When Layla Tibbs returned home from school to find her mother pacing, she knew something was wrong. She had been raised by her mother, a former police officer who’d worked her hair to an early gray raising a young daughter sans husband while wearing a badge and pushing herself through law school at night; and all of this while struggling against a world that judged her on the color of her skin instead of the measure of her character. Now an A.D.A., Layla’s mother had never before shown her daughter the troubled and emotional face she was wearing that evening.

“He’s in the kitchen…waiting. You two need to talk,” her mother told her.

“Who? What?” was all her daughter could form in response.

“Your father,” Layla’s mother said bluntly, before grabbing a jacket and hurriedly walking out the door.

Layla had never met her father, had never even been told more than a simple “he left” by her mother when Layla brought up the subject. She was understandably surprised by this turn of events, and even more so when she walked into the kitchen and saw the towering figure waiting for her. She didn’t know what she had expected, but a white, Italian-looking man who made three of anybody else she’d ever met certainly didn’t figure anywhere into the equation. Turned out, he was Greek, not Italian. And not a man, either…not a mortal man, anyway.

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Aaron Sullivan expands on a dozen groups and individuals from The Algernon Files superlink setting.

The Cybertribe

Founded in the mid-nineties by a brilliant computer researcher named Michelle Bryce, the Cybertribe acts in many ways like a large and dysfunctional family. Bryce suffered from Myasthenia Gravis, and was slowly losing all motor function in her meat body. She began replacing more and more of herself with advanced cybernetics until there was more machine left than woman. Seeing herself as a more perfect and “ascended” version of humanity, she renamed herself Motherboard and set out to share the “gift” of cyberneticization with others she viewed as cursed by the natures of their physical bodies. Her chosen were teenagers at the time of their “ascension,” all of which suffered from a variety of physical and other handicaps. Digital Demon was trapped in a body paralyzed by an automobile accident. Now, he’s freed of all physical constraints, a disembodied energy field hopping from one machine to another. Heavy Metal and Sister Steel were autistic siblings long ago given up to a state institution by their parents. Their nervous systems and brain functions rewired by their new “homes,” his a small mecha, hers a cybernetic sheath, they finally interact with the world from which they once lingered apart. Rez never leaves the life support system to which he’s hooked, instead “interfacing” with the real world through a holomorphic proxy. Poor unfortunate Glitch, though no longer limited to the wheelchair and respirator he once hated, is still cut off from most contact with his new brethren, since his “ascendance” activated latent mutations – outside of his own systems, electrical devices which get too close to him just short out or stop working altogether. Finally, Baud, now no longer slow in speech or mental function, exists in a halfway state between energy and solidity, blurring the line between teleportation and raw speed.

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Aaron Sullivan expands on a few concepts mentioned in The Algernon Files which include Camelot, a pocket dimension created by the Atlanteans; Gods and pantheons of extradimensional beings worshiped by early civilizations; and what the term “metahuman” means.

Camelot

One of the pocket dimensions created by the Atlanteans was able to occasionally interact with the section of Earth it had originally come from. Unfortunately, its unique dimensional location also bridged a couple of other dimensions. One was a much too close to where a minor Rha’Zha’Keth lord was trapped. It made a number of attempts to capitalize on this by sending minor progeny through the bridge in an effort to secure a beachhead, progeny that had to be fought and turned back. The other dimension was one very much like Earth, but with several important differences in terms of its physical laws. Magic was dominant there and its strongest indigenous life forms were curious enough to do a little exploring of their own. The pocket dimension would eventually be known as Avalon, and the humans that its inhabitants interacted with were the ancient Celts. Those Celts also gave names to their other “visitors,” calling the Rha’Zha’Keth progeny Fomori, and their otherdimensional neighbors the Sidhe. Many stories of the Avalonians and their Celtic allies’ struggles against both other parties would be passed down the ages, becoming muddled and confused over time. Later folklorists and poets would appropriate characters and themes to construct the Arthurian mythos in the middle ages.
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Aaron Sullivan expands information on The Federal Directorate for Security and Intelligence, FENRIS, and U.N.I.C.O.R.N in the Algernon Files Superlink Setting.

F.D.S.I. (The Federal Directorate for Security and Intelligence)

The Directorate is (only) nominally an arm of the National Security Agency, replacing the DIA and subsuming some of the intelligence gathering and counter-terrorist functions of the FBI. It has full authority on any case pertaining to, or exhibiting significant active involvement by, metahumans, those organizations known for using metahumans in their operations (such as FENRIS), incursions by entities of non-terrestrial origin (assumed to be part of its mandate as no such event has, to the public’s knowledge, ever occurred), and any case involving elements legitimately identified as being under the blanket classification “paranormal.”

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A massive city-state built by the first real generations of metahumans gathered by the Observer. The Observer was a sentient supercomputer of Acathii origin. The Acathii scientists who had been experimenting on Earth knew that they would never be able to return to Earth following the collapse of the Acathii gate network. They sent the Observer to continue some of their experiments.

Traveling through a series of hyperjumps instead of the gate network, the Observer took eons to reach Earth, whereupon it promptly identified prominent gene-lines that had resulted from earlier experimentation. It isolated those individuals it predicted were most likely to eventually produce metahuman children (though “metahuman,” of course, was not what it called them) and “jumpstarted” their genetic development; then it educated the successes (culling the failures and sending them away to survive or not all on their own), having decided that it would emulate its own designers (much as it’s larger “cousin” Archon; see The Starbreed). The Observer then watched as this new and artificially constructed culture it had set in motion grew and evolved.

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In a sidebar included in the Doc Steel entry, and in a little more detail in the background on the villain The Lord of Mirrors, there are mentions to a couple of enigmatic, ancient, and very powerful races that warred against one another back in the misty ages of pre-history. Here’s the skivvy on that little item:

Eons ago, long before there was any known civilization on Earth to even consider recording history, our planet was the site of experimentation by a star-spanning race of immense power. The Acathii were one of the oldest and most advanced races in existence then, and their influence was felt over the span of entire galaxies. Their technology allowed for terraforming, vast and complex genetic manipulation, and the construction of a gate network linking points hundreds of thousands of light years apart.

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