Coyotedancer

Dear Diary- Well, we finally did it. We went back to Dark Astoria, and while we didn’t exactly FINISH things there, we did make some progress. We did some time travelling, and we found out how Mot ended up under Paragon City in the first place. As usual, it started out with the Pantheon… I don’t think I killed any of them this time, though we did collectively do a pretty good job of making them wish they’d joined some other cult that *wasn’t* in our path, I think. Working for Unai, I’ve learned that the Pantheon have entire WORLDS of their own, so this time I didn’t have to wonder where all of these jerks and their annoying tiki mask spirits came from. I knew. Because I've been there. After rescuing a bunch of people from them (Potential sacrifices, I think-), we met up with my boss again. He and that genie I mentioned earlier had joined up to try and force Diabolique into… something. (I don’t really know what. They didn’t tell me. I think after I said that trying to summon the Mother of Magic was probably a really, really BAD idea, my boss decided it was better just not to tell me what he was up to. >_>) ‘Turns out, Mot has some connection to that pushy ghost, and sent a horde of goons to try to rescue her, including our ugly friend with all the eyes. B and I both know now that we can kick his butt all on our own, so he wasn’t even a little scary when we were facing him together, with our entire team. If he had been a smart monster, he might have tried to run. Mot ended up doing some funky thing with Diabolique, though, turning her into one of his minions? We just knew that was bound to get messy… Not that "messy" is really anything new for us. Still... We couldn't just let Mot gain her power on top of his own. So, we ended up back underground again, looking for her, and beating up more Pantheon cultists and a whole BUNCH of those giant, spikey things with the crystals all over them. (I think Red called them “Ravagers”?) We discovered, Diary, that with enough application of Force magic and telekinesis... they bounce. I didn't expect that. The tunnels were really dark and sort of hard to navigate, though. There were these big piles of scales and spines everywhere, and fins, and all kinds of organic-looking stuff that I’m pretty sure really *shouldn’t* have been down there. B and I got separated from the others in one passage (They all went left while we had gone right, but nobody noticed until we were already halfway down the hall-), and THAT got a little bit dicey because there were just swarms of cultists… We pulled it off, though, and were able to catch up to the rest of the team again when the halls reconnected. I was proud of us. ^_^ Eventually we managed to corner Diabolique, with what I would like to consider (at this point, at least-) inevitable results. B sent Antigone after her. I let Karun and Satavaisa (They’re my pet Elementals-) out to play. The Green Gremlins got in on it… And that ghost ended up regretting her poor life choices. -k

Tavaris' Sanctum of Shadows is finally done... Code: SANCTUM-2764 Server: Everlasting Details: A quiet place for Mystical types. Call this crazy thing an old Death Mage's "summer lake-house". XD The Sanctum's entry portal is currently anchored in the wooded, northern part of Saint Martial, but the main base itself is not on Primal Earth. It's "beyond the Far Horizons", in a dimension called the Midnight Sea. The location is heavily warded against intrusion by uninvited supernatural Entities and scrying magics, and was once a gathering place and informal retreat for many of Tavaris and Sarhadi's fellow Oranbegan magi. (Finding mention of it in ancient texts, or details about its location, wouldn't be at all unreasonable for a Midnighter or similar arcane historian.) Oranbegan characters may even remember visiting the place themselves in the days before the war. It's owners always enjoyed having guests, and often filled the place with them. These days, it's home to Tavaris and his eccentric little family... and still a place guests are always welcomed. (Access to the small "side rooms", which include the personal spaces of three of the SG members, the store-room and the hot spring... plus the portal to the Floating World pocket dimension (On the lower level of Kai's room-) is via the stone circle in the south-eastern corner)

Dear Diary- Did you know that there really *are* an infinite number of alternate dimensions? I learned that when I had lunch the other day with a few of the Portal scientists that I’d rescued... And then had to figure out how to put back together... Because they’d been pulled into pieces by a dimensional rupture... Which was one of the strangest things I’ve run into yet while working for Unai, and that’s really saying something under the circumstances. One of them even said that I was his “guardian angel”… That was really sweet. No one has ever called me that before. ^_^ They probably never would have if I'd stayed in Saint Martial, just being a nicer-than-average rogue. I haven’t gotten to spend much time in the Isles lately. Learning how to be a hero in Paragon City takes a lot of my time… But I do have to go back once in a while to find a proper ChiliWeenie. There are no Nick’s Weenies stands anywhere in Paragon, Diary! None. Not a single one. How can Paragon consider itself so civilized if there are no decent weenies?! Luckily I CAN always go home for that… My White Thorn secret identity is doing her job, and I haven't ended up on any Arachnos kill-lists yet. I still haven’t had much luck talking the Circle cabals in Paragon into not kidnapping people or generally doing the kind of anti-social things that make mortals send heroes after us, though. I think I’m going to have to start getting political if I want to make an impression. Or punchy. Or maybe both. We magi are notoriously stubborn, and once a Death Mage has made up their mind, it can be very, very hard to get us to reconsider… But I’m determined, Diary. My friends in that other dimension, where the Circle never lost their path, have convinced me more than ever that we CAN change course. I just have to figure out how to get that point through to enough of my own order to overcome fifteen thousand years of fatalism and social inertial. That aside, I’m still working for Unai, and travelling all over the multiverse. I’ve gotten to destroy all kinds of Praetorian robots now, since Antimatter was making trouble AGAIN… War Walkers are still my favorites, even though it takes a lot longer to turn one into scrap when I’m doing it on my own. (I keep telling B that everything is better when he’s with me, and breaking giant robots is no exception. Set and Spike. It’s A Thing, Diary. Our thing. ^_^) Not all of the robots are unreasonable, so I’ve even tried talking to a few instead of just destroying them… But that goes better under some circumstances than others. When the robots in question are arguing with their own counterparts from another factory, or trying to speed up time (I didn’t even bother to ask about THAT ONE, Diary. I don’t think I want to know how they planned on doing that-) it still tends to end in punching. And occasionally in being nuked. I guess that was sort-of fair. Call it pay-back for what Free Radical did to him the last time we met... I can’t really blame AntiMatter for being sore about that, but if he stopped being a jerk and trying to invade the world, MAYBE he wouldn't get beaten up quite so often. >_< -k PS: I’m *still* getting weird pictures in my orb’s storage folders. <_< Des has no idea who the other summoner is, and suggested that I try to look her up with the MetasWiki Visual Hero Identification database app. ‘No luck there, so far… But I figured if I CAN’T find out who she is that way, I’ll post a “Who’s this?” question-thread on CapeBook. (Crowd-sourced information-gathering, Diary. Am I a modern magus, or what?) Even if no one recognizes her… She’s pretty non-descript as hero-types go, honestly… Maybe they’ll at least have some idea who that guy with the swords is. He’s a lot flashier than his lady friend, and if I can find him? Maybe he can tell me how to contact her. She's probably wondering where her pictures went. (Player Note: And so the mysterious Psi Protean also joins the thread... More about him later, too. XD)

Diary, sometimes I’m really glad that I do Magic and not Technology… Last week, I helped Free Radical, Rocket Cat and a few of their friends deal with a very annoying problem involving Valkyrie’s spear and a horde of rogue nanites. (Nanites are miniature machines, like a whole cloud of very, very tiny robots-) I’m not entirely sure how, but some of them seem to have been brought to this world from the place where Battle Maiden came from. They had either escaped or been released on purpose in Nerva, where they caused all sorts of trouble. They even managed to take over Valkyrie! It was strange having to punch her, but with her spear and her own little machines under the influence of the rogue nanite swarm, there really wasn’t anything else that we could have done. After that, we went to find out who had brought those nanites to Earth and why. What we found were a lot of people from War Earth who seemed to be just as unhappy about the nanites as we were. They still tried to kill us, of course, because that’s just what they *do*. Werewolves throw rocks. Hydras barf. Freaks play loud music… And people from War Earth try to stab you. There were a lot of people from War Earth in that lab. And so a LOT of free-range nanites, too. It wasn’t a big surprise when one of the doctors we found scanned us and said that we had all been infected by the things ourselves. I really wasn’t sure how to feel about that. On one hand, Technomancy is A Thing. I’ve met a few people now who can do very interesting things with a combination of technology and practical magic, and there’s a lot to be said for taking advantage of modern innovations along side traditional arcane practices… But these nanites weren’t exactly trustworthy, and I decided that I’d rather not end up like Valkyrie did. That is to say, getting punched and kicked and radiation-blasted by the memebers of my own team. The doctor gave us all injections of what she called “counter-measures”, and promised that it would get rid of all the nanites in our systems… But that was still a little disturbing, and I have to wonder if it really *did* get rid of all of them. What if it didn’t? There could still be tiny little robots cruising around in me. That’s just freaky to think about, Diary. We found both Battle Maiden and Valkyrie while we were dealing with all of the War Earth people, and the nanite infections, and the doctors and all of that. After comparing notes about what we knew, it seemed like the real source of the problem was back on War Earth itself. So, we took a dimensional road-trip. We had to deal with swarms of rogue nanites, who had formed themselves in to all kinds of interesting shapes… Clouds, globes, swords, spears, lightning bolts… They were very creative. Eventually we did get them all under control, though, and while I can’t really say that we restored PEACE to the place exactly… It is still War Earth, after all… We did at least leave it with less of an infestation of random, hostile objects. -k (Player Note: This little adventure with Valkyrie, Battle Maiden and a billion tiny friends is @RocketCat's AE Arc#2060 "War Earth Rising"... Kai's in-character interpretation of the story's events are a little off, since she wasn't the mission leader who got to read the text, but the arc is good fun. The use of Night Ward's living spells to simulate groups of rogue nanites was brilliant.)

I'm mostly a dirty casual... I've just never really been in a position to do "serious" roleplay in an MMO. I never found a group I fit into quite that well. It is fun for me for a character to have friends that they can chat with regularly, though, or can hop onto teams with. I'm just more comfortable actually *playing* the game with people I already know. I'll have an IC conversation with just about anyone who tries talking to one of my crew, but I have serious reservations about PUGing rather it's a roleplay-centric team or not.

I... I feel like I have to +1 this just on sheer General Principles. XD

Dear Diary- I’ve never really thought of myself as an extraplanar explorer, but working with Unai (He’s Portal’s security guy-) has sort of turned me into one. I’ve visited quite a few new dimensions this week, and some of them were pretty nice places… Like the world where I met a group of Oranbegans who had never had to fight a war with the Mu. They still had their own bodies, and were all pacifists. They didn’t know any battle-magic or offensive wards at all! Unfortunately, that made them really easy targets for those Malta guys to harass… That was really an unfair situation, so I took care of the problem for them. While most of the mages I met understood why things had to come down to violent punching and a whole lot of tentacles, a few admitted to being very uncomfortable with the idea that on OUR world a Death Mage would ever need to know how to do that kind of thing in the first place. I’m not sure that they really understood what I tried to tell them about the war, and deals with demons, and the curse, and fifteen-thousand years of disembodied darkness.. but I am glad that I met them. I kept the dimensional coordinates for that world. Maybe someday, after I've figured out how to make one of those big, worm-hole portals of my own, I’ll get to go back there and talk to them again. I think we could learn quite a lot from that world that would be useful for guiding our own people back to the proper path. Unfortunately, most of the other worlds I visited weren’t nearly so nice... While running an errand for one of Portal’s scientists (Her name was Tina-), I met a version of Penny’s clockwork friend who tried *very* hard to melt my brain. I still felt a little bad for punching him, though, since every time I did it made his googly eyeballs slosh around in their jar in ways that rational eyeballs really should not. Eventually they got so tangled up and wrapped around his brain that he lost his balance, fell over and had to surrender. I don’t think I’m going to mention any of this to Penny… I mean, I know that THIS Rusty isn’t exactly *her* Rusty, really… But still. If I found out that someone was bouncing around the multiverse beating up alternate versions of B? I’d STILL have to be at least a little ticked off about it, on principle. I also visited a world where the staff of SUP3RFR31GHT seem to have taken over… That place was a wreck. I’m not sure what was up with that green guy (Who actually called himself “Bile”. Euwh.), but he was a terrible housekeeper. Even the statues were a mess in that dimension. That wasn’t the WORST world, though. As messy and rude as the Freakshow guys are, at least they have the courtesy not to greet everyone by BARFING on them. The same cannot be said for the natives of the Hydra’s dimension. Which, in my opinion, wins the award for Grossest Dimension Ever. By kind-of a lot. On my first visit to that world, I will admit that mistakes were made. As White Thorn, I really can’t avoid the obvious issue of… well… wearing white under hazardous circumstances. (Difficult Wardrobe Choices, Diary. The struggle is real. <_<) But now that I’ve been to Planet Barf no fewer than half-a-dozen times and had one new coat and two pairs of boots completely ruined in the process, a few valuable lessons have been learned. The first? Cast every single stain repellant cantrip you know on yourself and your armor *before* you encounter your first Hydra, not after. (Being barfed on by one Hydra seems to mark you as a target for further indignity from every single OTHER Hydra you’ll encounter, so it pays to prepare yourself early-) And second… never, ever tell Serge what really happened to that brand new outfit you’ll inevitably end up ruining somewhere along the way, no matter how careful you are. Tell him it was destroyed by a jealous rival, or by an insane Praetor or in a titanic nuclear explosion… ANYTHING but “It was dissolved by the caustic barf of a hundred angry gummy-bears”. He really doesn’t take that well. -k PS: Paragon City is strange about public transit. They have ferries, just like we do back home. (Some of them even have the same names. Which is a little weird.) They also have monorail lines that go almost everywhere. Those make sense. What I CAN’T figure out are the bus routes. There are bus-stops everywhere in the City, but I have yet to see an actual bus, either on the roads or stopping to pick anyone up. It’s all very strange… But, to be fair, I’ve never seen anyone waiting at any of those bus stops either, so maybe they’re only decorative? Some sort of art installation about the emptiness and pointlessness of mobility in a modern urban setting? I don’t know. So far, no one has been able to really explain it.

My two favorites spotted in-game this week? Gigglewatt (Adorable electric jester) and Taken for Granite (chibi stone tank).

I'm sticking with the Midnighters. Stuff this gang-and-corporate-hell crap. XD

*pokes Dae* I used to be @Brightfires... aka Mrs. @FlyingCodeMonkey FCM's not playing on Homecoming at all, but I've camped out with the crazy roleplayers over on Everlasting. XD

I have to ask, Proto… Do you make a habit of actually reading all of the bios and remembering the details of them for all of the other characters on those RP pick-up teams? That can make a huge difference. I don't think you and I have crossed paths in-game yet, but I'm going to use one of my own characters as an example here anyway, just because I suspect, under particular circumstances, that you'd end up accusing me of being one of those terrible Know-It-All players, too. Imagine I'm on a character named Tavaris, and we were doing Circle missions when some questions or misunderstandings come up.. That particular character of mine would not only be able to answer those questions or correct those assumptions to a very fine level of detail, he would also be more than willing to. (He's a teacher. He'd see it as his job.) And it would become obvious pretty quickly that he knows much more on the subject of Oranbega and its people than would *ever*, in any way, even begin to pass the "common knowledge" sniff-test. If you were just looking at him, standing there in his very ordinary civilian outfit, seeming like nothing so much as a stereotypical History professor, or maybe some random Midnighter... You'd have that "OMG. Another one of THOSE types!" reaction. Unless you'd read his bio and remembered one particular detail it mentions. That being that Tavaris is a Death Mage. That information you think a character "shouldn't possibly know"? It's his day-to-day life. (Afterlife? Unlife? Postlife? XD) OF COURSE he can read those ancient glyphs, or explain how a spirit thorn works, or talk about how the Oranbegans held off the Rikti who wanted to use their halls as a staging point during the war. 'Same for the moonlighting Crey scientist, or the disguised Rikti Mentalist spy, or the semi-reformed former Skulls Death Doll... or whatever... being able to talk about Uncommon knowledge with authority. Some characters really do have every right to know more than Joe Average-Hero. Now, if they're being really silly about it and don't have one of those kind of characters, I might join you in raising an eyebrow... But some degree of cheeseball is to be expected on a public server. That's just the nature of the beast. Just be wary of painting with over-broad brushes, though. Even if they haven't gotten around to writing a detailed biography yet, there may be more going on with that character than just OOC Knowledge infecting IC Play.

All I can say is that I haven't really noticed it happening.. and that if I don't answer your PM or Tell or reply on one of my threads, it's just a matter of my having not seen it. I'm chatty as all hell. Even if you ask me a question I don't know the answer to, you're like to get a response. It'll just be "Beats me!" or "No idea, dude." XD

That's not what One is talking about... If you turn on the option to keep copies of City's chat logs, each day it'll make a text file containing whatever was posted to the channels you're a member of, plus all of the system messages you see in things like the Combat and Rewards tab. If you want to keep in-character conversations that you had in Local or RP or Team chat, for instance, you can get them from there. Unfortunately, since the game's logging saves EVERYTHING, that can be an enormous pain in the rear to clean up into a reasonable form. For instance, here's a clip of what mine looked like in raw form during a conversation between Kai and Blue the other night... ============================= 2019-07-08 00:02:37 [Team] Kaikara: <color #010101>That could also be important. You may need to know someday why *I* do the things I do. 2019-07-08 00:02:42 Kaikara grants you 10.23 points of endurance with his Performance Shifter: Chance for +Endurance! 2019-07-08 00:02:42 You grant Kaikara an infusion of 10.23 endurance! 2019-07-08 00:02:52 You are healed by the Panacea effect for 64.58 points of healing. 2019-07-08 00:02:52 Your Panacea effect triggers and heals Kaikara for 64.58 points of healing. 2019-07-08 00:02:52 Kaikara grants you 7.67 points of endurance with their Panacea: Chance for +Hit Points/Endurance! 2019-07-08 00:02:52 You grant Kaikara an infusion of 7.67 endurance! 2019-07-08 00:02:55 [Team] Bio Rogue: <color #010101>"The things you do? Like what?" 2019-07-08 00:02:57 [Looking For Group] Vixon of Agua'Azul: <color #01ffff><bgcolor #019aff>and full ty 2019-07-08 00:03:02 You are healed by the Panacea effect for 64.58 points of healing. 2019-07-08 00:03:02 Your Panacea effect triggers and heals Kaikara for 64.58 points of healing. 2019-07-08 00:03:02 Kaikara grants you 7.67 points of endurance with their Panacea: Chance for +Hit Points/Endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:02 You grant Kaikara an infusion of 7.67 endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:07 [Looking For Group] Cmdr Mr Everything: <color #010101>ok np 2019-07-08 00:03:12 Kaikara grants you 10.23 points of endurance with his Performance Shifter: Chance for +Endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:12 You grant Kaikara an infusion of 10.23 endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:12 Kaikara grants you 10.23 points of endurance with his Performance Shifter: Chance for +Endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:12 You grant Kaikara an infusion of 10.23 endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:12 You are healed by the Panacea effect for 64.58 points of healing. 2019-07-08 00:03:12 Your Panacea effect triggers and heals Kaikara for 64.58 points of healing. 2019-07-08 00:03:12 Kaikara grants you 7.67 points of endurance with their Panacea: Chance for +Hit Points/Endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:12 You grant Kaikara an infusion of 7.67 endurance! 2019-07-08 00:03:12 Hasten is recharged. 2019-07-08 00:03:12 You activated the Hasten power. 2019-07-08 00:03:12 Your Hasten has increased your rate of attack. 2019-07-08 00:03:20 [Team] Kaikara: <color #010101>Well, just the latest example? THIS. ============================= That's only a few minutes time span, and there are exactly three lines in that entire mess that are relevant. Once upon a time someone had made a little app that would filter and clean the mess up, making conversations and planning sessions much, much easier to read and keep in a useful form. One wants to know if anyone has come up with a new version, or updated the old one, to work with Homecoming.

Diary, sometimes life throws strange things at you. My friend Feral has... some issues. She isn't always the most rational, most focused person I know. She gets angry really easily, and she kind-of loses control when she does. She's terrified of ANYTHING with tentacles, and she hates those Malta guys, and she once threatened to burn down everything on Primeva just because she didn't like the Devoured that have moved into parts of it. Even though I told her that the Temple was there. She also says my boss is a jerk. (I just said that Scirocco was complicated. Which is true.) But in spite of all that, she *IS* my friend and that means I care about her. A few days ago, she got pulled into Dark Astoria just like I did. She opened a door and she found herself right in the middle of a nightmare. She survived that. That THING didn't take her... But B and Slushie and I had to go and find her, and to talk her into leaving with us. She still seems really shaken up by all of it. She thinks that Mot managed to eat her somehow... even though I keep trying to tell her that he absolutely DID NOT... That she's still here, and that when it comes right down to it, she kicked that monster in the teeth by managing to survive. She just said that she was tired and she wanted to go home. I realized then that I didn't actually know where Feral was from. I mean, I know she has an apartment in Nerva, but she said that's not what she meant. She meant HOME-home. So I asked where that was... and Feral said she's from Iowa. A place made pretty much entirely of cornfields. I've never seen a cornfield, Diary. But that did make me think about something I'd never really considered before. Where *is* home? If someone asked me the same question that I had asked Feral, I wouldn't know how to answer them... I was born in Founder's Falls, in Paragon City. I've lived in the Sanctum since I was seven years old, beyond the Far Horizons of the Midnight Sea. It's anchored to Saint Martial in the Etoile Isles now, and people say they can tell that's where I'm from by the accent I have. I did grow up there, and at the Temple in Primeva. But which one is Home? Am I American? Or am I Etoilean? Or am I Oranbegan? If I found myself in Feral's place, where would *I* want to go? I don't know, Diary. And I'm not sure if that's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. -k PS: Something weird is going on with my Camera Orb. It stores images remotely to a cloud server, and Grant says it has a "unique identifier" that ought to keep it from crossing signals from anyone else's. My pictures, with my Orb's ID, go to its storage, while other Orbs with their IDs go to their own. Simple enough, right? Maybe not. In the last week or two, I've found a couple of someone else's pictures in my storage folders. I don't know who she is, but her little friend reminds me of one of Desdemona's demons. I think I'm going to ask Des if she knows who this lady is, so we can fix our Orb issues. I have enough pictures of my own to sort through without having somebody else's, too. <_< (OOC: And thus a guest from the future makes her first appearance. More on that later. ^_^)

Dear Diary- I had to go home and actually attend to my day job this week. Even though he's been busy getting beaten up in Dark Astoria, and I've been busy trying to learn how to be a hero in Paragon City, I *am* still Scirocco's intern, after all. That means that I do have some responsibilities beyond finding missing artifacts for MAGI and the Midnighters, or bankrupting the Council's robotics division. This time, my boss asked me to help GW... One of her bases had been over-run by a particularly ambitious group of Longbow people from Agincourt, and she was afraid that some of her staff hadn't been able to leave before the place was locked down. She wanted me to go and find them. For some reason, I wasn't really surprised to find out that my polite Mystic friend (I do hope that he'll be able to tell me his name some day-) was one of people that Longbow had captured. We just keep crossing paths with each other...Maros says that when that happens, it usually means that you have some point of destiny in common. Or, it could just mean that he's REALLY unlucky. It's hard to tell. Anyway, as soon as I had dealt with the Longbow officers who were threatening him, we went and found the others who hadn't made it out. Together, the four of us took care of the problem. Punching, and tentacles, and smoke bombs and a WHOLE LOT of red lightening were involved. It was really interesting running with a team of Arachnos people after spending so much time around heroes... And even though he is one of the Mu, it was good to talk to my friend again. After that, I went back to Paragon city to chase down some leads on a project of my own. I still want to find a copy of the Book of Lineages for B. (Or, as Azuria insists on calling it "The Codex of Bloodlines"... I tried to tell her that that was just a bad translation of the original Oranbegan title, but she was having none of it. She has it listed as the Codex in MAGI's artifact database, and that's all there is to it as far as she's concerned. Done. Finished. Never going to change. *sigh*) I decided that what I seriously needed was to talk to Akarist about the history of the book, and about the details of the rituals needed to use it properly. I know he's seen it done at least once or twice. Unfortunately, he had gotten himself kidnapped. Again. <_< At least this time it was by our own people... Apparently, the leaders of the cabal in Founder's Falls needed his help to negotiate a contract with a very nasty demon prince called the Envoy of Shadows. When I finally found him (Stashed in the mustiest part of an abandoned section of the old city's suburbs under King's Row, which he actually considered to be one of the LESS unpleasant places he's been kept while abducted-) we both agreed that what the Envoy REALLY needed was to be sent right back to the Abyss where he belonged. I said I would do that, if Akarist helped me track down a copy my book in the meantime. He thought that was an excellent idea. "Let us selfie!," he said, "And then get the hell out of here." Which we did. It wasn't easy dealing with the Envoy. He's a very powerful, very dangerous and very clever being. And I know perfectly well that it'll only be a matter of time before someone like Salizek or Regalion tries to summon him right back up again. But, at least, I do know the creature's True Name now... and I know that I can kick his demonic butt from here to the nearest Hellmouth should the occasion call for it. Maybe next time he'll be a bit more polite about that "I shall rend your flesh and devour your soul, puny mortal!"-business. The next day, Akarist called me back. (It's funny how much more quickly he's taken to phones, and texts and emails than Tav has, Diary. He even posted that selfie to InstaSpam. XD) He said that he had written out a set of instructions for the ritual for me. And not only that! It turned out that there had been a copy of the Book of Lineages right under my nose and I didn't even know it... The Head Librarian had had one in his collection for decades! Unfortunately, that copy had been stolen last winter by some looter, and wasn't just sitting in his library any more. When I asked him about it, he had no idea who had actually taken it. (We just get so MANY people coming through, Diary. Heroes, villains, Longbow, Crey, Arachnos… You name it, they all come smashing through Oranbega like they own the place. And they all wonder why we get so stabby and cursey and "I'll boil your bones!" about it. <_<) He did have a pretty good idea WHEN it vanished, though... And that gave me an idea. I'm going to do a little time travelling, I think. I'm going to go back, borrow that book before it was stolen, use it and then return it. I just have to make sure past-Arcanus doesn't see me. Or past-Tavaris. Or past-Amtes. Or past-me, since... you know... We're talking about the Temple library, here. What could possibly go wrong? -k PS: Did you know that portals to the spirit world can be dispelled with a very solid punch? I had no idea, but it seems the sufficient application of Light and Force magic can disrupt the woven essence of a portal enough to loosen its bond to the primal plane, causing it to become unstable and to fold in on itself. You just have to get rid of whatever horrific thing is guarding it first.

All I'm going to say is LISTEN TO HYPER. Hyper is wise. And a damned fine raid leader. When it comes to kicking copious Rikti butt, he knows what he's talking about.

Dear Diary- I decided the other day that I really, really needed more practice running around and being a hero with strangers. It's fun to do things with B and Red and Black Sheep and our friends, but I need to learn to adapt to other groups' fighting styles, and to NOT rely so much on always having familiar people beside me. So, I answered a call for help with fighting the Council on Peregrine Island, and I met a pair of heroes named Signal Fire and Jordan. They were impressive, Diary. Strong, confident, almost indestructible and coordinated in a way that reminded me a lot of how B and I fight when we're *really* on our game... Focused enough to anticipate each other and almost to read each other's minds. (Which is exactly what I suspect they were doing. Talking a little before we began our sweep, Signal HAD mentioned that he was a psychic-) For them "The Double-cut", as Jordan said, "was A Thing". And it was pretty awesome. XD Toku, one of the others in the group, is a professional Streamer and was live-streaming our missions to their audience and taking chat questions the whole time. (I totally have some Camera Orb envy there, Diary. Mine is cute and all, but theirs had a full-blown AI running it!) I think that's the first time White Thorn had ever been in anyone's live-stream, so I wore my new outfit. Serge should be pleased about that, though I'm not sure what the audience really thought about it. They were too busy asking if Woodwalker, who was a plant person, could grow peaches on her head. Hyacinth, Square Woot (Who had just the cutest blue kitten-bot running targeting on her gun-) and Dreamwrought rounded out the team. After we'd bashed about a million Council goons, Signal's police contact warned him about a couple of kidnappings... Some of the Circle's Peregrine cabal had apparently grabbed a Portal scientist and a writer for some reason... and they wanted to send us in to get them back. I've honestly gotten pretty used to having to punch other magi lately, and since kidnapping is just one of those things that does NOT help improve our public image at all, I stayed with the team to help. That's when one of the others started grumping about magic users being "vermin". <_< I think they were really directing that more towards the guys we were fighting than to me, but it still made me give them the eye a little bit. I guess they'd either forgotten that they had a mage on their team... Or they remembered just fine, but like that Agony guy on the broadcast channel, really didn't care how insulting they sounded. That kind of attitude just gets OLD, Diary. There I was, busting my butt and punching a member of my own order, trying to help someone who needed us, and... "Vermin". Magic is just a tool, like any other. Judge a magician by what they DO, not by what they ARE. So. Anyway. I did enjoy running with the group over-all, and Signal Fire was an excellent leader, so I didn't abandon them over a little bit of biased commentary. That turned out to be a Good Thing. After we'd rescued the kidnapping victims, someone tried to rob Peregrine Island's bank! And stopping that involved smashing a brand new kind of robot. Those Malta guys had brought along a thing called a Zeus Titan... And since he'd seen just how much I liked crunching big robots when we were fighting the Council, Signal Fire let me have one all to myself. ^_^ -k

Dear Diary- I don't *always* go back in time to change things and give MindWyrm grey hair... Sometimes I stick to the present. I've found myself bashing a lot of the Council's things lately. Warcries, Mekmen, Hoverbots… Even a set of what I swear looked like vampire vending machines. o_O That all started when I went to Striga Island to meet Mrs. Peebles. (She's a friend of one of the other Midnighters, who said she could use a hand-) One of the first things she wanted me to do was go to a warehouse in the little port town and clear it out. It was full of nothing but mekman robots, tramping around with those weird metal feet. It didn't stop there, though. The Council, it turns out, is pretty much EVERYWHERE. The ruined parts of the City... Other dimensions... It seems like if you can name a place? It's got Council. I don't think I'll ever be able to punch all of their goons. There are just too many of them. But I figure, at the rate I'm going, I miiiiight just be able to bankrupt their robotics division someday. It can't be cheap replacing all of those machines, and Percy tells me there are some REALLY BIG ONES at their base in Boomtown. I think I'm going to go there next. -k PS: 'Turns out Captain Hot-Pants actually *isn't* the flashiest fashion victim that the villain world has ever seen. One of the guys on Striga had him well and truly beaten. His name was Maestro, and while he had excellent taste in music, that outfit? Yikes, Diary. Just yikes. ======================================== Diary, sometimes being a hero is harder than it sounds... So, I know I'm supposed to do Good Things, right? Helping people, rescuing people, punching bank robbers and that kind of thing... and usually it's pretty easy to figure out what the right answer is. But every once in awhile I come across a situation that just ISN'T quite so simple. Like these big Nemesis things called Warhulks. I know I've talked about robots before. How some of them are People and some of them are Things, and the first you arrest while the latter you smash. Warhulks throw all of those distinctions right out a window. They're machines with human pilots, Diary. Human pilots who are zealots and who tend to prefer being blown up to being arrested. I haven't found a way to prevent them from exploding and killing themselves if they're defeated. No matter how gently I try to subdue them, it's always the same. So, if there's no way to prevent the pilot's death... my choice is either to leave them to do whatever evil they had planned, or to do what I've been told heroes *shouldn't* and, not to put TOO fine a point on it, essentially kill them. If I were still in the Isles, the answer would be simple. I would smash them and call it the pilot's choice to take death over defeat. But does that reasoning still apply in Paragon City? I asked B, and he said that sometimes part of being a hero is accepting that you really CAN'T save everyone. You have to know that sometimes no matter what you do, no matter which choice you make, there are going to be consequences that feel less than completely heroic. He says you have to learn to make peace with that. That this business, like anything else, isn't always completely black and white. I tried to remember that when I met Tyoss. He's a member of my own order. A Death Mage from the old city. One of Paragon's art museums had purchased a collection of Oranbegan artifacts from somewhere... Looted items, I'm sure. As I've found out doing artifact retrieval for the last few weeks, Paragon is absolutely FULL of those. (Seriously. More of our artifacts seem to be in mortal hands than in our own. o_O) He had found out that something personal of his was included in the collection. A pendant that he said meant a lot to him... So he went to the museum's warehouse and he tried to reclaim it. The museum had a problem with that, of course. They were firmly convinced... were absolutely SURE... that the pendant was rightfully theirs. (They'd just paid a small fortune for it after all, and hey, Oranbega's a dead civilization anyway, right? Dead people can't own things! <_<) And they believed that just by trying to get back something of his own, Tyoss was nothing but a common thief. By the time I got there, security had gotten involved, and everything had turned into a real mess. Tyoss thought that I was just another security goon sent to stop him, and we kind-of got into it. As White Thorn, I couldn't just *tell him* who or what I was. I had to knock him half-way into next week to get him to stop and listen to me. And then I had to talk the museum into NOT having him arrested and thrown into that big prison in Brickstown. I said I would help him find a lawyer and then he could take the museum to court, which is how modern people solve this kind of thing. He seemed skeptical, and it's probably going to be a massive pain in the butt, but it's better than the alternative. Most heroes probably wouldn't have bothered, I guess. They'd have just busted him. But Tyoss seems like a decent guy in spite of that "breaking in to a warehouse"-thing, so yeah... Sometimes the morality of this business just isn't so clear cut. That's an important thing to remember. -k

Dear Diary- MindWyrm is threatening to kneecap B and I both with her extra-strength Clue Bat today. She says that if we keep going back in time and messing with stuff, one of these days we're going to screw up continuity *so* badly that Baby New Year'll lose his diapers, and NOBODY wants to see that. Or we'll do something that destroys the world. Which may or may not be worse. I don't know. I don't think either of us messed anything up. I think we were both only trying to FIX our mistakes, not make new ones. We just... kind-of forgot to tell each other that we had the same idea. We went back separately instead of doing it together and Mind says that that probably made two "divergent timestreams". Ramiel didn't seem worried about it, but Mind says it's because he's a Mender and thus an absolute idiot. I just wanted not to have killed those cultists in Dark Astoria, Diary. I wanted Irena not to get eaten and my boss not to have nearly gotten himself killed by that ugly THING with all the eyes. And I wanted to know if the idea that Librarian Amtes had about mentally protecting ourselves from Mot's influence would actually work. Going back to that night was the best way to address all of that. So I did. I found Irena and Scirocco pretty easily. I remembered where they were in the big warehouse, and in spite of the angry cultists running all over the place we managed to stay together this time. Those guys couldn't really do anything to stop all three of us. 'Boss is pretty fierce when he has someone to watch his back. I still ended up right back in the guts of that THING afterwards, though. And this time I was there all alone. I didn't have B or Sheep or Red to help me. If I was going to get out, I had to do it myself. That was the real experiment, Diary. That was the test. Amtes has been studying Mot for a long, long time and she believes that the best way to keep it from influencing your thoughts isn't just a passive ward or a barrier. It's to actively counter its influence. Mot feeds on hopelessness, on anger and on despair, so "fight fire with water," she says. Focus on opposing emotions. Center your mind, as cheezie as it may sound, on a memory that makes you happy. A joke that makes you laugh. A dream that inspires you to look forward to the future. Hope, she says, is a literal weapon that we can use against the darkness of that place. I had already picked my memory and my focus, my hope, before I went back in time and I kept it close... And it DID work, Diary. I went through that place and came out the other side without giving up or getting angry. None of the humans died and none of the spirits escaped. What SHOULD have happened last time, DID happen this time. Ramiel had warned me that no matter what I did, I might not be able to save Irena or to keep my boss from getting hurt, though. There are moments in time that are fixed... Maros calls them "touchstones"... that just can't be altered. He felt like that moment was one of them, and he was right. I still didn't get there fast enough to save them, even though I tried. I don't know what the Sentinel really is... It doesn't feel entirely like Mot. It doesn't feel entirely like the cultist's spirits, either. It's something else. It's something broken. But I knew what I had to do to it. I had to make a point, Diary. I had to let Mot know that I could defy it. That I could look it in those hundred ugly eyes and say "No. Enough. No more." If that means making Mind mad at me, I'll accept her anger. Because I had to know. It had to be done. -k

Diary, sometimes I wonder just how many of these "Praetor" people there are, and why every single one of them seems to be a jerk. <_< Free Radical, a friend of B's from the broadcast channel, had to go and find a *former* Praetor named Antimatter the other day, and she asked us to help. Apparently, the guy is an inventor and sort-of a Mad Scientist. He's the one responsible for building a lot of the gadgets and the clockwork robots that the IDF use. (He may even be the person who invented the cute little Camera Orb that I use to take my pictures, since I think Grant said that he found that in a box of spare robot parts that one of the R&D teams had brought back from Praetoria City-) The guy seems to have a real thing for robots... His lab was full of them. I have mixed feelings about robots. They're pretty much immune to some of my Dark magic, not having souls to affect or to knock out of their bodies. On the other hand, my Force magic works really *well* on them. (All too well, according to The Center and his super-expensive-to-replace Mekmen and Warcries. ^_^) The trouble is, I can never decide rather I should think of them mostly as Things, like the Banished Pantheon's tiki-masks and totems, or as People. I've met a few robots who definitely SEEMED to be People. (iVY, for instance, who was a Praetorian lady-bot we met while chasing down Praetor Sinclair. 'Pretty sure she was definitely a Person.) Why does that matter? Because if I'm going to do the Shiny Hero thing, People have to be arrested. Things can just be smashed. So, where does that leave Praetorian clockworks and warworks who aren't iVY? I sort-of defaulted to "smash" with Antimatter's robots. Mostly because they were trying to kill us. Free Radical seemed to agree, which was a Good Thing since we had to punch our way through a fairly ridiculous number of the things. Just to add to the mess we were in, right in the middle of our trying to find Antimatter ANOTHER Praetor (This one's name was Praetor White, but he likes to be called Marauder-) brought a bunch of IDF goons to Primal Earth and tried to invade Steel Canyon! Those Giant Robots of his (Free Radical, who's Praetorian herself, says they're called War Walkers-) were DEFINITELY smash-fodder. B and I have honestly gotten pretty good at wrecking large targets like that. By coordinating our two best stealth attacks, we can take out almost anything in no time flat. Even giant war-bots. ^_^ Once that problem was dealt with (I never even got to see Praetor White. Apparently MindWyrm went and melted his brain while the rest of us were bashing the giant robots...), we *finally* figured out where Antimatter had gone. We had to chase him all the way into space! His lab was set up on a space station, although that was really hard to tell. (For some reason it didn't have any windows? Which seems weird to me. I mean, if *I* was going to set up in orbit, I'd want to be able to look out and see the stars and the Earth and all. The view would be amazing! But... Mad Scientist. Different priorities, I guess.) A couple of Vanguard soldiers had gone on ahead to check the place out, and were waiting for us when we got there. One of them, Lt. Harris, decided to stick with me. He was a brave guy. Maybe a little *too* brave... He kept jumping into the middle of things that he prooobably ought not have. It was a good thing for him that Death Mages also know a little Life magic. I kept having to throw my healing cantrips on him. He did make it all the way through, though. Even when we met yet ANOTHER Praetor. (This one's name was Praetor Berry, and I'm told that he's stupid-) We did eventually track down that big teleporting baby we were after, too... And Free Radical completely nuked him. She's pretty awesome. ^_^ -k PS: All that running around, bashing Praetors and robots, also gave me a good chance to show off the new outfit that Serge made for me. He said my armor was okay for "that semi-archaic retro-mystical thing", but probably wouldn't be as popular with mainstream fans, who want a more modern, sexy-but-not-TOO-sexy look in their young heroes. (I don't really care about any of that, but he seemed to think it was important-) Anyway, I just wanted some new clothes. I think B really liked the outfit, though. He just kept looking at me with this big, cheezie grin.

Diary, nothing is safe in Paragon City... NOTHING! Somebody tried to steal Tommy today. <_< Well, they tried to steal Tommy's skull, anyway... Which sort-of means stealing him too, because it's one of his fetters. (Fetters are what ties a ghost to the mortal world. Often they're things like a person's bones or their favorite possession, but they *can* be almost anything. GW says that all of Arachnos is hers, for instance. Tommy's skull is his.) Anyway, Etiole told B and I that there was some kind of disturbance at the Midnighter's Club, so we went to check it out together. THAT's when we found out that Tommy had been skull-napped, apparently by these weirdos in red outfits with eyeballs all over them. They had pretty much sacked the place, captured Percy (Ha! He owes me two rescues now!) and cornered Mr. Castanella, Sigil and Kadabra in the meeting room. For some reason Darrin Wade had showed up, too, and thought that he needed to be in on things. (I just don't like him, Diary. He seriously creeps me out for some reason.) We took care of the red guys pretty quickly once everyone was together, but by then they'd already gotten away with the skull. I was pretty worried about Tommy. I didn't know who those red guys were or why they'd taken him, and that sacred me. He's really important to me, you know? I didn't want to think about them hurting him, or-... Or doing any of the other things that magic can do to ghosts. I guess I should probably talk about him some time. I mean, about Tommy and why he matters... It's just-... He's known me my entire life, Diary. He was friends with my parents. My mom and dad were both Midnighters... Amin and Kingston Stolver. My mom was a necromancer who was really good with ghosts. My dad was a sorcerer; an elemental fire-caster. They did a lot of dangerous things and faced a lot of monsters, and rogue magicians and other horrors together. When I was born, my mom asked Tommy to keep an eye on me if anything ever happened to them, and he said he would. He had already been a ghost for years by then, and so she knew he would probably always be there. And he always has been, even before I started sneaking into the Midnighter's library to read their books and to talk to him. When Regalion wanted to use me as a sacrifice to bind the Breaker of Souls, it was Tommy who found out about it, and who helped my mother's ghost find Tavaris. Without him, I probably wouldn't be here. So... yeah. I really, really wanted to get him back. With some help from the Midnighters, we managed to track the red guys (They called themselves Rulu-shin) back to the Isles, to a place in the Potter's Field in Sharkshead. There was this creepy cavern under one of the old mausoleums, full of them and what LOOKED like storm elementals. They felt strange though, Diary. Like regular elementals that had been altered somehow... Or corrupted? It was freaky. At the end of the cave, we found a sort-of... Guardian, I guess? I'm not sure what kind of creature he was. He felt a little like magic, but it was weird magic. Etoile answered his three questions (At least THAT part was traditional-) and he let us pass. All we found on the other side of the cave was another group of the red guys, and this strange, floating stone artifact with runes carved all over it. I tried to read them, but it wasn't a syllabary I was familiar with. I would have loved to be able to take it with me, back to the Sanctum, but it was much too big and waaay too heavy for me to translocate all the way into the Midnight Sea. So, I had to leave it behind. Still trying to scry out Tommy's location, we ended up in a jewelry shop next that was know for fencing stolen artifacts. B looked at the cases and said I needed some shiny things, but I didn't really have time to shop. We ended up sneaking into the back room, where we found no Tommy, but a pile of the red guys and a strange portal. They took off through it, and we followed them. We ended up in another building, somewhere completely different, with still MORE red guys... and an absolute HORDE of these freaky, blue... bug-things? I don't know *what* they were, but they were sort-of rubbery, and winged, and they didn't have eyes, and they had little crystals sticking out all over the place. And they gibbered, Diary. They gibbered worse than Wailers. The portal they came from was really something, though... I've never seen a portal like that one before. It was huge, and beautiful, and the kind of sheer *power* it was pulling from... I have no idea where, Diary... I really don't. It felt so...alien. It wasn't some little Illusion Gate or a translocation spell. This was something different. I'm not exaggerating when I say it felt like you could move from one side of a universe to the other with that portal. You could move BETWEEN universes. I didn't have time to really unravel how it worked... I'll dream of being able to make one of my own like that someday, though. If I can figure out how to power it. And how to cast the anchoring rituals without killing myself. Whoever made that portal really wasted its potential, though. They could have gone ANYWHERE with that thing... But instead they just pointed it at the Abyss. And not even the *real* Abyss... Just the one in the Isles where part of Hamidon lives. <_< We met the guy who claimed to be the leader of the Rulu-shin, then, and he had the skull. (Tommy was really giving him what-for, too. He was NOT happy to have been swiped by some goon and tossed into a sack. Not that I blame him one bit.) Etiole, B and I did what we're best at, and took Tommy away from that jerk. We knew that Numina (Tommy calls her "Tammy", because she's his daughter-) was looking for the skull to, but she didn't show up in time to punch the thieves. She wanted to take the skull back to the Midnighter's Club herself, though, so we gave it to her. I went back later by myself to talk to Tommy, and to make sure he was okay. Mr. Castanella was there. He looked at me for a few minutes, and then he said that maybe it really was time for me to "Live up to my legacy". He said that I'm a Midnighter, just like they were. Just like my mom and dad. I think I really like that. And it made Tommy smile. ^_^ -k

Dear Diary- B and Feral and I all got texts from our friend Black Sheep today. One of her Longbow contacts had a big problem, she said, and she wanted us to help solve it. We all said we'd do it... but only if she could PROMISE us (Like, swearing on the names of the gods of wool-) that there would *not* be any pervs involved. She said she was pretty sure Dominatrix didn't have anything to do with it, so we agreed. Two people we hadn't met before also came along... Kik (Who is the cutest bug-person EVER!) and Aurora. The Longbow officer told us that a former hero named White Gold had gone rogue, and that he was causing problems around the city. He was a speeder, and could create "after-images" of himself... like echoes... that lingered wherever he had been. That made tracking him down pretty easy, though the echoes were a real pain to get rid of. Of COURSE the first place we tracked him to was right in the middle of the sewers. (I'm going to buy stock in the company that makes Lysol, Diary. I swear I am. <_<) From there, the trail led us to an office building, where we found out White Gold had joined some kind of hard-core protest group that were out to shut down certain research companies in the City for doing some pretty dodgy-sounding experiments. When we got to the company's lab facility, there wasn't just a protest going on... It was a full-blown riot! The protestors had broken into the building and were trashing the place. They even threw bombs at us! We had to break that up before they burned the whole building down. It's just not a Good Thing to throw bombs around in a place with all sorts of volatile chemicals, experimental drugs and who knows what else. I'm not sure if that lab's experiments really counted as Mad Science, exactly, but it was pretty close. <_< That lab is were we met Gerald. The company had been working on sort-of a transmutagenic drug that they had hoped they could use to cure cellular diseases. The protestors didn't really care about that bit, though. They just didn't like the way the scientists were testing it... So they used it on them. They exposed the lab people to their own compound, and it had changed them. We managed to rescue them all, but we couldn't undo what the drug had done to them. Diary, it had turned them all into small, furry animals. Mice, rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, chipmonks... Gerald? He had been turned into a squirrel. He told us that the protestors had claimed to be working with Hamidon and his Devouring Earth, and that there were some even more dangerous things in the lab that they might get into. We figured the protestors had been duped into working with the DE... But after checking the security video and some mind-reading? Nope. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing. Gerald agreed to help us get into the secured part of the lab. (He's a really brave guy. He navigated the air shafts on his own, scouted rooms for us, got into a fight with an escaped tarantula and everything-) It was a serious mess when we got there. The protestors had let out something REALLY nasty. And huge. And covered with tentacles. It hit hard, too. B had to use one of his armor's abilities that pulls material from targets to reinforce itself in the middle of that fight, to keep from seriously getting hurt. Usually doing that is just more weird than dangerous, but for some things it can really mess with him... That's why he has so much trouble with the Talons. It's not just that they get into his head. It's that when he uses them to strengthen his armor, or to heal, he ends up taking a part of them in as a part of himself. His having to do that with the experimental-drug altered green monster? That was scary. He says he can handle it. That it's just the way his armor works... But after the Talons thing? I'm still going to worry about what it does to him. Anyway, after we got rid of the Green Monster, we found out some interesting things. White Gold had just been using the protestors as a cover. What he was really after was another one of the lab's experimental developments. He wanted it to sell to the Goldbrickers! To King Midas! All of this was about a ROBBERY, Diary. <_< Gerald and his co-workers got turned into little animals, we got bombs thrown at us, a whole lab got destroyed and B had to absorb part of a giant tentacle monster... Because some super-speeding jerk wanted money. So we went to have some pointed words with the Goldbrickers. Some really, really STERN and pointed words. Some of their guys were tougher than the Goldbrickers I remember from back home. One of them even managed to dodge out of the way of my attacks fast enough that I missed him completely and ended up almost knocking poor Kik out of their body. (Sorry Kik. I really, really didn't mean to almost squish the cutest bug ever. 😞 ) Eventually we did corner White Gold, though, aaaand you can probably guess what happened. So, we got the guy... But Gerald and the others are probably stuck the way they are and no one will ever know if that drug might have worked if they'd had time to finish their experiments and refine it. Sort-of a win for the team. Sort-of not. -k ((Player's Note: If you're interested in meeting Gerald the Squirrel and punching White Gold in the nose a few times, this adventure is AE Arc#8856. @Harpsong's "Catch the Rogue Speedster". It's good fun, but there are some tough goons in there. Bring friends, like Sheep did. ^_^))

Hi Diary! So, running around and trying to learn how to be a Hero in Paragon City has been really fun. I've found out all sorts of stuff that I didn't know about the city, because they put these little plaques and monuments *everywhere* that tell you all about people and things that have happened. They also have these MASSIVE cement statues of their favorite heroes all over the place, too. (Those would be toast in the Isles. Someone would blow them up, or turn them into jello, or paint them bright orange five minutes after they were unveiled. Tops.) I also know where ALL of the good bookstores are, now. I spent some time talking to Mr. Castanella (The live one, not the ghost from Night Ward-) about all kinds of things... The Midnighters. Magic. My parents... You know. He wanted me to patch up things with Percy, because Tommy had told him we weren't speaking to each other after the dork ratted me out to the librarian. <_< I said I would, but I couldn't FIND him. 'Turns out he'd been kidnapped by the cabal of Circle people in Steel Canyon. He was super miffed that *I* was the one who came and rescued him. XD We talked about it on the way back to the Midnighter's Club, though, and while I still think he's kind-of a weasel we agreed to keep things civil. At least when Mr. Castanella's around. "White Thorn" has also gotten to meet a few more of the City's heroes. I ran into Des and her friend Overdrive again ('Pretty sure Des recognized me, but she didn't blow my cover. OD was clueless. ^_^), I met a real goofball named Sky Dragon (He seems sweet, but maaaaybe isn't the brightest Light cantrip ever-), and I talked to a guy named Ravenstorm. He's the most interesting one. He felt Dark. I recognized the shadows around him... But he wasn't a mage, or even an adept. He didn't seem to know much about magic at all! I meant to ask him how he could use Dark magic without being magically-trained or even magically-inclined (That trick might come in handy if the idea B's working on falls through-), but I didn't have time. I had to go break ALL of the Council's stuff for Mrs. Peebles, and Toby and his brother. I must have cost The Center a fortune in repair bills, Diary. It was fun. ^_^ I've also spent a lot of time dealing with artifact thieves. I mean, A LOT of time. That seems to be what White Thorn is getting a reputation for doing... Chasing down dangerous artifacts and dealing with the jerks who took them. Jerks like the Banished Patheon's cultists. I had to go get something called the Wheel of Destruction back from them. (An artifact that they didn't even know how to reassemble properly, I should note. They really are numbskulls.) I guess it's a Good Thing that they couldn't figure out what to do with it, because if they had I couldn't have used it myself to kick their butts. I *am* still mad about the thing with them and my boss in Dark Astoria, but I didn't lose my temper, and none of them died this time. Gregor said that I had done a great job when I brought the pieces of the Wheel back to him. He and Azuria remind me just a little too much of Edratarees and Rob, though... and I have a feeling that I'm going to have to go out and find that Wheel all over again someday. That's... sort-of why I disassembled the artifact again before I gave it to them. You don't leave things like that just laying around. I've also tried talking to a few of the other Circle people in Talos. Some of them are okay, but a lot of them have been listening to the Archmagus of Madness for way, way too long. (He thinks we ought to abandon the past, and just take over the modern City and turn it into a new place of our own.) His faction think they'll need a whole lot of host bodies for that, so that everyone can have one. They're out kidnapping new "potentials" all the time, looking for good candidates. I tried to tell them that that REALLY wasn't helping when it came to getting people to maybe not hate us, or run away screaming for a hero every single time they see someone with glowing eyes and spikey armor, but I don't think they listened. The weirdest thing I've done this week was for one of the Midnighters... He *said* it was another artifact retrieval... That the Warriors (They're sort-of a gang of SCA dudebros) had stolen the "Platonic Solids" and he wanted them back. I kind-of gave him the eye about that one. I mean, he wanted me to go out and take back basic Geometry?! But he said no, he was serious. And it was important. So, I agreed to do it. I punched Pythagoras, Diary. My contact had me punch Pythagoras. He was a lot younger than I thought he'd be... (Yes, Safe. I know. The real one's been dead since the 5th century BC. That was supposed to be a joke, you nerd.) Anyway, it turns out the Midnighter is a tabletop gamer and the Warrior dude stole his dice when they were playing Capes & Cowls at the local Merlin's. I'm not sure he really needed a hero to handle that, but... Yeah. Platonic Solids. In an old Crown Royal bag. <_< Sometimes the hero-business is just weird. -k

I'm fond of both, for different reasons... I liked the challenge of being a flier in the old version's fog, and the vanishing ghosts were just very cool to me the first time I saw them. I like the creepy weirdness of the new version's landscape and the sheer variety of things you encounter if you go street-sweeping. I also love the new DA story arcs.

I like blowing up mailboxes... I admit it.