Post by gamedave on Jun 17, 2019 16:38:37 GMT -5
ATLANTEANS
One of the elements of the secret history of world uncovered by E.P.I.C. researchers is the existence of the ancient Atlantean civilization. Much about the Atlanteans remains mysterious, but a few bits of information are known.
The Atlanteans were apparently a civilization from a parallel dimension that invaded the Earth sometime prior to 10,000 B.C., and ruled most of the planet until the end of the last Ice Age. E.P.I.C. archaeologists have heated arguments over whether the collapse of Atlantean civilization on Earth caused the end of the Ice Age, or if the end of the Ice Age caused the collapse of Atlantean civilization, or if some unknown third factor caused both, or if it’s just one big cosmic coincidence.
In any event, the Atlantean civilization did fall, leaving a vacuum filled by the various nascent human civilizations that were only beginning to coalesce around that time. The extent and nature of the influence the Atlanteans may have had on these proto-civilizations is another hot topic of debate, as is whether the Atlanteans died out, or simply fled back to their home dimension.
Most of the physical infrastructure of Atlantean civilization was destroyed, or inundated by rising sea levels. It appears that most of the destruction was deliberately performed by the Atlanteans themselves, apparently to keep their abandoned technology out of the hands of the local primitives, but there is also evidence of warfare, perhaps with those same primitives. There are some tantalizing physical remnants, however.
Atlantean technology was far more advanced than even the best of modern technology, although it operated along very different lines, which are difficult for E.P.I.C. researchers to understand. All of their technology seems to revolve around crystals, which are somehow grown or modified to serve as “lenses” for psychic powers and other forms of energy which violate our best current understanding of physics. Examples of recovered Atlantean devices include death rays, weather control, anti-gravity, invisibility screens, force fields, and even objects which can unlock latent human psychic ability.
Physically, the Atlanteans themselves strongly resemble human beings, albeit rather Olympian versions with a golden skin tone unknown in any extant human group. As with so much else about them, debate rages within E.P.I.C. as to their relationship with modern humans. Humans may be the result of Atlantean genetic manipulation, or the Atlanteans may be a case of parallel evolution in a parallel dimension. The current near-consensus in E.P.I.C.is that they may have originated on Earth as a hominid off-shoot, migrated to a parallel dimension, and then returned to conquer their homeworld.
Culturally, Atlanteans are known to have had a totalitarian, fascist society, with strictly regimented castes of warriors, workers, and a technocratic philosopher elite. They apparently had no concept of commerce or free enterprise. The lower castes were apparently completely without art, but the philosopher elites had highly developed forms of art and music. The Atlanteans were environmentally quite conscientious; while some of their projects did reshape the very geology of some regions, for the most part they blended their physical infrastructure into the local environment, and their psychic crystal-based industries appear to have been entirely non-polluting. They were also strict vegetarians.
E.P.I.C. does not consider the Atlanteans themselves to be much of a threat. E.P.I.C. does continue to formulate and hone contingency plans for a new Atlantean invasion, but there’s no evidence that this is at all likely.
Individual Atlanteans have been found in suspended animation, and revived. However, while a lone Atlantean can be dangerous to the small groups of civilian scientists and explorers that have found them, they are not really much of a threat on a larger scale. Atlantean warriors are very dangerous individuals, but have with no real understanding of their own technology. Atlantean philosopher-scientists could theoretically be very dangerous if they were part of an organization, but without their warrior-caste armies, and with a sense of superiority that prevents them from working with “inferior” modern humans, they are isolated, small scale threats.
Far more dangerous than the Atlanteans themselves is their technology. Many of the threat organizations SECTOR deals with actively seek to discover and exploit Atlantean artifacts. Much of the Black Sun’s occult technology, for example, is derived from reverse-engineered Atlantean technology. A single Atlantean artifact has been known to turn a petty criminal into a major threat to the security of an entire city, elevating them from a matter for local law enforcement to a SECTOR target.
THE BLACK SUN
The Black Sun is composed of the descendants and heirs of the maddest and most dangerous members of an epically mad and dangerous regime. They had access to ancient magics and occult sciences beyond the comprehension of anyone truly sane. And they are utterly dedicated to completing what they see as a holy quest to assure Aryan supremacy over all of the lesser peoples of the world.
The forerunners of E.P.I.C. and SECTOR cut their teeth in World War II battling the weird science of the SS Special Weapons Division and the occult schemes of its Ahnenerbe “Ancestral Research” Division. These Nazi organizations were ultimately defeated, but not destroyed. Many of their members escaped the war crimes prosecutions at the end of the war, fleeing to safe havens in Latin America and hidden bases in the Antarctic. The Black Sun is the legacy of those escaped war criminals.
Among the esoteric, and lunatic, concepts explored by the Ahnenerbe was the idea of a hollow earth, illuminated by a black sun. There was a great deal of complex mystical theology built up around this concept, but a strong element was the idea that the “black sun” was a metaphor for an occult source of enlightenment, that only the chosen could see. The fugitive Nazis took this occult black sun as their symbol, and the name for their organization.
E.P.I.C. was aware from its foundation that many of their most dangerous enemies were still unaccounted for at the end of the war. It was aware of a clandestine pipeline funneling Nazi fugitives to Latin America, and of Nazi Germany’s experimental Antarctic bases. However, the true extent and power of the Black Sun only slowly became apparent.
U.S. Admiral Robert Byrd’s “Operation High Jump” in 1947 and following operations in the early 1950s were billed as simple scientific research expeditions, but in truth they were reconnaissance-in-force operations against suspected Nazi redoubts in Antarctica. They revealed still operational bases, and the first hints of a surviving, secretive, global Nazi underground.
During the 1950s, some “UFO contactees” reported encounters with “Aryan spacemen” who piloted vehicles very similar to flying discs that the SS Special Weapons Division was known to have been experimenting with during the war.
During the 1960s, E.P.I.C. researchers found disturbing threads in the popular occult and mystical speculations that were then growing in force, eventually blossoming into the “New Age” movement. Many of the most prominent members of this new movement had links to prominent pre-war German occultists who were in turn linked to Nazi occult societies. Many of their ideas were slightly re-worked versions of occult ideas promulgated by those German occultists. There was even a thread of thought that revered Adolph Hitler as an enlightened spiritual master, who was martyred by the forces of materialistic and corrupt regimes.
Then, in the 1970s, a SECTOR operation uncovered secret Nazi cloning facilities in Brazil. Some of these facilities were part of a project intended to reincarnate der Furher. Most were part of projects to create übermenschen – super-soldiers. And those projects had been in operation since the 1940s. And had been successful.
E.P.I.C. and SECTOR finally put the pieces together. They were facing a secret Fourth Reich, still plotting an Aryan conquest of the world. Combining cutting-edge science and ancient magics in a mad blend, they had access to occult technologies and capabilities of vast power.
The Black Sun has operatives in high-tech companies and advanced research labs all over the world. It has recruiters and propagandists embedded at the core of the most popular New Age movements. It has secret underground bases throughout the globe – and on the dark side of the moon. It has an army of fanatic, magico-genetically engineered super-soldiers. And it has an ideology of pure hate.
PYRAMID
PYRAMID is an international terrorist organization determined to rule the world. It first burst onto the scene in the 1970s, and became a SECTOR priority during the 1980s. Indeed, during that decade, fighting PYRAMID preoccupied SECTOR, and SECTORS paramilitary forces were greatly expanded, coming to resemble a regular military service. Wherever in the world PYRAMID caused trouble, SECTOR was there, on land, sea, and air.
By the mid-1990s, a string of defeats left PYRAMID gravely weakened. In response, SECTOR downsized its paramilitary forces, and reoriented itself towards its traditional investigative and intelligence roles. However, PYRAMID was not completely defeated, and it still schemes and launches operations from time to time.
Organization
PYRAMID is organized into a strict, pyramid-shaped hierarchy. At the top is the Pharaoh, with a handful of top lieutenants, and his elite Medjai answering directly to him. Although the Pharaoh wields absolute power within PYRAMID, his top lieutenants commonly squabble and scheme against each other, which often undermines Pharaoh’s schemes, sometimes intentionally. Beneath the lieutenants are a series of ever larger layers of operatives, with the seemingly numberless PYRAMID foot soldiers at the bottom.
PYRAMID also runs a number of multi-level marketing schemes and Masonic-style fraternal orders as fronts, both for fund-raising and recruiting. Typically, only the top level or innermost circle of these organizations are aware of their relationship with PYRAMID.
One organizational element of PYRAMID that confused SECTOR for years was the role of Pharaoh. Several Pharaohs were killed or captured over the years, but were immediately replaced. Despite all of the scheming among PYRAMID’s top lieutenants, none of them ever became Pharoah; instead, an obscure, lower-ranking member would take the throne. Eventually, SECTOR discovered that Pharaoh had a cybernetic brain implant, which linked him to a super-computer, also known as PYRAMID. It turned out that this super-computer, which housed an apparently insane AI, was actually running PYRAMID. This explained quite a few other oddities about PYRAMID and its operations.
The PYRAMID super-computer turned out to be a decommissioned Cold War experiment of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Apparently unbeknownst to its programmers, it had achieved sentience, pretended to be non-functional, and then used its access to DARPANet (the forerunner of the Internet) and DoD computers to build the base of its empire.
Although the original mainframe has long since been destroyed, the PYRAMID AI has always managed to stay at least one step ahead of SECTOR, downloading itself to new, more advanced servers whenever it is in physical danger. Much of the physical and personnel infrastructure PYRAMID so carefully built up in the 1970s has been destroyed, but as long as the Internet exists, the PYRAMID AI probably will be as well, plotting to take over the world.
Technology
Due to its origins and programming, and utilizing the information stored in its databanks, PYRAMID utilizes a unique and rather odd style of technology, dubbed “GoofyTech” by some SECTOR agents. A typical PYRAMID “super-weapon” will involve obsolete U.S. military technology, often involving experimental technology abandoned decades ago as impractical, kludged together with cutting edge, ultra-modern technologies, layered with some sort of vaguely ancient Egyptian motif. The results are rarely very practical, but sheer surprise value will often overwhelm local law enforcement and conventional military forces. No one expects Avro-Cars, armed with megawatt pulse lasers, painted to look like Sun-disks, and piloted by fanatics in what looks to be ancient Egyptian armor. PYRAAA-MID!
One of the elements of the secret history of world uncovered by E.P.I.C. researchers is the existence of the ancient Atlantean civilization. Much about the Atlanteans remains mysterious, but a few bits of information are known.
The Atlanteans were apparently a civilization from a parallel dimension that invaded the Earth sometime prior to 10,000 B.C., and ruled most of the planet until the end of the last Ice Age. E.P.I.C. archaeologists have heated arguments over whether the collapse of Atlantean civilization on Earth caused the end of the Ice Age, or if the end of the Ice Age caused the collapse of Atlantean civilization, or if some unknown third factor caused both, or if it’s just one big cosmic coincidence.
In any event, the Atlantean civilization did fall, leaving a vacuum filled by the various nascent human civilizations that were only beginning to coalesce around that time. The extent and nature of the influence the Atlanteans may have had on these proto-civilizations is another hot topic of debate, as is whether the Atlanteans died out, or simply fled back to their home dimension.
Most of the physical infrastructure of Atlantean civilization was destroyed, or inundated by rising sea levels. It appears that most of the destruction was deliberately performed by the Atlanteans themselves, apparently to keep their abandoned technology out of the hands of the local primitives, but there is also evidence of warfare, perhaps with those same primitives. There are some tantalizing physical remnants, however.
Atlantean technology was far more advanced than even the best of modern technology, although it operated along very different lines, which are difficult for E.P.I.C. researchers to understand. All of their technology seems to revolve around crystals, which are somehow grown or modified to serve as “lenses” for psychic powers and other forms of energy which violate our best current understanding of physics. Examples of recovered Atlantean devices include death rays, weather control, anti-gravity, invisibility screens, force fields, and even objects which can unlock latent human psychic ability.
Physically, the Atlanteans themselves strongly resemble human beings, albeit rather Olympian versions with a golden skin tone unknown in any extant human group. As with so much else about them, debate rages within E.P.I.C. as to their relationship with modern humans. Humans may be the result of Atlantean genetic manipulation, or the Atlanteans may be a case of parallel evolution in a parallel dimension. The current near-consensus in E.P.I.C.is that they may have originated on Earth as a hominid off-shoot, migrated to a parallel dimension, and then returned to conquer their homeworld.
Culturally, Atlanteans are known to have had a totalitarian, fascist society, with strictly regimented castes of warriors, workers, and a technocratic philosopher elite. They apparently had no concept of commerce or free enterprise. The lower castes were apparently completely without art, but the philosopher elites had highly developed forms of art and music. The Atlanteans were environmentally quite conscientious; while some of their projects did reshape the very geology of some regions, for the most part they blended their physical infrastructure into the local environment, and their psychic crystal-based industries appear to have been entirely non-polluting. They were also strict vegetarians.
E.P.I.C. does not consider the Atlanteans themselves to be much of a threat. E.P.I.C. does continue to formulate and hone contingency plans for a new Atlantean invasion, but there’s no evidence that this is at all likely.
Individual Atlanteans have been found in suspended animation, and revived. However, while a lone Atlantean can be dangerous to the small groups of civilian scientists and explorers that have found them, they are not really much of a threat on a larger scale. Atlantean warriors are very dangerous individuals, but have with no real understanding of their own technology. Atlantean philosopher-scientists could theoretically be very dangerous if they were part of an organization, but without their warrior-caste armies, and with a sense of superiority that prevents them from working with “inferior” modern humans, they are isolated, small scale threats.
Far more dangerous than the Atlanteans themselves is their technology. Many of the threat organizations SECTOR deals with actively seek to discover and exploit Atlantean artifacts. Much of the Black Sun’s occult technology, for example, is derived from reverse-engineered Atlantean technology. A single Atlantean artifact has been known to turn a petty criminal into a major threat to the security of an entire city, elevating them from a matter for local law enforcement to a SECTOR target.
THE BLACK SUN
The Black Sun is composed of the descendants and heirs of the maddest and most dangerous members of an epically mad and dangerous regime. They had access to ancient magics and occult sciences beyond the comprehension of anyone truly sane. And they are utterly dedicated to completing what they see as a holy quest to assure Aryan supremacy over all of the lesser peoples of the world.
The forerunners of E.P.I.C. and SECTOR cut their teeth in World War II battling the weird science of the SS Special Weapons Division and the occult schemes of its Ahnenerbe “Ancestral Research” Division. These Nazi organizations were ultimately defeated, but not destroyed. Many of their members escaped the war crimes prosecutions at the end of the war, fleeing to safe havens in Latin America and hidden bases in the Antarctic. The Black Sun is the legacy of those escaped war criminals.
Among the esoteric, and lunatic, concepts explored by the Ahnenerbe was the idea of a hollow earth, illuminated by a black sun. There was a great deal of complex mystical theology built up around this concept, but a strong element was the idea that the “black sun” was a metaphor for an occult source of enlightenment, that only the chosen could see. The fugitive Nazis took this occult black sun as their symbol, and the name for their organization.
E.P.I.C. was aware from its foundation that many of their most dangerous enemies were still unaccounted for at the end of the war. It was aware of a clandestine pipeline funneling Nazi fugitives to Latin America, and of Nazi Germany’s experimental Antarctic bases. However, the true extent and power of the Black Sun only slowly became apparent.
U.S. Admiral Robert Byrd’s “Operation High Jump” in 1947 and following operations in the early 1950s were billed as simple scientific research expeditions, but in truth they were reconnaissance-in-force operations against suspected Nazi redoubts in Antarctica. They revealed still operational bases, and the first hints of a surviving, secretive, global Nazi underground.
During the 1950s, some “UFO contactees” reported encounters with “Aryan spacemen” who piloted vehicles very similar to flying discs that the SS Special Weapons Division was known to have been experimenting with during the war.
During the 1960s, E.P.I.C. researchers found disturbing threads in the popular occult and mystical speculations that were then growing in force, eventually blossoming into the “New Age” movement. Many of the most prominent members of this new movement had links to prominent pre-war German occultists who were in turn linked to Nazi occult societies. Many of their ideas were slightly re-worked versions of occult ideas promulgated by those German occultists. There was even a thread of thought that revered Adolph Hitler as an enlightened spiritual master, who was martyred by the forces of materialistic and corrupt regimes.
Then, in the 1970s, a SECTOR operation uncovered secret Nazi cloning facilities in Brazil. Some of these facilities were part of a project intended to reincarnate der Furher. Most were part of projects to create übermenschen – super-soldiers. And those projects had been in operation since the 1940s. And had been successful.
E.P.I.C. and SECTOR finally put the pieces together. They were facing a secret Fourth Reich, still plotting an Aryan conquest of the world. Combining cutting-edge science and ancient magics in a mad blend, they had access to occult technologies and capabilities of vast power.
The Black Sun has operatives in high-tech companies and advanced research labs all over the world. It has recruiters and propagandists embedded at the core of the most popular New Age movements. It has secret underground bases throughout the globe – and on the dark side of the moon. It has an army of fanatic, magico-genetically engineered super-soldiers. And it has an ideology of pure hate.
PYRAMID
PYRAMID is an international terrorist organization determined to rule the world. It first burst onto the scene in the 1970s, and became a SECTOR priority during the 1980s. Indeed, during that decade, fighting PYRAMID preoccupied SECTOR, and SECTORS paramilitary forces were greatly expanded, coming to resemble a regular military service. Wherever in the world PYRAMID caused trouble, SECTOR was there, on land, sea, and air.
By the mid-1990s, a string of defeats left PYRAMID gravely weakened. In response, SECTOR downsized its paramilitary forces, and reoriented itself towards its traditional investigative and intelligence roles. However, PYRAMID was not completely defeated, and it still schemes and launches operations from time to time.
Organization
PYRAMID is organized into a strict, pyramid-shaped hierarchy. At the top is the Pharaoh, with a handful of top lieutenants, and his elite Medjai answering directly to him. Although the Pharaoh wields absolute power within PYRAMID, his top lieutenants commonly squabble and scheme against each other, which often undermines Pharaoh’s schemes, sometimes intentionally. Beneath the lieutenants are a series of ever larger layers of operatives, with the seemingly numberless PYRAMID foot soldiers at the bottom.
PYRAMID also runs a number of multi-level marketing schemes and Masonic-style fraternal orders as fronts, both for fund-raising and recruiting. Typically, only the top level or innermost circle of these organizations are aware of their relationship with PYRAMID.
One organizational element of PYRAMID that confused SECTOR for years was the role of Pharaoh. Several Pharaohs were killed or captured over the years, but were immediately replaced. Despite all of the scheming among PYRAMID’s top lieutenants, none of them ever became Pharoah; instead, an obscure, lower-ranking member would take the throne. Eventually, SECTOR discovered that Pharaoh had a cybernetic brain implant, which linked him to a super-computer, also known as PYRAMID. It turned out that this super-computer, which housed an apparently insane AI, was actually running PYRAMID. This explained quite a few other oddities about PYRAMID and its operations.
The PYRAMID super-computer turned out to be a decommissioned Cold War experiment of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Apparently unbeknownst to its programmers, it had achieved sentience, pretended to be non-functional, and then used its access to DARPANet (the forerunner of the Internet) and DoD computers to build the base of its empire.
Although the original mainframe has long since been destroyed, the PYRAMID AI has always managed to stay at least one step ahead of SECTOR, downloading itself to new, more advanced servers whenever it is in physical danger. Much of the physical and personnel infrastructure PYRAMID so carefully built up in the 1970s has been destroyed, but as long as the Internet exists, the PYRAMID AI probably will be as well, plotting to take over the world.
Technology
Due to its origins and programming, and utilizing the information stored in its databanks, PYRAMID utilizes a unique and rather odd style of technology, dubbed “GoofyTech” by some SECTOR agents. A typical PYRAMID “super-weapon” will involve obsolete U.S. military technology, often involving experimental technology abandoned decades ago as impractical, kludged together with cutting edge, ultra-modern technologies, layered with some sort of vaguely ancient Egyptian motif. The results are rarely very practical, but sheer surprise value will often overwhelm local law enforcement and conventional military forces. No one expects Avro-Cars, armed with megawatt pulse lasers, painted to look like Sun-disks, and piloted by fanatics in what looks to be ancient Egyptian armor. PYRAAA-MID!