TwoDee

I think if you as a player are proactively asking yourself, "am I making room for other people to be in the spotlight right now?" at all, you're probably well and truly in the clear. Introspection is important in roleplay, and soliciting constructive critique is - at least in my opinion - also a must. You can never improve unless you know what you're doing wrong. Looking at dissatisfying roleplay stories that don't have the oomph you want them to, dissecting them, and going "why didn't this work?" is a fruitful and rewarding practice. To expand on the previous point that high-Magic character concepts in roleplay tend to be those most prone to providing unsatisfying, poorly-written "handwave" conclusions to conflicts, I'd also observe that this phenomenon is hardly unique to roleplay, and originated long before it. It's actually spread across all of the genre fiction from which City of Heroes derives its inspiration. An absolutely fabulous breakdown of why this occurs was provided by prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, of Mistborn and Stormlight fame: In short, if magic has clearly delineated, well-telegraphed rules and limitations that are known and understood well in advance, your audience is going to be a lot more receptive to the idea of a character waggling magic at a problem to make it go away. If magic is powerful and limitless, then it's wildly unsatisfying as a conclusion to a narrative arc, because there's no dramatic setup nor payoff to a wizard/dragon/fey queen/whatever going "abloogie woo, problem solved forever." If the exact rules by which the fey queen can resurrect the dead are not established well in advance, then when the hero dies at the end and the fey queen resurrects him, it's not a well-foreshadowed, interwoven narrative beat; it's a Deus Ex Machina. You may notice that going "to be dramatically satisfying, Magic needs to be strictly defined, limited in its application, and mechanistically explained so that there's no mystery to it" makes it a lot closer to, well, Tech or Science tonally. And that's not an accident. To quote Sanderson, himself quoting the legendary genre-fiction editor John Campbell, You may notice that Campbell's description of what makes "Fantasy" distinct, makes Fantasy sound like unbelievably lazy, sloppy writing, but that's because Sturgeon's Law was in full force for midcentury fantasy lit. JRR Tolkien was an exception, not the rule, and a lot of his imitators learned terrible lessons from him; that magic could be all-powerful, completely undefined and still be used to handwave away conflicts, that worldbuilding is more important than writing compelling characters, that fantasy needs innately evil, racially-coded antagonist species, and so forth. Gandalf would be a disastrous character to play in City of Heroes, because the Gandalf presented in The Lord of the Rings presumptively has the ability to just fly the ring into Mount Doom himself the whole time, inexplicably doesn't, and then handily pulls that power right out of his asshole when he needs to get the protagonists home safely. A roleplayer-character wizard in the model of Gandalf has no such compunctions not to leverage his limitless and ill-defined power to its natural conclusion of Always Winning At Everything, and I don't think that I need to explain to anyone in this thread how unbelievably lame it is to have one's supergroup or personal roleplay derailed by an "oh, don't bother, I'll just summon the giant eagles to solve the entire plot for us" moment. It is, again, not a phenomenon unique to Magic conceptually, but the pervasive notion of - -is baked-in to the history and DNA of fantasy literature from at least Tolkien on, in a way that is not as true of other contemporary genre fiction from which City of Heroes draws its themes. Thus, why I do tend to hold roleplay characters with the next to their name to a higher standard of scrutiny when they're posing solutions to roleplay plotline conflicts, especially when I don't know them well. Sanderson's First Law is hardly an inviolate mandate-from-heaven, but it's a good guideline to keep in mind when dissecting why powerful magic frequently ruins stories.

I'd like to start off by saying that I'm not here to police @MHertz's language over what is fundamentally pretty clearly a vent thread. I feel like his argument got very caught up in the aesthetic baggage of fantastical (invariably loosely Magic-Origin) character tropes, but in turn that meant that this thread likewise got caught up in those aesthetic trappings rather than what I feel is his most salient point, and what is closest to the core of the vent, from the second post: This is a real problem that I feel keenly in Everlasting's casual-RP scene, but it's hardly exclusive to Everlasting roleplay; it's something that I was inundated with back when I was still doing forum play-by-post, for instance. And it happens because there's no ground-level understanding - no "Session Zero" - between roleplayers about whether we're telling a shared story that follows narrative convention - as, say, Vampire: the Masquerade or FATE attempt to do - or whether we're playing escapist avatars to inhabit and live out a power fantasy, as older editions of Dungeons and Dragons and many video games do. (And as Vampire: the Masquerade is often played in practice, but that's neither here nor there) To the first group, melodrama and narrative conflict are very much the point, because the expectation is that these characters exist in collaborative pursuit of story beats: "Once my character is created, I divest their fate to the input of the group on what would make for good conflict." To the second group, melodrama and narrative conflict are a betrayal of the appeal; "I play this game to have fun. Is it so wrong to want to live out the fantasy of being a wizard who can ragdoll Lord Recluse? If I wanted to be a powerless, traumatized chucklefuck who struggles to pay his bills I would just go outside." Obviously, these are hyperbolic exaggerations of the "camps," as it were, and there are definitely players who land in the in-between spaces (we see a lot of them in this thread!), but the different philosophies exist, and friction is inevitable. Story-first players are going to get disappointed when they run up against characters who lack conflict because they're intended primarily to be standees for the author to hang out and vibe in a cool avatar. Power-fantasy-first players are going to feel put-upon when they try to pursue what the game has promised them - getting to be a hero who saves people - and have their presumptive damsels in distress go "but that was a character flaw I didn't want resolved, why don't you understand my story?" Certainly, what guidance City of Heroes itself provides directly caters to the power fantasy camp, not the collaborative-narrative camp.. At level 50+ Incarnate, you are the most powerful being in the game world, more powerful than the literal gods of the setting. The natural counterpoint to the 'I can't take players who play Gods seriously when they struggle with Skulls' argument is that eventually that character, and all characters if played enough, become powerful enough to beat down Statesman and Lord Recluse, to beat down Cole, to beat down Mot, to save and/or destroy the world singlehandedly. That's a ringing endorsement of "this is a game for you to live out that power fantasy," and while the game tells you in no uncertain terms that you can kick Lord Recluse's ass by blinking hard enough, it never once tells you "by the way, make room for other players and make sure you're not too powerful or else you'll piss people off." That would be a betrayal of the very triumphant feeling that the game writing is shooting for. People roleplaying as the game tells them to play aren't necessarily less valid than "Narrativist" roleplayers such as myself and the OP, and they're not inherently "roleplaying wrong." That said, I'm going to concur with the following, but I'm also going to bounce off of it: I agree with @McSpazz's take that high-powered and especially Magic characters are much easier to powergame in a way that trivializes other players' input. Although certainly a Tech-Origin super-scientist or Mutant or Natural Batman-alike can pull new capabilities out of their ass to defuse any narrative tension, it's a lot easier to write, and a lot more tempting to jump into as the first resort, if it's already preestablished that the character is a being of limitless or near-limitless power and agency. Magic caters to that particular fantasy better and with less dissonance than the other Origins, because Magic is by its very nature indefinable and infinite. Certainly, I think it's no accident that, as of Homecoming's polls a couple of years ago, Magic Origin dwarfs all other Origins in popularity, because there's so much more you can do with an Origin that's completely unfettered from mundane notions of scope and common sense. So, to take that one step further, I see a lot of the "woah there, aren't you painting with a broad brush there, @MHertz? You're catching us innocent dragons and gods and demons and vampire lords in the crossfire" rhetoric in this thread as a little bit forest-for-the-trees. These are character concepts that, although they can be roleplayed well - ❤️ and indeed are unilaterally roleplayed well by all of the lovely people in this thread who I wouldn't dare to impugn in a million, billion years ❤️ - are popular and powerful tools in the hands of godmoding roleplayers because of the greater utility that such a character concept naturally offers in the pursuit of godmoding. I don't think it's an accident that the OP latched on to high-powered magical creatures for his hypothetical godmoding bugbear, and "well, but can't a player godmode with any concept?" is begging the question in bad faith. I don't think it invalidates anybody's dragon, or vampire, or God, to acknowledge that just by the basic logistics of how godmoding works, you're going to meet a lot more godmoding Literal Gods in the roleplay community than you're going to meet godmoding Street-Level Mutants With a Day Job, and that does lead to an increased wariness when dealing with those character tropes among roleplayers like the OP but, also, myself: a sort of "Schrödinger's Godmoder" if you will. OP is pulling emotively from that paralytic paranoia-of-intent that I often feel when a character introduces themselves to me as "Hello, I'm Coolname Cooler'Surname, I'm a half-god half-god (both my parents were gods) who is also an archmage; please tell me about your character conflicts."

BRILLIANT “Yo, Trish!” Trisha Harris looked up from a veggie burger of dubious import to see her roommate, Beth Richardson, stalking across the dining hall. Beth’s frizzy black hair was tied back in a haphazard bun, and her skin still carried a sheen of sweat; she’d probably run straight from soccer practice without a chance to clean up. “You’re laaaate,” Trish whined, though with a tone that had no malice. “And you’re lucky as shit that the guest lecture got posted online.” “Coach held me up to talk about my passing.” Beth shrugged, punching Trish softly in the shoulder before craning her body on one foot and entering a little hop to snatch a banana. The students she cut in front of stepped out of her way, annoyed, before she returned to her roommate's table. “Not my fault they scheduled the HardLight doodly when like a million other things were happening.” “Yeah, well, we’re discussing it in…” Trish opened her laptop, then when it hung on the startup screen - a big Crey C - simply looked at her phone instead. “...thirty-five minutes, so let’s get you caught up,” The chair next to Trish groaned as Beth bodily threw herself into it, causing it to skip a few inches across the floor. “Wasn’t the lecture like an hour long?” Trish shook her head before adjusting a coffee-colored bang from where it had fallen out-of-place on her forehead. “No, he left early to do superhero stuff, and I’ll skip you through the parts that aren’t important.” Beth leaned in and pantomimed a kiss to Trish before peeling the banana. “You’re a saint.” “You know it,” Trish laughed, clicking impatiently as the laptop sluggishly loaded her browser. Luckily, the video on the university website was her last-open link. "I get why it had to be in Spanky Auditorium," Trish complained, finishing her veggie burger and standing up to stretch out her back before sitting back down, "so that his light wouldn't be all blown out, but those seats ruin your back. They're sooooo uncomfortable." "That's why they call it Spanky," Beth joked in return, noshing her banana, "because you're not leaving without a pain in the ass. I think they haven't updated it since the 70s." "I hope you appreciate the hardship I went through for you." "I thought of Mind Killer," Trish offered, trying to get comfortable again in the dining hall chair. "When I was in 11th grade, he used his fear magic or whatever on my high school homecoming to make some kind of social point about climate anxiety before the PPD took him down." "Shh," Beth laughed, "we only have half an hour!" "Rowr. Someone wants to let Criminal Psych know he works out," Beth appraised, gesturing with the uneaten tip of the banana at the angular abdomen onscreen. "Ewwww," Trish giggled, "Down, girl! He's old enough to be your dad." "Oh, no, for sure, but you gotta admit he kind of poses like he's giving bedroom eyes to the whole lecture hall." "I don't think he has eyes," groaned Trish. "Isn't he just a guy under the light? Like, you can see the grey hairs - fuck!" Beth laughed, making a "shoo" gesture at the screen to get Trish to unpause it. "We're getting sidetracked! Next you'll complain about the chairs again!" "My back is really stiff, okay?" Trish arched the small of her back and rubbed it, but obligingly started the stream again. Beth grunted out the vocal equivalent to a question mark as Trish began to skip ahead, interrupting the flow of the lecture. "He gets into a lot of really entry-level stuff here," explained Trish. "Milgram shock, Stanford Prison. Just really basic 'evil lurks in the hearts of all normies' content. Stuff we already know front-to-back." "Okay, sure, thanks." "Oop, too far." Trish scrolled back a minute, taking the opportunity to stretch out her arms behind the laptop before returning them to rubbing her back. "This section is all Praetorian history and examples," Trish offered, beginning to scroll ahead again. "Definitely go back, because it's kind of cool, but it's not gonna be on a quiz or anything. I was squirming in the lecture hall just like 'get back to the psychology!'" "I getcha," Beth nodded. "Lemme grab an OJ real quick." Trish continued skipping forward, unpausing when Beth returned, juice in tow. Trish skipped forward again, speeding the footage up to x4. HardLight danced around the stage in fast forward, making the fingergun gesture several more times. "He kept using that analogy, 'a gun wants to be fired,' like, all powered folks, even superheroes, are always gonna be more ready to do supervillainy because of the psychological priming of having powers, no matter what the powers are." "Seems kind of obvious. It's right there in the name: Supervillainy. Needs to be super to do the villainy." Beth shrugged indifferently, causing Trish to pause the fast-forward and attempt a Cliff's-notes explanation: "Yeah, but like - you know - it's like, we make out superpowered people who commit crimes as being worse than normal people who commit crimes, but all they are is people who've been given a better opportunity to commit crimes. There's nothing special about supervillains, aside from the powers." Beth shrugged again, this time really throwing her shoulders into it with a shitty, awkward grin. "Still seems kind of obvious, I dunno." "Well, yeah, because he's just trying to bring them down to our level to make his point." "Which iiiiis?" Beth teased, "We gotta run to class, at this rate." "It's getting there," Trish sighed, rolling her eyes and correcting a bang again as she leaned back over the computer. The crick in her back stung at the movement. Skip. Skip. "Here it is, this is right at the end," Trish insisted, pointing at the screen. "There you have it," Trish said, closing the laptop. "Main beats, uhhh, there is no scalable solution to supervillain deradicalization - interpersonal relationships are key - Brockmole and Witt gun study -individualized solutions." "You missed the part where he's like a... hot lightbulb dad-rocker," Beth joked, standing and slinging a small, sweat-stained bookbag back over her shoulder. "I left that part out deliberately," Trish quipped in response, making a disgusted face and gingerly shouldering her own backpack to keep it off the small of her back. "You see how everyone was all ready to leave? Spanky Auditorium's torture seating strikes again." "Yeah, no shit, girl. We should get massages," Beth suggested, setting the pace for the dining hall quad. "Your treat." "Like I have the time," Trish sighed, letting her eyes wander over the closed-captioned televisions broadcasting the news near the exit of the dining hall. "I've got my business class after Psych." "You don't even do sports, you've got no room to complain." "No," Trish supposed, lingering on one of the televisions. In it, HardLight was being interviewed following a fight in which he had, apparently, effortlessly subdued the Trainiac for the PPD. She rubbed her sore back self-consciously. "No, I guess not."

CorTexas, the psionic gunslinger who captures the American mind! Any similarity to Vahzilok heavy "Cortex" is purely coincidental and may or may not inform his inability to market himself as a solo hero. Presented here in both his brain and hat versions. CortexasHC.costumeCortexasHCHat.costume

Thank you so much! HardLight is a fun character to write for, although 'writing for HardLight' without actually writing for HardLight has been a unique challenge.

BAREFOOT [This story carries a strong content warning for violence and themes of post-traumatic stress] Anne tried not to tap her foot as Marcus Alvarez stirred on the couch, running through his biweekly routine of making himself just the right kind of uncomfortable. Back support was, as always, out of the question. Instead, the muscular ex-detective swiveled upright, treating the low-slung chaise longue like a barstool, head rotating like a turret to decide, she speculated, on what exactly he wanted to glare at today. There was nothing particularly interesting going on in the back-alley her office window looked upon, so instead he turned his head to the wall to re-read her credentials. As Alvarez’s eyes traced the counseling degree featuring her name - ANNE KELTER - for the thousandth time, she was quietly relieved that he didn’t linger nearly so long on the decorative Star of David further up the wall. It was a measure she’d enacted two years ago to keep clients from looking at her shock of frizzy ginger hair and then asking where in Ireland she was from. Luckily, Praetorians weren’t particularly taken with matters of ancestry… nor faith, for that matter. She offered, giving Alvarez more room to fidget, “Do you want to talk about your last week?” “Not especially,” the large man grumbled, narrow eyes still wandering across the wall over her shoulder. “But I ‘spose I should, before my caseworker will clear me to go back to work.” “How about we start,” she offered, obligingly, “with your side of the story?” Marcus sighed, and his eyes finally met hers. His macho standoffishness was melting under the weight of emotional fatigue. Looking at his eyes as he leaned back and they caught the light, she realized that the purple tint she’d first attributed to lack of sleep was actually a black eye, give or take several days of healing. “I was at the grocery store, and I’m getting some stuff for the home. Nothing fancy - meat, veg, some seltzer water. I’m at the checkout, and there’s these two off-duty capes holding everything up. They’ve got a tabloid open right there in the queue, and they’re tittering about this super thing - reading an article about how HardLight’s little sidekick Trespass is going down for a B&E, tut-tutting about how Praetorians always turn into vigilantes when they don’t get their way. Pissed me off.” “How did you know they were superheroes, Marcus?” A flash of anger passed across his eyes, and a full-body flinch followed. Anne quietly jotted down in her notepad that directly questioning the former Interrogator on matters of insight might be too raw. “Because the guy had rainbow gem skin, doc. It was Gemcutter, staying in his transformed form at the grocery checkout like a preening peacock, which made the big girl he was with the Tin Titaness, even if she had the good sense to go covert. Not that she could hide her physique worth a damn, even behind the baggy tank.” Anne frowned. It was very like Marcus to judge one metahuman for being overtly presenting, and another metahuman for hiding their true form in the same breath, but it was a bad sign for the treatment of his anger. “Did you ask them to be more considerate?” “Yeah, more or less.” Anne’s first instinct, to surmise aloud that he’d said more, was unhelpful. Instead she asked, calmly, “What did you tell them?” “I told them that if they were done playing monster gossip, then us normals would like to buy our toilet paper and cheezy crackers and go home.” “And they didn’t respond well.” Marcus snorted out a pitiless laugh, his broad shoulders bouncing at the memory. “Oh, Cole no. Titaness starts getting up in my face about how it’s rude to call myself a normal on account of metas are people too, and I point to Gemcutter and tell her that it’s not normal that he can’t get it up for her without running to the supermarket for a quick hit of the adoring fans.” “Marcus,” Anne started, “I appreciate you being authentic with me, I really do. I’m glad that you trust me enough to share this. However, we talked about acceleration last session.” “Yeah, I know,” he grimaced, averting his gaze again in shame. “But I swear, they were lording it over me, like… like…” Anne said nothing, but was quietly pleased when Marcus self-corrected, “I felt like they were lording it over me. They were being inconsiderate, but I felt like it was more than that. It was like they were taking up my space, daring me to tell them to move so that they could feel bigger than me.” “Very good, Marcus. I appreciate the introspection, I really do. You’re doing great. Now, they could have been trying to show off, but I’d like to ask, in the interests of reflection: what else could they have been doing, other than showing off?” Marcus thought on that for a moment, then ventured, uncertainly, “They could have been… just caught up in talking to each other, and not thinking about us.” There was a moroseness to the admittance, as if that was somehow worse. Anne weighed the risks of pushing on that, and decided to gently prod him. “How do you think they felt, when you called them abnormals?” “I didn’t do that, doc.” Anne kept a poker face, as best she could. Ex-cops could be huge pedants when it came to discussing their aggression, but the problem needed to be centered before it could be addressed. “Then, how do you think they felt, when you referred to yourself and the other non-metahumans as normals?” “Bad, probably,” Marcus grimaced, with a roll of his eyes, “but it’s water off a duck’s back, right? They’re so much more powerful than any of us. They’re literally the bigger people; they can ride it out. What does that say for our superheroes, if they can’t handle some heat from a prole like me at the checkout counter?” The minimization of harm wasn’t helping Marcus, but Anne knew that calling him on it was just going to make him get belligerent, rather than improve his empathy. She shifted tack. “What could you have done differently,” she laughed, politely, “to get through that situation without a black eye?” Marcus shoved his hands into his cargo pockets, and Anne was struck momentarily by the impression of a scolded little boy hiding sweets. “I could have not told him he needed an audience to get off.” “That’s a start,” Anne smiled, obligingly, implicitly bidding him to continue. “And I could have used… less charged language from the get-go. Less exclusionary language. I could have called myself non-metahuman, or even just not referred to them being metas at all.” Anne’s affected smile became an earnest one. This was progress. “That’s great, Marcus. You’re doing really well.” A moment of silence passed between them, as Marcus’ dark eyes rose to meet her own green ones. She was about to move into conflict defusal strategies, when he spoke up first. “I think… I think I was projecting a bit, doc. Treating them like they were someone else.” “That might be, Marcus. However, be careful that you’re not being overly hard on yourself. You’d be surprised at how often when someone says that they think the problem is their Mom, or their Dad, it’s more complex than that. Psychotherapy isn’t like it is in the movies. People are complicated.” Marcus’ frown showed a few teeth, and a hand rose from his pocket to scratch at the back of his hairy neck. He insisted, “No, it’s not that. It was what they were talking about, the Trespass thing. The supe bimbo caught, uh, trespassing.” This was new info to Anne, although she hadn’t had so many sessions with Alvarez to get a good sense of his time with the Praetorian Police Department. That was a land mine they’d left untriggered for now, but it looked like the time was rapidly approaching to step on it. “If I’m familiar with the city’s superheroes, Trespass is former Praetorian Resistance, correct? Were you on the other side of a fight from her?” Alvarez shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that.” A beat. “It’s the supe she’s with. HardLight.” Anne could hear it from his tone, and steeled herself: they were about to go someplace very dangerous. “The… NPI administrator? Glows all the time, with, ah-” She desperately wanted to say “the The Piano Teacher thing going on,” but settled in the interests of professionalism on, “the very sleek, black aesthetic.” “Yeah, that’s the one. I met him once before. Back when he was in Powers Division.” It was the way that the words came out: cold and blinding-hot, like the sun off a melting ice flow. Hate and fear. Anne didn’t put a lot of stock in the idea of her clients’ problems being the fault of single, dramatic moments, but it was clear that Marcus Alvarez, at least, felt differently. “Okay. It sounds like we’re making progress. Do you want to tell me the story?” Marcus took that invitation without a verbal ‘yes.’ His voice pattern changed almost immediately as he started recounting the story, code-switching into what she realized was a PPD glot. “This is Praetoria City…Imperial Year 28, so aught-seven, aught-eight in Primal years maybe. Powers Division were holding one of their endless goddamn award ceremonies outdoors in People’s Park, TPN filming. I think it was the Heroism Under Fire Award. Freaking joke. Anyway, he’s there with Gloomaiden - she was his sidekick then - and Riot Act is serving up the honors. Real who’s who of the would-be Tyrant set.” “It sounds like you were frustrated with superhumans then, as well?” “I wasn’t the only one,” Marcus quipped, tersely. “We had this prick in for questioning, Daisyrod. Don’t let the name conjure up something cute; guy was a Hamidon War vet like me, all the scars and the lingering cough to prove it. We Interrogators hadn’t gotten anything out of him other than the award show was the target; we told Powers Div to hold off until we could get a Scryer loaned from the Seer Network to peel him, but all we got was a bunch of wank back about how the PPD should remember their place.” “It sounds like you were feeling like your voice wasn’t being heard.” Alvarez’s teeth clicked together, and he shifted his weight, sitting up in the chair. “Oh, it was heard, all right. That tip just made more supes show up. Every Powers Division wannabe is there just begging for gunmen to show, so that they can be the one running to the front lines and saving the day for the camera. Joke’s on them, though. Turns out there’s a sewer access pipe running right beneath the podium, and Daisyrod’s already done the job. He rigged up a Hedgeclipper to the roof of the pipe - did you have Hedgeclippers on Primal?” Anne shook her head ‘no,’ although she had the distinct impression that she wouldn’t like the explanation. Marcus continued, “Pressure bomb with a defoliant payload, from back during the Hamidon Wars. You drop ‘em on the plant monster and the shockwave pulps everything in 100 meters, then the defoliant sets in. Anyway, the Hedgeclipper’s designed to airburst, so it’s not perfect for what our perp wants it to do, but it works well enough. Most of the shockwave disperses further down the line, but the pipe roof blows through the podium and nixes Riot Act right in front of all the cameras.” Anne quietly noted the thin wrinkle of a smile on Marcus’ face. “The shrapnel carries through the first couple rows, taking earth and sewage with. The organizers should have put the invulnerables up front, but they put the most photogenic capes there instead, so all the prettiest idiots get shredded. And then the defoliant starts burning, and every supe without toxin resistance starts having a real bad day.” Anne decided that she did not, in fact, like learning what a ‘Hedgeclipper’ was. “What happened then?” “Daisyrod, he laughs in his cell when we tell him what’s happening on the TV, but it’s not a ha-ha laugh. It’s awkward, like he didn’t plan this far and feels like the winner’s just supposed to laugh. First thing he asks me is what happened to Riot Act. No smile when I tell him, but I figure there must have been a history. “HardLight shows at the precinct maybe ten, fifteen minutes later. He’s in the suit he used to wear back in the day, the one that’s like a black spacesuit with the acrylic lines that he can glow out of. Just storms right past the guys at the entrance, making straight for the cellblock. The air’s shimmering around him from the heat - defoliant burning his skin awful, probably, making his powers run hot. And he’s got these brown flakes falling off him, everywhere he goes, like snow.” “This sounds like a traumatic memory,” Anne observed, aloud. The way that Marcus was recounting the situation, her mind rushed to post-traumatic stress, although her professional brain stepped in to remind that she was speaking to a former detective. Fine tactile details were his business. Alvarez ignored the suggestion, in any case. “Looking back on it, I realize it was someone else’s blood burning up on him, like frying an egg. And since Gloomaiden was sitting right next to him at the ceremony, and she didn’t show at the precinct with him… so much for that sidekick.” Today was not going quite how Dr. Anne Kelter had predicted. This was, she realized with a stark clarity, going to be One of Those Praetorian Memories, the ones that other therapists talked with her about in hushed tones while scrupulously omitting names. “Did you-?” “No, I didn’t realize it at the time. I put that together later. Anyhow, I swing over to the cellblock, and he’s already pulled rank, saying the Seers are caught up in an area sweep and he’s gotten special dispensation from Powers Division to interrogate the prisoner. I coulda… I could have called horseshit on it. I should have, even. We already had a confession from Daisyrod; the guy was getting shipped to the BAF as soon as we could uncap the roads. But I was getting this read off HardLight; that feeling in the pit of your stomach, where you know Powers Division is thinking about stepping on you like a bug.” “Marcus, I want you to know that none of this was your fault,” Anne uttered, gravely, reading the writing on the wall. “I know, doc,” Marcus confessed, but he couldn’t meet her eyes to say it. A moment passed where a moped rider buzzed by the alley window, and then he continued. “We let him in the cell - I mean, were we supposed to tell him no? - and he doesn’t even ask Daisyrod any questions. Just starts removing his gloves and his boots, one by one, and putting them on the table, showing the glow beneath. And I know why he’s doing it. It’s so it’ll burn when he does him. And I think Daisyrod knows it, too, because he just stays sitting there, setting his jaw, macho. He goes steel-eyed, and he even looks up at the big glowing bastard, until his eyes are starting to go bloodshot just from staring him right in the face.” Anne felt as if she were at the crest of a roller coaster’s hill, seeing the drop ahead of her but buckled into the car. “It don’t last long. Fifty seconds, maybe the full minute before he has Daisyrod whinnying like a horse with a broken leg. HardLight can do that party trick with his powers where he takes the feeling away… every time he hit the poor fucker, hearing him cry, I was wondering if he could make it worse, too. Me and the other cops just standing there, shuffling our feet, letting it happen because we know if we don’t let him do this to the terrorist, he’s gonna do it to us.” Marcus looked up, and Anne saw that his eyes were red. “And you know what he’s yelling at the guy? The whole time he’s painting his head all over the interrogation room? That he was gonna be the next to present, and the stupid bastard could have killed him. Nothing about Riot Act. Nothing about Gloomaiden. No, he was pissed about how he almost died, and about the award show. The fucking award show. Roaring and raging about how he was going to present Best New Superteam, as Daisy’s ears are starting to burn off under his fingertips.” Marcus took a deep breath, grounding himself. Quietly, Anne was proud that he’d internalized that lesson from the prior sessions, even though she was inches away from stopping the story for his own benefit. “I guess… I finally grew a spine when it was done. Or maybe seeing it just inspired me to take a stand against the supes. He’s looking like a goddamn horror show, with the blood on his hands and feet cooking off as he carries his boots out, and I step in the doorframe - the other officers looking at me like I’m suicidal - and I ask ‘did you plan on leaving any piece of Daisyrod for the BAF?’ “He gives me this look, and it’s hard to tell if he’s angry or trying to stare me down or just… just surprised, surprised that anyone would give him lip, that anyone wouldn’t be scared into silence around him. And he doesn’t say anything - chatty guy - he just bends over and lifts one of his feet, and I see that there’s something stuck in his heel, wedged in the glowing skin, casting a little shadow off him. And he pulls it out, and it’s a fucking - it’s one of Daisy’s teeth.” “He takes the wrist of my power gauntlet, and thank Cole I had it, because he would have done my hand like he did Daisyrod’s face, and he just p-p-puts it there and closes my fingers, like he’s giving a waiter a tip.” Easy there, Anne. Time to be a therapist again. You didn’t know that this would be a Praetorian thing, but that’s okay. “...and what did you do, in that situation?” “What do you think I did, Doc? I wet myself. Pissed my uniform pants, right there, in front of all my men. He left after that. He knew I’d seen what he wanted to show me.” And there it was, laid bare, like an easy-answer therapy session in a Hollywood movie. Anne chased the rabbit. “Could you elaborate on that, Marcus? What did he want to show you?” “The truth about metas. He had to take his human face off, just a little, enough to show me that he’s not us, none of them are, not in their heart of hearts. You know what we are? We’re dogs to them. They let us live in their house until we bite back, and then they put us down.”

BREATHLESS Desmond St. John's heavy jacket flapped behind him in the sea wind, and he was keenly aware of the exposure. His heavy body was more 'church dad' than 'gang boss' these days, and although he wasn't particularly self-conscious about the way his outdated cybernetics mismatched his newfound huskiness, the heavy sweater beneath the parka served to shield the eyes of delicate young women. Not that the Rogue Isles had a lot of those, and not that his current company qualified. The uniformed Wolf Spider behind him might have been called petite in another lifetime, but the hardscrabble tautness of the muscles beneath her armor and the jaundiced twinge of recreational Superadine landed her squarely in the realm of less seemly terms like sinewy or wiry. She had a personality to match, with yellowing teeth arrayed in a crooked smile as she tapped her truncheon mindlessly on shipping containers. "You promised me something big, King," Operative Lynndie Jessen spat, barely able to contain her hunger through the vestiges of equitability. "I'm two goddamn inches from earning my backpack and I'll be damned if you fuck me on this." "I've got your kickback," Desmond soberly promised, stuffing his right hand into his pocket to keep the rubberized pads on his palm out of sight. He'd long since learned to lean on cool, even tones and minimal body language when dealing with the Wolf Spiders. A lot of them had something to prove, and a retired supervillain like him seemed like an easy punching bag for clout. He could hold his own, but he also valued stability in his business, and the last thing he needed was for some idiot Spider to bring by his idiot Spider friends. Lynndie was an idiot Spider, herself, but she was a known quantity, so Desmond worked well with her. "Fresh off a Faultline trawler," he crooned, leading her to a container that was, like most in the yard, marked in Cage Consortium iconography. A heavy padlock kept the mustard-yellow doors cinched, and he retracted his hand from his pocket with a keyring. For a moment longer he stood there, fumbling with the lock, and then the doors swung open to reveal a trove of plundered superhero ephemera, mixed haphazardly in with canned food and a few folding chairs. Desmond thought he could feel a subtle 'pop' as the salt air met the stagnant dust inside the box, although he wondered if it was just the energy he was feeling, like a toy collector breaking the mint. "No way, Des," Lynndie shouted, shouldering her truncheon to jog excitedly into the enclosure. "Is that Heat Transfer's helmet?" "That it is," Desmond deadpanned, surreptitiously sparking up a menthol with his palm-ports while the Wolf Spider was poring over the smuggled goods. "Plus Castle Doctrine's riot shield, Canvas' paintbrush and beret, and Freethinker's amplifier, give or take a little water damage. Got some miscellaneous enhancements in there, too. You get one." He held a finger up on his off-hand - the one without the cybermods - and didn't address Lynndie again until she'd turned to see it. "One piece of gear, that was the deal. And not Cortexas' psi-revolvers or the Absentee's medical reports, those are going to private buyers." "What if I take the Psivolvers," the Wolf Spider snipped, indignantly, "and shoot you with 'em?" Desmond refused to let himself take the bait, and just took a long drag of the menthol through cracked lips. He luxuriated in the cooling feeling on his metal teeth before responding. "Because if you had psionics they would have pressganged your green ass into the Fortunatas or Banes. Don't be stupid, Lynndie. Take whatever you think your higher-ups are gonna like, and then get me past the port authority. That's all we're doing here." "I could take it all. You wouldn't be able to stop me." Desmond just stood there, outside the crate, smoking his cigarette. The servomotors in his knees helped him stay still, not backing down but not making any moves. Perfect control of one's flinches was a nice trick to have when dealing with Wolf Spiders. The unblinking plastic of his one cybernetic eye - the iris patterned with a card-suit club - didn't hurt either. "I wouldn't. But then no more kickbacks, and you go back to getting promotions the honest way." Lynndie fingered the handle of her truncheon, then finally made the correct decision. "Shit, King, you know I'm a two-bit thug," she coughed, taking the red-and-blue helmet and tucking it underneath her elbow. "What happened to you? You used to wipe the floor with thugs that were like, twelve bits at least. I heard you once went toe to toe with HardLight and put him in the hospital, and that lightbulb motherfucker can crush a car just by tossing blinky lights at it." "It's my heart," Desmond admitted, stepping past the Wolf Spider to find a suitable container so that she wouldn't be flagrantly carrying her bribe up to the customs office. "Gave out in that fight with HardLight, actually. Pushed the cybermods too hard, jacked up the nerves telling it to beat. Why d'you think I sold my shock-mace?" That was a lie, actually, but it would keep thugs like Lynndie from turning over his apartment looking for it. He slept with the thing every night, leaving it to charge on his hand-ports like an iPhone on a dock. He wasn't keen on having to use it for home defense, because the heart arrhythmia wasn't a lie. "Damn, you beat his ass while you were having a heart attack? Destined Ones are nuts." "I didn't plan on the heart attack," Desmond scowled, "and besides, Jack of Diamonds, Five of Hearts, and Queenie were there. Arachnos had us ripping off Westwind Power Labs, some kind of dumb sci-fi looking experimental fuel thing. I'm pretty sure they contracted us as a distraction so they could do their Zig routine, and HardLight showed, all glamor and thunder. He had us on the ropes from the start. Jack had the heat cannon, but heat doesn't do nothing to the guy. He was hovering out of reach of my mace, Queen's spear, and Five's arm while smacking us around with force blasts. Real 'playing with his food' shit." Desmond's nose scrunched as he remembered the battle, and when he turned to offer a paper bag to the Wolf Spider, he saw that she was leaning on the inside door of the container with her prize. Desmond supposed that he was committed to telling the story, now. "Get to the part where you're kicking his ass." Desmond sighed. "If you'd ever fought the guy, you'd know that he eats your feelings to power up. Feels like your whole body falling asleep, and he can feel what you're doing instead. He can't do it to cybernetics, so I was able to fight fine, but Queenie was all metagene with no mods so she was practically useless. Five and Jack had the arm each, so they could aim at least, but he was pummeling them with his energy blasts so they couldn't get swipes in. But then he, uh..." Desmond hesitated, crouched in his shipping container full of abandoned hero-ware. He was unsure how much further he wanted to take this. "Yeah?" Desmond closed his eyes, committing to the truth. "...he flew in real close, and told me seriouslike that I had to turn off my chest dynamo because he was feeling my heart giving out. I still remember how his body language changed, too, like someone had flipped a switch and he went from all puffed-up and proud to being my mother." The Wolf Spider blinked and that cracked smile vanished from her face as she processed the new information. "So, what, did he fight back?" "Nah. I cracked him a hard one with the mace and for a moment I could feel it. Like my chest was exploding, then it went away again. Scared me shitless." Lynndie's face went greener than usual, the vestigial remnants of her empathy placing herself into Desmond's horrifying situation. "You still beat him, though, right?" "Yeah," Desmond grimaced, with no pride at the memory. "I think his powers started fritzing when I hit him, because Queenie and Five were able to get their shit together long enough to start going to town on him. Whenever they worked him over, though, I'd feel it - the heart attack I was having, and that he was keeping me from by commandeering my nerves. I had to stoneface it, y'know. I was the King of Clubs, but the guy was saving my life and I couldn't let the others know. So I ordered Jack to take the prototype and scram, and told the other two not to capekill because we weren't that kind of operation, and that I'd catch up with them." A pause passed between the two of them, with each leaning on an opposite container door. The Wolf Spider spoke first. "So what happened to HardLight?" "Queenie'd cut one of his legs real deep, and Five had busted up his neck and ribs, so I had to help him up. Burned the plastic on some of my augs while I was at it, but we both needed a doctor. I wasn't going to go to Brickstown Memorial and just get my dying ass arrested, but he squeaks out that he has this refugee clinic in Seven Gates where they don't ask too many questions." Lynndie's mouth hung open slightly as Desmond took another drag of his cigarette. He continued, through a mouthful of smoke, "You ever see a guy lie like a method actor when his ribs are broken? Because he was slick. Made up a whole story about how I was a refugee with no papers, and my mods were ex-IDF. Said that he'd been ambushed by Freakshow when he'd detected my heart attack, and that I needed cardioversion stat. They didn't even question us. I guess he brings in a lot of refugees for treatment." "So what, that's it?" "That's it. In a few days, I was on a boat back to the Rogue Isles, and HardLight spent weeks in a hospital bed telling the TV that he'd gotten thrashed by the Aces Wild gang, who made off with the prototype. He didn't dime on me once. I think he knew that he could survive being a cocky fuckup supe, but I wouldn't survive being a supervill who needed a superhero to save his life." Lynndie stared appraisingly at the smoldering tip of Desmond's cigarette, and stepped forward from the container. "Hey, I'm sorry, Des," she finally managed, her broken mouth unused to words of encouragement. Wolf Spider Jessen expressing sympathy had the same dull discomfort to it as watching a native English speaker trying to parse the plot of a telenovela without subtitles, and Desmond couldn't help but laugh at the unbecoming behavior. "Don't be sorry, Lynndie. Smuggling ain't bad. After I broke up the gang Jack stayed on with me as my hands, and we've made tidy on sunken hero bases ever since. Half the risk, just as much profit as the supervillain song-and-dance." The two resumed their walk back to the port office at a more languid pace, with Desmond handing Lynndie her paper bag before turning to lock the container. "What happened to Five and Queen?" Without skipping a beat nor looking away from the lock, Desmond shrugged, "They took a job on Lockhart and got shot to death by a bunch of steampunks. Ugly way to go." The Wolf Spider visibly cringed and managed another, "Oh, I'm... sorry?" "Don't be," Desmond chuckled. "Five of Hearts was a klepto who always cheated on divvying up the loot, and Queen of Spades was a massive fucking racist." Flicking the cigarette into the water off the concrete jetty, he growled, "What's with the apologies? Just 'cause I have a sob story you think I've gone soft now?" "I just thought maybe you had a change of heart," the Wolf Spider unintentionally punned, bagging her contraband helmet like a teenager hiding a bottle of liquor. "Nope, just getting old. Supervillainy's a young meta's game. There's better money for me in contraband." Producing a line of wire from a port in his cybernetic hand, he connected his blocky black satellite-phone and began interfacing with it through his cybernetic eye. The little club design on the iris lit up to show active use, a stylistic vestige of his time as a supervillain. "Speaking of which, scram and get me that paperwork." "That's what I like about you, Des," the Wolf Spider cackled, regaining her bearing now that there wasn't so much ooey-gooey vulnerability polluting the docks. "You're always looking for the smart play. No room for sentiment." "If I made the smart plays, I wouldn't have been a Destined One in the first place," he quipped in response, turning slowly around to take in the docks. Unbeknownst to Arachnos, an encrypted message went out over the airwaves:

BULLETPROOF “Always the bridesmaid, huh, AB?” PPD Pilot Graham Haldeman always had a teasing tone to his voice; hardsuit aces usually needed it, to do what they did. Today, however, there was an audible frustration behind it. His shoulders were set too tightly into his body, his smile too toothy. He may have showed up for drinks with the placid Transcended, but something was eating Haldeman and Aurabright was fairly confident what it was. “I assume,” the blue-skinned Kheldian hybrid gently intoned, as he gestured to the barman for something hard for his friend, “that this is about the metro robbery.” “Hell yeah this is about the metro robbery,” Officer Haldeman half-spat, his smile waning as he sidled onto the next stool over. Unlike his uniformed compatriot, he wore his plainclothes… give or take a bomber jacket that he’d shamelessly decorated with unit patches. The Blue Holiday Lounge’s clientele were 90% PPD or Longbow on any given day, which meant that the discerning alcoholic had to get at least a little peacocking in. Not that Aurabright was the type to get off on jurisdictional dick-waving, or really anything for that matter. Haldeman glanced suspiciously between the statuesque Peacebringer and his unseasonal piña colada a few times, asking an unvoiced question. “We both like the taste,” Aurabright explained, his glowing eyes closing in a slow blink. This was a satisfactory enough answer for Haldeman, who accepted his own drink - whiskey on the rocks - with a curt nod and promptly resumed his tirade. “I get that things were different for capes on Praetoria, but that doesn’t give HardLight the right to pull that ‘stand back, officer, we’ll handle this’ crap on us. The whole Powered Armor Corps were outside the Independence junction with our mecha-dicks in hand, while HE went in and mopped Caligula’s guys like we didn’t know how to do our jobs.” A television above the bar played the evening news, which just served to exacerbate Haldeman’s torment. Above a headline - HARDLIGHT STOPS SUPERVILLAIN ON RUNAWAY TRAIN - the hero himself gave a silent, close-captioned interview. With the sun down and a dark backdrop, the incandescent metahuman’s features blurred as he spoke, although the cameraman made a valiant effort to focus every time the powerful - and bearded - light source atop the glossy bodysuit moved. The news story shifted to a dramatic highlights-reel of phone footage, taken from every conceivable angle, as the black-clad hero walked, unafraid, into a train compartment and effortlessly dispatched two goons in Roman-themed body armor with thrusts of concussive white light. The moment that had gone viral, however - had been recirculated in .gif form on every Brickstown-local messageboard and seen endless play on the news - had been when the towering Caligula himself shouldered a frankly cartoonish autocannon and unleashed a barrage of automatic fire. The hero had placed a svelte, glistening arm before him, and the entire burst dissolved first into fragments and then into molten metal mere inches from the palm of his hand. With a practiced fluidity, HardLight grasped the ball of white-hot steel and splashed it spectacularly onto the train floor behind himself, well clear of the bystanders. Continuing the motion, he punched forward with his other arm, which launched a third concussive blast so precise that the techno-Roman supervillain’s helmet had dented backwards in the shape of his forehead. Caligula dropped like a rag doll, joining his witless minions in a stunning display of both overwhelming force and immovable durability. “He and Trespass,” Aurabright pedantically corrected, stirring his drink with a plastic sword. It was enough to pull Haldeman away from hate-watching the bullet-catching stunt a third time. “Who?” Haldeman snapped. He vaguely remembered there being another metahuman present, but if the news wasn’t going to care, he wasn’t going to, either. HardLight, HardLight, HardLight. “Trespass,” Aurabright repeated, unshaken. “HardLight’s sidekick. The genetically-modified chimera.” “Oh,” the mech-jock recalled, with a roll of his fiery eyes. “You mean the bunnygirl.” “The young woman with rabbit characteristics,” Aurabright cordially agreed, lingering on the 's' in 'characteristics' in a way that was just slightly inhuman. “You know, you should do joint patrol with the NPI sometime. She’s really quite the character. Good-hearted.” Haldeman was fairly certain from the fleeting impression that a good heart wasn’t the first thing he’d noticed. “Well, that character,” he griped, opting for civility with a swig of his drink and a grudging thank-you nod to the alien officer, “got shafted out of the spotlight just as much as we did. I don’t think she fired a shot the whole time, just got to usher the hostages out and look pretty in the aftermath.” Aurabright’s typical monastic smile turned, for a fleeting moment, impish. The Kheldian was about as prone to humor as he was to anger, but it was enough to get across to Haldeman - who was suddenly very aware of his own mere, impotent humanity - that there was something Aurabright knew that he didn’t. “Okay, out with it, space-asshole,” he insisted, pointing accusatorily at the piña colada-wielding Transcended. “HardLight’s not bulletproof,” Aurabright said, simply. “You’d know that... if you attended joint patrol.” “Bull,” the pilot protested. “He took a magdump that would have cut my mech in half, in the palm of his hand. Showoff’s got a force field.” “He has an energy field,” Aurabright corrected, “that outputs heat and light. His force powers are activated, not passive. The only way he could have blasted the bullets away is with the same amount of force as the cannon, and that would have hurt or killed the passengers.” “I don’t get it.” “It’s Trespass,” the Kheldian officer finally explained, human teeth bared in a good-natured smile. “Her superpower is to convert energy of one type to another type, or move energy between conduits.” The mech pilot wasn’t putting two and two together, and the whiskey wasn't helping. “So?” “What you’re seeing,” Aurabright extrapolated, raising a gloved hand to point at the television, “is the kinetic energy of the bullets being siphoned into his energy field as heat. The bullets go slower and the field gets hotter, until the bullets stop moving at all and the field melts them.” “So…” concluded Haldeman, with a suspicion dulled by the half-glass he'd raced through, “...the bunnygirl saved his ass, but she also made it look like he’s way more powerful than he is.” “Precisely,” Aurabright chuckled, in a rare and slightly-uncanny display of mirth. “All showman. If there's one thing I know from the patrols, it's that HardLight's got Powers Division running through every vein. No wonder he had you wait by the sidelines; he wanted to show off!” “Yeah, no shit, bud-” Haldeman stopped in mid-sentence, connecting a few delayed implications. Turning to his friend, he gestured with his whiskey, spilling just a bit over the lip. “Wait. You mean that whenever he strolls on into an active situation like he goddamn owns the place, and just stunts on bad guys, it’s because she’s juicing him the whole time? And he doesn’t give her credit?” “He’s giving her credit right now,” Aurabright blithely countered, gesturing again to the television with an open palm. On the news story, HardLight had his hand on the shoulder of a masked woman with bunny-rabbit ears, clad in a suit of muted blue body armor. In every way that HardLight’s uniform was pure antiheroic bombast - tight latex over a v-shaped body, patterned with jagged sunbursts and studded with spikes and chains - Trespass’ was tactical pragmatism, intended to downplay the unfortunate connotations of a ‘bunny girl.’ Next to HardLight and with them both in costume, she practically melted into the background. The closed-captioning read, - THANKS TO TRESPASS, WHO GOT THE HOSTAGES OUT EXPEDIENTLY WHILE I HANDLED CALIGULA- “He’s walking all over her!” Haldeman spilled more of his whiskey as he cocked the glass back as if to throw it, before his self-control reasserted itself. Mechsuit aces had a reputation for getting hot under the collar, but he had a tab at Blue Holiday and didn’t like the idea of it going up. “If I were her right now, I’d turn his light off just to make a point about who wears the pants. What is this!? Why’s she sidekicking for that douchebag if he treats her like that?” “Not everyone wants glory, Graham,” Aurabright gently chided. “Now you’re thinking like HardLight.” “Well,” Haldeman half-yelled, his anger at his own sense of emasculation now fully translated into anger on behalf of the suborned sidekick, “what the hell does she get out of it? Playing second fiddle to a raging Praetorian narcissist?” “I think,” Aurabright concluded, peacefully, as he placed his empty glass on the countertop, “that’s for her to know, because despite my time with the NPI, I’m not sure I’m equipped to guess.”

Greetings, Everlasting (and, presumably, the other Shards)! What follows are several pieces of fiction oriented around my primary character, HardLight, as something of an 'expanded bio.' Kudos to @CrystalDragon for her stellar Roleplay Writing Prompts, of which the 'no OOC information' stipulation got me to pondering about a twist on the format: in a wilderness of identity such as the superhero community, would not the perception of a hero, not the objective truth communicated in OOC threads, dominate what is understood? In a world where superheroes are celebrities, rendered in idol and billboard, does who they "really are" matter at all? What does the city say about them? Thus, Kaleidoscope: 5 stories about how the Radiant Rake is seen from the outside, through 5 different-colored lenses. Please feel free to comment or critique, as I've created this thread largely just to keep myself honest and make myself work on my roleplay writing over the holiday break, and I'll be linking each story back to the header post. Likewise, if you ever interact with HardLight 'in the wild,' you can consider the events of each story to be scuttlebutt that your character might contextually be familiar with. Above: our antihero du jour BULLETPROOF BREATHLESS BAREFOOT BRILLIANT BROKEN

All of my characters are necessarily very verbose, because I naturally have a heavily-overelaborate, purple prose style that inevitably cross-pollinates into dialogue. When I'm writing in a curated way - original fiction or fanworks, etc - I do several passes to cut down, and cut down, and cut down again to convey terseness and efficient speech, but in a naturalistic format such as real-time roleplay, I'm always going to default towards an excess of qualifiers and descriptive terms. Because I don't want to treat roleplay like my job and do an editing pass in real-time every time I type up a quip in mission RP, I tend to just parse the characters' loquaciousness through different filters that handwave why they are that way, be it HardLight being a politician who can't speak straightforwardly, Capitoline being an android with a full encyclopedia in his head, or Douglas Win having extremely high standards and needing to constantly complain at-length about things that don't measure up to them.

I must apologize, no sooner did you ask me this than I was laid low by a killer sinus infection that has left me incapacitated for several days. That said, I think that @Coyotedancer has the right of it, in that the Demons were always a secondary concern, relevant primarily to the much more important lore of the Circle of Thorns. Thus, most of the details on Demons aren't important and can be 'fudged' - stuff like why different books work for Abyssals and Wailers can just be improvised - so long as it doesn't interfere with the Circle Lore. I imagine that for any faction there was also a lot of 'tribal knowledge' in the writer's room that they're not privy to. Re: Churches, the one in First/Night Ward explicitly posits that religion was something that was kind of subsumed by the Cole Regime into something toothless and ineffectual. That said, that runs contrary to the literal angels we see in Night Ward, who clearly have some kind of hostile agenda in store for the denizens of the Netherworld...

To bounce off of this: although Bat'Zul and the Wailers are never once referred to as being from the Abyss the way that Circle Demons are, they're treated as thematically interchangeable in Hard Luck the Demon Hunter's arcs. That is to say, Hard Luck describes Bat'Zul as "a demon problem" equivalent to what he's dealt with with the Wailers when sending you to ask Virgil Tarikoss for help with the Wailers, and the Wailers presented in his arcs face attempted parlay from the Circle of Thorns and are presented as behaving identically to Abyssal Demons as far as summoning and banishing. Truenaming works on both Wailers and 'normal' Demons (see the Envoy of Shadows), and the Circle can summon and employs truenaming on both. Both can be bound/truenamed by books; 'mainline' Abyssals by the Malleus Mundi, and Wailers by Tolshak's Mysteries. Both breeds of demon also operate on identical pact logic and structure. Hard Luck further equivocates Johnny Sonata, the PTS and the Circle by classing them by a single term: "demon-callers," which he unilaterally despises. (This is neither here nor there, but the Wailers also attack sites in the Spirit World in Hard Luck's arcs, which is something we see the Circle/Abyssal Demons do, but also something we see ghosts do in First Ward and fey do in Croatoa. The Spirit World is a decently defined location with its own logic in City of Heroes.) Moving on, we also have the Tip Mission Demonic Pink Slip and the Demonic Blood Sample salvage, which refer to demons as coming from the lowest regions of the Netherworld, which we must presume is synonymous with the Abyss based on the Abyssal demons encountered in the former. In the Tarikoss Strike Force, Bat'zul is likewise described, identically, as coming from "The Depths of the Netherworld." Ergo, Bat'Zul, too, is from the Abyss. (And, not for nothing, but Circle Hordelings really look like his chicken-boys). Demonic Threat Report, on the other hand, refers to "Demons" as a class but provides no further clarity. Due to the identical methodology vis-a-vis Abyssal Demons and Wailers, and the identical nomenclature used for all three ("Demons," "Demon-callers," "The lowest layers/depths of the Netherworld"), there's a strong argument to be made that all Demons presented in the canon - Circle, Wailers, Bat'Zul - have a unified source and role, in that they are all hostile, sapient fauna from an extraplanar region called the Abyss, albeit there is enough difference between layers of the Abyss to create distinct morphological differences between "breeds." What they all share in common is the ability to travel to our plane, the ability to receive souls as a form of nourishment/currency, immortality, and - definitively, in the case of the mainline and Wailer breeds - a weakness to truenaming and a capacity to warp reality through soul pacts. None of this, mind you, is to hold player demons to this canon at gunpoint! But, it is to consolidate what all we have as far as demon canon, and I think given the differences in behavior and appearance of the Abyssals we see aside from a general malintent, there are strong arguments for player demons to come from both other, more obscure regions of the Abyss (as the Wailers seem to be) or from other dimensions entirely, as say, Black Swan's creatures are.

A few more of my own headcanons that have come up in recent RP Mutant and Science metahumans are not mandated, but strongly encouraged to get regular health checkups with a SERAPH or GIFT (or both) -employed clinical geneticist to screen for potentially-maladaptive complications of their superpowers. Regenerators might develop cancer at an accelerated rate, for instance, or telekinetic flyers might experience muscle atrophy, or mutants who mimick animal biology might find themselves afflicted by similar problems to those animals (a lupine mutant might have the increased likelihood of heart problems that comes with certain dog breeds, a scaled mutant might develop dermatological conditions that are exacerbated by shedding, etc). This requires a much closer-knit relationship with a much more specialized primary care provider than ordinary humans, and there are whole private practices of doctors that specialize in metahumans alongside the public option. Shark lawyers who specialize in exonerating supervillains on technicalities are a plague in Paragon, as are 'a superhero fight broke my leg and destroyed my car'-type ambulance chasers. Both were emboldened by Chris Jenkins, Attorney at Law, who is notorious as the trailblazing pioneer in the field of legal superhero profiteering, and widely hated by the cape community. Due to the Citizen Crimefighting Act making costumed vigilantes function similarly to a roving police force, the FBSA keeps a pool for legal payouts, but heroes who get sued too often can often find themselves getting rerouted to crap work as a liability. The Paragon Police Department maintains a sweeping CSI infrastructure to keep up with the absolutely ludicrous amount of crime scenes active in Paragon at any given time, but the need to employ many, many people to keep all those investigations running means that CSIs tend to be quirky, with relaxed restrictions on behavior and training compared to the frontliners. Add this to the fact that one can only throw so many resources at 'another Fifth Column guy got gunned down, it's probably Council' and you have an overstaffed and under-respected field.

If I may bounce off of this, this is (sort of) canon! The Newsman badge points out the Theodore Knight Building, which was a skyscraper that a bunch of different Supergroups shared as a (presumptively, more affordable) super base, and both Doc Delilah and, erm, Arachnos note that Faultline was just lousy with hero bases before the Incident, which is what makes it such prime territory for looters following the Incident. So, there's evidence to suggest that Overbrook deliberately catered to/tried to entice heroes to develop it before the disaster, and I think that it stands to reason that they would continue to do so after the disaster

Aw snap!

Oh, it's magnificent @Wravis! Thank you!!!!

That's a headcanon of MY headcanon, as nowhere is it explicitly said that it's due to impurities, but yeah, it stands to reason that the colorful skin and behavioral problems are prevented by purity of the mix.

Fixadine postdates the Hamidon War, or at least it does in its current form. In Tami Baker's arc, Praetor White describes his boys as having been clean when he abandoned them, and then being surprised when they showed back up addicted to a chemical he wasn't familiar with, and had to hire scientists to retroengineer it. So the point in favor is 1) Duncan is absolutely the original supplier of Fixadine, and in its current form it's a "recent" drug The point against is 2) Praetor White could just hire scientists to make him some Fixadine and they clearly had no trouble just figuring it out and doing it, so an esoteric component like Incarnate blood probably isn't involved. Canonically, Superadine is a derivate of old WWII super serums, like how contemporary meth is based on ephederine-based stimulants from around the turn of the century. This suggests that there's likely some canonicity to @Darmian's hypothesis of it being a less-stable derivate of Hamidon War era suicide-soldier drugs.

It's worth noting that there are also physiological differences in the effects, and the outlook for a Fixadine addict is a lot grimmer than for a Superadine addict. Both versions of the drug Are bright green injectable liquid in their chemical form Are addictive Grant super strength, durability, and rapid regeneration Color the skin a bright, unnatural shade, deepening with use Make the user grow larger with use, eventually culminating in the 'Huge' body type Heighten emotions, making it easier to turn to violence when angry However, Superadine also: is neurodegenerative, causing users to literally 'get dumber' adds geokinetic abilities in some 'street' users, without much lore or explanation put into what causes it can be refined into a 'pure' form that offers the same suite (strength, regeneration, durability) plus a customizable array of additional powers like future sight, gravity control, and super senses, with lessened side effects The fact that Family Bosses and Elite Bosses are totally lucid and don't have green skin suggests that the pigmentation and 'dumbifying' occur due to impurities in the mix, not the Superadine itself Fixadine, by contrast: allows the user enough remaining mental faculties to speak lucidly, use heavy machinery and complex explosives, negotiate on equal face with other factions, and so forth seems to have a heightened rage component; Destroyer battle dialogue consists almost exclusively of escalating bays for violence and 'hyping up' with lots of ALL CAPS This may also owe to their existing culture as a human military unit that rode out the worst battles against the Hamidon, compared to the Trolls, who are just 'street trash' causes a much more violent form of chemical dependency that permanently damages and then kills the organs during withdrawal, preventing users from ever going 'cold turkey' and making Fixadine users addicts-for-life. This is implied to be the reason why Hero Corps and the Major are willing to murder to keep it from proliferating on Primal Earth. I've always had a couple of commonsense headcanons about this, most prominently that Superadine microdosing to induce regeneration can be used to treat Fixadine withdrawal without organ failure, but of course it's not a perfect solution because it's like getting someone off black-tar heroin by addicting them to OxyContin Unlike Ms Liberty, her Praetorian counterpart Dominatrix has Gravity Control powers. As Dominatrix is the canonical source of Fixadine, it's not a stretch to assume that Fixadine, like Superadine, can be refined into a 'pure' form that imparts Gravity Control without the organ failure

Yellow confounds me! This is the kind of thing that drives well-bred gentlemen in gothic horror fiction to madness!

This is true, but I can't help but find a certain irony in decrying a binary interpretation of crime and criminality in the forum for a duo of games literally called City of Heroes and City of Villains. It ties a bit in with a debate I'm having over in the roleplay forum, but I can't help but feel that City of Heroes is the wrong place to attempt to critically apply a multifaceted, academic approach to the intersection of poverty, race, and myriad other real-world American social factors with criminality. By text, City of Heroes is a game about superheroes - archtypal, mythologized 'monsters for good' who are possessed of great personal power that they use to affect justice - and supervillains, who use their great personal power to do categorical evil. A huge part of the power fantasy of existing in this space is to be able to do Righteous Harm To The Evil, and that requires concessions from a real-world understanding of morality. It's the same logic as playing a Paladin in Dungeons & Dragons: the mere existence of the Paladin presupposes a number of fantastical departures from Earth such as the existence of objective capital-E Evil and the intrinsic righteousness of doing violence to Evil beings. But boiling down complex morality to a simple rubric where the individual has the power to affect positive change through exciting action is part of what makes D&D, and specifically the Paladin, fun. To chide the Paladin player that in the real world, violence begets violence and Evil is a social construct wielded by agents of institutional power is counterproductive and, to be frank, kind of an asshole thing to do. The Paladin player knows that humans are complicated. They want to simulate playing a hero who's uncomplicated, and you reintroducing moral ambiguity is unwelcome contrarianism. Similarly I consider it kind of a dick move to chastise a superhero player for deriving enjoyment from beating on, say, the Lost, because in the real world law enforcement disproportionately targets the poor.

I agree, in principle, that mechanical incentives to RPPVP would be a great technocratic solution to the problem, but I am a bit of a realist (alternatively, a lot of a cynic) about working with the tech, and the social dynamic, that we have, rather than what we could have. I'm not in favor of a total rewrite of Hearts of Darkness, for instance, but it has nothing to do with me "wanting to be told who my character is" - - and everything to do with that I'd much, much rather the devs work on creating new content for all of the villain players, than take a scalpel to imperfect content that already exists in the name of satisfying roleplay purists. I do agree that we've gotten very sidetracked by this point, so I'm going to take your attempt to recenter on the original topic of why isn't there more conflict RP between heroes and villains? and run with it. To me, when you peel away purely logistical answers like 'well, there are much less villains than heroes' (which is something we debate extensively on this forum and indeed, in this thread), the social answer to that central question is that conflict RP is rarely pursued with the "Session Zero," negotiative approach that it requires to have any hope at succeeding, and when it is, there's often a mismatch - demonstrated robustly in this thread - between villains who justifiably want equality of opportunity, and heroes who justifiably want equality of outcome. Irrespective of the perfect-world "every character is somewhere on the grey spectrum and has complex and sweeping motivations and end-goals" ideal that we have neither achieved nor have a consensus on achieving, a problem with making conflict RP satisfying to everyone is that fundamentally, at an archtypal level, the villain's goal is to introduce negative change, and the hero's goal is to maintain the status quo. That's what makes the hero-villain binary tick, but it also makes creating equality of opportunity in roleplay 'wins' an impossible proposition as far as lasting verisimilitude. If the Circle of Thorns got to notch a W half the time and heroes got to win half the time, then the scroll of Teliekku would be safely in custody and unable to hurt anyone, but the City Council would be replaced by bodyjacked wizards. If the Freakshow got to win half the time and heroes got to win half the time, then Dreck would still be in prison but Independence Port would be a post-nuclear wasteland filled with irradiated corpses. If the Council got to win half the time, then the Striga volcano base would still be in ruins but there would be a true-breeding subspecies of Vampyri spawning throughout Paragon like the plot of the Strain. When heroes are a ratchet on the negative progress created by villains, then equality of opportunity just means that the villains win but slower. This is not to say that villains cannot ever ever never ever win, but the stakes are different. Villains can win to a point. Villains can give heroes the slip, or make inroads on their schemes, or break a few eggs for their omelet. However, you're never going to get the buy-in from hero players for villains to win the big one, the dramatic ultimate moment where The Plan comes to fruition. Hero players won't stand for it. There's too much basis in the genre, and in the hero fantasy, for hero players to just passively go with the flow of "yeah, the world gets measurably worse this time, but next time we'll maintain the status quo." They're going to try to weasel out of it, and find loopholes, or invoke the 11th-hour Deus Ex Machina, because that's what superheroes do. They want equality of outcome: the balance of power is maintained, the villains go to the Zig and break out because it's a paper bag, and the conflict begins anew, fresh for more roleplay. Personally, my strategy as a villain roleplayer to address that conundrum is to cede ground: it is to not pursue equality of opportunity at all, and instead to enter with the expectation that I can take victories that are nonthreatening to the ongoing health of the shared space, but when it comes to my 'master plan' or 'end goal' I must take a gamemastery role and allow my villain to be dethroned for the sake of letting the heroes fulfill their end of the fantasy. And I acknowledge that this is an act of surrender, where I'm compromising an element of what I might want in the name of facilitating a good time for a broader swath of other roleplayers. I'm not going to mandate that other villain roleplayers follow my doctrine, because my process is an effort-intensive and elitist one that assumes a formulaic simplicity on the part of the community, but it has lead me through a battery of conflict roleplays that I have enjoyed, and I hope that it helps to articulate why I think so much conflict roleplay fails before it even starts. EDIT: As a corollary to this, this does mean that I tend to find it a lot more defensible to ask that my villains win when their schemes are low-stakes. As a good example, I have one villain that wants to kill half of the people living in King's Row, and I have another villain that wants to steal rare Hong Kong action films from collectors. This is just speaking for myself, but I wouldn't consider a hero player unreasonable for asserting "I'm not okay with you killing half of King's Row in this roleplay without my hero stopping you," where I would consider a hero player unreasonable for asserting "I'm not okay with you stealing the original reel of 1997's Full Alert, starring Ringo Lam."

I'll fully admit my bias any day of the week. I have very strong opinions about what is and isn't best practices in roleplay, and I'm well aware that my notion of what villain RP, and conflict RP, is doesn't mesh with what a lot of people perceive it to be. Although I think something that's interesting here is that I land on the opposite side of the aesthetic of City of Villains from you, @Greycat, potentially owing to me being a Villain main on Live and still carrying that mentality. I don't really intend for this to become a "well um *snorts obnoxiously* actually all of those problems are present in baseline city of heroes, especially the map thing" post so I won't make it one, but I will zero in on this: This is interesting to me, because I feel that one of the great failings of City of Villains is that it fails to make you a reprehensible or notoriety-worthy villain, which leads to a lot of muddy waters regarding what 'villainy' looks like in a player character. At its launch, and using the moral characteristics from later in the franchise, the more accurate title for the spinoff would be City of Rogues. The writing is by-and-large better than in City of Heroes, but the stock character you're railroaded into being in the majority of villain content isn't the awful heel you love to hate... Instead, for most of City of Villains content, you're just a superhero that punctuates their superheroism by saying edgy stuff about beating people up and occasionally robbing a bank. Let's be honest, here: most supervillain content doesn't paint you as a dupe. The lowbie, Hearts of Darkness stuff, sure, I'll grant you that. But for most of City of Villains? You're a hero that wears leather and skulls and can say the word "hell." The content you earmark as needlessly edgy for your tastes is, to me, the only parts of the game that actually deserve the title. I adore Peter Themari. I stan Westin Phipps. I want a game that makes me uncomfortable to play my creation. If the game is billed as City of Villains, a game about becoming the baddest supe this side of the tracks, why should I settle for limp-wristed justifications? I want to get to actually be evil, which is something that City of Villains abjectly fails to deliver outside of those fleeting moments of glory. I don't want my villains to be "actually, really they're heroes if you look at it another way or factor for their upbringing." My villains are fucks. They make their bones on breaking them. They thank you for your sympathy by pissing on you, unless you're on fire, in which case they'll let you burn. They cheat and snarl and hurt and kill and their existence begs for a hero to come and stop them. Where I'll agree with you is that I don't vibe with the occasional content that paints me as a bumblefuck, but even then, I tend to let it fly because of something you allude to: This is the dream, but that's just it: it's the dream, because the devs could never possibly predict all of the deeply personal, dysfunctional, beautiful schemes of tens of thousands of individual player villains. A hero is stupid-easy. The villain does a thing, and the hero undoes the thing. Wham, bam, thank you Statesman. But villains are the instigators, and that means that no amount of pre-preparation on the part of the devs could ever fully satisfy what makes a villain truly compelling, which is whatever their personal malfunction is, their damage, their broken taboo that allows them to transcend morality. In spite of the lack of formal infrastructure to support it, that's why I identify as a "villain main." We're - and I'm using the societal 'we're' here - transfixed by villains because of the possibility of what they could do next, of the sheer potential energy that they bear compared to heroes. And that's the dragon I chase when I roleplay villains. I want to delight and dismay, I want to be ghoulish in my implications without turning my roleplay partner's eyes away. I want to experience the rush of what it is to be loathed and to be worthy of that loathing. I want to squirm in my seat whenever I emote what my character does. And then I want the catharsis, and to deliver that catharsis to others, of letting my creation finally be toppled. To me, no other roleplay compares, and to deny my villain their Evil is to cheapen that. And, if I may spool back from the tangent and onto the topic of facilitating conflict roleplay, just because hero players don't want to, themselves, play villains for a myriad of very good and very valid reasons, doesn't mean that they don't want a good villain to give their hero a reason to exist.

Yes, I adored it! Green is still available to claim, and I'll admit a perverse curiosity about Yellow and Black, the only two I couldn't find... especially yellow! That should have stood out the most!

As an incredibly petty update, I was the first to find Green even though I'm out of the running now, so I can rest with my ego intact