An original universe, four years in the making. F1RST POWER is its first sound — seven tracks, each one a theme for someone who lives inside it.
Earth-0730 begins in the years after the world nearly ended twice.
The first time, half of everything vanished for five years and came back to a planet that had already grieved and moved on. The second time, reality itself started colliding with other versions of itself — and the people who stopped it did not all walk away whole.
What survived both was a world with an enormous, unspoken problem: almost every hero it had counted on was gone, retired, or too damaged to deploy. The mantles were still there. The names, the symbols, the shields. Just nobody inside them.
Everything in this universe bends around those two lines. Who you actually are versus who you're expected to become. What you inherit versus what you choose. Every character here is standing somewhere on that question, and the album is the sound of five people answering it differently.
Mutation isn't rare here. It's the quiet norm — thousands of people carrying abilities nobody catalogued, most of them living ordinary lives and never registering as anything at all. The world calls them anomalies: not heroes, not threats, just people the system has no column for.
Most anomalies are never found. The ones who are found are usually found by someone who wants something from them.
And not all power on Earth-0730 is mutation. Some of it is older — cosmic, inherited, or elemental, from pantheons and hidden nations that kept to themselves while the world burned twice. Where those forces come from, and who still answers to them, is a longer story than five files can hold.
After the Incursion Years, the old upstate compound was abandoned as indefensible — too visible, too far from anything, too easy to watch. What replaced it sits under Manhattan: a converted deep-level facility six floors below the street, accessible through three unmarked entrances in three different boroughs, with a hangar that opens into the East River.
It is, by design, the last place anyone would look for the most-watched people in the world. It's also just their house. There's a kitchen. Somebody is always leaving dishes in it.
The current team wasn't assembled by a government or recruited by an agency. They were kids who lost the same person in the same summer and got moved into the same underground facility because there was nowhere else safe to put them. Everything after that — the training, the missions, the codenames — grew out of grief long before it grew out of duty.
Most of them are still in college, taking classes online between deployments. They are also, functionally, the only line left.
Meridian was founded in 2031, four years into the Incursion Years, by people who had watched the world be saved twice by luck and decided that luck was not a strategy.
Their founding document is only two pages long, and the argument in it is almost impossible to dismiss: in 2018 the world lost half of everything and had to wait five years for someone to fix it. In 2027 reality began folding in on itself and the response depended entirely on whether a specific handful of people happened to still be alive that week. Both times, the gap between catastrophe and the right person arriving was measured in years. Both times, that gap was filled with bodies.
Meridian's entire mission is closing the gap. Never again should the world have to wait for the right person to exist.
They don't recruit heroes. They manufacture successors. Meridian maintains the Legacy Registry — a comprehensive index of every unclaimed mantle, every dormant symbol, every name the public still trusts — and works backward from it, identifying anomalies whose biology could be made to fit.
Then they make the biology fit better. The serum work, the conditioning, the parts that require somebody to be strapped to a table: Meridian subcontracts all of it. HYDRA remnants take most of those contracts. Meridian's hands stay clean, its funding stays legal, and its press releases stay heartfelt.
Meridian's director is Dr. Ilaria Venn, known internally only as the Curator.
Before Meridian, she spent eleven years running the Legacy Archive — the institution responsible for cataloguing every enhanced individual who died, retired, or vanished. Her job, functionally, was writing obituaries for heroes. She wrote four hundred and six of them.
In 2029, during a mid-scale incursion event in Lisbon, emergency response arrived forty minutes late because the two people capable of containing it were dead and no one had replaced them. Her daughter was inside the evacuation zone. Venn has never once mentioned this publicly, and it is the only thing about her that explains anything.
She isn't a fanatic. She's a grieving archivist who did the math and reached a conclusion she can defend in any room she walks into: that waiting for heroes to emerge naturally is a policy, and that policy has a body count. She would tell you she's the only person taking that seriously.
Meridian believes power should be assigned. This team believes it should be chosen. That's the whole war, and it's why every file in this archive is about someone refusing a version of themselves that was handed to them.
INTRO: ARMY is deliberately ambiguous. It's Meridian's theme and it's theirs. An army is only ever a question of who's pointing it.
Born July 17th, 2021 in Queens, to Sandhya Raavi and Aniruddh Stark — during the five years the world was missing half of itself, under circumstances nobody involved has ever fully explained out loud. She and her twin were raised by Sandhya and by Arun Raavi, the man who chose to stay and be their father anyway, and who was the only one of the adults in that arrangement who never once made it complicated.
She grew up as Sara Raavi. Not Stark. That was deliberate, and it held for fourteen years.
She's a mutant. The telekinesis came first, early and quiet, and she hid it the way you hide a bad grade — badly, and only from the people who already knew.
In the summer of 2035, Arun was killed in a car accident on his way to a Stark Industries convention. Within weeks she was living six floors under Manhattan with her sister and Kal, because Sandhya could not safely keep three grieving, superpowered teenagers in one house and knew it.
That same summer, days before her freshman year, Meridian took her. Four days. A HYDRA cell holding the contract, an amplified variant of a serum that was never meant to be recreated, and a mantle already selected for her before anyone asked her a single question.
The team pulled her out before the conditioning took. The serum stayed. She came home with a body she didn't recognize and a symbol with her name already printed on it.
She refused the mantle publicly and permanently. No shield, no star, no manufactured symbol for the cameras. She took The Allegiant instead, because allegiance was the one thing nobody could put in a syringe.
She fights with telekinesis and twin vibranium discs — thrown flat, recalled mid-air, fitted with a release in the center that snaps a blade edge out of the rim mid-flight. She is also, to the ongoing irritation of at least one Asgardian, fully worthy of Mjolnir, and picks it up roughly once a year to prove a point.
She co-leads with her sister. She studies business, produces music almost nobody knows she makes, speaks five languages, and is functionally incapable of resting. BASEL1NE is the sound of someone rewriting their own foundation instead of inheriting one.
She was born out of a wish made by someone who wanted to end gods, and she was named, originally, only Love. After the war that killed her father, the God of Thunder adopted her and gave her a full name — Emilie Love Thorsdottir — specifically so she'd have something human to hold onto.
She was raised between New Asgard, on the Norwegian coast, and a facility under a city on the other side of an ocean. Her earliest memories are of being handed weapons by people who loved her and were also, quietly, afraid of her.
Emilie's power isn't learned. It's inherited — cosmic in origin, capable of leveling a city block on a bad day, and entirely unearned in a way she thinks about more than she says out loud. Everyone who raised her had an opinion about what she should become. Meridian's file on her is longer than anyone else's on this team, and it's the only one they've never acted on, because nobody there has worked out what you'd even do to a person like her.
The specifics of how she keeps that power in check are classified. What isn't: she decided very young that she'd rather be underestimated than uncontrolled, and everything about how she carries herself follows from that one choice.
Her codename is ET — her initials, and a joke about where she's from that she made exactly once and everyone else refused to let go of. She's one of the only beings alive who can lift Stormbreaker without being handed permission, and she trained hand-to-hand with the Dora Milaje, which means she fights like she's proving something to people who aren't in the room.
She never had a civilian identity to protect — which made her the natural keeper of everyone else's for years. She studies astrophysics, plays acoustic guitar, and is slowly, deliberately learning the languages the Allspeak used to hand her for free. IN HER ORBIT is about gravity: what pulls a weapon toward being a person instead.
Born May 29th, 1970 to an Indian mother and an American industrialist father, and christened with a first name that made him easier for boardrooms to pronounce. After his parents died in 1991, he legally reordered it — Aniruddh first, Antonio second — because the version of himself that was convenient had stopped being worth the trade.
The public still calls him Tony. Almost nobody who matters to him does.
He survived 2023. That's the part the history books get right and the part that means the least to him. He lost his right arm, not his life — and then spent the years afterward losing people anyway, slower and quieter and without anything to punch.
By 2027 he was already retired and already back, because the Incursion Years didn't care what he'd earned. In 2035 he took in three grieving teenagers he had no legal claim to and no business raising, and built them a home six floors under Manhattan, a training floor, and eventually an entire operational infrastructure — because the alternative was letting Meridian find them first.
He doesn't deploy anymore, mostly. He builds — inhibitor bracelets, suits, safehouses, contingencies for contingencies. He is the reason every kid on this team can exist in public without hurting anyone, and he is painfully aware that a device which dampens power is one rewrite away from a device that controls it. That's the exact argument Meridian makes. He built them anyway. He audits the code constantly.
G.B.P.P. isn't the man from the posters. It's the version underneath, in the order it actually happened.
Born March 18th, 2021 in Lahore, in New York by the time he was two, inseparable from the Raavi twins by kindergarten. He's a mutant — speed, senses that pick up too much, a healing factor, bone claws — and he kept all of it secret from his own parents for years, because he understood at seven what people do with things they don't have a word for.
When he was ten, his family was attacked. He used everything he had. It wasn't enough. Arun and Sandhya took him in that same month and never once let it feel like charity — which is why, when the accident in 2035 took Arun, Khalil grieved him as a father too. He was the third of the three teenagers moved six floors under Manhattan that summer, right beside the twins.
Kal never had a secret identity. He was simply too fast to keep one — there's no plausible deniability when a person crosses four city blocks in under a second on camera. Where the twins had fourteen years of anonymity to lose, he had none, and built his entire personality in the open because nobody ever offered him the alternative.
He wears a custom dampener so he can sit through a class or stand in a grocery line. Even damped, he's the fastest person in most rooms.
He runs reconnaissance, first contact, and evacuation — the jobs where being early is the entire point. Raised Muslim, raised again in a Telugu-speaking household, fluent in six languages, and constitutionally incapable of not being the person who shows up. His metabolism means he can't fast, which he's made an uneasy peace with and still thinks about every year.
MONOLITH is about the cost of being the constant. The thing that doesn't move, even when everything else does.
Born the same July morning as her sister, into the same house, under the same assumed name — and almost immediately proved that identical circumstances produce nothing of the sort. She's a mutant too, but where Saranika's power announced itself, Sesha's arrived as air: quiet, ambient, easy to mistake for a draft. She figured out what it was long before she told anyone, and she told anyone much later than she should have.
The same accident in 2035 took Arun. The same facility took her in. She processed it by building systems, and has never once processed anything by talking about it.
Meridian's file on Sesha exists and is marked low-priority. She has read it. She has made no effort whatsoever to correct it, and considers that classification the single greatest tactical asset anyone on this team has.
She never took a legacy mantle and never wanted one. She picked Minerva because it was hers and it was accurate — strategy, not spectacle. The name doesn't reference anybody. That's the entire point of it.
Aerokinetic, lethal at range, and functionally invisible in a fight until the moment she decides not to be. She runs mission planning and tactical diagnostics for the whole team and co-leads alongside her sister — an arrangement that works because they disagree constantly and privately.
She's a trained pianist who has played Carnegie Hall more than once, studies biochemistry online on the pre-med track, and reads comics obsessively. MINERVA is a theme for the ones who get underestimated on purpose, and use every second of it.
Two screenings. One tells you where you'd stand in the war. The other tells you whose file you'd share. Ten questions each — answer honestly.
Every universe needs more than five people. Fill out your file and Earth-0730 issues you a clearance card of your own — your name, your power, your alias. You're in the story now.
One vote each. Whose story hit you hardest? Tap to cast — then see where everyone else landed.
This roster is encrypted. Five intercept fragments are hidden across the files above — one in each, numbered 1 through 5. Recover them, arrange them in order, and enter the five-word transmission to decrypt the classified roster.
Read every file to unlock the archive.
The final transmission is sealed. Decrypt the classified roster in FILES PENDING to bring everyone together.