Pounce | Los Diablos

Los Diablos...

In the early 1980s, a cataclysmic series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions ripped along the Ring of Fire, wreaking havoc across the Pacific region. The so-called "Big One" struck as the San Andreas Fault unleashed its power, and the entire California coast collapsed into the sea.

Simultaneously, the slumbering supervolcanoes under Yellowstone and Mammoth Lake erupted with unprecedented force within the West Coast of North America. Ash plumes blocked out the sun for months on end, as far away as the Midwest and China.

However, it was not just North America that suffered. But the entire Pacific "Rim of Fire" had awakened with unbridled fury that was never seen before. Japan was smothered under a permanent ash sky as Mount Fuji and hundreds of smaller volcanoes blew their tops causing cities in Japan to be covered in ash. Entire cities on the coastline of China China were swallowed by the earthquake-spawned tsunamis that raced across the ocean, wiping out coastal regions and sinking economic powerhouses that once dominated the world economy. The Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia - no country within the Pacific was left untouched by this unspeakable event.

In the aftermath, as the death toll climbed to 50-80 million and spread across several nations, the geopolitical order shifted. With its cities drowned and the world economy in ruin, China descended into chaos and famine due to the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers not being able to grow sustainable crops. Japan became isolated from the world once again due to it becoming under a gray veil that now clouds the island.

In North America, the West Coast of the US's major population centers had been obliterated. And in the ruins of Los Angeles, a new destiny was emerging. Renamed "Los Diablos" by the survivors, it became the loosest of territories - a lawless frontier beyond the long arm of any central authority that sat in Washington DC.

At first, the US government had tried to rebuild the ravaged coastline, but the wave of aftershocks and crashing of economies around the world forced the politicians in Washington to focus on salvaging the Heartland and the East Coast. The Midwest of the US had been heavily affected by the falling ash, and the resulting food rationing made riots an everyday experience.

As the years passed, reclamation stalled. And in 1992, Congress officially designated the West Coast of America a "free economic zone" in an attempt to incite the private industry to do what the government could not. By ceding control Congress had hoped private interests could rebuild what they could not. It was a gamble that paid off, attracting pioneers to what some called the "American Outlands".

This led to no taxes. No regulations. No federal government to issue orders.

And to everybody's surprise, it worked. Just like the Wild West of the old era, the ravaged coastline somehow attracted the adventurous and the foolhardy. Enough people wanted to live their lives without being held down by the heavy hand of big government so that the wave of refugees turned into a trickle of immigrants. Enough companies wanted to ply their trade without rules and regulations for money to flow in as well. The roads began to be repaired, and the cities were cleared of rubble.

And in these apocalyptic ashes, a new type of human would rise due to the Enhanced that also popped up in the seventies.

The so-called Hero drugs had first seen the light in the seventies—an unforeseen side-effect of an attempt to create the perfect diet pill. Corners had been cut and safety trials skipped, so the pill hit the market as a dietary supplement instead of a strictly controlled drug.

None was shocked that there were side effects, but the nature of those effects was a different story.

Many more people died when they tried to take the pill, but in some people, the metabolic changes resulted in weird and wondrous transformations. The rumors became reality when a woman who could light fires with her mind demonstrated her talents on live television. The active compound was analyzed, purified, and modified until you had a drug strong enough to kill most people.

But the few survivors became far more than they had been.

The drug was banned and, of course, declared an illegal narcotic in 1976. How many people could consider injecting something that had a roughly 95% chance of killing you or turning you into a cripple for life?

The answer was, surprisingly many.

They were the dreamers and the desperate, the thrill-seekers, the greedy, and the plain insane. Prices went through the roof.

The industry went underground, and when it resurfaced, it was in the reclaimed ruins of the West. The world had to relearn what it meant to be human; it had to adjust to masked heroes and villains battling it out in colorful costumes, with bombastic names. At first, the masks had been a way to preserve anonymity; the bank robber's mask eventually turned into the villain's horned helmet. Soon, the masks had begun to represent something else. A new life. A new destiny.

It was a new America, and it deserved new heroes.