"Excuse me," he will say to whichever one of the librarians looks most likely to be both helpful and free, "can you show me how the computers work?"

(He will do his best to choose his tone to persuade this person. Unfortunately that probably involves sounding HUMBLE and having an EXCUSE prepared for why he FAILED at this EXTREMELY BASIC TASK that is not LITERAL TIME TRAVEL or possibly ENDING UP IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE.)

"Were you having trouble logging in on the guest account or something?"

"I am as of yesterday no longer a member of the Maine Restorationist Reformed Baptist Synod," he says, "thank God should he happen to exist. I have never actually used a computer before and do not know how, but have heard great things about it."

He's pretty sure he's in enough (subtle) makeup and altering his default style of speech and facial expression enough that this mildly suspicious interaction will not be that easy to connect to the life he plans to lead.

Weird. You get all types at the library and this isn't the first time he's had to walk someone through the basics of using a computer. So long as the Not-Amish man doesn't try asking the librarian for his credit card info, he can get a very basic lesson in how to use a computer

"So, welcome to the wider world I guess?"

"Thank you."

Does this lesson happen to include 'click on internet explorer to explore the internet?' How about 'what Google is?'

The lesson includes:

- How to login to the computer.

- How to search the library's catalog.

- How to use internet explorer and Google.

- How to play solitaire. 

And lastly a warning on how he should not download porn on the library computer.

He will cough slightly, look mildly embarrassed, and say "I understand, thank you."

And then he will GOOGLE. Obviously someone has installed a tracker on the library so he can't do anything illegal, so his chief security is through obscurity. He is going to Google for the names of various famous superheroes and supervillains, himself included, and see what they've been up to recently.

Some of the more generic names do in fact turn up results for capes, Survivor was one of the first American vigilantes and was ultimately killed by Murder Inc, the mafia organization. Minerva was an rather successful italian heroine who died due to getting to close to Behemoth's kill aura. 

The more specific names don't turn up anything relevant. The Titanium Tyrant turns up a brand named Tyrant of overly macho knives, many of which are titanium. The advertisements say they are very hard and triple serrated. 

Easy enough to displace, if he continues in his current career.

Well, this confirms alternate universe (/attempt to make him believe he's in an alternate universe), not future.

... And his family? His friends? Everyone who worked for him in the Royal Court? He has real names to search for, if the supervillain names fail.

Nope. Nothing about any of them.

(There is a singer with the same real name as one of his Royal Court, but further research reveals this to be a coincidence.)

Unsurprising. Prudence may still be around, but if she is she hasn't told anyone.

All right.

What's the current state of the power armor industry, our of curiosity? He'd like to see how long it took for them to catch up to him without his helping hand.

The power armor industry can be divided into three categories.

1)  Power armor made by tinkers, a specific sort of cape. These suits vary wildly, from building sized suits to lightweight form fitting bodysuits that nonetheless provide the wearer with enhanced strength, durability and lasers. These suits generally speaking are not for sale. According to the internet this is because they require substantial ongoing maintenance.

2) Amateur power armor, made by engineer types in their spare time as a hobby. These look cool but aren't useful. They also tend to be hazardous to the health of their users - their are public safety campaigns cautioning against trying to build your own power armor if you aren't a tinker.

3) Various industry prototypes that seem to be mostly for show - none of these have been deemed practical enough to manufacture in any real quantity.

There was a period, which lasted for actual years, in which the Titanium Tyrant believed that there existed basically reasonable people who tried to do things, and that they would end up at various offices of power at corporations and in governments and so forth and so on because this was useful for doing things. One of the only people he knew who was actually as smart as he was had told him that not believing it was his major failing, and he always took Mr. Smith seriously even if he ended up disagreeing with him. It had taken years for his wife to gradually ease him out of this belief, and what he had considered the charming naivete of his youth.

He had actually figured, by the time he turned thirty-five, that he had accurately calibrated his cynicism about the competence of the rest of the world. They never solved the feedback problem or worked out any half-decent efficiency program and their engine miniaturization is completely inadequate - they had forty years and they still haven't caught up to where he was when he was seventeen -

Well. He'd thought Stage Three would be hard. All right. He'll spend the next few hours looking up superpower categorizations for both origins and effects, recent history, who the President is, the world's most infamous supervillains and greatest heroes, and so forth and so on, and then he can move on to researching how gambling is done in this world and just how secured casinos are against people being him at them.

There are twelve classifications used for powers, though not all of them fit into those categories. Categories that may be new to him include thinkers, who have various sorts of enhanced cognition, and trumps, who have powers that have to do with powers themselves (such as nullifying, enhancing, or providing them).

The first sources he finds when he searches for the origins of powers indicate that powers manifest during very intense moments, and that the best powers tend to come from moments when someone is being very heroic. However further research on the parahuman specific PHO wiki and the more general Wikipedia itself, indicates that basically all powers manifest from intense stress and trauma. The heroism story seems to have come in part from confusion over a PR campaign designed to keep teenagers from trying to give themselves trigger events. 

His initial googling of "world politics" brings him to a Wikipedia page with a map of the world near the top of the page.

The Titanium Tyrant is disturbed by this world having "Thinkers" as a whole category of powers and not being perfect. His world has one Thinker, who spent his life being a supervillain, and if there are any others they are smart enough to not tell people and to make a quiet killing in the stock market, and yet they seem in many respects (most notably powered armor, but that's his specialty) to be behind his world in spite of having thirty more years to develop. 

... Going by the origin story, local powers are not the same thing as powers at home. (They don't even mention idealists.) Noted. He'll need to avoid making too many assumptions that any type of power will work the same way here and at home.

Some islands appear to be missing. Is there an entry in this online encyclopedia for "Newfoundland?"

Newfoundland is the Canadian island that was sunk on May 9th, 2005 when the Endbringer Leviathan broke the continental shelf with his macro-hydrokinesis, applying pressure on a scale sufficient to sink the island. Over half a million people died.

The name Leviathan links to a page about him: Leviathan is thirty feet tall, one of the fastest speedsters in record, and incredibly durable, but it's his large scale control of water that is his most dangerous trait. Locations he attacks are battered both by torrential rain and tsunami-intensity waves, and with sufficient time he has shown the capability to sink landmasses. His attacks on ports have led to a substantial decline in global trade.

A linked article provides a list of his attacks, roughly one per year since 1996.

Another linked article provides a list of capes that were killed defending the world from him. There are several hundred entries.

That is - horrible. Genuinely horrible. The Titanium Tyrant is shocked.

Could the Atlantic Six stop Leviathan? Yes. Leviathan would be a day with an unfortunately large number of civilian casualties, and then they would arrive, teleport him into outer space on a trajectory for a black hole, and that would be that.

But if the Atlantic Six had attacked - before the Smith copied the False Sage, before Gateway joined, before Minerva made her army, after Livia had weakened the Survivor, in the first years of the Six's formation...

... Every member of the team except the Survivor would be dead.

What are the other Endbringers?

Behemoth was the first Endbringer, emerging in 1992, and physically the largest. He is dynakinetic, capable of manipulating energy to shoot lightning bolts, spew fire, and redirect attacks. Within approximately 32 feet his powers are not Manton limited* and capes who get that close are typically killed instantly. His cape casualty list is twice as long as Leviathans.

The Simurgh emerged in 2002 and is physically the weakest of the Endbringers. Her most devastating powers are her unrivaled precognitive ability and the psychic screen she issues that breaks and reshapes the minds of everyone in the city she attack. Victims exposed to her scream will generally act entirely ordinary until they find themselves in a position to inflict massive harm, engaging in suicide bombings, poisonings, and sabotage months or even years after the exposure. The Simurgh uses her precognition to aim many of these attacks, setting up complex chains of events that result in maximum damage. Her cape casualty rate is shorter than her siblings, but a disclaimer notes that do to a lack of certainty, secondary victims of those affected are not included.

*A term for the limitations of most powers around effecting other people, and the insides of other people.

Behemoth, only the Smith (or the False Sage he copied, of course) could beat, and not by conventionally fighting. The Simurgh - 

- Precognition is not a thing. Some people have boasted of having it, made public predictions and been publicly wrong. There might be a precognitive who has told nobody that precognition exists and is making a killing on the stock markets, but if so they haven't told anyone. The general theory is that no precognition can model the effects of superpowers that haven't been created yet, because they are so purely chaotic and because they are not present in the world as of the time of the predictor gaining their powers.

The Simurgh is completely terrifying and he has no idea how the world still exists.

He'll continue his research.

Capes have had a substantial impact on world politics since they first appeared in the early 80s. The Cold War ended when a single parahuman, Scion, began to blast missiles used for nuclear test out of the sky and disable launch facilities. The Soviet Union collapsed soon after, and while Thinker led market reforms saved the country from complete economic ruin an attack by Behemoth destroyed Moscow and an unstoppable parahuman named Sleeper roving the country had left it too fractured and destitute to have any real impact on the global stage.

The United States emerged as the most powerful geopolitical entity, with the Chinese Union-Imperial (CUI) second, it's cape all conscripted into a single military force.

Recently geopolitics has revolved substantially around the Endbringers, both in terms of how to coordinate fighting them and in terms of managing aid and refugees. Sydney and New York City were both rebuilt following early Endbringer attacks, though recent policies have started to focus less on rebuilding and more on resettling affected populations - immigrants make up an increasing portion of the US population. An reasonably well respected Endbringer truce allows heroes and villains to contribute to defending against Endbringers - a South American dictator attempted to order the arrest of dissident capes recovering from injuries after the fight and was swiftly deposed. However both CUI and Russia have demonstrated considerably less cooperation with the truce.

In the US and Canada, the government sponsored Protectorate, and corresponding paramilitary non-cape group the PRT, have established themselves as the most prominent and powerful of hero organizations.

Eidolon and Scion are generally considered to be the two most powerful heroes. Eidolon has the ability to manifest whatever powers he might need, often with the individual powers being sufficient to make him a heavy hitter in their own right. Scion is known for continuously flying around the world and doing good deeds, ranging from putting out forest fires to healing a woman dying of cancer to fighting off Endbringers, often with powers involving a glowing golden light. While he has demonstrated imminent power, he doesn't seem to have any particular prioritization in what he does - in one particularly famous case he flew directly past a fight with Behemoth to rescue a kitten stuck in a tree some hundred miles away. The only known time he spoke, or communicate at all, was when he said "Scion" in response to someone asking his name.

Other famous living heroes include:

- Alexandria, with flight, strength, and invulnerability. Member of the Triumvirate that leads the Protectorate, along with Eidolon and Legend.

- Legend, third member of the Triumvirate, with laser based powers and extremely fast flight

- Dragon, the world's foremost living Tinker.