Forrest Cameranesi Geek of all Trades

(5x22) Pantheon Synthesis: Part 2, Episode 1

Following the end of the First World War, the world spent the rest of the 20th century in a Cold War threatening nuclear annihilation of all civilization. Though the Axis powers of Europe had been defeated in their long-term goals to rebuild their own ancient empires, the nationalism that inspired them lived on in force in the wake of the Gallic Empire's collapse. Besides Germania and Romania retaining their own nation-states, Brittania and Iberia claimed their own, and their nationalistic spirit spread into their allies and former colonies in Columbia, mostly the United States thereof, but Canada and Mexico as well. The four major European nation-states and the superpower of the United States collectively divided and rebuilt Gallia into its own nation while curbing any impetus to empire it might have, and founded the United Nations to enforce their newfound nation-state system upon the world.

But besides the island-continent of Auei, the rest of the world was none too keen on that nationalism, nor the capitalism economy that came part of that ideological package. Instead, Russia and Persia allied with Xiania to rebuild the remnants of the old Mongol and Indian empires together into an international communist movement across all of Asia, which then spread south and east across Africa and America. With the world's only two nuclear powers at its helm, this spread of communism terrified the United Nations. First the United States, then the five major European powers, all scrambled to finish their own nuclear programs to achieve mutually assured destruction.

With the mortal world on the brink of destruction, the Pantheon began to intervene much more actively in terrestrial affairs, though still as subtly as possible, in order to stave it off. Appearing mysteriously to high-ranking officials of the most powerful governments of both sides, representing an impossibly well-resourced and well-informed but assumedly mortal shadow organization they called only "the Foundation", the Pantheon influenced politics and policy decisions on both sides to continually pull humanity back from the brink of destruction. Only on the rarest of occasions were they forced to intervene directly, averting what would have been hot-war trigger events through direct technological means.

Next: Pantheon Synthesis: Part 2, Episode 2