I still really hate the character limit.
April 11: Disney/Marvel announces plans to create Avengers and X-Men Academies. Not to be outdone, DC announces their intention to creat a few Titans Academies. The stated purpose of these schools is to educate the children in the safe, ethical, and legal use of their powers, keep the kids in school until they're eighteen, and more importantly, keep them from going out and getting themselves and other people killed (or more cynically, to keep them from ending up dead on the news, in costumes from the comics those companies publish). Of course, telling the kids that they're going to have to wait
years before they can go out and 'be superheroes' doesn't exactly endear the idea to them, regardless of how the parents feel. Near Cape Canaveral, FL, President Obama breaks ground for the Space University. On Stp-Earth, the first section of the Russian Empire's heavy astronef is launched to the space station
Pyotr Velikiy. It will arrive at the station on April 14th.
April 13: On Inp-Earth, Ed Greenwood becomes a Chosen of Mystra (and Mystryl, and Midnight, but all three treated as one goddess) around this date. A small number of other Forgotten Realms fans also become Chosen by her, but only Greenwood is Chosen by all three Aspects.
None of them are more than a small fraction as powerful as the Chosen in the books, of course. US President Obama orders all surviving OV-100 class Space Shuttles (OV-101
Enterprise, OV-103
Discovery, OV-104
Atlantis, and OV-105
Endeavour) returned to active duty, and flown to Vandenberg and other suitable locations, for refitting. While technically part of NASA and the USSF's Space Exploration Command (a.k.a. Star Fleet Command, among other nicknames), for the duration of the war, the OV-100 class (and the subsequent OV-200 class, to be designed from lessons learned from the upgraded OV-100s) will be on temporary assignment to the USSF Space Assault Command, or SAC. To help pay for the retrofits, special 'Shuttle Bonds' are issued by the government. More general war bonds are prediced, and a number of advertising companies are already preparing commercials for them; some comic and magazine companies have already dusted off the ones they used in the 1940s, with or without updates. USSF PR personnel begin reviewing the records of USSF officers and other ranks with names similar to those of
Star Trek characters (whether their superiors will listen to their advice on this, or not).
April 14: One of Infopunk-Earth's nascent mages begins serious work on codifying the rough equivalent of the Transmutation School in D&D parlance. Tellingly, some of his "talismans of power" (reusable material components) include his lucky dice in a small leatherette dice bag, and a small purple unicorn figurine.
April 17: On Dp-Earth, 12-year-old genius Alexander 'Lex' Luthor creates an advanced radio-computer, capable of easily accessing the internet of Infopunk Earth. A remote terminal for the device is given to his father, the criminal mad scientist Dr. Alexei Luthor, as a birthday present. On Inp-Earth, an early failure in Project November's teleportation experiments is adapted into a potentially long-ranged disintegration ray.
April 19: The astronef
Myrmidon, carrying the embassy from Stp-Britain, arrives in Earth Prime orbit. After circling the planet twice, she enters the atmosphere, and glides down for a landing at London Heathrow Airport, chosen for the length of its runways. In Inp-Germany,
Heinkel Flugzeugwerke is revived by a group of investors, including certain empowered relatives of Ernst Heinkel. Their medium-to-long-term plan is to manufacture the Space Jet vessels from the
Perry Rhodan series.
April 21: On Dp-Earth and Inp-Earth, respectively, Robert A. Heinlein and J. Michael Straczynski announce that they are collaborating on a movie serial script, tentatively named
Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy. Casting has barely begun, but both James Doohan and DeForest Kelley are already under contract as stars, and Gene Roddenberry has expressed interest in this adaptation of his late counterpart's work. Many visual effects will be done by computer on Inp-Earth, and transferred to Dp-Earth by the power of radio (Dp-Earth TVs are getting a lot better, thanks to information for Inp-Earth).
April 23: Lex Luthor joins several Inp-Earth internet forums (including this one, having stumbled across it on a Google-walk), and his impressionable young mind is somewhat warped by the experience.
April 27: Starship Enterprises, Ltd. is founded in California, by CBS, Paramount, and a large group of Star Trek fanclubs, for the purpose of manufacturing enhanced (enchanted) technology on a Star Trek theme. On Stp-Earth, US President Phelps breaks ground at Cape Canaveral for the William Cranch Bond Astronef Field
(might need a better name).
April 29: Lex Luthor discovers the TV Tropes entry called
Cut Lex Luthor A Check, and is deeply inspired, despite his father's insistence that the idea completely misses the point of his villainy.
April 30: The elder Luthor discovers the Evil Overlord List... and promptly discards it as the meaningless prattle of small-minded fools, like anything else that points out what he's doing wrong. The younger Lex holds a different opinion. On Earth Prime, Hanley Page Ltd. recieves permission to attempt a Starfighter refit on two of the surviving
Victors.
May 4: On Inp-Earth, Disney/Lucasfilm founds a group of holding corporations, and some subsidiaries thereof: Republic Space Services (containing Corellian Engineering Corporation, Incom, SoroSuub, et cetra), Republic Automation (Cybot Galactica, Indudstrial Automaton, etc.), Republic Defense Industries (BlasTech, Taim & Bak, etc.), and Republic General Products (Fabritech, Novaldex, etc.), as well as endorsing the Jedi Church's attempts to become an official NGO. Star Wars fanclubs are informed of this in advance, allowing rapid recruitment of empowered ('Force-sensitive', according to corporate documents) engineers and other workers (in a few cases, whole fanclubs are recruited together, into the same subsidiary). The point seems to be a mix of 'good PR' (or the hope that such will develop), 'going with the flow,' and 'making a profit off of existing copyrights, since Star Wars fans were most likely going to make these things, anyway' (similar reasoning inspired the creation of Starship Enterprises, above).
May 16: The 'Valentine's Gift' (see February 14) arrives at Dp-Earth orbit, then makes a landing at a custom-built runway, a bit east of Blackpool. In Inp-China, a
mysterious white ooze leaks from the middle of a street in Nanjing, China.
May 23: On Inp-Earth, DARPA begins 'back-burner' R&D for a hypothetical prototype
battleplate. Conservative estimates project construction to begin before the end of the 21st century... on the Dp-Earth calender.
PLACEHOLDER
August 5: Childers-Robertson-Smythe study "On the Methodology of Thaumatological Didactics: A study of the art of magic leading to its evanescence into a science" is pre-published on various 'open access' websites (Childers is a parapsychologist and occasional hoaxbuster, Robertson is a psychology professor and empowered Negima fan, and Smythe is a more normal psychologist). An average of 800 hours of self study (when that works at all - more than half gave up partway through, and some had not developed powers by the time the study ended), 400 hours of classroom training, or 200 hours of intensive training with one teacher and one student, generally allow an unempowered person to develop the basic spellcasting power that many nerds and other outsiders gained instantly during the Probe Event. Those who still believed that the powers were a hoax, or could not bring themselves to believe it was possible for them to develop powers, uniformly failed to develop any.