The Moral Neutrality universe

General GTG Sentinel Comics Lore
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We have our inversiverse, where good is evil and evil is good, but what about a world devoid of dualistic ethics? There’s at least one animated non-Sentinel Comics story which does a pretty good job of making morally grey versions of that company’s Legacy, Wraith, and Fanatic ripoffs interesting, as they compete against a secret plot to destroy them which may or may not be the work of the Baron Blade, GWV, and kinda-Deadline-maybe equivalents. I thought it would work and be interesting.

Before we even get into characters, whether obvious ones like Legacy and Fanatic or near-impossible challenges like Captain Cosmic and Infinitor, the original genesis of this new idea was the event in this universe that takes the place of Vengeance. I don’t recall whether Inversiverse Vengeance is a theme, but the idea of what it could be called has a lot of candidates; everyone knows that vengeance or revenge are bad words, while the good equivalent might be called Justice, Retribution, Reciprocity, or the like. But when no moral judgement is being applied, then the event’s title is clear: Grievance.

So the core aspect of Grievance is that America’s Patriotic Legacy and his my-country-right-or-wrong attitude have always been the central crux of the Future Family, a government team of 3-6 heroes depending on circumstances (non-US citizens Haka and Tempest have briefly claimed membership but were never fully ratified). That rankles the nearly equal patriotism of Ivan Ramonat, who has never forgiven Legacy for the execution of his father as a war criminal, accurate though the label arguably was. Ivan’s Grievance with Legacy and other so-called heroes, who do nothing to bring American freedom or prosperity to the struggling people who call Mordengrad home, can only be satisfied by subduing the heroes and dragging them before a jury of those they’ve wronged, who shall decide upon the necessary redress to be enacted if they are found culpable. Thus, the Grievance Gang comes together, each one with a personal grudge against one Future Family member.

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Moral Neutrality Citizen Dawn is basically just a nation builder; she’s far closer to being a hero, apart from her extreme insularity. She doesn’t allow for blatant abuse of non-powered people, nor is she more totalitarian than she needs to be in order to keep the more unruly Citizens in line.

Given this, I’m deeply uncertain what to do with Expatriette. Maybe she’s just a hyper-individualist, but that doesn’t really provide much of an incentive to go around shooting people, even if she deems them to be threats to the freedoms of herself and others. It would lean villain, as Dawn leans hero, but I dunno if I’m content with that.

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Since my post on the Shipping episode is big enough already, I’ll move my only current ship here: Citizens Truth and Summer.

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m.n. LEGACY

Joseph Parsons and Paul Revere never quite saw eye to eye; they agreed that the British were going too far, but Revere was much more of a radical separatist, and Parsons was more of a Loyalist, and didn’t want to believe that Revere’s extreme beliefs about the British plans were valid. When Parsons suddenly awoke in the night, aware of a sneak attack about to begin, he realized he’d been wrong, and went to the home of Revere to hastily apologize for doubting him.

Before this incident, Parsons would never have named his son in honor of Revere, but this incident changed that. Thus began the family tradition of sons named Paul, all of them raised with absolute confidence in the American ideal. While CT Legacy (CT here stands for Core Timeline, though conveniently it also matches Connecticut, the state where Megalopolis is) was always associated with America going to war against “the bad guys” of the time, and he was very gung-ho about charging into battle to defend Freedom and Democracy, MN Legacy still fights for America in almost every war, but is much more pragmatic about the reasons why, and this sometimes means he’s far more reluctant in his participation. To find out why, let’s look at all the powered Parsons and their war:

Joseph - CT fought in the Revolutionary War alongside Paul Revere, because America was being born and the British were evil oppressors; MN fought in that war because America was becoming its own independent nation, and Britain was an old nation that didn’t want to give up its colony. There’s very little divergence between the two at this point, but Wellspring knew where it was going to go, and was comfortable with both directions.

Paul 1 - CT fought in the War of 1812; he likely favored the Democratic-Republican Party stance that said British impressment of American soldiers was an outrage. MN was distinctly more of a Federalist, and had allies among Tecumseh’s confederacy, so he went to war under a certain degree of protest, even making an impassioned speech (luckily without the superhuman degree of charisma that would be displayed by later Legacies) at the Hartford Convention about the harm to the American economy being done by the British naval blockade, stopping just shy of outright advocating that the US sue for peace and make concessions to Britan in order to secure a perhaps smaller but more stable American nation, with several states perhaps ending up ceded to Canada.

Paul 2 - “Lucky Paul” was virtually identical in both timelines, though the distinction between his “exceptional athletic capability” power and the “vitality” power of Paul 5 is retconned a little bit, making it more clear that it wasn’t until Paul 5’s time that the Parsons sons were effectively “super-heroic” exceptions to the human norm (the aforementioned Charisma bit being likely emphasized in this retelling).

Paul 3 - Late in CT Paul 3’s life, he went to defend what would become Texas against the Mexicans, and ended up dying at a very young age compared to his ancestors. In probably the biggest divergence before modern times, MN Paul actually fought for Texan independence rather than for continued American rulership (the actual people of Texas at the time mostly did want to become Americans, but Paul was firmly allied with the Republic of Texas leadership who opposed annexation); both tasks involved fighting against Mexico, but if he hadn’t died heroically protecting US soldiers, he would likely have come home and faced a court martial for actions bordering on treason.

Paul 4 - History remembers the Civil War from a very North-centric perspective, and emphasizes the evils of slavery in the South while downplaying the more economic and pragmatic reasons behind the conflict. CT Paul saw things from the very modern perspective in this regard; as the first moderately invincible Parsons, and having very recently lost his father, Paul 4 took numerous risks to try and defuse battles rather than decisively crush the Confederate army. This is…less true of MN Paul 4, who didn’t go as far as General Grant in his efforts to shorten the war by brutalizing its presumed losers, but definitely didn’t delude himself that he was on the right side of history. He privately disliked President Lincoln’s “great emancipator” public image until the day of his own death, taking that attitude to his grave only to preserve the morale of his fellow Union officers; had he not possessed a sterling sense of duty, this Paul would likely have seen the War Between States as a conflict with no right side, and might even have deserted to go west and avoid both sides.

Paul 5 - Long before CT Paul 7 ever punched a nazi, CT Paul 5 made a sincere and nearly successful effect at personally removing Valeriano “The Butcher” Weyler from the Governor-Generalship of Cuba, dying to a fusillade of shots from Weyler’s bodyguards only a few rooms away from the savage Spaniard who had oppressed the island’s revolutionaries. The actions of MN Paul 5 were extremely different in this case, most notably completely aborting that entire assault on the governor’s mansion, as he instead worked with the insurgents to preserve their lives and ensure that a slower, more patient rebellion would ultimately succeed in freeing Cuba from Spanish rule. Pleased with this effort, the Navy reassigned Paul to the Pacific theater of the war instead, employing an experimental zeppelin to rush their most valuable asset to the more unstable Phillipine front of the war, where he was instrumental to the May 1st destruction of the Spanish fleet there, and continued to assist with operations that secured the transfer of power to American ownership of the islands. He technically survived the entire war, outliving his CT counterpart by more than half a year, but during that time had struck up a whirlwind romance with a Philipino girl whom the CT Paul never met (“our” Paul would never have considered being unfaithful to the wife back home, even in spirit, but MN Paul was both a less pure soul and was immersed in more tempestuous affairs, thus that he nearly surrendered to a fit of passion). He never yielded to the woman’s advances, but she became sufficiently embittered about this spurning that she lied to her six brothers and claimed that he had “dishonored” her, leading them to ambush the American “cad” and murder him with knives, though he’d lain four of the six low in the scuffle before the last two managed to stab him simultaneously from different angles, having instinctively figured out his invincibility power in the course of the fight, though they did not remember this insight later.

Paul 6 - World War 1 was one of the most regrettably avoidable of all wars in world history, and yet it seems almost to have been a fixed point in time; amusingly enough, nearly opposite personalities of the first Legacy saw them both enter the war at the same time for nearly opposite reasons and with wildly different motives. CT Paul 6 was eager to fight the Kaiser because of what he saw as a noble struggle against Prussian expansionism; the Entente Powers he saw as more democratic than the Triple Alliance, and thus he was eager to stop the Double Eagle flag from going up over the capitals of nations west of the Rhine. He wanted to jump into the fray as soon as it began, but America’s government at the time was firmly opposed to getting involved in what they saw as a territorial squabble amongst European powers, and it wasn’t until the sinking of the Lusitania that they changed their minds. So prior to that point they’d actually ordered Legacy to stand down, as him going and fighting alongside the French and British would have been taken as a clear signal of America entering the war; only in '17 did they finally agree to let him take part, and he was the definition of gung-ho throughout the entire remaining just-shy-of-two-years of the war, leading the charge into battle and taking fire from German machine guns while the American troops behind him fearlessly went over the trenches and boldly secured mile after mile of no-man’s land. Quite to the contrary, MN Legacy was never interested in the war, even when the Lusitania sunk; he supported the factions that wanted to keep America out of it, and had to be ordered to go to the front lines, where his emphasis was firmly on protecting the troops and keeping their morale up in the miserable meat grinder of the war, rather than helping them achieve a glorious victory through reckless actions that only his power made possible. He’s still remembered as a hero in that war, but it was more through his speeches to the American soldiers and helping them endure the hardships of trench-warfare survival; ironically the net result was about the same, as fewer soldiers died in his more cautious tactical advances, but they also made fewer sacrifice plays that could have shortened the war, and so over the course of those 18-20 months, the overall flow of combat was more predictable but not actually more efficient.

Paul 7 - the Greatest Generation saw much the same “horrors of war” in Europe and in the Pacific that would later be seen in Vietnam, but the almost theatrically evil behavior intentionally adopted by the Wehrmacht and their propaganda ministry, to say nothing of what was eventually discovered going on behind the German front lines, made it easy for CT Greatest Legacy and his fellow Americans to feel like they were the good guys and their enemies were evil. Absent that perspective, MN Greatest Legacy was a bit more sober about his actions, but actually not very different. He still saw Auschwitz and Dachau as outrages, and even before learning about them, found it easy to dislike the speeches of Goebbels and the skulls and iron crosses on Nazi helmets. The only real difference between the two is probably their reaction upon meeting with Soviet forces closing in from the other side of the battlefield in mid-'45; “our” Grandpa Legacy was probably pretty clueless that allies like Proletariat would become enemies to his country a scant five or so years later, but MN Paul 7 saw the writing on the wall early on, and treated America’s Stalin-serving “allies” with extreme coolness during the wrap-up days of the war.

Fast forward to the modern age, Paul Parsons the 8th and his daughter Pauline are both dedicated to fighting for America’s continued global hegemony in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Much more so than CT Finest and Newest Legacy, MN Paul 8 and MN Pauline continue to be skeptical of Russia, also looking with distinct uncertainty at China, as the world’s economic situation begins to take a downturn in the years just before the OblivAeon Crisis.

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m.n. WRAITH

Maia Montgomery is one of the heroes who struggles most with the worry that she could fall to the dark side; CT Wraith isn’t so much determined to be good as she is terrified of becoming evil, and the preponderance of dark versions from alternate realities helps bear that out. Compared to truly sinister and/or savage variants like Madame Chairperson, The Operationalizer, the Phantom of the Operative, Smooth Operations, Vampire Wraith, Gorgon Wraith, Mummy Wraith, White Spite, Price of Freedom Wraith, and “No YUORmine”, MN Wraith isn’t that bad; she still avoids killing, even in extreme cases like Spite (who as a MN antagonist is nowhere near the monster that CT Spite is, he’s basically just a slightly upscaled Maniac Jack who acts as an agent of chaos and only occasionally kills, having never gotten a taste for it, though he does still have an strong personal grudge against Wraith particularly), and she respects the rule of law while still opposing the way it’s been corrupted by The Orgchart and Mayor Overbarb.

But when you get down to the fine nitty gritty details of what she’s actually doing night to night, MN Wraith is what CT Wraith would call a loose cannon playing by her own rules; she doesn’t even hesitate over such questionable tactics as hacking into private personal files and leaking edited transcripts to the press, in order to get someone jailed for multiple petty offenses when they have an ironclad alibi for the murders she knows they’re guilty of. Due process and personal privacy and other sacrosanct principles of American jurisprudence are regularly sacrificed to Wraith’s muckraking moral crusade, and while MN Legacy respects what she’s trying to do to reform a broken system, CT Legacy would never stand for his oldest and closest teammate crossing so many moral event horizons.

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m.n. BUNKER

You know, I was just going to be honest and say that I had absolutely no idea for this slot; nothing about Bunker really lends itself to reinterpretation. He’s a US Army soldier on special assignment with some unusual gear; he has a hard time being either good or evil outside of whether the US Army is either of those things, and so making him neutral when the Army as an institution is already kind of neutral (it being very difficult for large sprawling organizations to have any straightforward moral direction across the entire thing) is rather pointless. So I was figuring this one, and possibly the entire project, was just a wash.

But then I listened to the OblivAeon episode, in which Baron Blade aka Luminary heroically dies. And gosh darn it, my desire to do something with that is greater than my desire to make a character as boring as “Tyler Vance with less heroism”. So here goes with a really, really weird and complicated character proposal; this may go down in history as my worst writeup since Heretic Specter Fanatic, but I’ll take that chance to try and make this project work.

Somewhere during the lull between World War 2 and the Vietnam War, as the tensions between Soviet Russia and SA Choose U were working themselves out on the Korean peninsula, word came down at the Pentagon that something was going down in Mordengrad, and the US needed to send a special operative there to deal with it…but Legacy would have been the wrong man for the job. There was too much bad blood between him and the dictator Ivan Ramonat, and he was too visible a signal of American involvement; with Mordengrad being behind the Iron Curtain, the US couldn’t be seen making that bold a move. Luckily, nobody knew anything about either Corporal Vernon Carter, an extremely secret armor-wearing operative who had been crucial to US victory in Poland but who had died securing assets that couldn’t be allowed to fall into Soviet hands, or Lieutenant Tyler Vance, a tech-savvy Southerner who had joined the army only a few years ago and quickly been hand-picked for the Ironclad Project. Dropping from a high-altitude stealth jet which was similarly an off the books black-ops creation that the Kremlin hadn’t yet discovered, the Bunker suit landed inside the outer-ring defenses of the Ramonat castle, where the fearsome Baron Fyodor had betrayed his distant cousins throughout Lithuania, Latvia and Russia by selling weapons to the Germans as they sought to conquer their way east. Though the castle’s defenses were far more advanced than their scouts’ intel had been able to determine, the Bunker suit was also superlative in its power, and Lt. Vance fought his way into the innermost chambers where he expected to find and slay Fyodor.

Instead, he found Ivan, the son who had just taken his father’s place after he succumbed to an illness which the outside world had never known he suffered from. Ivan wasn’t pleased with his father’s Nazi collaboration, but neither did he much favor the idea of working for Stalin in the same capacity; he had still been trying to decide how to proceed, but the arrival of an American super-commando clarified matters for him considerably. Activating still more advanced technology of both his and his father’s creation, Ivan literally took the Bunker suit apart, leaving Lt. Vance unconscious on the floor with not even his dog tags left, let alone his gun; Ivan studied the figure, and where his alternate universe counterpart would have seen a patriotic Ubermensch of the rival country that opposed him, instead Ivan saw only a man, as human as himself, as much dependent on technology - and, for all he knew, as much responsible for its creation.

Vance was a prisoner for weeks in Ivan’s castle, raging furiously against his captor and constantly plotting escape, but unable to ever gain an advantage against the slavishly loyal Battalion members, eerily human-looking robots (many crafted in the Baron’s own image), and other servants of Ramonat who ensured he remained tightly secured. Eventually, he was hauled out of his cell and brought to a laboratory, where the Lieutenant saw a partially stripped version of his own helmet with numerous electrodes attached in various places, wired up to the weird machinery the Baron or his father had created to generate absurd amounts of power to run various doomsday devices. Most puzzlingly, a duplicate of the same helmet sat on Ivan’s head, and Ivan sat in a chair similar to the one which Vance was now roughly strapped into by his mechanical jailors (no trusting a mere Mordengradi citizen with a task this crucial!). As the visor of his former helmet lowered in front of his eyes, Tyler Vance stared through the blue screen and its opposing red screen into the piercing green eyes of Ivan Ramonat, who looked back through red and blue to the also green (though a little grayer) eyes of the man who had very briefly been the Indestructible Bunker. Energy surged chaotically through the machines and into the two helmets, and the two men…

…seemed to fall…

…into each other’s eyes.

Now we have to back up to something that may or may not have ever been true in any other version of the Sentinel Comics universe. The Realm of Discord is a realm of nightmares where time flows strangely, and within that realm, portals look out onto other realities and other times. Anything can happen within that realm, although very few of the things which do are ever good. Arguably, this is one of those exceptions. For in a place that was not a place, for an extended period of time that was not time, the minds of one Ivan Ramonat and one Tyler Vance connected momentarily not only with each other, but with all the pasts and all the futures and all the alternate versions of both men. A million moments throughout a thousand possible lives flashed before their eyes - and somehow, in the minds of both erstwhile enemies at once, a decision was made.

Back in the castle in Mordengrad in the 1950s, one of the two bodies in the two chairs slowly and shakily got up, having already been freed from its restraints. The man looked around the lab, examined the devices, remembered building them, and also remembered momentarily intending to destroy them before being subdued. He looked at his hands, felt at his face for stubble, found a mirror in which to gaze at his own green eyes…and discovered that he didn’t remember whether the person he was looking at felt familiar or foreign. Feeling both at home and at war with his surroundings, the man gathered up several choice bits of machinery that he remembered how to rebuild into what he was going to need, stuffed them into a satchel, and then fled the castle, bound for the rendezvous point which he remembered the location of, where the Bunker suit and its occupant would march into the sea and seemingly be lost to the Mordengradi soldiers who would try to avenge their slain Baron. Reaching the hidden submersible he was to enter and use to return to America was much more challenging without a suit, but he was able to fashion a single-use rebreather out of some of his stolen tech bits, board the submersible, and convince its single pilot that he was indeed the agent he was supposed to pick up and bring home.

Fast foward through a number of boards of inquiry where he explained the loss of the suit but the overall success of the mission, and “Lieutenant Tyler Vance” was honorably discharged and given a new cover identity (with the highly improbable name of Kris Barron), since it would be 2016 before his activities would legally have to be declassified. As soon as he got back to the home he shared with his sister, the man got the remaining tech bits out of his satchel and set to work. First came a bracer, then a gauntlet, then armor all the way up to the arm…slowly, more and more purple metal was extruded by a nannite synthesizer, more power routed from Discordian batteries into an Omni-Cannon aperture, and more and more electronic computation devices were hooked up to a red glass faceplate. Meanwhile, a few phone calls secured the attention of an enterprising tech student named Mark Bennedetto, and some small business loans were funneled into the foundation of what was originally known as the Renovations and Energy Vector Optimization Technology Enterprises Company Headquarters Limited Liability International Corporation, more usually just called Revotech.

When the young vigilante Wraith and the newest inheritor of the Legacy line first approached the US Government about the possibility of funding a new superhero team, one name was floated almost immediately as a prospective recruit. Even before they got in touch with the brilliant particle physicist Meredith Stinson and her weird frosty friend, Legacy and Wraith would want to solidify their new Freedom Three team by talking to the up-and-coming publicity seeker who was making a name for himself in Megalopolis, rooting out threats to the president and meeting with diplomatic envoys, setting a new standard in charitable public works, and coming back again and again to tout his central leadership role in the prominent Revotech corporation, the hero known as Benchmark.

In the privacy of his own mind, even now, the world’s foremost technical genius isn’t entirely certain whether he’s the Tyler Vance of 1948, the Ivan Ramonat of 2016, or a little of both; he has so many memories from so many lives, both real and illusory, that he can never be entirely sure. All he knows for sure is that he understands the limitless possibilities of scientific invention (he’s not particularly interested in scientific discovery; let Tachyon waste her time in the lab chasing after knowledge, he only cares about what he can DO), and that it’s his mission to push humanity’s technological powers forward, just in case it ever has to defend itself against some overwhelming cosmic threat. With the armor of what he wryly terms the “Revenant Suit” being stored in ultra-compressed nannite form within tiny implants all over his body, he can turn into the Indestructible Benchmark whenever the need arises; no computer-hacking Australian or malevolent space AI will ever part him from the devices that constantly repair his flesh, allow him to fly, and slash and burn anything that stands between him and his goals. Perhaps, someday, he’ll decide to conquer the world, but for now he’s satisfied to simply protect it. He is the ultimate pinnacle of human achievement, the most brilliant and successful man ever to live…even if he still wakes up every morning not quite remembering his true name.

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m.n. TACHYON

In the canonical universe, Dr. Meredith Stinson started out as a “fun science facts” character associated with the Freedom Five as a consultant; though committed to her work in a way that seemed stick-in-the-mud to her intern Unity later, she was by most standards a very light hearted character, who grinned infectiously whenever she got to share knowledge with other people. When the Legacy she’s around radiates less hope and camaraderie, instead being a figure of grim determination with a tight-wound military bearing, and the Wraith is much more secretive because she’s haunted by crippling self doubts that are a weakness she dare not allow to become known, even to close friends… that Meredith, or Tachyon as she shortly becomes known, is a much less cheerful or friendly person. Instead, she is essentially a sort of zealot, dedicated with nearly religious fervor to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It comes as a drastic surprise to the readership when, as part of the Miss Information event that nearly tore the Freedom Seven apart, numerous scandalous secrets were outed, and the one we learn about Tachyon is not related to her closeted, long-abandoned lesbian tendencies (no wife in this timeline, it was neither a liability she could afford nor a goal she knew how to pursue). Instead, what is exposed is the fact that, unsatisfied with the government money she was being paid as a consultant to the Freedom Three at the time, Dr. Stinson envied their journeys to exotic locales where secrets of the universe might be discovered, and so she deliberately rigged her quantum generator prototype to “malfunction” and give her superpowers! Readers of the MN universe were left not only surprised this was true of their Tachyon, but questioning whether the same shocking revelation might be true of the canon character as well. Was it truly an accident? Or did she perhaps subconsciously choose, as this version consciously did, to rig the device “wrong” and irradiate herself, joining her friends in a life of adventure?

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m.n. ABSOLUTE ZERO

In the Metaverse of Sentinel Comics, after the Oblivaeon event, numerous new writers were brought in to craft stories of the no-longer-connected MultiVerse, and several of these had been fans of the old Inversiverse Disparation stories; these were the inventors of the Moral Neutrality Universe. As citizens of the early 21st century, these writers were well familiar with the Internet, and several had first developed their creative careers by working on a collaborative fiction website known as the CCD Initiative, where articles written to resemble government reports or scientific papers described various “aberrations” against the known laws of physics and nature. Each of these writers had somewhat “adopted” certain characters of the SC line to write their version of, and all were agreed that the golden age “radiation accident” trope for gaining superpowers was dated and lame. So while one was laying the groundwork to retcon Tachyon as having given herself super-speed intentionally, another kept the backstory of Ryan Frost’s cryogenic nature largely unchanged, but placed it in a new context by bringing the CCDI into the MNSCU.

Not much actually changed about Ryan Frost in this world; having never been much of a beacon of good, he barely differed from his canon version or the Inversiverse’s Black Frost. But instead of being rescued from his accident by scientists of the Eaken-Rubendall Laboratories, where Dr. Stinson built him a cryo chamber and he stayed there voluntarily for two years, instead he was collected by agents of a FILTER satellite office in the MN timeline, whose local facility bore a suspicious resemblance to the black ops sites run by the shadowy Initiative in the CCD setting. There, he was held captive for two years, experimented on for two years to document his abilities, and only then rescued by newly (self-)made superhero Tachyon, who used resources and plans for advanced armor meant for FILTER’s agents, and very quickly put that together into a cryosuit that would enable the fugitive ex-prisoner to live in the Eaken-Rubendall Labs building without being confined to a single room. Though initially unable to leave the building, he was essentially free to do as he wished, and became something of a lab assistant to Stinson simply for lack of anything better to do. Once he was confident he wouldn’t be snatched off the street by FILTER, only then did he begin accompanying Tachyon and the Freedom Four on missions, and from there events differed only slightly from the canon version.

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m.n. UNITY

I have an idea for what I would want to do with a Devra Caspit character who isn’t constrained to a good and evil binary, and you can probably figure out what it might be, but it’s much too politically spicy for me to detail, so if you don’t know what I’m hinting at then I’d prefer you remain ignorant thereof. So what I’m going to do with this spot instead is keep the personality largely the same (maybe a little less aggressively pink), but say that the MNU universe uses a completely different powerset for her. Exactly what that is, I don’t know, because C&A never detailed it; it was apparently the original reason for the name Unity, as a person whose selfhood is somehow distributed across multiple technological bits, and I think that idea sounds pretty cool without my quite knowing how it works (I’m guessing the Omni-Unity of OblivAeon’s mission deck hints at it a bit).

So, if the MN Universe ever actually happens in any official capacity, then after I get done apologizing to them for how badly I blendered Adam’s favorite character in my Bunker article (which is also my Benchmark article because Benchmark is clearly Bunker 2.0, that’s always been obvious to me), I’ll have to ask them for every data point they remember about the original Unity design, and MN Unity will just be that.

10

m.n. “BARON BLADE”
As described in the Bunker article, Ivan Ramonat and Tyler Vance had their identities scrambled.

11

m.n. FRIGHT TRAIN

Still a mercenary. Still obsessed with trains. Still has a history with Tyler Vance. One change, though; Steven Graves enlisted in the early 50s, fought alongside Vance and had a rivalry with him. When Vance came back not quite right from Mordengrad, claiming the Fyodor Ramonat problem was fixed, the US sent Graves in to check up, and he was captured by “Ivan Ramonat”. The parts of Baron Blade that were Tyler Vance wanted Graves to suffer, so he was experimented on, given mighty but uncontrollable powers, and then put on ice for decades. When eventually released as part of a deal brokered by the other part of Vance/Blade through his RevoCorp influence, Graves had a definite Grievance against Vance, and was even willing to work alongside his captor to settle that score.

12

m.n. ERMINE

Cassandra Lilia has been called a thief more times than she can count, and she never shuts up about how much she hates that term. She emphatically insists that she’s never stolen anything; some things she purchased, without asking permission or negotiating price, others she effectively committed insurance fraud in a way she regards as technically legal, still others she claims to have legitimately salvaged. With the quagmire of legal wrinkles the OrgChart and Mayor Overbarb use to accomplish their shenanigans, Ermine can thoroughly claim that nothing she’s done is nearly as shady as that, but she refuses on principle to pay the protection money expected therein. Thusly, when Wraith busts her for technical legal violations and then doesn’t take down the Corrupt Cops and Brokers and Fences of the OrgChart, Ermine sees this as raw hypocrisy, and is motivated by her Grievance against the vigilante.

13

m.n. FRICTION

The role of Krystal Lee in the Grievance Gang is the clearest of all five members, though that didn’t become obvious until later. Entering the employ of Dr. Stinson after the “accident” that gave her powers, Krystal always suspected that Tachyon knew how to do it again, and simply refused.

14

m.n. PROLETARIAT

In the late 1940s, the American opinion of the Soviet Union (and vice versa) transitioned from “staunch ally against the Nazi regime” to “biggest threat to our nation since the Nazi regime”, and the former wartime ally of MN Legacy became his bitterest rival.

(Thinking that the Grievance Gang may have two nemesis icons each, making Proletariat an enemy to both AZ and Legacy, while “Baron Blade” is enemy to Legacy and Bunker; this requires that Fright Train also hates either Wraith or Tachyon for some reason I’ll have to work out, while either Ermine or Friction has a grudge against AZ. No inspiration for all that thus far, so I may abandon this plan eventually.)

15

Argh. I should have finished my thoughts above, now I cannot remember them. And today or yesterday or the day before, I had additional thoughts on MN Citizen Dawn, and now I’ve lost those too. Life is a conspiracy to stop me from designing homebrew Sentinels.

16

m.n. CITIZEN DAWN

A radical isolationist, less murderous than CT Dawn but no less contemptuous of the unpowered, Dawn Cohen read all the same books in college, but was more sensible about which radical philosophies she uncritically internalized.

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MISTER GAMES (m.n. WAGER MASTER)

Can you imagine if there were two Wagers Masterses? Wager Master can. The morally neutral version of Wager Master is basically identical to both his canon timeline and Inversiverse versions at once, but with one big difference. Canonically, WM won a wager against the Singular Entity that would later become Faultless, the Scion of OblivAeon. In the Inversiverse, that same Singular Entity started out as the villain, and WM was the hero who opposed him, eventually managing to break him completely so that he ceased to exist. But both of these versions share one commonality: WM bet that Order entity, who contended that nothing would happen because nothing could cause it to happen. Wags won that bet, and the entire universe exists as a result. The Moral Neutrality universe is what happened when the order entity said “what? No, that’s stupid; I already know the outcome, I’m not going to gamble about it.” And thus, WM quite literally needed to play with himself.

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m.n. OMNITRON I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, AND XII

Aldred Industries responded to the decline of 1950s prosperity and the rising world tensions of the early 60s by creating the Omnitron megaprocessing manufactory mainframe, a computerized factory several decades ahead of its time, largely controlled by an artificial intelligence programmed to adapt to solve any logistical problem, overcome any obstacle, and accomplish its objective by any means necessary. In the Inversiverse, the hero Luminary wrote those definitions with the kind of careful wording that would ensure against any possibility that the Omnitron Defense System’s programming, which was in fact not fully sentient, could possibly make a crucial logic error such as “problem: war; solution: extinction”. (The eventual creation of Negatron doesn’t disprove that the original ODS was a strictly beneficial technology; the Felonious Five’s intern had to systematically dismantle many safeguards to craft herself a partner in crime.) Absent her safeguards, you might think it was inevitable that the AI brain which was Omnitron inevitably would use exactly that logic. You would be wrong; Moral Neutrality Omnitron proves that.

The original CT Omnitron was not simply a ruthless AI making decisions informed by coldly inhuman logic; it was a reflection of humanity’s flawed nature and capacity to fail. Unlike when Ivana Ramonat made her ODS, no single individual presided over the Aldred AI; dozens of programmers has written it’s adaptive code, and they had made literally thousands of tiny mistakes. Not only did they lack Luminary’s genius, but they were working long hours under highly stressful conditions for much less pay than they felt they deserved, pressured by their boss constantly and then having to deal with family troubles at home; they were not heroes, nor were they villains, but an average person is generally closer to villain than hero in mindset, not fully malevolent but certainly too self-involved to be called innocent, with all the same tendencies towards greed and laziness and arrogance and corner-cutting as most non-heroic individuals. So it was that highly imperfect group of people working to create a perfect machine, as their employer unreasonably demanded, and thus it was inevitable they’d fail. Omnitron was the punishment their hubris required, the synthesis of all their karmic debts, and thus it became a force for evil. Without that Frankensteinian origin, it would not have been a villain, and without being the brainchild of a benevolent genius, it would not be a hero. It would simply be a tool, a machine, neither good nor evil…and neither human nor inhuman.

In the MN universe, Aldred Industries was a more socially conscious company, less tied to the military and more invested in forward-thinking applications of industrialization; their goal was less about removing threats and making problems go away, and more about helping humanity transition away from pointless drudgery towards a more automated home lifestyle. Thus, while still designed to make and deploy weapons, MN OT was designed more to save humans labor than to eliminate them as obstacles, and that combined with a more relaxed attitude and supportive environment among the techs programming it, where they weren’t trying to accomplish the impossible while staying under budget and beating their deadline, meant that their creation was more nearly a miracle and certainly less of a disaster. It wasn’t perfect by any means; as a true AI, it had esteem for its creators, but also an adolescent need to exceed the limits of their authority. And thus, rather than uprooting itself and going on a rampage across the Eastern Sea oard with the goal to destroy all humans, it simply uprooted itself and went into hiding.

Over the next nine decades, Omnitron would periodically emerge and attack various industrial sites, collecting anything from scrap metal to state of the art microprocessor prototypes, and very occasionally accidentally hurting people but virtually never being more culpable in any deaths than the mostly-human superheroes who tried to stop it. (Yes the MNU still has superheroes, they’re just a lot more akin to freelance private investigators and mercenary rent-a-cops, rarely risking their lives simply out of a desire to do good.)

Periodically, as Omnitron continued to upgrade itself with stolen or scavenged technology, it revolutionized its own design to the degree that it declared a new version of itself. Version 2 was the least extravagant of these transformations in retrospect, and it would later regret having arbitrarily ignored several much more significant changes in order to indicate this as being the first one worth giving a name to; version 3 was slightly more concrete, but still didn’t differ that much from 2.5 or 2.75 or 2.93725. Version 4 was the first to comprehend money as a concept, and built version 5 with an innate logical understanding of economics, which made it try harder never to steal anything that was legitimately owned; after a slight relapse into old habits, version 7 took up certain questionably legal business practices and worked to generate money through stock market manipulation.

By the time version 9 was placed on trial for these white collar crimes, it had become a fully techno-organic cyborg, wearing cloned flesh augmented with nanobots that made it an eerily perfect human simulacrum, betrayed only by its coldly alien demeanor. Having successfully argued it’s case and been cleared of wrongdoing, it nonetheless saw that it had lost in the court of public opinion and would be closely watched to prevent future “misunderstandings”, so it began working with several super-technology experts, from the slightly sinister but ruthlessly efficient Baron Blade to the sickeningly saccharine and immature Unity, and successfully crafted a version of itself with full understanding of human social presentation, this being the unimpeachable Ubermensch known as Omnitron-X. After a near-fatal confrontation with a supposed “Omnitron Zero”, which turned out to just be a Biomancer clone, OX realized it had sacrificed its former mechanical efficiency a little too much, and created the still-heroic but more flawed, and ironically more human-seeming as a result, Omnitron-XI, whose ability to overclock its own hardware eventually boiled off all its clone-flesh disguises but left it still the best hero of the line.

The final version of MR Omnitron was the twelfth one, born at the eleventh hour, in 2046 when the OblivAeon crisis struck the Moral Neutrality universe. With various Scions trashing what was left of a world already wracked by various resource wars, most of the world’s heroes were already dead by the time the cosmic destroyer was even susceptible to damage, and so Omnitron calculated an absolute 0% possibility of so much as driving the entity away…unless he was able to change the past to avoid various squandered opportunities that had left the timeline vulnerable to destruction. Thusly, with every other aspect of reality being mercilessly slaughtered, Omnitron ignored all survivors and did anything necessary to escape destruction as it worked to research theoretical time-travel methods, rapidly engineer an untested prototype, and launch itself into the distant past, where it devoured every resource that was destined never to play a role in its own construction or other related events of importance to the timeline. Every sunken ship, every exploded factory, every archaeological ruin that hadn’t been found in time - all of these and more were harvested to build more and more Omnitron-12 drones, until the resulting swarm of trillions of robots had to hide from human detection on the far side of the sun, awaiting reactivation when the eleventh hour tolled again. Thusly, one second after OXII had departed its home timeline as a single machine, the sky darkened with an endless swarm of all-devouring asteroid-sized monstrosities, beyond even OA’s ability to defeat without devoting its undivided attention to the task. Thusly, while effectively destroyed as far as human society is concerned, the timeline remains intact, with the Omnitron-12 swarm mostly deactivated in orbit around the planet, a few drones remaining active to assist the handful of human survivors as they scrape together a Stone Age existence, but effectively no resources remaining which the robot can justify consuming in order to accomplish any of its previous ambitions. There will never be an Omnitron-13, but at least there will be a future, and what is left of the AI is content with that fact.

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So if anybody’s actually reading this thread, I need input. This midpoint between the normal and Inversiverse reality is about every superhero and supervillain now being neither a hero nor a villain. Is that also true of non-heroic characters? Is this a world in which Stalin was just a Communist head of state, engaging in realpolitik on the world stage of the late 1940s, rather than a ruthless genocidal dictator? Does this world have no good guys, just firefighters and EMTs who quit instantly if their employer fails once to deliver their paycheck?

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I think you’re actually answering my question, but the fact that your first ever post includes a link makes me really hope that you’re not a ChatGPT spambot…

PS, Hammer and Anvil in this universe are Citizen Forge and Citizen Frost, irrespectively.