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Hi! Your friendly neighborhood novaphile here, Amber Lynn Carter. I've been asked to work up a less formal history of Team Tomorrow for this site, since there are several more structured ones out there, both scholarly and sensationalist. (Dreaming of Erehwon is a personal favorite, BTW.) I'm going to take you a bit more "behind the scenes," as it were, to show you some of the seminal events in T2M's past and present, and wrap it all up with a look at what the future might bring.
Unless you've been under a rock since N-Day, you know that on New Year's Day 1999, the founding members of Team Tomorrow were introduced to the world. Caestus Pax (hi Dad! :-), Lightning, Griffin Armstrong, the Apollo Kid, Splash, Ricardo Montoya-Bernal, and (cough) Psyche formed the core team, along with the Ragnarockette, Shadow Artist, and poor Slag as the first Auxiliary members. The skeptics were quick to dismiss them as a publicity stunt, but the Al-Burhan raid got everyone's attention in record time. T2M's reputation went up like a rocket, and pretty soon noble novas from all walks of life, including most notably Slider, Quasar, Ana Texeira and Pele, were joining up. The team's first year was a string of stunning successes.
Then came the so-called "Equatorial Wars."
This first use of elites in warfare was to change the face of the world. Not the least of its effects was on the young Team Tomorrow. The full power of Team Tomorrow was assembled to protect innocents and end the slaughter. They were expecting a hard-fought battle, but with elites fighting each other in all directions, they felt they could pull their punches enough to avoid killing other novas.
What they didn't expect was for DeVries' operatives to immediately forego all internal conflicts and turn on Team Tomorrow en masse. Attacked with a ferocity and brutality unknown in nova combat until that time, Team Tomorrow was initially overwhelmed by the DeVries elites' attack. Despite the viciousness of the battle, T2M worked overtime to avoid lethal force...until Totentanz sped up behind Slag and forever altered the course of history.
Several T2Mers tried to come to Slag's aid, but other elites (notably Pursuer and Prometheus) held them off for the few seconds Totentanz needed to finish murdering Hiram Goldberg. Unsurprisingly, Team Tomorrow went nuclear.
Though reluctant, Aunt Jen was willing to talk briefly about the battle that lead to Hiram's death.
"It was a bloody, insane, overwhelming nightmare. Lethal quantum powers were being thrown everywhere. Most of us had started pulling our punches a little less, except for Slag and Quasar, but I think the Elites smelled blood. They knew that teamwork gave us the long-term advantage, which meant that the longer the battle went, the worse their situation. On the other hand, they were all professional soldiers, and the worst we'd faced were nova gangsters.
"It was almost as if they'd had the same thought all at once. If they could start killing us off quickly, we'd fall apart and they could finish us off. So each one of them picked a target and went all out. Pursuer went after Pax, some woman whose name I never learned created a vacuum around me, Prometheus turned some gadget on Quasar...and Totentanz hit Hiram from behind.
"We all went a little crazy when Hiram died, I think. Pax screamed — it's the only time I've ever heard him scream, and I'll remember that sound to my dying day — and when he saw that I was in trouble, he just looked at the elite attacking me. She just...vanished, almost. It was 'just' a force blast, except it was Pax doing the blasting. She was a fine mist before even I could react.
"Anyway, he made a few gestures, roared 'Take them out,' and elites started falling. We were in no mood to play nice any more. Guggie got her hands on a nova watching Totentanz's flank and she just...broke him. Guggie and Hiram were good friends. In less than a minute, they'd had enough. Pax had given Pursuer that scar of his, Totentanz had already bolted, and they just broke and ran. You could say we won, but it sure didn't feel like a victory. Between Hiram and those two novas, I think we almost would've rather lost."
Much has been said by many about the editing done in footage of that battle, claiming that Team Tomorrow was actually defeated and it was covered up. The truth is that Proteus did pull strings to have the footage edited, but not due to any difficulties T2M had mopping up the elites. With Hiram dead and Pualani gravely wounded, Caestus Pax ordered the team to take the gloves off. John Carter learned tactics in military special operations, not the comics. The results against the makeshift DeVries alliance were devastating. Two elites were killed in as many minutes of fighting before everyone withdrew to lick their wounds and mourn their dead. It wasn't difficult for Utopia to negotiate a peace once the various heads of state saw that the "public relations" heroes of T2M had teeth. But the need to kill in battle, the loss of the much-loved Slag, and the ensuing cover-up, would sober many Tomorrowites...and make them wonder just what had happened.
What really wounded T2M, however, was watching DeVries pull dozens of strings to allow Slag's killer, as well as the callous murderers of hundreds of helpless innocents, to go free. The United Nations did nothing, and even Project Utopia could do little more than shrug. Despite their victories in battle, it truly was Team Tomorrow's most terrible defeat. Team morale has never been lower, before or since.
Caestus Pax immedately began an aggressive recruiting drive, expanding Team Tomorrow far beyond its initial charter. Public relations had been part of the team's initial purpose, showing the world what noble and dedicated novas could do. But Director Pax would not risk another Slag, especially when it could easily be avoided by having more "practical" divisions added to Team Tomorrow. Today, the world sees a little less than forty novas representing Team Tomorrow, and even this website concentrates on those members. However, under Pax's leadership, T2M's actual power would expand to over twice its apparent size, until today when over a hundred novas serve with T2M in one capacity or another.
Meanwhile, Antaeus began leading Team Tomorrow in the greatest environmental cleanup in history (and hopefully, of all time). The Zuchima macrobe project helped boost morale in T2M, and Pax and deputy leaders Ricardo and Splash waited for an opportunity that would restore the team's confidence.
They didn't have long to wait.
On September 15, 2002, Kashmir turned into Hell.
For decades, India and Pakistan have warred over a chunk of land that only has value to the farmers that call it home. But to many in both governments, it is a symbol of national pride (and a source of political power) based on the age-old idea that rhetoric wins support on the home front. Kashmir has been a time bomb since 1947, when the two nations first went to war over it.
Ironically, it was China that set it off.
Ostensibly entering Kashmir "to guarantee Asian security," China instigated the bloodiest conflict of the 21st Century, resulting in battles that destroyed entire cities (most notably Sringar, where the entire population of 30,000 was killed in two hours of fighting). Less catastrophic but more spectacular (and more well known, sadly enough) was the battle that literally blew away the top of Mt. Rakaposhi, leaving it more than half a kilometer shorter. All sides — particularly nova-poor Pakistan — hired numerous elites.
With almost half of the world's population about to go to war, something had to be done. Despite the impossibility of implementing the new "two-on-one" rule with so many novas involved in the engagement, there was only one nova force with the manpower to do what needed doing. It had all the earmarks of another Equatorial War...except Pax had a plan.
Unlike the sub-Saharan situation, the chances of the warring novas allying with each other to fight T2M were effectively nil. Therefore, Pax went after each army one at a time. They went into Pakistan first, where superior numbers and coordination allowed the team to neutralize both the native novas and the elites in a matter of minutes without loss of life. India's forces were more problematic, but fortunately more reasonable; after an hour of intense skirmishing, Column Shiva was convinced to retreat to the Indian border.
Finally, Team Tomorrow confronted the Exploding Heavenly Mandate. The world's two largest standing nova combat forces faced each other. Pax made a stirring speech in an effort to avoid combat. The Mandate attacked, expecting superior numbers to win out over raw power and greater experience.
They walked right into Pax's trap, as Slider's spatial warps, Quasar's force fields, Psyche's illusory powers and Lightning's electrified ground fields turned the EHM's attack in on itself. The Mandate saw the light before N! had come back from commercial break, allowing them to save face after the least effective mass nova attack in history. (Of course, N! got all this on tape, but the Chinese were...persuasive. Now you know why N! can broadcast freely throughout the Middle Kingdom. If you know people who know people, they keep a few copies around for "archival purposes"... :-)
Less than a year after Team Tomorrow's worst defeat, they won a victory completely unprecedented in human history. They won a battle that prevented a war and may have saved the lives of everyone in Kashmir, not to mention millions in India, Pakistan and China. The one down side of the whole affair is that they got stuck administrating Kashmir. Both India and Pakistan have screamed bloody murder about this, but neither side would agree to anything else. And while China almost certainly had ulterior motives in its play for Kashmir, the stability T2M's presence provided (while avoiding any risk to "loyal Chinese novas") left Beijing in a generous mood.
On a personal note, what gives me the greatest hope for humanity in general is that the T2M exploit that has most thoroughly captured our imaginations and hearts to date isn't an epic quantum battle, but an ostensibly simple rescue mission.
Except this rescue took place in near-Earth orbit.
The dramatic rescue of the Discovery caught the attention of the world in a way even the most violent nova battles couldn't. It showed the sheer wonder of the Nova age in a way that anyone could approve of. We saw how limitless our boundaries have become with the advent of quantum powers. Every space organization on the planet got its official wake-up call. And Team Tomorrow got the chance to show its stuff in a truly spectacular way that didn't involve shooting at people. Despite the millions that it had helped through environmental work, emergency shelter, disaster relief and crime prevention, the pure joy of working in space was infectious even among the most jaded members of T2M.
It was Team Tomorrow's proudest moment.
To be continued.
© 2002, 2009