Idea: take costume changing away from arbiters and put it in red phone booths

[temnix]

"Today we are proud to report that after a long fight Paragon City has recovered an important part of its history - the famous red phone booths of yore. Only the oldest residents of our city will now remember that time, but once, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were no tailors, no Icon outlets. Heroes who maintained a double identity or simply wanted to adjust something in their tights away from prying eyes had to find places to change, and the phone booths were a natural choice. Wooden, solid, private if one blew on the glass, they were nothing like the flimsy, transparent sideshows that today humiliate residents still bereft of a cell phone. True, sometimes it took waiting in a line while that guy finished his call, for, come the Four Riders of the Apocalypse, no champion would throw out an American who put in an honest nickel - and those who did have long since been lost to darkness. But the march of technological progress is relentless. For over five decades now the once-indispensible boxes have lain in storage of the Paragon City Communications Authority, saved from mold and rust only by the loving hands of a company of enthusiasts. Ironically, the metallic, see-through booths that came in their stead and even their successors, the open calling stations, also appear destined for oblivion.

 

On the other hand, the old red booths, phoenix-like, might be rising to a second chance in the sunlight. With city personnel shortened by the emergency in Galaxy City, arbiters will be freed of the misassigned and uncomfortable duty of arranging heroes' clothes and concentrate on their training. Instead - and instead of once again sending champions to distant, supercilious tailors in dangerous neighborhoods, all costume change and adjustment will be done inside the repainted, restored red phone booths that our readers will soon see appear, or rather, reappear, across Paragon City. Heroes too well-known to alter their image without a loss of influence will be able to simply drop a few coins into the machine. The city administration claims that distributing these booths will lighten the load in too-frequented spots like the steps of Atlas Park, severely taxing for what technicians figuratively call "weaker hardware," at least as far as the function of adjusting costumes is concerned. Heroes will spread around. Expect two-three booths per city district and, unlike in the past, there will be no wait lines. Transdimensional novelties of DATA embedded in doorknobs will send each entering hero into a separate microdimension to iron his leotard in so that any number of them might run in and out of the same booth. We are being assured that while changing the costume a hero will be completely safe from all harassment, indeed removed from the world, and, less believably, that all booths will be placed at well-considered points where the street is safe too. The press secretary was evasive about whether security bots will be provided to guard those locations. Our editorial opinion is, not likely, but at least a bested hero will be able to duck inside and wait there for a minute or two, until the villains chasing him give up and walk away.

 

In conclusion, another curious feature is being attributed to the old - no, the perennial! - classic booths. Some of the cynical, jaded telephonists who studied the technology and connections of their dialing systems have converted to eager acolytes and sing praises to forgotten features and functions of the so-called "ground cable." This "analog" connectivity, they claim, is harmonized with the power of Earth and allows a hero on one "server" to send a message to a hero on another "server," even visit a friend there. He can temporarily transfer himself between these servers in what they have dubbed "Matrix mode." The dialing hero disappears in one booth and reappears in its counterpart in a parallel dimension without expending "character transfer tokens"! Although the techs expect this shift to last only from dawn to dusk or dusk to dawn and there is expected to be a limit of its own on such visits, heroes would, no doubt, find this a welcome opportunity to explore a reality that is slightly different, join a Supergroup, trade at the local auction or partake in a Task Force for which the cadre in the original world is not available. All well and good. But we at Paragon Times have a simpler hope: to use that lingo, our "hardware" is old, our "connection speed" is limited, and at "peak times" we dearly wish some of the heroes threatening to make this particular "server" burst at the seams would and could pour off to somewhere. Now, it seems, they can. Will they? Only time may tell."

[Rudra]

Uhm... first? The Arbiters are red side only. And if that is what you mean, that only red side is affected by this, then I have to ask why only red side and not blue side or gold side are being punished in this manner. Second, the reason why the trainers all have tailors incorporated into them is for ease of access. And you are talking about taking away a QoL change to add something that never existed in the game before to do the exact same thing. (Even one of the Superman movies made reference to this, that the old phone booths don't exist any more so there is no phone booth changing unless you want everyone to watch.) Third, the point of going to a tailor or a trainer is that you have someone to talk to in order to get your costume updated, and a phone booth, while an old classic for supers changing into their hero ID, cannot give feedback on how to update their costume. (So you are mixing tropes, mixing Edna from the Incredibles with a phone booth to quickly remove your civilian clothing revealing your worn underneath super costume.)

 

So for multiple reasons, I oppose taking away costume edit functions from trainers to move to phone booths.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

 

[biostem]

The issue is they'd need to then re-code those objects into tailors.  You could always go to said tailor/facemaker if you wanted to keep things RP-friendly.  Alternatively, you could edit the costume them go and use a costume change emote within the phone booth to pull off the effect.  After all, Superman didn't alter his costume in any phonebooth, he just switched into it, there.

Edited February 20 by biostem