Bitt_Player

The Resistance? Nah. You'll see. Whenever anything going wrong or weird in Praetoria, or whenever some group's secretly manipulating things from the shadows, who does it turn out to be?

The Syndicate. Every. Single. Time. The Syndicate is Praetoria's Nemesis Army.

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy if I ever saw one. Also a very easily-angered Russian man if I ever saw one. Geez, anyone who'll kill two people because a fortune-teller said he'd go to prison has got some kind of problem.

Malta Sappers. I hate their stupid stupid Endurance-stupid-flooring perma-stupid-Stunning stupid faces which are stupid and also stupid.

They can floor my Level 50 Brute when she's got her godmode running! Any other faction needs an Elite Boss with exceptionally cruel power selection to pull that, stupid Malta just needs the right stupid Minion! I never do missions against Malta any more. I simply refuse to put up with stupid Sappers being all stupid.

So yeah, stupid Sappers are my buzzkill. Although I'm not fond of the Carnival of Shadows with their sap-on-death and their phasing Master Illusionists either.

Behemoth Overlords are the emus of demonology.

Anyway, I personally like Fly because it's relatively safe. You can usually get where you're going without Jackhole McVillainface trying to kill you. Plus, you get to admire the scenery along the way.

So, I'm actually against more flying enemies. Last thing I want is to be cruising over Peregrine Island on my way to somewhere or other and have a pair of Sappers drop me out of the sky. The Bane Spiders on the walls in Grandville are bad enough, my Brute ended up with Invisibility just so she could fly for two minutes without getting a Web Grenade (and attendant -Fly) in her face.

Happy Independence Day, America! I'm sure tomorrow will feature a great deal of pyrotechnics in states where they are legally acceptable, and only slightly less in states where they are not.

Why do people hate Comic Sans so much again? More importantly, why does LaserJesus worry so much about what other people have their CHV font modded to? I mean, I could understand if someone had snuck into LaserJesus's house and switched his own client's font to, say, Wingdings, but Comic Sans? I feel like I'm missing something here.

I've got a character who's somewhere around 350 years old. She actually lost track herself a few decades ago. She vividly recalls Matthew Perry's steam ships arriving outside Edo, if that gives some perspective. She lost all interest in romance about fifty years ago, after a long period during which she would, on repeated occasions, consider starting such a relationship for a short time (maybe a few minutes), realize that anyone she might be interested in would be (depending on what year it was) one fifth to one tenth her age, and then pick up the first alchoholic beverage she could lay hands on and drink until her skin stopped crawling. Somewhere in the 1950s, she went through what she likes to describe as a "psychological restructuring", which most people think just means she went slightly crazy.

These days, she's far too interested in the fascinating complexities of personality found in virtually everyone to focus so much on just one person anyway.

Another couple of characters I have aren't quite immortal, but their aging has been drastically slowed, to the point that they'll probably outlive all our grandchildren. They're lucky enough to have found each other, and their relationship has been working out well so far, if only because they still think the way they did when they first got married, as well as looking the same. Even though they're still in their forties, they know they're going to live for hundreds of years, and their psyches are already showing the effects. Mostly in their unusual perception of time, in that they feel like they have a lot of it, but don't much notice it's passing. More cynically, it helps that they both have a number of psychological hang-ups and are unnvervingly dependent on each other, a situation either addressed or worsened -depending on your perspective- by their realization and acceptance of their own, and each other's, issues.

So there's the solutions my immortal or long-lived characters have. One stopped caring, two fell in love with someone just as long-lived. The first option, of course, may be easier.

I love threads like these. Well, let's take a look at my individual villains:

General Phi: Evil robot. Seriously. As in, "hey, guys! I just kicked a puppy! 'Cause I'm EVIL!" kind of evil. He's got an automated factory cranking out his robotic drones, and he's processing plans for world domination. His hobby is giving people a hard time, especially heroes and the occasional civilian. However, General Phi has one rule: Whether they're the finest in artificially-sentient war machines or meatbags who've somehow managed to transcend their squishy worthlessness, never, ever betray a friend.

Mecha Maven: Not evil, but entirely amoral. She'll do just as she likes, and what she likes is destruction and mayhem. She might've been a hero, if only she hadn't decided that General Phi was a good mentor. Her tenchomancy lets her summon her own personal Quirky Miniboss Squad at will, and she's the Dragon to Phi's Big Bad.

Rehnac Naturai: She's so horrible her home planet's government built a space ship especially designed to make a one-way trip, stuffed her in it, and shot it in the general direction of what might possibly have been a livable planet. Which turned out to be Earth. Sucks to be us. The way she sees it, she's just better than you, and that means she can kill you and take your stuff if you have anything she wants. In theory, she's Phi's Brute, but in practice, she's a loose cannon who tries to compensate for her lack of morals or standards with her massive ego.

Rosa Kreuz: Despite having a name that's just a bit surreal if you know German, Rosa's the single most horrible character I have. She once placed an ancient and powerful curse on a man so that as long as his lineage continued, he and his decendants would be forever plagued by his most hated enemy. Rosa did this knowing that she herself was that man's most hated enemy, and that, so long as his family line continued, this curse would make her immortal. She just hates that guy so much. Rosa's a big Nietzsche fan, as well. She figures that she's the Übermensch, or one of them, and that she therefore has the right, or even the duty, to replace humanity's current system of moral values with one of her own design. In practice, she rather likes Lord Recluse's system, and gleefully enforces it when not trying to murder the poor sucker she cursed in order to make herself immortal. After all, he's got kids now, she doesn't need him any more.

Gamble Spider: Perhaps the least trusted Arachnos Soldier ever. They don't know what she's up to, but they do know not to give her access to any sensitive information, especially after the time she "forgot" to disable WSPDR's backup generators before they broadcast the truth about the Power Transfer System all over the Isles. Whether she's a plant, in idiot, or a jerk isn't clear, nor is the exact reason why she isn't dead yet. Evil? Maybe not. She always works alone, and almost never seems to pick up any missions that involve fighting Longbow or heroes.

Nightingale Parfait: Lover of Obfuscating Stupidity, which is why she uses such a silly name. Parfait comes from Praetoria, where she is known as Emperor Cole's most irritating and persistantly-incompetent minion. Something like Invader Zim with black magic and mini-skirts. Cole's more competent followers worked up a mission important-sounding enough to obscure its impossibility, then sent her to Primal Earth to accomplish it. Parfait, free of the constraints of Praetorian life, has been happily doing whatever the heck she pleases ever since. She's another who's pretty much amoral. She knows she shouldn't rob that bank, but she wants the money.

Dammerungklinge: He barely knows any German, but tries to use it to sound more hard core. His goal is to kill off a certain hero who beat him in a fight once, and to do that, he's set himself the goal of becoming the ultimate swordsman, by any means necessary. He's got a magic robe, a magic sword, a dream in his head, and a sparkle in his eye. Dammerungklinge is often tricked by people who offer him greater power in exchange for his work, which is primarily assassination. He'll kill anyone -or die trying- if the price is right. All because he wants revenge on some guy. So yeah, he's right up there on the evil scale.

Mina Falsetto: Some jerk decided to sell her own soul to Satan in exchange for power over demons and hellfire. Pretty standard contract, except that said jerk tried signing it with the made-up name "Mina Falsetto" instead of her own name. Satan, naturally, didn't like the idea of that, and so, just to prove you shouldn't try to pull stunts like that on the Father of Lies, found himself a woman who actually was named Mina Falsetto, gave her power over demons and hellfire, but still took the soul of the person who made the deal with him. Mina's not at all evil, but she's a victim of the belief that certain things make someone inherently bad. She has demons who follow her around and do as she says, so she must be a horrible person, right? The more her hellspawned minions encourage her to to whatever she pleases, the more obligated she feels to be bad, no matter how little she wants to. Mina's probably going to be the first, if not the only, villain I bring hero-side when Going Rogue comes out.

Alecto Serene: Some villains do what they do to get paid. Most such mercenary criminals take their payments in cash, but Alecto Serene prefers to be paid in information. She'll loot and murder any time and any where if the person asking her to can tell her something she wants to know. That said, she has a distinct tendency to pay evil unto evil, and in fact appears to be a hero of the extremist variety. She'll also be spending some time in Paragon come Going Rogue.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that bit. What got me is that, on the map, they're still connected, since apparently no one's mapped the Etoile Islands since the late 18th century.

But wait, if no one's mapped the Islands since before that eruption, Grandville, Cap, Oakes, and Bloody Bay would all be one landmass. What the heck, cartographers?!

Okay, all right. So, we all know that Port Oakes and Cap au Diable are, in fact, the same island. My question is, what is this island actually called? Is the island named Cap au Diable, and Port Oakes is just a district on it? Is it the other way around? Does the island have some other, unrelated name? It's driving me crazy not knowing this.

Don't forget: Arachnos is a terrorist organization that is very openly hostile to the United States. So they pretty much get what's coming to them when Longbow and Paragon heroes go beat them up.

What are your graphics settings?

I still want a dollar sign chest emblem. It just bugs me that characters can run around with the emblem of Soviet Communism on their chest, but not the icon of American Capitalism.

Heck, why stop with the dollar sign? We can get multi-national and put in the symbols for pounds, yen, francs, the Euro, won, shekel, and whatever other currencies we can come up with.