Instant bios

[Greycat]

Ever just have that moment, someone says something or you see something and a backstory for a character just pops right into your head? You might expand on it a bit later, give it some detail, a few flourishes here and there, but the core of it seemed to jump right out at you?

 

Share a few, with what triggered them!

 

Starting here, for me. During a discussion of names and desirability, someone (I should find the thread) mentioned nobody would be looking for one like "Rusty Muffler." So, of course... bio jumped into mind right away. The kernel of it, at least, with someone hiding a ball of stolen nanobots in a muffler before getting caught. The mechanic who came to work on the car? Named Rusty, of course, with his own shop, gets swarmed by them when he works on the exhaust. End result - powers. And his hero name of Rusty Muffler? It's all they could get out of him as he tried to tell the people in the hospital what happened. "Rusty. Muffler..."

[Greycat]

Unused one that came up this morning.

 

I've got a "retro reenactor" character (playing as close to the way the game was in 2004 as we can. It's definitely interesting.) Runs across an NPC panhandler saying "Got some change?" Which triggered:

 

"Worst way to discover you're a mage: Come up on someone asking for change. While looking for some, mention 'be the change you want.' Person turns into an old dollar coin. Horrified, you pick it up. You now have a sentient coin and a lot to think about."

[Chuckledunk]

I remember looking at the big chunks added by bio armor powers and thinking, "Wow, that looks like crap", and then immediately this character popped into my head.

 

Spoiler

  

19 hours ago, Chuckledunk said:

Captain Sewage

 "I'm the hero Paragon City needs, just... not the one I want to be right now."

Mutation Water Blast / Bio Armor Sentinel Hero

Unaffiliated

When his story began, mild-mannered Dewey "Deuce" Crapparson worked as a sewage engineer—which, as any hero would tell you, is a dangerous occupation in this city.

Sure enough, during a routine bit of hiding in a septic tank during yet another Lost incursion, he got doused with a flush from Crey facilities. Beyond merely being disgusting, this flush in particular was from a cornered conspirator flushing illegal, experimental chemical agents.

This in turn imbued Deuce with powers he really would have preferred not to have. Despite his protests and insistence that he would really like to just go back to work, everyone around him was so dead-set on being supportive about the whole thing that he felt like he had no choice but to at least give a try at being a hero. Now, he uses his control of human excrement for the good of all!

When the s#!t hits the fan, Cap'n Sewage is your man.

 

 

[Haijinx]

I had been able to fool myself into thinking of bio armor as crustacean like until this moment.  

 

Now I am forever ruined.  

 

 

[Latex]

I wing absolutely everything and I'm inspired in an instant by concepts I gravitate toward, honestly I think that is the beauty of Roleplay, dynamic, flowing and imaginative minds. My two main characters are inspirations OP mentions, but a dozen, hundred of them, with pieces taken apart and put in it's place.

Philosophy is my thing, my favorite character (of all time) is a sentient robot that was initially created to serve humans base greed and lusts, in City of Heroes I researched Praetoria to make that concept plausible here, Praetorian Clockwork already laid the groundwork for that. Seeing first hand that the Resistance used Clockwork Bots as 'suicide bombers' in a few missions made my character side with Emperor Cole in any discussion related to her past, the game directly influenced the character, completely changed my idea of which direction to go; guess she sort of became a Villain.

 

My other character is an outright Villain but for all the right reasons. Paragon City seems like a swell place to live until you take a big step back and break it down, on this character I go with the notion that all Heroes are narcissist as evidenced by statues dotting Paragon City whilst there is still major problems with crime and corruption literally beneath the statues feet, all media is owned by corporations with an agenda that generally dislikes painting Heroes in a bad light. You can think of Batman vs Superman, General Zod would not be on Earth if Superman didn't arrive, there would of been no destruction of Metropolis, Superman was the cause, Zod was the effect, alas Heroes need to be completely eradicated to bring back some semblance of balance. Of course it all goes way deeper than this but you get the point, Villain with morals, these are by far the best Villains imo.

 

It's really hard to pinpoint a single thing that made an instant backstory/bio, it's a lot of smaller things for me! The suicide bot thing really stuck out to me and made me question how that would affect my Clockwork character.