Vanguard Initiative

The Vanguard Initiative is a set of government sponsored programs that focus on many aspects of meta/human interaction.

Vanguard One is a think tank program tasked with predicting the threat metas (both individually and collectively) pose to the general human population. It is the brainchild of Evan Hampton, although he did not become a member of the program until late 2063. The name was changed to Vanguard One after the creation of other programs; prior this program alone was known as the Vanguard Initiative. The founding program remains quite active and continues to take a "hands off" approach, interviewing researchers and witnesses for data collection instead of the metas themselves.

Vanguard for Peace (rarely known as Vanguard Two), focuses on counseling to encourage metas to remain connected to their families and communities. Unlike Vanguard One, it is very hands-on and has no connection to its parent organization (other than both drawing from the same budget pool).

Vanguard Restraints is a privately owned for-profit design company. It's main client, the government sponsored Vanguard Three program, focuses on providing restraints for meta powers. The company motto of 'restrain the power, not the man' focuses on ways of preventing the escape of meta prisoners without creating a situation that is less humane than experienced by jailed non-meta criminals. The company outsources the production of many of its designs and includes such prestigious organizations as the UEMS and several foreign governments as buyers of its products.

Vanguard Four  no longer exists. It began as a government program designed to explore the possibility of exploiting metahuman plasma and electrical generation as power sources. The potential profit possibilities of such a project were so great that corporate lobbyists immediately began campaigning to privatize the program as soon as they started showing even marginal success. After privatization, large portions of the program were immediately moved to countries with lax human rights laws, but immediately started encountering problems with both industrial accidents and sabotage.

Although Evan Hampton proposed three other Vanguard programs in his initial three thousand page report several years ago, all three have been deemed either impractical or unnecessary. In modern times, even Evan Hampton has publicly agreed with this assessment.