Mckeedee123

Well, the militias wouldn't really be setting themselves up against the government, in theory. They'd just be created so that people could defend themselves without relying on the government or their own, individual strength. Normally, the government probably wouldn't like it, but with all of the chaos, fighting their own citizens in addition to these external threats wouldn't be preferable to just letting them exist for the moment. Is that Corvallis' endgame? We have Rainmaker destroy the town at the end? I wasn't around when the thread was created.

I don't suppose I think that Chasmfiend belongs in Corvallis in his current state either, both because he's way too powerful for the city (and probably for the RP in general) and because he doesn't really compromise to fit into the city's structure, but that's actually a pretty good point. This could represent the beginning of a new era in the Corvallis thread, where the chaos in the city causes things to become increasingly decentralized. Epics and vanillas start forming their own little militias and gangs to defend themselves from all of these ethereal threats, and the government is forced to compromise with these factions because there's just too much going on to pick fights with the groups that are only subverting its power passively. Eventually, the city reaches its breaking point, and the government falls apart, leaving just these groups.

Believe me. I didn't want another Deathwish/Deathgale thing going on, but sometimes I guess we just have to make these sorts of sacrifices for the sake of Epic name okay-ness. I just couldn't think of a better one. Alright. Reading back over the scene to see where we left off, it looks like Quicksilver drew his line in the sand and then we have a handful of posts about people flying off to fight him. Next comes the actual confrontation, if it's happening. It's possible that the best option for writing it would be from the viewpoint of a third person, since otherwise all of the dancing between perspectives might mess it up a bit. This is a cool moment. (Wait, is it just Edgerunner who's going there? *Double-checks thread* Nope. Looks like Deathwish is in there too. If we want Crush to get involved, Kobold can write that post now as well.)

Welp, there it is. Enjoy the nightmare fuel. How are we going to move forward with the Quicksilver situation? I assume he escapes, since Busdriver did and he seemed much less likely to than Quicksilver in my opinion, but how? How does this encounter change his group's position in The Dalles?

Corpsemaster rumbled along Route 26 in a beaten pickup truck, feeling content. It had been a very productive night. He hit a particularly bad bump on the road, and his eyes flicked over to the rear-view mirror, checking to make sure that none of his cargo had fallen out. Eight years after Calamity, the roads were in pretty bad condition. Barely usable, really, but he was glad that they still served their purpose. When the road system finally did fail, Corpsemaster would be unable to make these little body runs, and he'd have to snatch his servants from within the city of Astoria itself, which might cause trouble. Portlanders had much less power to protest his incursions. As he turned his attention back to the road, something caught his eye. Two human figures, walking along the road away from Portland. Middle-aged. Male and female. Armed. Dare he risk it? Dare he add two more bodies to his load? What if they rendered his truck impotent? He sucked on his cheek for a moment. Aw, what the heck. Without braking, he shrugged his hunting rifle onto his shoulder and took a quick potshot at the couple. It went wide, blowing a chunk out of a tree behind them. The two of them whirled around, taking a moment to register the attack, then bolted into the pines. Corpsemaster licked his lips and floored the gas pedal, wheeling off the side of the road in hot pursuit. As he wove his way through the densely-packed trees, he began reaching out with his power, summoning a group of minions in anticipation of the kill. The tarp spread over the truckbed began to ripple and shift as the bodies underneath transformed. Spines arched, bones shifted and snapped, and a pack of creatures that were not fully human started poking appendages out of the sheet of cloth that held them down. He mentally gave them the command to wait, and they shuffled back underneath. Up ahead, the couple appeared to exchange a glance, and then the woman stopped running, turned around, and clicked the safety off of her shotgun. Corpsemaster floored the gas, and she only managed to get one shot off before he clipped her with his truck, knocking her into a tree with a crunch. The buckshot blew apart his windshield and a good portion of it embedded itself in his throat, but he ignored the damage, hitting the brakes and commanding his corpselings to attack. In a surge of rabid excitement, a pack of reanimated bodies clambered out of the truckbed and tackled the woman's prone form, punching, kicking, and biting. She screamed as her warm, fresh blood mingled with the corpses' cooling viscera,. After a few seconds' struggle, her arms ceased flailing and she choked her last breath, buried in a furious mound of undead flesh. Corpsemaster tutted and ordered the creatures to go after the male. He raised her quickly and had her bring her pack to him. Dried food, ammunition, and assorted camping supplies. Not a bad take. He continued rifling through her pack until a tortured howl announced the capture of the male. Corpsemaster always tried to take some alive on these runs. Corpselings were nice, but they weren't really... subjects. Every Epic needed someone to rule, and Astoria had more than enough supplies to feed whoever he decided to drag back into The Catacombs. Sobbing, the male was pulled before Corpsemaster, who gave him a quick inspection, then jerked his thumb towards the truck. The corpselings chattered their teeth and dragged him up into the bed, prompting a new round of screaming, which continued as they piled on top of him, trapping him underneath for the long trip back to Astoria. Corpsemaster picked a bit at his healed throat, then climbed back into the truck and headed off.

The intro post I had in mind was him returning from Portland (or wherever) with a truckload of corpses he'd gathered and maybe killing some refugees along the way. He has this huge labyrinth of tunnels going down underneath the southeast section of town with a single exit, carved out by an Epic he works with whose wounds spew out acid whenever he's injured. Perhaps the Adventurer could try questing there, or else the Financier or Lightwrought could deliver supplies to the portion of the population that he's herded into it.

They don't really have any mental faculties. The corpses are "animal-like," but everything they do is a result of his influence. He can have them do complex tasks, so long as he knows how to do them himself. The power works passively, so he doesn't have to be paying attention to them for them to do stuff. Blood loss doesn't matter, since he controls the bones and tendons directly, so long as they're connected to the spine, which is the focal point of his influence

That's fine. His weakness is poetry. The bodies do decay normally, but he happens to enjoy the smell of rotting flesh

I pictured the healing being slow, but infinite. the flesh will always recoalesce eventually. As for corpses controlled at once, maybe 66.

Well, mostly it wouldn't be because of the need for a pro-government faction itself, it's just that I think that Astoria is cool and I want to get in on it (not to mention that we've arguably only shown about one "gang" that bases itself in the city so far, Winterspell's.) The central Epic, and the only perspective character in the gang, would be Spiritmaster, an Epic with a healing factor and the ability to animate corpses (unlike Lightwards, they don't heal upon animation or regain a semblance of "life.") The corpses "bear crawl" around instead of actually walking, and have a sort of feral aspect to them. Spiritmaster can access their senses through his mind, and can control them absolutely.

Sirce Luckwielder. He must have still been around when I still joined, but I don't remember him.

Okay. Believe it or not, I only just barely read the Astoria thread today. That's some nice stuff right there. The Adventurer, especially. I loved him! He pretty much encapsulates the idea that the PC in most RPG's is actually a complete jerk. What a great idea! I'm not sure about Winterspell, though. His relationship with his subordinates was a little mushy for an RP where 90% of the characters are either maniacally sadistic, mentally ill, or both. When did Luckwielder leave? I think it'd be neat to introduce another pro-government faction to the city, seeing as The Cavalry, The Destructors, Winterspell's retinue, and Blackwave's crew are all working together to plot the city's downfall at the moment. I'm picturing a group of Epics that have created a base inside of a network of tunnels they've built running beneath Astoria Column.

Well, with his current powerset, he probably wouldn't really do much fighting, since he isn't mechanically interesting. He'd have to fight in an altered state, if ever. The ending of that last post, by the way, wasn't implying that I needed to do something else before the afternoon ended. They're going to do their stuff tomorrow. Also, it's been several months and Shattered still hasn't really moved forward with the side-plot in The Dalles. I'm tempted to write the follow-up post myself, but I think I need a new perspective to go at it from. Are you absolutely firm that we shouldn't add Lottery to Freq's gang, Kobold? It just doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to me.

Bam. Worldbuilding. Eat your hearts out, Oregonites. I hope you don't have a problem with it, Voidus (I cannibalized the Epics from Brisflame, by the way.) Also: I had absolutely no idea what kind of gas was used to kill Fuzzy, so I just went with something that sounded sciencey and would theoretically kill quickly without much pain (which is what I got from the description.)

Newcomers never really appreciated the Burning District. Mouldbreaker could see it on Outlaw's face. The man was confused by the juxtaposition of broad, tightly packed streets with cultivated farmland, nervous about the massive pyres of multicolored flame lining the roadways, and even more apprehensive about entering them head-on. Mouldbreaker considered explaining the fires to Outlaw, but... some things just had to be experienced directly. He'd get it eventually, anyway. The fires couldn't really hurt you, and, in fact, were really quite beautiful, simply harmless by-products of the powerset of the rather odd Epic that called this region his own. Ghostfire's gang was a powerful element in Salem. they'd operated this land semi-independently since way back when Inferno had been ruling the town, just after the Capitulation Act. She and her partner, Maelstrom, had burned, crushed, and swept away vast sections of the city in an effort to turn it into an agricultural hub in the years prior to Soulcaster's arrival, and subsequent murder of the pair. What remained of the suburbs, and most of the south and eastern ends of the city proper, were stretches of poor, but arable, farmland, dotted with the occasional ruin used to house workers. Sure, you could find a working piece of industrial equipment in other parts of the city occasionally, and that's what fueled Salem's failing manufacturing industry, but for the most part, Salem was a farming town. It was a farming town with a relatively enormous population, a stable government, and an extraordinarily popular attraction which people spectated from one end of the Fractured States to the other, but it was a farming town nonetheless. Epic dictatorships for miles and miles around imported food from Salem. The Burning District was one of the more recognizable features of Salem. The colored flames could be seen in the night sky from miles away. The other was The Spires, massive spikes and arches running across the city, forged from pure titanium. They were another souvenir from Inferno's regime, created by Springsteel as a bounded across the city to battle her enemies. No one could figure out how to extract the metal from the spires, and they seemed stable enough, so they just sort of... stayed. From a distance, Salem looked like a giant porcupine. The locals liked it. It made the city distinctive. Mouldbreaker was on his way to the warehouse Ghostfire ran his territory out of, and he'd brought Outlaw with him. Over the course of the day's fights, he'd taken a liking to the man. He wasn't boisterous or proud, like most Epics, he just sort of stood there and listened. Mouldbreaker could work this guy. So when he'd gotten a call about an incident between Ghostfire and the Rift Cult, one of its bordering semi-kingdoms, he'd decided to bring him along, maybe teach him how to defuse the situations that the hotheaded idiots who ran the farms got themselves into daily. In this case a Rift Cult militiaman, in uniform, walking through the burned district, getting captured and starting off a round of threats and posturing between the two factions. He had almost reached the warehouse when his mobile rang. Distracted, he fumbled with it for a second before answering. "Hello?" Antithesis was on the other end, barely able to contain her glee. "We've found a body. I think that the next few days are going to be pretty interesting." --- Considering her powerset, it was ironic that Antithesis enjoyed chaos so much. It wasn't really the crazy, violent, let's-watch-the-world-burn kind of chaos. It was more the sort of interpersonal conflict and let's-turn-everybody's-lives-into-a-bad-soap-opera kind of chaos. He preferred it to Showstopper's blatant sadism, at any rate, even if the quirk made Antithesis an inefficient tool at times. Take her reaction to this sparking Epic assassination, for example. People would be talking and fighting and angry and tense, and that in itself seemed to make her happy. She was smart, though. Brilliant. Most of the time, she used that to play people off of each other for her own amusement, when she really wanted to, however, she could negotiate Salem's complex political landscape with a skill that left even Mouldbreaker baffled. She rounded out the main three City Guard members. Mouldbreaker could transform inanimate objects into fruit-flavored gelatin, a power which sounded ridiculous but was actually surprisingly useful. Showstopper had enhanced strength and the ability to cancel out another Epic's power of her choice, and Antithesis could negate the powers of energy Epics and prevent matter from its usual "flow" from areas of high concentration to low on a small scale with low precision, which was... extremely weird, and highly situational, but... it was what it was. She hadn't bothered waiting for him before trying to figure out what had happened. They didn't really have proper forensics anymore, but they could still deduce some stuff. They'd probably gotten about as much out of the scene as they possibly could at this point. He strode over to Antithesis. "Hey there, What have you found?" She gave a lazy salute. The Guard didn't really espouse formalities like that, but she liked to greet him that way. He did technically outrank her. Barely. "Yeah, okay. So originally, we didn't think anything was wrong, but with how she ticked off the Grease Squad last week, we figured we'd try and see if she'd been assassinated as part of that rivalry, and... she was." She shrugged. "Okay." "No signs of a struggle, no visible marks on the body. Lungs, heart, all that stuff looks fine, as far as we know, so it wasn't mustard gas or anything. The guys who we sent to check her out were about to send us the 'okay,' except then they opened up the brain. It's... it's not how brains are supposed to look. Necrosis. She was probably killed with some sort of neurotoxin, which... is just nuts. Who around here even has access to chemical weapons like that?" Mouldbreaker had to absorb that for a moment. Epic killings were not common around here. Vanilla militiamen were executed occasionally as part of the politics of Salem's "turf wars," but an Epic hadn't been murdered within city limits for... a year and a half, maybe? On the last occasion, when Sockrock had died in a skirmish between him and the Towelsnappers, Mouldbreaker had brought the entire guard together to utterly annihilate the offenders. Letting them get away with something like that would have set an awful precedent. And now it had happened again. There was only one way that he could reasonably deal this situation, and that was by killing the perpetrator in punishment. "Antithesis, let's talk detective stuff."

I TL;DR'd the profile the first time you posted it, but I just went back and read it again. Having been with this RP for a while, I can say that you don't really have to worry about dying so much. Epics get by just fine without PI's. In fact, it's often better when they're "vulnerable," since they have to be a bit more clever. The incorporeality is fine, but perhaps you should go with Blackhoof's idea and have the pain be a sort of physical attack that he shoots out. It's usually best if a power has a sort of moving, "mechanical" element to it. It is. In most cases, I think that his transfersion would count as a Prime Invincibility, since he has enough precision to render bullets and weapons useless. Against Epics that can kill outright, though, it's not as useful (though he can still drown them or whatever.)

Well, I mean, Quiver or someone noticed a few weeks ago that you had in Abaddon's profile the tidbit that his Incorporeality wasn't affected by Showstopper or Corpsemaker, which we had a little discussion about and then decided wasn't feasible. I don't know if you saw that or not. It isn't so much that we want him to be underpowered, it's just that one of the points of Salem is that no Epic is really above the authority of the city guard. The three of them together can pretty much kill any one Epic, no matter the powerset. It's an important part of the idea behind the city, which is that conflict is going to have to take place at a very small scale. It's not a huge, in-your-face sort of thing, like in Portland. That's a format that works pretty well with Abaddon, I think. Actually, speaking of small-scale fighting, how about we introduce a sort of gangfighting element to Salem, to see if that livens it up? We can say that the actual, distributive arm of government in the city is very loose. Soulcaster just took the divisions that were already there and forced the leaders to accept new responsibilities. Basically, the gangs would have the people living in their territories produce simple goods in exchange for food from the countryside, which would have its own gangs. The gangs wouldn't fight overtly, they'd just intimidate and assassinate their rivals to try and accumulate people and territory, maybe have a little skirmish here and there. Nothing to attract attention.

Uh... yeah. If he rampages in Salem, he's going to die.

Nope. My experience in 3rd grade English says otherwise. Third person Omniscient literally means creating the scene using the thoughts and emotions of every character involved as opposed to Limited, which only uses the perspective of a single character at a time. An official-looking site on the internet agrees with me, so it must be true. Jokes. We joke on these Questions threads, and then occasionally someone will say "hey, that would actually be pretty neat," and it's used.

Yeah. I've thought about that. "You're gonna charge me for my three-egg omelette? Do you have any idea who I am?" "I was just giving you a heads-up, mister Timeport. If you're strapping for cash, you can always just head a few streets over and slaughter some vanillas while you wait. You'll be working up an appetite and getting money to pay for your meal at the same time!"

Mister Hamsterface, eh? You know, there's something funny about that early scene that I've been thinking about recently, and that's the reference to "Epics eat free Fridays" at some unnamed resteraunt. Does anyone else think Portland could use a little corner diner as a casual meeting spot for our feuding Epics?

He asked for honest feedback. I'm trying to give it, especially since I actually wish that I could get honest feedback on most of my posts. Believe me, I understand what you're saying, and I'm not trying to coerce Cog into doing anything.

It's a struggle we all face. "Noble protector", huh? That's interesting. Maybe we could try something mythological. Along the lines of "Mars" or "Artemis" or... or maybe biblical. "Samson" or... "Ephraim". "Hunter"? Huh. It seems as if it's a lot easier to come up with female names that have a connotation than male. That's odd. Of course, there's always just the option of leaving it as is.

The writing has been fine. Since you really seem to be fishing for honest feedback, though, I'll tell you that the name sort of bugs me. I'm not sure why, but most of the vanilla names that we come up with never seem exactly right to me, especially Epics' real names. Maybe they're just too arbitrary. "Adelmo," anyway, is a bit unwieldy. Keep it, change it, it doesn't matter to me. My new crack theory on this phenomenon is that in the RP, most of our names really mean something. You can get a lot of information from "Arsenal", "Backtrack", and "Nighthound". "Mason", "Max", or "Jack" feel as if they just got slapped on after someone looked up "random name generator" online. Perhaps when we make vanillas from now on, we should focus on unusual-ish names that communicate something about the person, like "Hope", or "Summer".

It's fine. This is kind of a weird community, since it's small enough that we can all sort of know each other and most of us come from friendly-ish backgrounds. It usually takes a few weeks for people to get acclimatized to the unspoken rules of the Shard, even if they're pretty active throughout that period. For example, we don't really downvote around here. The stigma attached to downvotes is a sort of casual "I don't like that" or "that's sort of stupid" in most of the larger communities, but here it's considered extremely rude. The only posts I've seen on 17S that have actually been downvoted into oblivion are ones where the poster was insulting another user or trolling. And yeah, we spell things right around here. It's not that we're snobbish about it or anything, but it just looks very out of place when someone uses "texting" grammar instead of "e-mail" grammar. It's like an itch that we all sort of want to fix, but don't want to bring up because we're afraid it's rude. Case in point: Weirdpersonx's "-thx bai". The urge to "correct" him whenever I see that signature is... intense.