One Last Weapon

Too bad they couldn't switch the last two words, because that would have made a beautifully understated acronym. But as it stands the OLW stands out for seeming rather ominous, and rightly so.
The Mathiesin family are practically royalty among the superhero community. Sort of. If they put up with such things and if they let people know who they were. But they were some of the first superheroes to act as such, and they did it in an era when powers like that were still looked at as if they were witchcraft. Science, not magic, in the end, but it wasn't like they could prove that then.
Anyhow, they spent a lot of time pushing that science along, to make sure that someday the world would accept them, and their children, and their grandchildren, and so on and so forth and including all the other various powered people who would pop up over the course of the next century.
And as is the case with science, especially where powers are concerned, some of it got a little dicey. And by dicey I mean lethal.
A/n: This whole article is conjecture. Ruby doesn't know any of this for sure. She's extrapolating based on limited data.
...
That being said, she's pretty good at guessing. Especially when it comes to these kinds of things.
They may or may not have been the ones to actually invent the OLW, but it doesn't matter because it ended up in their hands anyway. The theory was to have a way to stop some of the really bad supervillains of the day. They didn't have the kind of tech that we do, to even the playing field. So they came up with ways to kill them instead.
The only problem was, they also now had a way to kill every superpowered person in the world, all at once. At least, that's the theory of the OLW.