Heroid

((Rawhide, you have one of the best board handles ever!

Keep rollin' rollin' rollin'... (and no, that's not a Limp Bizkit song ) ))

((For you, Eat_Me! Hope you like it!

And if you do, I have a bigger version I can email you if you want to pm me your email address. ))

((Thanks Vexxa! Dunno why I didn't see your comment sooner!

And here's another. This one was a quick doodle (about 20 minutes) that I did in Manga Studio (which I also did Anola on).

The Rhythm Thief
http://heroid.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d2zmxge

He was inspired by this song/video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ive4NdBMjt0

And while the drawing doesn't look like my usual stuff, I hope you still like it. ))

So my females escaped and not an hour later, I met Genevieve.

Genevieve is old. Achingly old. I hurts me to think about the effort that it takes her just to walk. But walk she does – no cane or crutch or Hoveround for this old girl. “The day I can’t get around under my own power is the day I’m going to pack it in,” she said not long after I met her.

She found me in the park near Silver Lake and though I was unaware of it at the time, she immortalized me. She’s an artist, you see, and I was basking in the morning sun, napping on a bench. I made a rather nice subject, if I may say. Of course, she’s a rather good artist. That mural of the 1st Hero Brigade in Virtue Hall in Virtue Hall at the Old Civic Center? She painted that when she was my age, a senior in high school, having won the commission through a nationwide contest.

And then there was the Time Magazine cover from 1958 also, but I think the mural itself establishes her credentials well enough.

After she was done with the painting, she came to sit by me. Gen is one of those wonderful people who know to treat cats and dogs and other creatures as persons. Personhood is very important to animals, and especially to cats. We do not like being taken for granted or worse – treated as… as… a piece of property. We’re dynamic individuals with wills of our own and we like to have that acknowledged by the humans we take up with.

Gen showed me her painting and said, “See how beautiful you are?”

I looked at it with sleepy eyes with as much indifference as I could muster. Yes, I was beautiful. Princely. I mewed in appreciation, indifference overcome by my incessant need for attention.

She lifted me up and sat me on her lap, then placed the painting on the bench in the spot where I had just been.

“You have a collar, but no tag on it,” she observed.

“True,” I said, though it sounded more like, “Mwrr.”

She shook her head sadly and said, “I suppose you belong to someone.”

“Mwrr.” Which meant, no, I belong only to myself.

“No?” she asked, as if she understood, “Would you like to come home with me?”

I thought about it, and figured, why not? She probably had food and maybe a soft pillow I could sink into.

“Mrrll,” I replied.

She slid the strap on her art supply bag over her shoulder, then placed me in a comfortable, dark spot in it. “It’s not a far walk from here, Pretty Prince,” she said, then picked up her painting and took it and me home with her.

(( A beater robot. Love it! ))

((Interesting thread!

Gemini Rose, my archer, is able to jump incredible distances because her footwear is treated with an amazing compound created by a Professor Brainard.

HEROID is able to leap to so high and far simply because of the strength of his robotic legs. Of course at around a thousand pounds, when he lands, he tends to do some damage to the street or sidewalk. Those potholes you see around the city... yeah.

Alias Smith levitates through TK.

Rogue Atom teleports using her quantum powers.

Canine does the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon type of running/leaping.

Winter Girl's superspeed is explained by her creating a layer of ice between her feet and the ground, thus reducing friction and effectively skating at high speeds through the Rogue Isles.

Anola skitters and leaps like a lizard.

My Praets are all still using Ninja Run, so...

Rogue Ion uses her ion powers to increase her natural speed.

Speed Date is just beginning to master her energy manipulation powers in order to give her super speed.

Anthrosaur is Anola's analogous brother, so he does the lizard thing.

Rhythm Thief? He's usually cloaked when he's in motion, so no one really knows *how* he moves through the city. He just... appears.

And those are the main characters I'm playing atm. ))

((New post up!))

http://alternautuniverse.blogspot.co...dbye-pt-9.html

((New post today! ))

http://alternautuniverse.blogspot.co...dbye-pt-8.html

I’m inside the white building now, locked in a cage that is stacked in a wall of cages. I smell the females from the alley -- frightened, panicked – their scent and their frustrated calls drive me to join their cacophonic chorus. I leap onto the heavy wire-gridded steel door, throwing my strength against it as if I had a prayer of forcing my way out. But then, I do, don’t I?

Somewhere inside of me, I know I still have powers. And I still know how to use them. All I need to do is focus, poke my mind around in the cage’s locking mechanism a bit and then just TK-ly open it. But this… this… extremely primal, feline side of me will not let me leave my harem to their fates. When I escape, they must come with me. However, I can’t wait forever, can I? My human mind knows how these things go. There is always a surplus of cats in animal control shelters, and the more feral we act, the sooner we will be euthanized.

Across the way, a dog smiles at me with its deceptively benign beagle face. That friendly look will buy him days, perhaps weeks – more than enough time for someone to come in and see him, and upon seeing him, fall in love with him and make him the family pet. This pooch will wind up with a cushy bed in a nice apartment where his master will feed him brazed beef and soup bones with the meat still on them. He just has that kind of face.

I look at the other dogs in their wall of cages across the wide aisle from us cats. There’s an adolescent boxer not too far from the beagle. And there’s a female who looks to be a Lab/German shepherd mix. She’s older, but not too old, and also has a pleasant face. Then a Chihuahua, a small terrier, a pug or bulldog (I get those mixed up), two short-haired, yellow mongrels. Further down are more dogs I can’t see as clearly. They all are fairly docile, one or two of them barking now and then, but for the most part they are ignoring my girlfriends’ incessant caterwauling. It is as if they understand that not causing a ruckus and getting along well with the humans will buy them a little more – and maybe enough – time.

“My God, this is a rowdy bunch!” one of the humans says, raising his voice over our racket. He’s looking at our side of the aisle as he says it.

“So whaddaya want me to do about it?” another replies. “Can’t put ‘em down until they meet the required.”

“Where’s the acetaminophen?”

“Whaddaya gonna do?”

“I’m gonna dissolve some pills and put it in their water.”

“What?!”

“Yeah. My old man used to do it to the neighbors dogs to keep them from barking at night.”

“Jesus, man, if you get caught, they’ll fire us both.”

“You want to put up with this all day?”

“No.”

“Then get me the acetaminophen.”

I know what acetaminophen is. I know it’s handy for a headache when I’m a human. I have no idea how strongly it will affect me as a cat. It may very well render me unconscious. If I have to act, I have to act now.

I spray the inside of my cage (and the unfortunate felines in the cages beneath me) which drives my harem into an even louder discord. Then I do something that the human side of me does with much regret and reservation, but the cat side of me does with exuberance and wicked glee. One by one, I fire psi darts at the dogs.

It takes great concentration on my part because, well, it’s hard to stay focused long enough to actually come up with a plan, let alone execute it, but soon the dogs are howling, whining, and barking becoming even noisier than the cats.

“What the fu--?” one of the humans says.

The other human is looking around, confused. “I don’t know,” he says, “but something’s happening…”

One final task on my part and my plan will be complete. The smoke alarms in this place are of the most common variety. They have a button that you press to test them. I use my TK to press that button on the two alarms that I can see.

“Smoke!”

Both of the humans look around and sniff the air.

“I don’t smell smoke…”

“Well, they do!”

“Nah, it’s –“

“Both alarms are going off. It’s smoke. We got a fire somewhere.”

“But I don’t see it!”

“We gotta carry these cages out of here!”

“It’ll be quicker to just open the doors.“

Yes, I planted the germ of that idea in his head…

“Then open ‘em and we can all get the hell out!”

Less than a minute later my females have dispersed (without so much as a backward glance my way – ungrateful wenches!) and I am on the rooftop across the street watching the unfortunate humans who work at the shelter scratch their heads as they wait for the fire trucks.

((Be sure, when you're talking to the police, to say the entire name of the game -- City of Heroes-slash-Villains. Because if you say, "Officer, I was just wanting to talk to her about c-o-x," you are going to be tased and beaten.))

((Real life was hectic Friday, but I have a new one up today. ))

http://alternautuniverse.blogspot.co...dbye-pt-7.html

((My weakness is just keeping up with the chat around me. I miss some great stuff sometimes that I don't catch until I look back through the chatlog. Or my own character goes silent because I'm eavesdropping on a nearby conversation.

I think my strength is that I'm pretty willing to let things happen to my characters. Things said and done in roleplay tend to have an effect on my characters. It keeps me from scripting my dialogue and rp, and lets me be surprised by the turn of events.

As far as dialogue goes, the best thing you can do is listen to people talk in real life and keep that in mind as you voice your characters. I play both teen and adult characters. I'm lucky enough to have a lot of nieces and nephews (my own two kids are adults now) so I'm able to hear teenagers talk all the time. Also, I try not to play characters whose voices I can't hear in my head. ))

((Aw man. He seemed like a decent guy. One of the people who make wherever he hangs out just a little classier. My dealings with him on the boards were always pleasant and cordial. Rest in peace, friend.))

((More art. This time it's Anola -- my spiny, scrappy, mutant lizard-girl. You might run into her in Gemini Park on RP Saturday nights. ))



Link: http://cityofheroes.deviantart.com/g...29080#/d2ybwba

((I don't have a problem rp'ing with people playing Kheldians, whether they are rp'ing them as Kheldians or not. I'm just saying I don't enjoy them. I don't like the alternate forms, and I just can't get into the symbiotic thing. There's just not enough flexibility built into their backstory to suit me. And since I don't enjoy it, it's hard for me to rp it. My characters interact with Kheldian characters all the time. It's just not for me.))

((I also know for a fact you can get a character restored. People do things they regret all the time. The devs know this since they are people too. ))