Arkham Event

The Arkham Event is the collective name for a series of terrible events that befell the city of Arkham in the 1920's. The near-destruction of Earth was averted by the heroic action of a man, his trusty giant robot, and his favorite book-loli.

This entry is a stub to be filled in at a later point in time, and covers the events that would fall within #ss2 canon.

Background

The 1920's was a time of decadence and dissatisfaction worldwide, but particularly so in the Western world, and secret mystic societies and cults sprang up almost on a weekly basis. By the close of the decade, though, many of these cults had been absorbed into a larger group known as the Black Lodge. Counted among its 'membership' some of the most powerful Mythos sorcerers in the world, the Black Lodge name became synonymous with criminal and terrorist activity. Public sector police and government forces were not always adequate to the task of repelling sorcery-backed criminals, leaving them to be fended off by local heroes, more secretive government agencies, or other mysterious forces.

Among those who opposed the Black Lodge was the Arkham-based zaibatsu known as the Hadou Group. By the 1920's, the Hadou Group was in the fullness of its strength as a corporate powerhouse, with the same far-reaching power that the zaibatsu conglomerates based in Japan once wielded. Hadou Kozuo, who had founded the Hadou Group in the late nineteenth century, was one of the handful of souls well aware of magical and Mythos threats, and dedicated much of his corporation's financial reach to creating a Deus Machina capable of fighting off the awesome powers of the enemies of humanity. He would not live to see the fulfillment of his wish; after the assassination of his son and daughter, Kozuo bequeathed his mission and his purpose to his young granddaughter, Hadou Ruri, who went on to oversee the completion of the Deus Machina Demonbane.

There was one crucial flaw in this operation, though: in order to function, Demonbane required a trustworthy sorcerer and a powerful Grimoire, and all the Hadou Group's money could not buy either. Thus, they turned to an unlikely detective, touching off the conflict to come.

Aftermath

With the conclusion of the Arkham Event, the Hadou Group's resources were in shambles, with the vast bulk of its capital spent in the reconstruction and stabilization of the city and its holdings broken and scattered and devoured by opportunistic companies. Exhausted by the effort and not possessed of her grandfather's uncanny money-building talents, Hadou Ruri lived to see the great work of her family undone. (Some have speculated that this event was one of the turning points towards the Great Depression some short years later.) When asked about the fall of the Hadou Group, Ruri maintained that the destruction of the Black Lodge and the Anticross was all she truly desired. To this day, the Hadou family remains among the New England old money elite, though it retains mere scraps of the financial power it once possessed.

Dealt a terrible blow by the failure of the C Project and lacking the power and vision of Anticross to sustain it in hardship, the Black Lodge group disintegrated into a handful of squabbling successor cults, each claiming legitimacy over the others. In the modern day, only a handful of these successors still exist, and none of them command the power and fear of the Lodge's heyday.

The near-realization of the C Project was a shock and a blow to the ego of world governments unaware of the dangers of the world they lived in. An extensive censorship campaign, inadvertently facilitated by eyewitnesses' reluctance to speak of their own personal experience, suppressed general American knowledge of the event for decades to come and relegated the near end of the world to the conspiracy theory dustbin.

The Arkham Event was not the only herald of the changing age. The demonic incursions that spurred the Capital Defense Plans of Tokyo, New York, Paris, Germany, and Sweden, as well as the discovery of a prehuman civilization deep within Antarctic mountains, cemented the dire urgency of a need for a global task force capable of dealing with such monsters. The World Security Organization, a group sponsored by the League of Nations through the 1930's, was the first such effort; however, it was not until the creation of UNIT and AEGIS in the 1950's and 1960's that a true world-spanning government-sponsored intelligence network evolved.

Of the Arkham Event's central players, it is believed that Master Therion and Etheldreda were destroyed in the final cataclysm, or pushed outside of space and time as we know it at the very least. Daijuji Kurou and Al-Azif lived quite happily for the duration of Kurou's mortal lifespan until his death in 1973 of natural causes, at which point Al-Azif surrendered herself to the custody of UNIT's Japan branch and was not seen until decades later. Of Deus Machina Demonbane, nothing can truly be said.