In Memorium – CoH – Champions

The first in a server-by-server retrospective of City of Heroes characters …

Champions was my first, best server.

Well, I’m not sure if it was first. But it was the best. It’s where we got invited to supergroups first, the Freedom Phalanx — and eventually created our own, the mighty Consortium of Justice, part of the Alliance of Champions coalition, which I eventually became an officer in, and which was tons of fun until we got overrun by drama llamas).

But I digress.

Champions eventually became our secondary server, if only because we’d pushed to 50 those who were going to be.  But it still had some of my earliest (and best) alts.

These are their stories …

Psi-clone was, of course, my Mary Sue.  Hell, I even dressed like him (without the little eyeball logo on the breast pocket, of course) — or, rather, he like me (hey, I have tan slacks, red shirts, and tweed sports coats — go figure).  An Illusion/Empathy Controller, he was my first to hit 50, and he was the head (and chief financier) of Consortium.  Graeme Thorne was a venture capitalist who woke up to find himself with these strange powers; his heroic origin was a mystery (to be revealed in a to-be-completed novel, an extrapolation of the various RP tales I wove around him).

He was someone I ran in enough circumstances that he had a wide set of costumes — his suit, his shirt-sleeves (the most common), his “Indiana Jones” gear, and (for Halloween) his Golden Age awfulness.  (There’s a full-blown Silver Age suit that the PR Department worked up for him. You can get a glimpse of it below …).  After the Terra Volta Trial, he started suffering from added mutations (the glowing eyes, for one).

I loved the Illusion Controller set, and actually ran another hero up to 50 in it. It had damage, control, and pets — who could ask for anything more?  Oh, right … Confusion.  Pure comic gold …

I loved the character so much, I created a version of him in Champions Online. Not the same, of course.  Just a mind blaster, really, in that one.

 

PC ran around mostly duoed with Amorpha, Margie’s Dark/Regen Scrapper.  The two of them were pretty much unstoppable forces of nature — A could stand toe-to-toe with pretty much anyone, while PC kept things under control and cleaned up the riff-raff.  She served as second-in-command of the CoJ.

The fellow pictured there is not Psi-clone, but actually a villain — Mister Thorne — a Soldiers/Pain Mastermind, as I recall.  Yes, he looks a lot like PC.  Yes, he ran the Consortium of Injustice on CoV.  Yes, there was story there …

He was teamed (for all we ever ran them, i.e., not much at all) with Undone. We got them to 17 before getting tired of them.

Torchielle was my fire blaster (Fire/Energy, though the latter was used solely for a “go away!” knockback attack and a couple of buffs). She was the daughter of an energy-based heroine and a dragon, and spent her career dealing with both parts of her heritage (her cloak was from Uncle Fred — literally; and, of course, she eventually manifested dragon wings).

She eventually became (after dinging 50) a local college student, but still active in the hero biz.

Torchy was a classic example (to me) of how you could have a female heroine that wasn’t running around in tights or a bikini.

Torchy usually duoed up with Hildegard, a Fire/Mace Tank.  They were truly an awesome team — Hildy would tank a massive number of bad guys into a corner of the room, Torchy would buffity-buff, and BOOM all those great AoE Fire Blaster powers on their butts.  That just plain old never got old.

Lynn Calodo was a solo toon, a Dark Melee/Invuln scrapper, all gothy-goth and whappity-whappity and with an odd origin that involved winery technology and Crey Industries.

Fazenda was a stage magician who was aided by a Orion-esque energy harness, that let her fly (originally teleport, but that was the world’s most annoying power) and throw energy bolts.

For quite some time she had some odd costume quirks, including an illegal/obsolete set of fishnet stockings before they were available, and a slit skirt that was slit the wrong way.

She was an Empathy/Energy Defender, and teamed up with Araware, a sentient sand creature (and Spine/Dark Armor Scrapper). I always loved Energy Blast, but it was incredibly annoying to whomever you teamed with, due to the knockback.

They were unique in that they were part of Lorne/Mal’s “Storm Knights” SG.  Two of the last active members, in fact. We kept the rent paid …

Velvet Jones was a reformed villain, actually pulled in from an old tabletop RPG game I had.  She’d been just plain “Velvet” there, but that name was taken, so I added “Jones” (not knowing that there was a Saturday Night Live “Velvet Jones” character of a very different nature).

She was a Super-Strength/Invuln Tank, and she usually teamed up with P-siren, a Bubbles/Mind Blast Defender and former Russian spy, also based on the same tabletop game.  Unfortunately, the two of them ended up with bupkis DPS, which eventually brought them to a grinding, non-entertaining halt in the mid-30s.

For a time, though, they were our mains, part of the Freedom Phalanx SG, and so involved in all sorts of very social activities (ah, those were the days).

We eventually recycled the character concepts in much more recent play (Velvet became a SS/Willpower Brute, much more her style), but they never got out of the teens, level-wise.

Velvet was another toon with a lot of costumes — her garish super-hero one above, but a full-body suit (both in black stealth mode, and in more Christmassy colors), as well as a trailer-trash cowboy boots / jeans / tube top, as I eventually rerolled her in. Margie played around a lot with costumes for P-siren, too.

Mr. and Mrs. Azure were a pair designed around humor.  Based on Mr. and Mrs. Blue in the (vastly underrated) movie Undercover Blues, they were actually time travelers, back in modern days to have fun. They enjoyed witty banter and various supergroup/team channel hints that they knew something about the ultimate fate of anyone that they happened to be around.

He was a Martial Arts/Super-Reflexes Scrapper. She … fought crime. [UPDATE: She was a Grav controller]

Mister Ravenous (Super-Strength/Invuln Brute) was a favorite of mine.  When City of Villains came out, he became one of my lead villains in the CoI (“Strength in Numbers … Profit in Cooperation”), a War Wolf gone rogue.  He was impeccable in speech and dress, and had a deep stack of pre-programmed tells all of which had to do with eating his opponents.

Amusingly enough, his suit was always subject to various clipping gaps — which made it look like he was ripping out the seams, which was excellent.

His duo was with Margie’s Charity at Home. Their relationship was unnatural, but Platonic. They eventually made it to 23 before we got tired of Red-side.

There were multiple Al McGordo characters over the years.  The idea of the cowboy who happened to get too close to the radioactive remains of an H-Bomb test was too good to leave alone. It was always about Radiation in one form or another — Rad/Rad Defenders, Controllers, that sort of thing.  He was generally a solo character, never going too far in levels, but I just plain old love the name …

A version of him ran a bit with Christmas Present, one of the best uses of that particular strappy costume I ever saw (Invuln/Ice Tank).  Margie enjoyed pulling her back out on a regular basis to play, eventually getting her to 19.  (Note the last pic, with a copy of Margie’s UI layout.)

Eliza Dee was a Crey experiment who broke free and went off to the Rogue Isles to be on her own, violent, ownsome.  She was modeled after Galatea (the Power Girl variant) clone of Supergirl in the Justice League Unlimited cartoon.  (Galatea was the statue that Pygmalion brought to life; “Pygmalion” was the title of the Shaw play that was adapted as My Fair Lady, with the name of the crude woman brought to civilization of “Eliza Doolittle”).

Anyway, she was a SS/Invuln Brute, who ran around a bit with Margie’s Bacchante, but never amounted to much.  She actually got rerolled on another server, a bit more effectively (to be posted about later).

Unchained Path was created after the CoV costume parts became available hero-side.  She was a Kin/Ice Controller, which meant that she basically slowed the entire bad guy group down to zero.  She had some very angsty, tragic, monastic-obsessive story line, but, ultimately, she was so good at locking down bad guys, in so many ways, it almost became boring.  She hung out with Idzuna, a katana scrapper. They got up to 20.