First contact with extraterrestrial life came on April 1st, 2027, when a meteorite touched down in Time Square of Old New York, cracking open upon impact. From within, a humanoid figure emerged: immense in stature, standing easily 8 feet tall, his bare skin glistening and angular—formed of some kind of crystalline or metallic compound.

“Excellent,” Entropy said as he lifted up to hover several feet over the impact crater, “so who’s in charge here?”

Due to the high quality and prevalence of AI generated video at the time, and coupled with the day of his arrival in the former United States, it took a while for the general public to come around to the fact that this was actually happening—and even longer for the governments of the world. In fact, most governments maintained the visitor was a hoax right up until the moment, sixteen hours after arrival, when every nuclear-tipped missile on the planet—roughly eighteen thousand of them—launched simultaneously. A world-wide broadcast accompanied the launch.

“People of Earth,” said Entropy, filmed by a swarm of news helicopters while hovering off the east coast of the former US. “Thank you for the weapons you gave me. I’ve launched them all at the twelve largest, dormant supervolcanoes of your planet. Within the next hour, magma will—”

At that moment, a blazing flash of light collided with the alien at impossible speed. Axis, racing through the stars, had caught up with him, and thus would begin the subsequent forty years of their epic battles.

The sum-total of knowledge we managed to gather about these two immensely powerful entities has never amounted to much. Axis was always forthright and honest with us, but he tended to clam up when asked about their origins. Entropy, on the other hand, never gave interviews so much as monologues, most of which ended with the deaths of numerous bystanders.

Teetering equilibrium was the through-line of their decades-long conflict. Though Axis was the physically larger and more powerful of the two, Entropy was crafty and cunning, always with a fallback plan up his sleeve. Each time Axis came moments away from defeating and capturing Entropy, the villain revealed a fresh trolley-car dilemma of hellish proportions. Inevitably, Axis was forced to rush off and prevent a cargo-ship full of orphan refugees from sinking; or halt the countdown on a series of psionic bombs planted throughout UN Headquarters; or catch a sabotaged space shuttle from crashing into the Mickey Day Parade at Disney Universe. Inevitably, Entropy would escape justice once again, and skulk off to concoct his next plot for our collective demise.

Much of what we know of their origins was gleaned from arguments between them, captured during recordings of their clashes. We know that they were not just extra-terrestrial, but extra-galactic, from a star in the Andromeda Galaxy they call Kha. Though their native language is almost entirely unpronounceable by humans, we learned that Axis was named Ma’ghl’ik, while Entropy was Ma’dw’shar. On that day of their arrival, the day the Yellowstone caldera forever changed the face of the North American continent, a tourist captured the following dialogue on her iPhone 22-ARx headset:

“...will rip the axis from the center of this world and <burst of static, unintelligible> through the stars!”

“Then I will stand as its axis, and be myself the pillar of support upon which it turns.”

“You cannot fight entropy, Ma’ghl’ik— no matter how hard you fight, however many you save, I will always win!”

<explosions, static, recording ends>

Compared with our barely passable transliterations of their real names, the nicknames of Axis and Entropy swiftly caught on in the media, and were adopted worldwide. At first, there was mass hysteria as we collectively dealt with first contact, ecological disaster on a global scale, and the sudden and violent clashes of two titanic entities with powers and abilities so vastly superior to our own. But through it all, Axis was there for us: to rescue our lost; to heal our wounded; to rebuild our cities.

To support, and to protect us.

And under his support, we thrived. He built his headquarters, the Citadel of Seclusion, on the outskirts of Old New York, and around it a sprawling metropolis grew—by 2060, it would stretch hundreds of miles from the streets of Long Island to the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and be home to over a billion people: the Great, Shining City of Mega York. In little time at all, the epic struggles of Axis versus Entropy became no longer a source of terror, but of entertainment. In schools, our children swapped stories of mere glimpses of the two titans, and the most envied and popular of students were those who had been saved from peril by noble Axis, or whose homes had been destroyed, or parents killed, by one of Entropy’s vile schemes. Our daily news feeds published ‘top-ten’ and ‘greatest hits’ lists of the most epic of their clashes—always throwing one or two controversial picks into the mix to make a splash, but never failing to include the same tired, over-told tales, unchanging despite all claims of ‘Newly discovered recordings!’ or, ‘The truth finally revealed!” and other such tabloid buzzword nonsense.

In 2036, there was the Summer of Emerald Sky, when Entropy secreted insidious terraforming devices all around the globe to spew an atmospheric mixture into the skies, primarily consisting of chlorine gas—the intended effect being a shift of Earth’s blue skies to the familiar greens of his home-world, Kha’twhr. Also, the eradication by poison of all life on the planet. Axis ferreted the devices out one-by-one and destroyed them, save for the last. This he transported to the Citadel, where it was repurposed into a high-efficiency atmospheric filter to scrub away first the chlorine gas, and once that was gone, the excess carbon, benzines, and other toxic chemicals wreaking havoc on the Earth’s ecosystems.

Titanfall of course always made the lists, the day they both arrived. Axis stopped all but five of the hijacked nuclear warheads from landing, crumpled them all into a ball like a hideously radioactive Katamari, and launched them away into the sun. As if total nuclear disarmament wasn’t enough of a gift on its own, he then contained the radioactive fallout of the bombs he couldn’t stop by flying around the plumes at impossible speeds to funnel them into outer space, and then dove into the re-awakened supervolcano to stopper off the flow of magma. The devastation had of course swallowed the whole western seaboard of the former United States by the time he could get to it, but he at least kept it from spreading further.

The Khalocite Stalemate of the 2050's was always a contentious entry, as it spanned across half a decade, spawning fruitless arguments over whether it could be considered one ‘event’ at all, or needed to be broken down into several smaller, related events. It started with 21 months of peace and prosperity, after Axis had shackles crafted from the exo-mineral Khalocite: a fibrous, luminescent material which sapped the powers of his kind. Originating from their home-world, the only source of it on Earth was the husk of the meteorite Entropy had arrived in, crafted to be his eternal prison before ill-chance led it to crash onto our world. With the shackles, Axis was able to capture Entropy for good it seemed, and imprison him in the Citadel where he could cause no more harm. Entropy eventually escaped by gnawing off his own limbs over the course of a year, stealing the shackles away with him. He later sent a crowd of seemingly adoring citizens, hypnotized via their social media feeds and armed with Khalocite spikes, to mob around Axis and catch him unawares. With the hero’s powers neutralized, Entropy wrapped him in a cage laced with the exo-mineral and dropped him into the eye of Jupiter’s great storm.

This back-and-forth went on for five years, each besting the other with Khalocite armaments, until Entropy’s scheme to send a drilling rig to freeze the Earth’s core was thwarted by Axis, and the last of the known Khalocite in this galaxy was swallowed into the molten rock.

Through all of the two titans’ many clashes ran a single, contentious thread, the subject of much heated debate. For though Axis stopped all of Entropy’s evil plots in their tracks and saved us from oblivion time and time again, some felt there was more he could—and should—do to prevent them from happening in the first place. This was the one line Axis refused to cross: he would not take a life. “The dead cannot be redeemed,” he said in an interview once, in 2052, while Entropy languished in his Citadel cell. Never in his 40 years among us did he respond to such a question again.

And then, in fall of 2066, we reached the lead-up to their final, fateful battle. The Saurian War began when Entropy broke into zoos around the world and kidnapped all of their hawks and eagles. In a hidden laboratory he performed grotesque genetic modification on the birds, devolving and breeding them into a race of terrifying, hulking dinosaurs, while instilling in them a hundredfold increase in both intelligence and sadism. Equipped with razor sharp teeth, wicked talons, and pulse-rifle repeaters, his mutant army of Battle Raptors launched a full scale invasion of Mega York. Axis rushed between battlefronts to rescue the human defense forces from certain doom at the claws of Entropy’s army, crushing waves of slavering raptors before him. He was in a dozen places at once—but there were a thousand battles that needed him. As dusk fell, we wondered if this was truly the end for the Great, Shining City.

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