A brief setting run-down (those of you familiar with the Aberrant timeline will see a lot of familiar stuff here, those also familiar with Adventure!/Trinity/Exalted will also notice some borrowings; nonetheless, there's new stuff for all as well):
In the spring of 1998, everything was pretty much normal (by which I mean, it was like Actual Reality - same President, same general derth of magic and super powers, and as far as almost everybody knew, same history). Then (on a date I'm not bothering to look up since I'm away from my books), N-Day happened. All over the world, people of all ages and from all walks of life spontaneously developed spectactular paranormal abilities, most commonly in moments of extreme danger or stress. All that power released suddenly generated countless disasters and inexplicable phenomenon. Consequence: worldwide panic. In an effort to restore calm, the UN security council drafts and ratifies a document in at a meeting in Zurich called the Zurich accords, declaring these new super-humans (dubbed "Novas" by the media) to be humans, holding the same rights and responsibilities as citizens of their respective countries as they did before their "erruption". Working closely with a think-tank called the Pontowski Foundation (sp, again, away from books), the UN creates a special branch called "Project Utopia" to study Novas, promote their peaceful inclusion in world society, and employ them in pursuit of humanitarian goals. Dr.s Mazarin and Rashoud, in a clinical study later revealed to have been terribly rushed, isolate what comes to be called the M-R node, the growth in the Nova brain which allows them to harness "Quantum" energy and use it to reshape reality.
Almost immediately, questions are raised publicly about the completeness of the popular explanation for paranormal beings and paranormal phenomenon. For one thing, a number of paranormal incidents are observed with no apparent tie to a human cause (the first of several "phantom islands" is discovered near the Azores, Dinosaurs are found wandering in the Congo, etc). For another, many so called "Novas" find that M&Rs theories can't explain certain aspects of their powers and in particular, their strange memories and sense of connectedness to other paranormals. In India, a woman named SK Buranu steps forward to present a theory which adds to and modifies that of M&R, with a mixture of science, philosophy and her own strange account of a future history. Her work forms the basis of the study of Psions, a type of paranormals who lack a node but share with Novas the same genetic and cellular differences with humans. The energy they manipulate is commonly called Psi, though its more precise term is Noetic energy (study of: Noetics). Buranu's story runs something like this: she is from more than a century in the future, at a time long after the Novas of our era have gone mad with power and been exiled to the stars. (With a few changes, this is the cannonical setting for Trinity.) A great cataclysm caused the end of all reality in Buranu's time. For unknown reasons she (and it was later revealed, a few others) were displaced into their present timestream, but the Psi (which for Buranu is the energy of all life) released with so much death also poured in with them. In short, N day was not only a super-saturation of earth by Quantum energy (the exact source of which is still disputed) but also by Psi. Earth's powerful Psi field still has the "flavor" of that lost age - the new Psions it produces have subconsciously recreated certain cultural and technological elements of the destroyed era due to their sensitivity to that field. The most dramatic example of this is Biotech - living technology that lives on the Psi field of its owner was a staple in this lost future. Not only can some Psions intuitively remember how to build and use the technology that their predecessors/forerunners wielded, but because of the surplus of "free Psi" floating in Earth's conceptual space, when a new Psion first acheives Awareness (manifests their paranormal abilities for the first time), some of that Psi is often crafted spontaneously into Biotech equipment already attuned to them.
Nearly simultanious with Buranu's announcement came the first public message from a group calling itself the Inneffable Faculty of the Heptagram. Their pronouncement came because one of their students was being held in an English prison on suspicion of espionage - he had come under scrutiny at British customs and no proof of his citizenship in any country could be found. The I Fot H? were extremely cryptic and undisclosing in their negotiations for the young man's release - speaking through pillars of flame, animate statues, every canine in the London metropolitan area simultaniously, and the like. However, their public display opened the flodgates for public awareness of and soon research into another segment of the hastily constructed category "Nova". Having been blindsided by Buranu, Project Utopia monopolize public understanding of the phenomenon, trumpeting a charismatic young hire who called himself "Diving Swan". A branch of paranormals called the "Exalted" (the name was introduced by the I Fot H? - Project Utopia initially tried to replace it with "Stellars" but their campaign proved unsuccessful and was eventually abandoned) were identified. Again, they lacked nodes but shared the same specific genetic tags common to Novas and Psions. Many had vague and fantastic memory of an age of magic and wonder in which they had once lived and, in many cases, ruled. Their powers seemed unusually divorced from traditional scientific explanation, though some Exalts argued that they still functioned within a logic specific to their bygone age.
While both the public and the academy were largely unwilling to beleive fanciful tales of some prehistoric magical civilization (or, more correctly, civilizations) or alien-filled, dystopian future, more and more corroborating evidence came to light. In the wake of that fateful day in 1998, a number of uncharted islands and structures on both land and sea (and in at least one case, in the air) were discovered (some immediately, some with a greater delay) which contained the remnants of the era testified to by many Exalts. It was the extraterrestrial and extra-dimensional contact that garnered the most attention, however. Initially the only government willing to consider Buranu's description her future was the People's Republic of China, and then only in secret. They funded a paranormal-powered survey effort to locate one of the alien races which Buranu testified had been a close ally of humanity in her time. First contact with the advanced intrastellar, Biotech-centered civilization of the Qin was made. Not long after, American Nova astronauts on Mars discovered an interdimensional gateway in the form of a metalic human face with a mouth wide open as if screaming in anger or pain. The members of the expedition who became temporarilly lost on the other side of the portal found a massive techno-magical cave complex, like the innards of some unthinkably large machine. Its residents, a fabricated race of magical machine beings (calling themselves the Autochthonic or Alchemical Exalted) were disturbed from untold millenia of slumber by the astronauts. When contact was again established with Houston, plans for contact and negotiation were opened.
A lizard-like, bioluminescent race popularly known as the Chromatics sent war parties from their homeworld to Western Africa near the close of the Equatorial Wars (which saw the first large scale use of paranormal combatants in warfare). Apparently, their stone-age civilization was mislead by another interstellar race posing as their deities. When this misunderstanding had been resolved, the government of Nigeria (the big winner in the Equatorial Wars) established an ongoing relationship with the Chromatic homeworld. Finally, a refugee community of a race dubbed the Rakhshasa were given assylum and territorial concession by the Russian federation when they came to earth after the destruction of their empire's capital world. The Rakhshasa are entirely inorganic beings, apparently composed of a form of Quantum-sensative stone - they have no difficulty living contentedly in regions of Siberia largely uninhabitable by humans. In exchange for land rights, the Rakhshasa supply the Russian Federation with super-fertile soil; a byproduct of their method of extracting Quantum energy from the countryside.
The current leading figure in the study of paranormal phenomena (what she calls "Telluric Science") is Dr. Chalondra Hammersmith. She champions the popular, though still disputed theory of a fourth, often undiagnosed para-type (Daredevils). Besides regularly butting heads with Project Utopia's science and publicity divisions, it also happens that she is, in an objective, outside the setting way of looking at things, right. Her position is that Quantum and Psi are specific forms of Telluric energy (or Z-waves), which is the fundamental stuff of reality. Quantum is the stuff from which the material universe is composed. Psi sets the mold through which Quantum flows - the blueprints of the universe. The third form of Z-wave, Serendipity, governs causality (one framework for understanding Daredevil abilities is that each circumstance has an infinite number of possible outcomes, and Daredevils are able to subconsciously choose outcomes which they find more preferable). The ebb and flow of Telluric energy in its various forms, and the free conversion of one into another, creates the "hologram" of the universe as we precieve it. Novas work primarilly with Quantum, Psions with Psi and Daredevils with Serendipity, but all of them (epecially the first two) depend on the innate ability of their mediums to transform into each of the other two - nothing can be real without all three forms present. Exalts, interestingly, manipulate Z-waves in a more holistic way.
(A little omniscient narrator might be helpful here: N-day was the conflux of 4 different events. Divis Mal released a massive Quantum pulse in an effort to make some peers. The collapsed Psi field of the dead Trinityverse collided with March 23rd, 1998 (looked it up!). Similarly, the shattered alternate dimension of the Exaltedverse did much the same thing, except, in pieces. These three events coincided because of the 4th, a powerful wave of Serendipity sent hurtling into the future from the massive release of Z-waves that was the Hammersmith Event of July 21st, 1922. Serendipity randomly applied to a system breeds strange coincidence. This all adds up to a general supercharging of the Earth's Telluric field; portions of alternate dimensions overwriting themselves on to Earth's reality and in a few cases [since the Serendipity function of Z-waves allows for this], the effects of the calamity preceeded the causes - some of N-Day's phenomena reach back as far as human prehistory, or even further. The impact of the original Hammersmith Event was largely temporary, but the new situation is self-perpetuating - in short, the world is fantastically strange in a very open ended way, and can only keep getting stranger.)
A Little Popular Termenology:
Some Factions:
Stryck Wiki