Coyotedancer

My Excelsior "bird things" don't have bios and never will. I know who they are and why they do what they do, but I avoid roleplay with them like the proverbial plague, so there's really no point in wasting any time fighting with the game's text interface to drop in details that don't matter. It would be more useful on that server to list the characters' combat stats and speed-run times, but honestly I haven't bothered to do that either. The rest of my characters, who are on Everlasting, do all tend to get a biography at some point. Usually that happens some time after I've spent awhile playing them. I only do casual, mission team roleplaying these days, but even with that, having at least a short bio is expected practice and it can save me from having to explain OOC for the twenty-seventh time this week that, yes, my player character Oranbegan really is a Madness Mage, and yes, he has a good reason for not trying to feed your goodie two-shoes heroes to his pet demon. Call it a biography of convenience as much as anything.

'Probably my fault, starting that... Nova Primeva is very much farther into fanfic territory than it is related to anything in the current canon, and Arte's background is just personal fluff. Apologies for side-tracking the thread's intention.

*Kai and Arte eye their Nick's Chiliweenies doubtfully*

They're the reason Mot was sealed where he was... When Marcus brings the urn to "the end of the world" the caverns under Astoria is where he ends up, basically on the Oranbegans' doorstep. (You'll see all of that when you run Marcus' personal story.) They make sure he stays there. When Mot starts to break loose, it's an absolute disaster for them. Trouble is, when Mot devours an Oranbegan spirit it's permanent. It's not just the usual matter of "Oh, well. Guess I need to float back home and find a new body. This one's wrecked." It's the end of the line. Poof, Gone. A light snack for an angry, evil God of Death and Decay. 'Pretty scary thought for a bunch of otherwise basically immortal ghosts... Now add the presence of the Talons to that... A group who are all too ready, willing and able to rip those bodies they're usually cruising around in to pieces, making them even more vulnerable to being devoured than they already were. A group who actually manage to take over a part of Oranbega in one of the arcs, apparently corrupting it so thoroughly that they break Tya's green crystals... and things get dire fast. Arte's story is that he's the only survivor of a cabal who were sent to try and re-enforce the wards. He got to experience the Talons tearing apart his entire group, and then watched Mot devour every one of them. Knowing that when that happened those people were gone forever. His cabal and the Oranbegans who called the part of the sunken city that the Talons took over home likely weren't the only ones Mot chowed down on. I have no trouble imagining him going after every single Oranbregan he could get a tooth on, as payback for having bound him for so long, and we know his reach extended well beyond Dark Astoria itself. (The last arc mentions him devouring other places. Chicago, I think?) He didn't have time to find and devour the entire Oranbegan population (In my own storyline he never found the Temple in Primeva, for instance-), but it's not a stretch to think he probably took a sizable chunk out of them, in and around Paragon City in particular. That could end up being a lot of people that they aren't ever going to get back... Magi, elemental casters, their Thorn Wielder guardians. People like Tavaris and Amtes and Bahir likely lost some very old friends to Mot, without even being part of a group like Artemian's. In Arte's case, that loss was pretty much total, and it just broke him.

Indeed. Mot is/was a Damned Big Deal for them... My own are still dealing with some of the fallout from that. I'm not going to spoiler anything for you, VT, but let me put it this way... Mot's effect on the Circle is why Artemian is the way he is. And it's why Kai would pretty much translocate anyone who ever seriously suggested that she send him back there to a place so deep in the Abyss that Lilitu herself wouldn't be able to find them. Dark Astoria is a nasty business for the Oranbegans.

Absolutely. 😆

I've intentionally avoided the "actual civil war" track with my Oranbegans... They may not all agree on things, and their disagreements can certainly be very fierce and sometimes very personal, but that hasn't really turned into any large-scale flinging of fireballs and tentacles at other cabals over philosophical differences of opinion. (It seems to me that the magi would consider themselves too civilized for that kind of thing, given the way their culture has been described. ) Working at cross-purposes, sure. Plotting and scheming to get political or material advantage for their own cabal, absolutely. Using tradition or existing social conventions to support their particular point of view, without a doubt. But outright physical or arcane combat? Nah. That's for barbarians and the Mu. Nova Primeva happens because of gradual cultural evolution, exposure to the modern world, and something of a collective reawakening and remembrance of what the Oranbegans, as a civilization, had once been. The Battalion Wars were sort-of the final catalyst in that process, forcing them to take a stand with the rest of Humanity. As for the whole "the dead can't change"-thing... I'd argue that the old devs wrecked that idea themselves when it comes to the Circle. If they were unchanged from their state at the time they gave up their bodies, they wouldn't be the murderous jerks we all love punting off of rooftops in Kings Row. Remember what got them into the fix they're in. They had to dodge the demons' retribution because of an intentional act of mercy. They had collectively looked around and realized that they'd done a Very Bad Thing... 'That the war had turned them into the same kind of genocidal jerks they were fighting... and they said "Nope. We're not going to let the demons kill the last of these Mu, even though the Mu were all in on destroying us." There was some realization there that two wrongs weren't going to make anything right, and that story just doesn't say 'Civilization of Total Evil' to me. It involves realizations that don't jive with how the Circle is presented in the current day. The official line was that being disembodied and isolated for so long made them "inhuman". That it changed them. So. Yeah... 'Shot that whole the-dead-can't-change business in the foot there, right from the start, just to make the Circle yet another gang of monotone bad guys rather than something more interesting, more nuanced and ultimately, I think, more tragic. ETA: Oh, and that big, spikey tree on Thorn Island? In my personal storylines, she's a she. And an elemental Entity that the Oranbegans have considered sacred since long before they became ghosts. And she reflects the state of her people.... Which is why she's currently mostly-dead, very grumpy and generally in a pretty dark place, figuratively speaking, In the Nova Primeva timeline she's a little like a localized version of Yddrasil. 'Leafy, green, very much a protective presence... and every spring she covers Thorn Island and neighboring parts of Primeva and Agincourt in drifts of white blossoms. The locals use the tree blooming as an excuse for a week-long, region-wide party.

Did you mean for that link to be a mess, Piece?

Most of my crew, with their little collections of -Res procs and Perf Shifters, would have a sad. Not to mention the Peacebringer, whose team-mates only let him play with them because his KB powers all have Suddens slotted. 😝 (ETA: Although, the Sudden Acc KB-to-KD... Is that one more of a Special or an actual proc? I know the Overwhelming is a proc, since it'll add KD to powers that don't normally have it... But I can't for the life of me remember rather or not the Sudden does the same. I want to say it doesn't... but, yeah. I can't remember for sure and I'm too lazy to go look. XD)

Now that I have time to make a serious post... I actually do play around quite a bit with some very "head-canon only"-ideas with the parts of my crew who are focused around the Circle of Thorns. The Circle, as it exists for the Sanctum magi and their associates at the Temple in Primeva, isn't a monolithic entity. In their world, the Oranbegans have several distinct factions, who don't always see eye-to-eye. While any of them would (and do-) grump extensively and often about people from the surface world invading their space, taking their stuff and generally making a mess of the place, they're not in agreement about what to do about it. A lot of them are still your typical City-canon "Burn their souls and steal their bodies!"-types, but there are others who are much less "Feed them to the demons!" Those tend to look at the modern world, see opportunities and would prefer finding a way to co-exist.... at least on some level. Even within the 'peaceful' factions, there are still some arguments about just how much interaction ought to be encouraged. One set just wants to be left completely alone, another doesn't mind interaction with the surface-folk but won't tolerate the constant pillaging and theft of their books, a third is all-in on raising a chunk of their city and joining modern humanity for a night of pizza and club-crawling. They're curious about everything that's changed, and fascinated by the weirdness of the modern world. (My own Oranbegan characters tend to be in the later groups. The Temple magi are very much type 2, while the voyagers of Ordus Viatoris, and Tavaris and his Sanctum magi would fall in with the third. Nova Primeva, the post-Battalion future that my Ordus Chronos time travelers come from, is what happens if the coexistance faction becomes the dominant Circle ideology.) I just never liked the idea of an ENTIRE CIVILIZATION having exactly the same ideas and opinions, with very little variation. I mean, there's no way Akarist could be the *only* Circle mage who wasn't all-in on being a body-snatching evil ass-hat. The older ones, the magi, may not always see things in the same way modern humans do. Fifteen-thousand years as disembodied ghosts is going to leave its mark... But they are still people, and people aren't all going to react to their circumstances the same way. Add in interactions with the more recent, mortal minions that have been recruited into the group, and the experiences of the ones who have been out and about more than their comrades, and it just seems reasonable that there would be more than one potential track to take.

I have to disagree pretty strongly with that. Honestly, having the KB-to-KD option available for it is what makes Bonfire worth taking. Back in the Live days, prior to the first of those showing up? It was basically a non-starter. Very few people used the power, and for good reason. It was just a bad pick. It made itself darn near useless by flinging things out right out of its own radius on a regular basis. Some of us still *tried* to find good uses for it... but most seemed to end up respeccing right back out of it, grumbling about "trash powers" and "Who actually thought patch-based knockback was a GOOD idea?!" Granted, when the old devs introduced the first KB-to-KD special, it only came from the not-always-available, seasonal Summer Blockbuster event arc and it was an exclusive. You couldn't have more than one in a build, so dropping it into Bonfire came at the cost of using it anywhere else. We lost that cost when Sudden Acc was introduced, with its non-exclusive version. So... Would it make people feel better if Bonfire went back to only accepting the exclusive, Overwhelming version? They're much more expensive, and less easily obtained than just buying a recipe. If you couldn't just easily drop in a Sudden that you picked up for a million INF or so on the auction-house, you might see less people taking and using the power. Or it might increase the frequency of people running Summer Blockbuster.

*eyes her time travelling magi from Ordus Chronos and their whole post-Battalion wars Nova Primeva thing...* Nah. I've never done that.

I've always hoped the Flying V was a Nemesis front company. They claim to make something harmless... motorcycles, let's say... but in reality? That's where the steam-ponies come from. 😝

*grumbles as she walks over to the base portal and enters the code for the Sanctum* *finds Tavaris and has a Very Serious Conversation about his apprentice and her friends tinkering with dimensional boundaries*

Some people just want to look like twelve-year-old edge-lords. I guess they think it's funny, or clever or that by flying their dork flags high they'll somehow "own the prudes" or something? I don't know... It's a strange mindset, but it's also common enough in virtual spaces to draw some comparisons between those humans and the habits of other poo-flinging primates.

I actually went Claws/Fire/Mu Brute for my "zen mode" farmer... Mostly because I hate the sound effects for Spines, and Claws was more fun to play than Rad, "Best" is pretty subjective in City, so there are going to be a lot of different ways to judge that.

Yes. Yes you do. 😝

I feel like I have to channel LordAlmighty from Liberty for a second here... Cheers! 😆 (Although for me, it's usually vanilla matcha rather than anything boozy.)

I played around with my shikigami over in Onmyoji... 'Did something really silly, and actually decently equipped and started leveling my little set of cosplaying frogs. 😄 (The froglets are joke versions of some of the SSR-rank regular shikigami. They're absolutely adorable, but not really practical to level, equip or play in most parts of the game. I'm mostly doing it because I want to be able to field an entire "serious-looking" frog team for Realm Defense. Something that'll make anyone who draws them in a match laugh out loud over how ludicrous that is.)

Server down? - Page 14 - Help & Support - Homecoming (homecomingservers.com)

*imagine what the internet spilling all over a server room floor would actually look like* I think I need to borrow someone's brain bleach...

Bahir, my Oranbegan heliomancer, says that magic is more stylish than science Every.Single.Time.

Welcome back, Mondo. This down-time really is unusual for Homecoming. 'First time in the last two years it's gone down for anything close to this long. The most we typically see is the short and routine downtime for resets and updates and such.

Hmm... If we need a Karen to "deal with the issue", I could probably cosplay one in a pinch. I mean... middle-aged, soccer-mom type suburban white chick with a bobbed hair-do? I already look the part. All I have to do is figure out how to be relentless and demanding. How hard could that be?

If you're up to giving him a second try... You might have a better time with Dual Pistol/Willpower. WP Sents are tough enough to handle quite a lot and DP is one of the better-done damage sets.