Vigil The price of freedom is eternal vigilance

As Allied and Soviet forces closed in on Berlin in the last hours of the would-be Third Reich, the Nazi occultist project, codenamed Walpurgis, successfully opened what they called an übergatter. What had apparently been intended as a last-ditch effort to expel the invaders instead invited another - and a far worse one than anything out of Hitler's worst nightmares. The massive creature laid waste to large sections of Berlin, devastating the marshalled forces of Allied, Soviet, and Axis armies alike largely as a side effect of its rampage. Conventional weapons having proved utterly ineffective, President Harry Truman ordered the use an untested prototype of the secret Manhattan Project. This so-called "atomic bomb" did successfully destroy the monster, but the resulting explosion was nothing like the estimates of the scientists who designed it - the entire city of Berlin was destroyed beyond repair, and a shockwave of unidentified energy radiated outwards, apparently spreading across the entire surface of the globe.   This Havock, as it came to be known, had several major effects, both short and long term - to the surviving chains of command of the world's major military powers, the first was severe and persistent interference in wireless communications. To this day, decades later, whatever radiation was produced by the destruction of the otherworldly monster continues to make radio transmissions unreliable over any great distance. Far more tragically however, was the human cost - people the world over were killed instantly by the hundreds of millions. This was catastrophic enough, but tens of millions more were affected in far stranger ways - they manifested strange mutations - often these changes did involve gross physical transformations, but invariably those affected developed what have come to be called metahuman abilities, the nature of which are nearly as numerous as the people that have them. The vast majority of humanity emerged from the Havock apparently unharmed, but in the decades since, many of their descendants have also become metahuman themselves.   Today, 35 years after the calamitous end of the Second World War, the Earth is a very different place than it might have been. The globe-spanning colonial empires of Europe have uniformly collapsed - the economic, political, and technological upheaval that developed in the wake of the Havock toppled more than one government, and travel by both sea and air are significantly more dangerous than they once were. Transcontinental politics are now largely a distant memory, for both better and worse. Word of the state of affairs of distant parts of the world are the stuff of rumor, almost legend. A series of short-lived, largely local conflicts erupted across Europe in the latter half of the 1940s, resulting in some minor adjustments to pre-war international borders, but several major changes to the names and governments controlling those nations.   Germany itself no longer exists. Much of the southern and western portions were absorbed by neighboring countries, and the northeastern third that remains, while nominally independent, is essentially a vassal state of Great Britain today. The site where Berlin once stood is still under reconstruction, and bears a new name - Arcadia. Today this young city is perhaps the most cosmopolitan place in Europe - one of the few places that can truly be considered multicultural, since it has come to be a major point of contact for the major powers of this new, strange world. As such, it is also a center of trade, a focal point of idealism, a hub for research and technology, and a hotbed of intrigue.   And, of course, Arcadia is the birthplace and base of operations of the Vigil.