Chapter Text
1970s — Divergence Begins
China accelerates industrialization through aggressive state planning.
No Watergate → U.S. political trust remains higher.
China wins the 1979 Vietnam War, boosting military prestige.
China begins early Weather Machine research.
1980s — Two Powers Rise
The American Party forms in the U.S. as a reformist technocratic movement.
China grows faster than in real history, becoming a major global force.
1990s — The American Party Breaks the System
1992: The American Party wins its first presidential election (Ross Perot).
1996: The American Party wins reelection.
China enters a massive economic boom (lasting until 2014).
The Soviet Union collapses → First Cold War ends.
2000s — China Builds the Weather Machine
2009: China completes the Weather Machine, initially used for agriculture and growth.
2010s — The Great Deterioration
U.S.–China relations collapse.
2015: China secretly uses the Weather Machine on the western U.S. → continuous rainfall.
China begins a massive military buildup and starts designing a Mobile Fortress.
2020s — The Pacific War
2021
China completes and publicly reveals the Mobile Fortress.
The U.S. begins building its own version.
2024
The American Party wins the election again.
November: U.S. discovers China’s weather attacks → national outrage.
2025 — War Begins
February 2025: China launches a surprise attack.
China uses the Weather Machine to sink ships across the Pacific, gaining naval supremacy.
China invades Taiwan with the Mobile Fortress.
North Korea invades South Korea; nuclear weapons are used but ineffective.
South Korea pushes to the Chinese border, but China invades and overruns Korea.
Late 2020s
With the Weather Machine moved away from the U.S., America reclaims the flooded West.
But with its navy destroyed, the U.S. loses the naval war.
The American Party grants expanded wartime powers to the military.
2029
China invades Japan.
The U.S. provides air support and deploys its own Mobile Fortress, but it is not effective.
2030s — Collapse and Cold War II
Japan is fully conquered and occupied.
Millions of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese refugees flee to the U.S.
The war is lost → Second Cold War begins.
The American Party uses wartime authority to justify one‑party rule for “stability.”
China floods the western U.S. again using the Weather Machine.
Global Chaos
Iberian Civil War becomes the first major proxy conflict.
Spain conquers Portugal and enters the Sakoku Isolation Period.
Russia enters a warlord era; China invades Siberia and installs a puppet regime.
2040s–2050s — The Age of Proxy Wars
Worldwide proxy conflicts intensify.
The U.S. invades Mexico and Canada for land and strategic depth.
Germany is taken over by the Nature Party, which wants nature to dominate human civilization.
Austria falls to a Fourth Reich movement.
Eastern Europe becomes dominated by crime syndicates.
Venice falls under futurist technocratic rule.
The Great African War begins (18 years long).
India and Pakistan fight a nuclear war → both fragments.
China funds rebels in NE India to create a puppet state.
U.S. Regional Administrators form to manage local crises as the military gains more power.
2060s — The Military Council & The Birth of X
The Military Council forms and becomes the real power in the U.S.
The American Party becomes a symbolic government controlling only Washington, D.C.
Massive breakthroughs in biology and sub-dimensional research lead to X, the catalyst drug that unlocks elemental abilities.
France suffers end after 40 years of civil wars (2027–2069); Brittany becomes independent.
2070s — Elemental Age Begins
China has 14 Mobile Fortress airships; the U.S. has 9.
The South Mexico Regional Administrator requests permission to invade Yucatán due to rebel activity.
The Military Council authorizes the operation with a 9‑month deadline.
The campaign fails; the administrator is removed; rebel presence increases.
The Leak
The formulas for X, Fire, Water, and Lightning leak to the public.
Elemental powers spread uncontrollably.
Earth, Ice, Wind, and Plant remain available only to government and black markets.
2080s — The Main Plot Era
Society is transformed by elemental powers.
Multi‑element permanent users are unheard of.
The first user Multi‑element permanent users emerges in this unstable, militarized, superpowered world.
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The year is the mid‑1970s, and China stands at a crossroads. Mao Zedong, aging but still fiercely curious, begins quietly studying Western scientific writings that had been previously dismissed as bourgeois fantasies. Among the scattered papers and translated journals placed before him, one idea captures his attention more than any other: Nikola Tesla’s speculative concepts for weather manipulation.
The notion is outrageous, impossible, and yet… intoxicating. A machine that could command the skies, bend storms, summon rain, or deny it. In a nation struggling with agricultural instability and eager to leapfrog the West, the idea feels less like science fiction and more like destiny.
Intrigued, Mao orders a discreet initiative: a hand‑picked team of scientists, engineers, and military planners is assembled under absolute secrecy. Their mission is simple in words but monumental in scope — study Tesla’s theories, extract what is useful, and begin the foundations of a Chinese weather‑control program. What begins as a speculative research cell becomes the seed of a project that will, decades later, reshape the world: the first blueprint of the Weather Machine.
This is the butterfly that flaps its wings — the moment that alters the future.
Beijing, Early 1970s
Mao Zedong sits wrapped in a thick coat despite the warmth in the room. His health is failing, but his curiosity is not. A thin stack of translated material rests on the table beside him—Western scientific papers, confiscated books, recovered notes from decades past. Most of it is junk. Some of it is dangerous.
One document holds his attention longer than the others.
Nikola Tesla.
Old. Dead. Ridiculed.
Mao does not care that Tesla failed. Mao cares that Tesla thought big.
The paper describes atmospheric energy, resonance, the idea that weather is not chaos but a system that can be pushed, nudged, coerced. The language is speculative, incomplete, borderline delusional.
Mao smiles.
China, he thinks, has time. The West wastes it.
He does not announce anything publicly. That would attract the wrong attention. Instead, he issues a quiet instruction through channels that bypass Party bureaucracy.
A research group is to be formed.
It will not be called a weapons project.
It will not be housed under the military.
It will be framed as agricultural and disaster-prevention research.
Only a handful of people are told the truth.
Zhongnanhai, Closed Session
The scientists Mao selects are not loyalists. They are survivors.
Men and women who endured the Cultural Revolution by keeping their heads down. Engineers who learned to lie convincingly. Physicists who watched colleagues disappear.
They are summoned individually. No group meetings at first.
Each is told the same thing, separately:
“Chairman Mao wants to know if weather can be influenced.”
Not controlled. Not weaponized. Influenced.
The questions are cautious, but the expectation is not. Failure will not be tolerated—but neither will publicity.
They are given:
A remote facility
Unlimited theoretical freedom
Strict compartmentalization
No one sees the full picture.
At first, the work is embarrassing. Equations that go nowhere. Models that collapse under real data. Western theories that don’t survive Chinese geography.
One junior researcher privately calls it “a ghost project.”
He stops using that term after a colleague vanishes for “reassignment.”
Internal Opposition Begins
Not everyone is blind.
A mid-level Party official in the Ministry of Science notices the funding irregularities. Equipment orders that do not match declared research goals. Power consumption anomalies.
He raises concerns internally.
Within weeks, he is accused of ideological deviation—“overreliance on foreign science.”
His career ends. Officially, he is reassigned to agricultural supervision in a rural province.
Unofficially, everyone understands the message.
The project continues.
The First Prototype
Late 1970s.
The prototype is crude. Massive power draw. Poor control. No precision.
When activated, it does not produce rain.
It produces instability.
Pressure shifts ripple outward. Local storms behave strangely. Crops fail in one county and flourish in another. Fishing villages report unpredictable winds.
The scientists are terrified.
This is not influence. This is interference.
Reports are written, rewritten, then rewritten again to soften the language. Data is buried. Side effects are classified as “natural anomalies.”
The facility is temporarily shut down.
The failure is never reported to the broader Party.
Mao is informed directly.
He listens. He says nothing. Then he asks a single question:
“Did it work at all?”
When told that it changed weather patterns—even uncontrollably—he nods.
Failure is acceptable. Proof of possibility is not.
The Cover-Up
The prototype is dismantled. Records are split across departments. No single archive contains the whole story.
The official explanation:
A failed agricultural climate-mitigation experiment.
The scientists are reassigned but not dismissed. That alone tells them everything.
This is not over.
After Mao
Mao dies. Many projects die with him.
This one does not.
Because it has already been reframed.
The handoff is subtle:
The language shifts from ideology to stability.
From revolutionary ambition to national resilience.
From Mao’s curiosity to long-term state security.
The new leadership does not fully understand the project.
They do not need to.
All they see is a classified line item labeled:
“Strategic Climate Research – High Long-Term Value.”
That is enough.
The scientists remain. Older now. More careful. Less afraid.
They stop asking whether it should be done.
They focus on how to make it work.