HEROID

“So, little brother how goes the project?” Howie smiled as I wheeled my chair into his lab. It was rare to see him smile – he was always absorbed in his work, and science was his work. The kid was a genius and we had used most of my settlement money to fund this project. If he was successful (which I was 100% certain he would be) then I would get my money back a hundred times over. Working for himself, anything he created would be entirely owned by him and no one else with which to cut the profits. Just him and me. “It’s going great, Danny! Let me tell you what I discovered today –“ And he launched into a detailed explanation about things that I have no idea of what he’s talking about – nanotubes aligned along multiple axis simultaneously, quaternion disambiguation, quantum matrices, multi-spectra assimilation, and other words that I can’t pronounce even in my head, which it was, all of it way, way over. At the end of it he said, “It absorbs more visible light even than Vantablack, and – get this – it displays properties that shouldn’t be possible according to our understanding of physics. I have barely begun to catalog all of the frequencies of light and energy it absorbs. I’m going to patent it under the name, ‘Deep Dark’. I’ve already applied on proof-of-concept based on peer-reviewed micro-quantities.” “That’s great, Howie! It sounds like we’re almost rich!” “Almost. I have a few more goals to make and then we can proceed with all the legal stuff with the patent office.” The smile faded as he looked at the three whiteboards that were filled with his equations. “It’s just…” “Just what?” I asked. It was probably nothing. Howie always did this; it was part of his success in his field – he always double-checking himself. This was probably just another case of his second-guessing. “I’m having trouble recreating the stability of the substance in larger quantities. Small, nano-batches work just the way I expect them to, but in larger batches, it gets… weird.” He stared at his numbers as he spoke. I tapped his elbow and he looked back at me like I had just awakened him from a nap. “You can get this figured out, Bro’.” I said. “You’re the smartest person I know.” “Yeah, but…” He got behind my chair and pushed me to the window looking into his clean room. “Look in there.” I looked. I had seen it before. The air-tight, thickly-insulated, reinforced room was full of tubes and equipment. To enter the room, Howie always wore special gear, partly to protect his experiments, but also to protect himself. We peered through the big window at the large containment vault in the center of the room. The vault was a pill-shaped white box, six feet long by four feet wide with a hatch at the top and wires and tubes attached on the sides and bottom. Today, instead of being white, it was black. More than black. It was like a black hole had been punched in reality. The entire unit was dark and the tubes and wires were also, where they connected to it. “Um… did we spring a leak?” I asked. “No. It—it seems to be replacing the atomic substance of the vault with Deep Dark particles, keeping the properties of the original substance. And that’s not all. Watch this – “ Howie grabbed the joystick for the robotic arms that he used to maneuver hazardous substances in the clean room. The arms swung toward the now-black vault with their skeletal fingers reaching toward the unit. When they touched the vault, there was a small explosion of strange energy that shot the robotic hands away from it. “Is it supposed to do that?” “No, not any of it.” “Is that going to be a problem?” Before he answered, the lab’s security monitor chimed to let us know that someone was at the front door. The monitor showed a young woman in a black business suit waiting on the stoop. She carried a large leather briefcase and a small black leather purse. Howie said, “I’ll get it,” and got on the elevator to take him up from the basement. I watched on the monitor as he opened the door and when the woman started talking, I turned on the mic so that I could hear. “… representing Crey Industries in the matter of patent application number 00U81, ‘Deep Dark’, patent-pending.” She held out a business card for him to see and when he glanced up at the security camera, she held it up for me to see also: Boyd, Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe, Attorneys at Law. But why would Crey Industries be sending a lawyer to see Howie? What business did they have with him? He had worked an apprenticeship with them when he was going for his Masters degrees, but that was years ago. “You can talk to my lawyer,” Howie said and started to close the door in her face. That’s when a couple more people stepped onto the screen – two big men, also in black suits, but unlike the woman, they didn’t look anything like lawyers. One of them stuck his fist out and stopped the door from closing, and then they pushed their way into the house. I wheeled as fast as I could to the elevator and started hitting the button to call it down. Howie needed help! The elevator took its time coming down. I could hear thudding sounds and shouting above me, but when the lift’s motor kicked into gear, the commotion stopped. When the door opened, I looked in horror at my brother’s unmoving body lying on the floor. The two big men and the woman stepped over him and shoved my chair out of their way as they began searching the lab. It was like I was beneath their notice. “Who are you?” I demanded. “Whoever you are, you’re no lawyer!” The woman stopped as the two men took the whiteboards off of the wall and tore into Howie’s computer to steal the hard drives. “You have no right to do this!” I shouted, then picked up a glass beaker and threw at the woman. That got her attention. She knelt in front of me and said, “Ah, Danny Collins, the elder-but-lesser of the Collins Brothers. Danny Collins – career minor-leaguer, former Major League coach, and now a paraplegic. What a sad accident that was. The settlement was quite generous, I understand. Enough to fund Howard’s research and development.” “You’ve done some homework,” I said. “C.I. has been following Howard – and therefore you also – for a long time now. You know he refused the opportunity to work for Crey? Poor decision on his part.” “I think we got it all,” one of the big men said. “We’re finished then,” the woman said. “Goodbye, Danny. Don’t bother to call the police. I think you will find them as unresponsive as your brother.” One of the big men pulled Howie off of the elevator and she stepped in. “This isn’t over,” I said. She paused. “You’re right. We almost forgot the working sample.” One of the goons tore the actual freaking door off of the clean room then walked in and reached into the darkness of the containment vault. The hatch on the top was impossible to see, blended in with the rest of the unit, so he punched the outer wall like he was trying to knock a hole through it. The vault hit back and sent him flying. “Oh. My. God. You can’t find good help these days,” the woman said then picked up a long-handled ladle from the lab supplies and stepped into the clean room. She gently felt with her hand around the top until she found the latch for the hatch. She opened it with slow, careful movements and dipped the ladle into the dark. Then she stepped out and put the sample in a jar. “Let’s go,” she said. “What about these two?” one of the big men asked. I wheeled my chair to block the elevator and tried to sound as threatening as an unarmed man in a wheelchair could, and said, “No. No way are you leaving here with that.” The woman smiled and said, “Put him in the tank.” The goon was superhumanly strong but I struggled until he stuffed me through that hatch and then the world went black. I heard the woman say, “And for your edification – I am so a lawyer.” The hatch closed on me and I was drowning in Deep Dark. It filled my mouth, my nose, and my lungs. It itched like a billion ants crawling all over me. It burned my eyes and tasted like pure acid on my tongue. It was torture. It was overwhelming. I tried to not give in but I felt myself slipping into the dark. Sensations faded and then there was nothing—no awareness until I was pulled out of the tank. I don’t know how long I was in the containment chamber but after some time I felt cold, robotic hands poke me and grab at me until they took hold and lifted me out of there. It took a moment for me to remember what had happened. Someone said my name as the robot put me down. Then I felt another set of hands – human hands this time— clamp around my wrists and pull me across the floor. I opened my eyes but the lights were out and I could barely see. “Danny?” someone said again and I recognized my brother’s voice. “Come on,” Howie said, “We’ve got to get this stuff off of you now.” Again, I was pulled across the room, this time to the emergency shower in the corner. Howie shoved me in like a heavy sack of potatoes and turned on the water. It was cold and shocked me nearly as much as had hearing his voice. “Come on… come on dammit…” he said. “What’s wrong?” I asked, trying to make him out in the dim light. He had some sort of hard-bristled brush scrubbing me. There was panic in his voice as he said, “It’s not coming off!” The brush was hurting and I was afraid he would scrub the skin right off of my face. “Howie—stop. Tell me what happened. I thought they killed you.” I put out my hand and pushed the brush away. “No. They just zapped me with a taser and that put me out. I’m not as tough as you, I guess. They stole my notes, my hard drives… anything they thought might have my research on Deep Dark. I thought they had stolen you too when I couldn’t find you. Then I saw the door to the clean room and figured out where you were. I—I was worried you were dead too. ” “We should call the police.” “I already did. They told me I sounded like a crazy person… called me a “Doc Brown”, laughed, and hung up on me. It seems that Ms. Boyd-Dewey-Cheatham-and-Howe bought the entire Latveriaville police department.” I sat there, the spray chilly but calming at the same time. It could have all been much worse. At least we were both alive. “At least turn on the lights,” I said, “so we can see how bad this stuff is stuck on me.” “Um… Danny? The lights are already on.” “What” “You can’t see?” “Oh God— I’m blind!” “No! No! It has to be the Deep Dark.” Howie grabbed my head and lifted my chin, turning my face into the spray. “It has to come out— keep your eyes open! Keep flushing them!” “It’s not helping! Do something!” “I’m trying!” he said and I smelled some sort of solvent and felt it splash over my skin. “Don’t get that in my eyes!” I said. “I’m trying not to!” I could see him like a shadow in the dark, running around the lab looking for something— anything— to get the Deep Dark off of me. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and I stood up and grabbed him, shaking him and begging for him to fix this. “Danny!” he shouted. I stood there flailing my arms and yelling in his face, panicked. “Danny, Stop!” I didn’t so he shoved me and I fell back several steps but managed to keep my feet. “Danny—you’re on your legs! You’re standing!” I nearly fell over when I realized what he was saying. I quit shouting. I was no longer panicked, but instead I was stunned and completely confused.

The restoration of Galaxy City and Gemini Park.

I would say I hate puns but that would make me an Outcast on this board.

There is a forum section for PVP. Can we get a forum section for RP?

I wonder if there are any plans to provide a "Roleplayers" category on the forums here. It was a great place to post your characters' stories. These type of posts will just get lost in the "General" category.

Champions Online has some lovely graphics and an exceptional costume creator. The female characters can be very beautiful if you work at it and you can actually get a variety of female faces by using the sliders. But all of the male characters look goofy and no matter how hard you try, all of the male faces wind up looking alike. Also, when you roll up a new character, you always start with at the same spot and run the same Purple Gang missions over and over until you are sick of them. I have never gotten to the higher level content because the level 1 to 20 content is so repetitive that I get bored. City of Heroes has them beat on 1 to 20 content, hands down. CO is not a game for altoholics like me. Bases in CO are not customizable and there is no creativity involved in the game after character design and conception. These issues and a few other things are why I prefer CoH to CO.

Hey, Xen! :)

So, now that we have four servers, have any roleplay supergroups begun to form? If so, on which server(s) are you forming? I've thought that Everlasting sounded like a good place for rp'ers to call home. Anyone else care to share their ideas and opinions?

We need Galaxy City!!!