ozone and the thick darkness broken by cracks of light–it was his heaven, and he was the only man in heaven.

 

It wasn’t long until William found  two scientists named, of all things, Rigor and Mortis, who were interested in seeing if they couldn’t reverse engineer Rhonne’s treatment from William’s body. It was difficult to extract samples, nothing could pierce his skin, but they made due with saliva and tears. Eventually, they were able to replicate and mass-produce Rhonne’s treatment.

 

The Atomic Thunderbolt managed to achieve Dr. Rhonne’s dream. Mankind no longer had to fear nuclear war.

 

Which is exactly why there was one.

 

The War

 

The period of 1946-1950 was one of hope. As the first member of Homo Rhonne, William put any fears the public had about superhumans to rest. He performed feats of strength around America. He crushed tungsten in his hands. He napped in blast furnaces. He was Houdini as a god. He even got to help the police on occasion. There was one case where a group of bankrobbers surrendered peacefully as soon as they saw him walk up in his costume. William Burns was a superhero, and soon, everyone would be a superhero. People were excited.

 

In 1948, Rigor and Mortis finally got the Rhonne treatment to work. Thus began what William would remember as a dream-like period of history, brief and blissful. New superhumans rose one-by-one to join him. Mr. Invincible, the Atomic Miracle, Skyscraper Smith, and more, and more, and more, until there were more superhumans in real life than there were in the comic books. The world felt like it was about to transform into something strange and beautiful. The world was on the cusp of becoming something like a global Olympus.

 

Then 1950 rolled around.

 

War broke out in Korea. The United States fielded their superhumans, and somehow, superhumans from China were there to meet them.

 

Nuclear secrets weren’t the only secrets leaked to the communists.

 

A tense stand-off ensued. Superhuman on superhuman conflict promised to level Korea. When every punch hit with the force of a nuke, there wouldn’t be a country if the superhumans went at it.

Then someone threw the first punch and took out part of a city. Both sides denied it, both sides blamed the other, and both sides called for retaliation.

It was a bizarre conflict. The superhumans were unable to harm each other, even with their strength. Yet they still hit each other as the country shook. It was what was expected of them.

 

Then the nukes came into play. They were of course, useless against superhumans, but so were other superhumans. Their purpose was to hold hostage what the superhumans carried about–their lands, their cities, their people. Human extinction was an impossibility with the superhuman numbers being what they were, but most of mankind wasn’t

 

The military leaders and politicians promised that the nukes were brought out without the intention of actually using them. They were deterrents. Their purpose was to stop the superhumans from destroying the country.

 

They were either unwilling or unable to grasp the irony of the situation.

 

And then, just as with the superhumans, someone threw the first punch.

 

And that was that.

 

There was nothing to do but wait. It started suddenly. Lots of explosions. Lots of fighting. But overall it was a very slow apocalypse. Lines of communication were cut, which made the situation so much worse, as military commanders treated dead silence as a go-ahead to retaliate. For most places, it was as if a wall had suddenly been placed between them and the outside world. Nothing existed but their town. Then people got sick along with planets and animals. Everything died. It was like a killing frost in summer.

 

William recalled that he felt like he was on the street again. All he could do was wait and endure, wait and endure.

 

Total environmental collapse resulted before the decade was up.

 

The Present

 

Mankind now lives on a planet where man alone stands as organism.

 

War has become a thing of the past, as there is nothing to fight over but dust.

 

There are no plants. There are no animals. Buildings remain, though they are rare, bubbles of glass and light in endless desserts.

 

The oceans churn without life, blue empty wombs, the deep tombs of species mankind would never know.

 

Mankind is content, but not happy. The domes provide everything, so long as its nothing real. Children know what forests and jungles and animals are without having seen a blade of grass.

There are special places, church-vaults which contain the last non-human organisms. Some care for them. Most don’t. Most don’t want anything but the domes. That was a cost almost as great as the Earth itself–the human spirit.

 

Mankind doesn’t go outside. Mankind doesn’t look outside. Mankind doesn’t even feel the sunlight unless its first filtered through tinted windows that hide the ugliness outside. Mankind was encouraged by their leaders to immerse themselves in the pleasures of the domes to curb the skyrocketing post-war suicide rate–“darkening” as its called, for enough time spent out of the sun will kill a superhuman. But now the behavior is set. Now it does not need to be encouraged. Now it is simply human nature.

 

The Atomic Thunderbolt now roams the multiverse looking for something, anything, that can grow in the radioactive wasteland of his homeworld. He hopes, with the same hope that burned within him when he became the Human Thunderbolt, that if he can revive his world that he can revive the spirit of his people.

 

He searches to this day.