As I went over in a prior post, the Antarctic Ministry of Culture, in addition to disbursing general artistic grants and operating training workshops, also managed the task of creating, cultivating and curating several shared universes for the purposes of continental mythmaking. By far the largest and most popular was
Separate Spheres, depicting a hard science space opera future for the Cosmintern and the human race. Exploring Cosmicist themes and serving as a grand exercise in worldbuilding at a literally galactic scale, it would consistently rank highest on citizen engagement, budgeting and international distribution. Aside from the star of the program, the Culture Ministry would also devote resources to a variety of different projects. Two of these,
Demimonde and
Athame, would come to be regarded alongside
Separate Spheres as the Big Three of Antarctic shared fiction.
While
Separate Spheres revolved around an imagined future and
Demimonde* centered on a fantastic and mythologized past,
Athame would attract attention as the only one of the three set in a recognizable present for viewers, striking a balance between the former's hard science and the latter's fantasy to create a mythology for a revolutionary society. And what better mythology for the modern world than superheroes?
Athame aimed to create an internally consistent and grounded superhero universe, one that depicted its characters as accessories to the Zeitgeist rather than Ubermenschen steering the world on a whim, the better to keep from accidentally writing the franchise into corners as conditions on the ground changed** and to better suit the goal of telling stories that took place either in the recognizable present, the immediate past, or the foreseeable future. As such, the core works would take place in chronological order, with an amount of time passing in-universe equal to the gap between new installments of the franchise.
Athame would revolve around those altered by exposure to an anomalous object, the titular Athame. Originally appearing the the form of a small meteorite, the object impacts with an ARC space platform, the Centimanus, transforming the sole survivor and contaminating the Earth's surface with debris from the platform inexplicably imbued with the same transformative effect. From this initial super-empowering event the
Athame narrative revolves around three core heroes exposed to the object itself and a secondary cast of allies, heroes and villains empowered by debris all over the world or working to study or contain it. As a concession to franchise viability, the core troika are rendered immortal by their abilities and are recast as necessary while other characters live and die organically around them, providing a good deal of the series' emotional weight.
In the vein of other superhero universes, the
Athame shared world is defined most strongly by its central triad, the franchise's answer to the DC Trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman or their Marvel equivalent in Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor.
- The Outsider was formerly an astronaut named Crozier Dalton,*** sole survivor of the destruction of the Centimanus. Directly exposed to the Athame for an extended period and floating exposed in the void of space for even longer, the shattered astronaut would somehow linger until his abilities fully awakened and he returned to Earth. Aside from an ability to perceive and manipulate electromagnetic signals, the Outsider's greatest strength is incredibly powerful and precise telekinesis, which he can use in the traditional way but also to simulate superhuman strength, flight and durability. His costume is relatively simple, consisting of a sleek Corps of Discovery space suit (sans helmet) and a trench coat he acquired when he landed. It's a great mystery to the fandom whether he can actually remove the suit, since he only eats or drinks out of habit and by his own admission only breathes because it unsettling to others when he doesn't.
- Erebus is perhaps the most unusual, having never been human to begin with. Originally a Nightspore drone, exposure to the Athame as it plummeted through the atmosphere would spark genuine consciousness in the machine and cause a reaction in its repair systems that would result in the creation of a humanoid body for that consciousness. Both highly intelligent and deeply curious, Erebus has an almost childish innocence that contrasted both with her incredibly firm moral core and nightmarish abilities. Despite possessing a humanoid form, Erebus retains hypertrophied versions of the conventional Nightspore power set, with vantablack skin repurposed into an ability to generate an impenetrable cloud of aerosolized blackness and an ability to finely tune chemical, auditory and visual stimuli to provoke a wide range of biological effects in humans from seizures and heart attacks to finely tailored hallucinations.
- Athame forms the moral center of the setting, beginning the series as a fish out of water and gradually acclimating to both her new abilities and to Antarctic society as a whole. Originally a climate refugee, she is transformed when the anomalous object that will come to bear her name impacts in her District. Transforming itself from a rough-hewn meteorite to a black stone ring inset with a crystal, the ring responds to its owners commands, transforming from a ring to a knife to a spear and boosting its bearer physically in the process. Permanently strong and durable as a consequence of contact with the ring, when she activates her full abilities it generates a suit of even more resilient armor and in its spear form can generate and manipulate light and allow its bearer to teleport. One of her early character arcs involved returning to Africa temporarily with the outbreak of the Azanian Revolutions, working with locals and ARC forces to stabilize the region that would form the Commonwealths of Azania.
Given the nature of the supporting cast the
Athame universe would go through a variety of enemies, with the most notable being a recurring northern assassin-turned-cult leader who went by the name
Glycon. Given the ability to transfer his consciousness by exposure to the wreckage of the Centimanus, he would use his abilities to gather followers, with the goal of collecting as much wreckage and as many empowered agents as possible in a bid to aquire the Athame itself and become truly immortal.
*A science fantasy alternate history universe combining my increasingly unusual
King in Yellow setting with some ideas about New Weird urban fantasy I was kicking around. It would be bounded in scope from around 1800 to around 2100 and was considerably more structured owing to arising out of a published work in-universe.
**Think all those Marvel characters that continue to exist despite being Soviet supersoldiers from the future or whatever OTL. There's is some precedent for this "consistent flow of time" thing in major comics, most notably Valiant Comics, which stuck to its internal chronology religiously. In this universe they avoided the crossover with Image that destroyed both their brands for a generation and helped to crash the comics market.
***Showcasing the post-revolutionary Antarctic tendency to draw names from Antarctic explorers and other important figures in the continent's history.
