...my old Necro MM is kinda dead.
Couldn't cast a final necro spell on him/herself, eh? :p
I think actually this is a fairly easy one once I sat down and thought about it.
We have just allowed a God - Mu to become incarnate on our plane. The other gods in an agreement on the possible consequences of more of them walking among us and the possible destruction of the Multiverse - placed Earth in Stasis - basically they wormholed it outside of the timestream to a future date where things are more stable.
You could even have it that a bunch of time controllers and gravity controllers worked together to do it. A nice video could be made to explain it 
But if the game lives on as a static disk image version of I23 or 24, none of the in game lore will address anything like this. Which is why I maintain that there are no RP consequences. It may be interesting to have a few player characters aware of something happening, and trying to convince everyone else, but there are problems with that too:
1. None of the NPCs will ever acknowledge anything. The game and their lives will be "business as usual" as far as they're concerned. So if the player characters are aware of something, you have an even worse situation than the normal player meta-knowledge of a game leaking in to player characters - at least with standard meta leak, some NPCs have knowledge of events that occurred elsewhere in the game. In this case, that is impossible.
2. Without the people in charge of running the new CoH actually saying "this is what happened" and defining, officially, what the in-game explanation for the interruption is, this thread is clear evidence that trying to incorporate multiple player versions will result in RP chaos. Yes, a group of RPers can choose to define "time stasis" as their big event - but what happens when they meet someone whose character is built upon a different explanation, like it being a parallel dimension, or Portal Corp. shifting the world, or something?
3. Even if the devs declare 1 single official explanation, with a static disc image, they can't add it to the game, which goes back to problem 1. Sure, it makes unified RP easier, but significantly messes with NPC interactions.
