r/GustavosAltUniverses

Inspired by the real life urban legend, known as the 2006 Volleyball Incident.

Image credit: This article

The 2006 Volleyball Incident refers to an incident that unfolded during a volleyball game at Ithaca High School, located in Ithaca, North Dakota. On September 20, 2006, twenty students on Ithaca's women's volleyball team died suddenly under mysterious circumstances during a game.

The names of the deceased to this day have never been released, and there is little to no official information about what actually happened, with almost all records of the event being mysteriously erased following the incident.

The incident was hotly debated amongst fringe conspiracy theorists and internet sleuths alike, but for years nobody knew what exactly happened at Ithaca High School.

All everyone did know was that twenty high school students died under mysterious circumstances during a volleyball game in 2006 and no one knew why.

Attempts at investigating went nowhere, thanks to all records of Ithaca High School's entire existence being mysteriously erased, with the entire town of Ithaca having seemingly taken on an "oath of silence."

The only records that indicated Ithaca High School existed at all could only be found on Deep Web chat forums hidden away from the surface web.

All that changed, in 2015, when a mysterious video was uploaded to YouTube that revealed that the events at Ithaca High School were the result of something not of this Earth.

The video, which was about seven minutes and fifty seconds long, told a disturbing story.

For the first two minutes, all was normal. However, at around 5 minutes into the video, the horror began: the twenty people who died that day suddenly began screaming in agony and convulsing violently on the floor.

On video, one high school student was heard screaming, "It burns! It burns!"

Another volleyball player claimed that she was being "Eaten by monsters" before she died.

But the most eerie part of all was a particular moment in the video, about six minutes and thirty seconds in: a redheaded woman was seen vomiting a mysterious black substance before passing away.

Nobody could identify what the black substance was-not even leading microbiologists or biological warfare specialists.

As of 2026, the video still remains on YouTube. The investigation into what exactly happened at Utica High school in 2006 is ongoing, at least in the darkest corners of the internet.

Upon becoming the PZPR's general secretary in January 1993, Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz freed political prisoners, lifted press censorship, legalized opposition parties, and announced elections where Free Poland would be fully allowed to participate. Tadeusz Mazowiecki immediately began campaigning for President on a pro-democracy, pro-capitalism and pro-NATO platform.

The PZPR removed Marxism-Leninism from its program, aiming to become a social democratic party. The party nominated 49 year old Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who campaigned on building a socialist democracy in Poland, for President.

Christian democrat Jan Olszewski founded the Movement for the Republic party, and positioned himself as a conservative candidate critical of the two frontrunners' liberal positions. Independent Stanisław Tymiński campaigned as a left-wing nationalist opposed to economic liberalism and Atlanticism.

At the beginning of the election campaign, Mazowiecki was expected to win in the first round, but as election day approached, he lost many voters to Olszewski and PSL nominee Waldemar Pawlak. Despite this slippage, Mazowiecki still finished first in the first round, receiving the endorsements of all disqualified candidates other than Tymiński (who endorsed Kwaśniewski).

Consequently, Mazowiecki was elected by a landslide in the second round. He won every voivodeship and the vast majority of younger voters, and was congratulated by world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev (USSR), Helmut Kohl (West Germany) and George HW Bush (America).

Mazowiecki was eventually inaugurated on 10 July 1993. An anti-communist Sejm took office the same day.

Assumptions:

• The election fraud hysteria that followed Trump's defeat in 2020 in the OTL doesn't happen.

In 1936, Ethem Nejat renamed the MESFR to the Turkish Socialist Republic (Türkiye Sosyalist Cumhuriyeti, TSC). That same year, Turkey deployed troops to Spain in support of the Spanish Republicans, establishing itself as a committed opponent of fascism.

When World War II broke out in 1939, Turkey declared neutrality, but it became pro-Allied when Italy joined the war in 1940, thanks to a territorial dispute over the Dodecanese islands. Germany and Italy responded by supporting the Golden Square, an Arab nationalist, pro-Axis movement led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani.

The Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 led Turkey to stop trading with Germany and Italy in solidarity with its fellow communist country. On 2 July, the Golden Square revolted in Baghdad, capturing its radio station and giving a speech urging the peoples of the Levant to rise up against the "Jewish Bolsheviks".

By the end of the day, all of Baghdad had fallen to the Golden Square, which proclaimed the Iraqi State with al-Gaylani as its head of state. The Axis powers immediately recognized the Iraqi State, which began advancing towards Basra and Mosul, two of the largest cities in the region.

Iraq's advance was slow, but Basra fell to the Iraqis on 12 September, followed six days later by Mosul. Despite controlling all of the major cities in the region, the Golden Square took until December to expel all Turkish troops from the region.

Now that Iraq was under its control, the Golden Square made the annexation of Syria, Lebanon, mandatory Palestine and Transjordan its goal. As such, 300,000 troops commanded by Salah al-Sabbagh invaded Syria, only to be defeated at Raqqa by mid-February.

The Battle of Raqqa was one of the turning points of World War II, as the Golden Square lost much of its army and virtually all of its heavy weapons. A Turkish force under the command of Süleyman Nuri (the "Turkish Zhukov") marched into Iraq but faced effective resistance from the Golden Square (not to mention Iraq's terrain), delaying Turkey's advance by almost one year.

It was only after the Turkish victory at the Battle of Zakho in March 1943 when Nuri's Turkish Second Army began liberating Iraq. Mosul was liberated on 17 April, and the Battle of Baghdad eventually began on 25 July. On 17 August, the Second Army captured Baghdad and executed much of the Golden Square's leadership, crushing the rebellion.

On 17 June 2001, the Arab Army's 4th, 6th and 8th infantry divisions and the 10th Mechanized Division and 14th Motorized Brigade launched a military coup in the city of Cairo, receiving support from the United States as well as the majority of Cairo's population.

The loyalist 15th and 18th infantry divisions, 15th Mechanized Division and 36th Infantry Brigade set up a perimeter around Cairo's presidential palace and parliament building, and attempted to resist the coup, which was promptly condemned by Yevgeny Primakov's declining Soviet Union.

This resistance was crushed, as the putschists were twice as numerous and had five times the amount of tanks and an order of magnitude more IFVs and APCs. Consequently, at 06:00 on 18 June, the 8th Infantry Division captured the parliament building, whereupon the 4th and 6th Divisions launched a siege of the presidential palace.

With his remaining loyalists failing to put down the coup, Mohieddin surrendered and transferred power to Mohamed Hussein Tantawi's Military Council for National Salvation (MCNS), which signed a ceasefire with separatist rebels and. The US administration of Ann Richards immediately recognized the new government and announced an initiative to prevent terrorists from obtaining the UAR's nukes.

In the weeks after the coup, the Tunisia, Mauritania and Yemen Regions declared independence under secular governments, while different sections of the Muslim Brotherhood formally proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Algeria and the Islamic State of Sudan.

The Moroccan Independence Army (MIA) similarly liberated Casablanca and restored the pre-1971 Moroccan state, this time controlling all of West Sahara. Peace negotiations went well, but it took exactly four months for a treaty to be signed.

Tantawi ruled a territorially reduced UAR until 2005, when presidential elections were held and won by a centrist candidate.

During the aftermath of World War I, Germany became a communist country while the White Army won the Russian Civil War. Karl Liebknecht became the first leader of the Free Socialist Republic of Germany, but he died in 1924 and was succeeded by Ernst Thälmann, who adopted a policy of socialism in one country and a planned economy.

In 1939, Germany signed a non-aggression pact with Fascist Russia, and the two regimes partitioned Poland. Two years later, Russia launched "Operation Nevsky", an invasion of Germany. Despite initially occupying most of Eastern Germany, the Moscow Accord forces were defeated at the battles of Berlin and Dresden, and the German Red Army liberated most of Eastern Europe before launching a siege of Berlin in April 1945.

On 30 April, Russian Vozhd Konstantin Rodzaevsky committed suicide, and Germany established a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe, beginning the Cold War. Following Thälmann's death in 1953, a power struggle between Walter Ulbricht and Heinrich Himmler was won by the former, who ruled Germany until his 1964 overthrow by Erich Honecker.

Under Honecker's leadership, Germany's economy and society stagnated, and Germany invaded Switzerland in 1979. After two short-lived leaderships, Egon Krenz became the leader of Germany in 1985, and implemented a series of political and economic reforms.

The fall of the Moscow Wall in 1989 led to the rapid downfall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and precipitated the collapse of communist rule in Germany in December 1991. The 1990s proved rough for Germany, allowing former Stasi officer Gerhard Schröder to rapidly consolidate power after taking over in 1999.

Schröder eventually invaded the Netherlands in 2008, followed in 2022 by an invasion of Poland. In 2024, he was reelected with 88.5% of the vote versus 4.4% for PDS nominee Lothar Bisky, 3.9% for Free Voters nominee Hubert Aliwanger, and 3.2% for The Republicans nominee Tino Chrupalla.

The INLF's initial uprising was supported by Iran through the Quds Force, and was followed by parallel uprisings by the Houthis, Hezbollah and the PIJ. Khalifa Haftar's Third Arab Army crushed these poorly planned efforts with relative ease, but Iran's proxies remained active at a lower level, and oil prices went through the roof.

Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood took advantage of the weakening of the UAR to launch Operation Al-Khalid on 15 February 1994. Operation Al-Khalid was a series of armed attacks against UAR targets in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt (where the revolt was crushed), Algeria and Sudan. The Brotherhood was the only non-separatist faction, as its goal was to replace the UAR with a revived caliphate.

Unlike the Shiite Axis of Resistance, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood received military and financial support from the Gulf monarchies (bar neutral Oman). Osama bin Laden brought over his former mujahideen fighters and other Islamist volunteers to Sudan, where they fought their own insurgency against Gaafar Nimeiry's Fifth Arab Army.

Non-Islamist separatist factions such as the SSNP, Lebanese Forces, PLO, Peshmerga and the royalist Moroccan Independence Front (MIF) also played a major role in the war, forcing the Arab Army to fight multiple fronts. Adding to the civil war's complexity were frequent clashes between ideologically opposed separatists, i.e. the SSNP and the LF.

During the first five years of the war, there was no winner in sight, but, in August 1999, Marwan Hadid's Syrian Muslim Brotherhood won the Battle of Aleppo and established a provisional Islamic government. From this point onwards, the war increasingly turned against the UAR as soldiers from its Sunni Arab constituency increasingly defected to the Brotherhood and separatists.

By mid-2001, the ASU had become greatly unpopular with its citizens, who blamed Khaled Mohieddin for the loss of much of the country's territory and wanted him gone.

[Errata: Kurdistan also became independent after the war]

Upon becoming the leader of the UAR in 1970, Ahmed Yahya made the destruction of Israel his main geopolitical goal. The Mukhabarat stepped up its support for the PLO, and the UAR continued to purchase weapons from the Soviet Union in addition to developing its own military industry (beginning with production licenses).

Israel similarly continued to expand its military in preparation for a possible conflict. Prime Minister Golda Meir decided that, if Israel was destroyed, the remnants of the Jewish state would establish a government-in-exile and launch an insurgency against the Arabs.

During late September-early October 1973, the Mossad noticed increasing amounts of Arab vehicular activity in the West Bank, Golan Heights and Sinai peninsula, as well as a greater number of air reconnaissance flights. The UAR eventually invaded Israel on 6 October 1973, a day that was also the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

While the IDF and Mossad were better trained and had better tech than the UAR forces, the latter had the advantage of numbers and morale, in addition to a Soviet military airlift that resupplied the UAR's military just enough for a conflict. As such, Beersheba and Haifa fell to the Arabs on 8 October, followed on 11 October by the Battle of Tel Aviv.

Despite reliable American support for Israel (Richard Nixon said "We can't let an important ally fall to the Arabs"), Tel Aviv fell to the Arab Army by noon on 15 October. Meir and the rest of the Israeli government fled to Washington DC, from which Israel continued to exist on paper like the Baltic states, while the UAR replaced Israel with a Palestine Governorate run by Yasser Arafat.

Israel's nukes were captured by the UAR, which soon began developing means of delivering said nukes. The UAR did not have any ability to use its nukes until the early 1980s, whereupon it adopted a "no first use" policy.

Remnants of the IDF launched a guerrilla campaign with support from the United States. Yahya responded by expelling all Jews from Israel, a decree that not only proved to be logistically impossible to implement but also seriously harmed his regime's international reputation.

Furthermore, while the Arab world was glad Israel was gone, and this military victory provided the UAR with a sense of national identity it hitherto lacked, regional differences remained a problem for the sprawling state.