The year was 1942…
World War II was in full swing, and the US had been involved for just over a year. Five years before the Roswell incident there was another incident, one that occured at the North Pole.
A mysterious vehicle of presumed extraterrestrial orign was discovered near a US operated weather station, a weather station that was actually far more than meets the eye. Deep beneath the ice there was constructed a hidden facility known to exist by a double handful of people in the entire world.
This was the Morrow Project.
The vehicle had apparently been buried there after a crash some sixty-five million years in the past.
The government wasted no time, spared no effort in their attempts to unlock the secrets of the object, dubbed 'The Stranger'. Six months in they called in the now impoverished and greatly discredited genius Nikola Tesla — they had detected power inside the thing, power of an exotic electromagnetic frequency, and Tesla was still considered one of the greatest minds in the field, the father of the 20th century.
31 December, just one week before his death on January 7 in 1943, Tesla unlocked The Stranger, and for the first time the Scientists were able to enter it. Inside was a trove of high technology, but it was well beyond their capabilities to analyze.
The last thing Tesla did in his life was open up the sealed area where the electrical signals were emanating from. Inside he found a sphere — and that sphere had what looked to be a miniature star inside, and from that star tendrils of energy lashed and arced about inside it. Intuition prompted the man to grasp it on either side, and then he pressed his brow to it.
And that is when the world changed.
The instant he made a third point of contact with the sphere Tesla felt his mind expanded tens of thousands of times over. And it was far too much for him to contain…at least that's what the theory and data support, but who knows? All that is known for sure is that there came a pulse of energy from the sphere, all the power inside it released in a burst that washed over the entire world in an ever expanding ring along the lines of force that makes up the Earth's magnetic field.
Nobody outside of The Stranger even noticed anything, though there were power glitches. Strange memory lapses, and bizarre events of wildly improbable nature occurring the world over without any apparent links between them.
Tesla spent his last three days in Area 51, indeed, The Stranger and Tesla were why it was built in the first place. He was buried in a small ceremony, and the world quietly went on its merry way, blissfully unaware of what was to come.
Six months later, on a battle field in of all places France, came the first recorded appearance of a Super. Pierre Lumierre manifested superpowers during a fight, a magnesium flare struck him, and he burst into flames — and he kept on burning without being consumed.
As if First Manifestation were the catalyst, dozens of people — even a few animals — started showing paranormal abilities.
And their powers didn't just go away, in many cases they proved to grow stronger.
It has been sixty-seven years since First Manifestation, and the world is vastly changed. Supers are a part of world culture now in full blown comic book reminiscent glory.
It is 2010, The Age of Heroes.
And Tesla's brain…watches from deep below the northern polar ice.