Paradigm_Shift

Amatus took one last look at the group before continuing on his way. He internally sighed with relief as the PPD converged on the group - the only thing he had to do with the whole ordeal had been with healing some commuters. They had no reason to come after him.

Two blocks later, Amatus' journey was impeded when a Mortificator and a slew of abominations leapt (or shambled, as it were) in front of his path. "Good day, sir." Said the mortificator in a fake cheery and obviously deranged tone, brandishing a blood-covered and tarnished hacksaw. "Are you prepared to make a donation to the cause of scientific advancement?"

Amatus took one look at the abominations and stopped dead in his tracks. "Stars above..." He whispered.

"Yes yes, it is a rather big deal." The mortificator agreed. "I suppose I can allow you a moment for prayer or..."

"It is absolutely atrocious..." Amatus whispered, fury creeping into his voice.

"Now look here, I will not have you denouncing my work." The mortificator said darkly. "This is for the greater good, you know - here I am, helping to try and elevate humanity beyond the reaches of death and I never get so much as a 'tha-"

"Your reanimation technique is atrocious, you dolt!" Amatus screamed, advancing on him and throwing his arms in the air. "I can tell just by looking that none of those things have fully secured muscle ligaments! Their skin is not producing any keratin if their leathery quality says anything, so they would fall to pieces if I sprayed water on them!"

"Oh. Uh." The mortificator stood there sheepishly. He had heard from some friends over in the Rogue Isles that occasionally villains would drop everything and lecture them on their methodology, but he had never expected to actually encounter one.

Amatus had approached one of the abominations and was prodding it experimentally. "Low overall coordination and balance, limited eyesight, no hearing, its center of mass is in its chest, and..." He felt at its neck. It just stood there, awaiting a command from its perplexed handler. "...Can this thing even turn its head? IDIOT!" He said, turning and screaming into the mortificator's face.

"Uh. It can vomit acid?" The mortificator said meekly.

"So what? Anything with a working stomach can vomit acid if only due to technicality! And if these things are not producing keratin, they are most certainly not producing the needed enzymes to protect their stomach lining, which means that they must be part construct." Amatus said, trembling with barely contained rage. "And, of course, there is the small fact that they are rotten and falling to pieces even as we speak. These...are a disgrace. From the number of varying bits in each of these, I would say it takes at least ten specimens to make a single one of these shambling, artless piles of filth. And yet, despite having clearly gone through the trouble to acquire the resources necessary to construct them, you half-***** the rest of the work and you cheated by using mechanical aid. What do you have to say for yourself?"

"Well...These things are kinda mass produced." The mortificator said carefully, now somewhat nervous. The man was obviously crazy, and probably a necromancer or something, which meant he would have to tread carefully. "And like you said, its takes a lot to make these things, so there is a lot of cutback, and the Eidolon surgeons get first pick..."

Amatus facepalmed. "Ah, I see. These are a corporate effort. But alright." He straightened up and and adapted a thoughtful look. "I can think of a few ways to improve upon their template without any additional expenditure of resources..." A fleshy tendril peeked out from the folds of the wrappings around his head...

Amatus stood there patiently as all the gathered other-worlders completely ignored both him and his previous statement about portal corporation. A vein throbbed in his temple.

"Fine fine, ignore me! Not like I have anything meaningful to contribute here..." He muttered bitterly to himself before turning and heading away from the group. Sticking together was all well and good, but this world had already proven to be much too similar to the last. 'Absolutely everybody here is a complete pissant.' He thought darkly. He started following the broken tram-line, figuring that if he stayed with it he would eventually reach Talos...

OOC: Normally I would wait for the train to actually 'land,' but events and previous narration have already pseudo-established that we are well past that point. BIC:

"While my understanding of the functionality behind this mode of transit is less than scientific..." Amatus said slowly, peering out the front window of the monorail, "I take it that people running around while utilizing explosives on our current equivalent of a road is something of a ba-"

And then, because Amatus was such a long-winded git, the tram caught up with both lldela and the gunman, along with the very probable new hole blasted in the mono-rail by the explosive. Amatus reflexively dissolved into a cloud of Archaea cells and literally flew right through the walls away from the impending trainwreck.

Amatus tsked. "I do not blow things up. Especially things I need. I would not poison the staff for the same reason." A brief moment of silence. "Now mind controlling spores, on the other hand..." He began.

***

Elsewhere...

"Into the garden of forking paths, wherein it strides amongst the treetops, taller than the trees, its voice throughout the garden thunder sent to bring...Giants and the djinn, multiplex of wing and eye, whose strong obedience broke the sky. The land of which was full of twisted things, and text, and aching eyes, and lost was all the innocence of anger and surprise…”
As the mysterious stranger passed by, the telephone booth suddenly dialed a call.

***

Crey Corporation R&D Complex, basement level IV, lab II.

Dr. Wainscott paused as the wall-mounted phone rang. He swore under his breath and carefully extracted his arms from the mess, putting down the trusty pair of surgical scissors he had been using and then winding the plastic sleeves off his arms. Still muttering curses under his breath, he answered the phone.

He hated it when somebody called him in the middle of a vivisection.

“Hello?” He asked curtly. He then yelped with surprise as his answer was a screeching feedback tone. He recovered and hung up immediately. “This line is supposed to be secure from idiot prank-callers…” He grumbled, turning back to his little project – only to see that his computer had booted up, logged itself into the administrator profile and was pulling up his email. All in record time too, usually it took two minutes to do so.

He warily approached his computer and opened the email. First, there was a photo of a strange woman wearing archaic clothing, labeled ‘Mirel.’ Alongside the photo was a stylized color picture of a truly bizarre human DNA strand, and a short report describing the relationship between the woman in the photo and her apparent powers. Below that was a set of coordinates, placing her somewhere in King’s Row.

It called her, “One who is exalted, most commonly referred to as a ‘Dragon Blooded’…”

Amatus did not bat an eye at the giant Crab - he had stopped being impressed by constructs, no matter how fancy, ages ago. The police drone had only garnerned his interest because it was the only one he had seen that could fly.

"What can you tell me about Portal Corporation?" Amatus asked lldela. "Those pissants who attacked me only knew a little about it. Mainly where it was, and about cross-realm travel. Specifically, what am I going to have to do in order to return to where I came from?"

So hey.

Playing the game as a magic-origin hero/villain/undecided, you may make use of several single-origin enhancements under the names of Joule, Grey and Hermes. In the lore description of these three, it is stated that all three are 'magical dimensional entities.' Each has a distinct portfolio - Joule is the dimensional entity of Technology, Grey is of Exploration and Insight, and Hermes is Travel.

It is my basic understanding that magic is derived from the spill-over power given off by such entities. They radiate power, alot of which spills over into our world to be harnessed. Ley lines are points in our physical universe where the dimensional barrier is particularly in-tune with such entities, allowing for their power to more easily pass into our world, and of course nexi are the focal meeting points of multiple ley lines.

This is all elaboration after consulting with other forum-goers, but most if not all of this conclusion is either backed by or at least plausible through lore - I would advise checking the Circle of Thorns and Oranbega lore, the 'in-game timeline' lore, and the lore for Joule, Grey and Hermes.

That being said, welcome to the forums, and welcome to the RP forum. We have been expecting you.

OOC: Ugh, sorry about my absence. Apparently, turning vacuum cleaners into rocket launchers is not possible.

BIC:

Once Ildela and Amatus had boarded the tram, the white-clothed man looked around suspiciously. "I do not like this method of transit." He said. "It would be far too easy to spread a plague using such. Far too much contact and exposure with other specimens, far too much distance covered and otherwise isolated locales visited. Are the likes of these 'tram stations' a common feature of developed areas?"

Amatus kept pace with lldela as she headed for the station. He landed on the front platform and rematerialized. The first thing he did was take a look at one of the nearby Police Drones.

"Fascinating." He said, leaning over to stare at the initialed lettering stamped onto it. "A construct that can fly. It looks rather fragile though...And what is its function? It does not appear to possess any weaponry or tools...And with these flashing lights it would make for a horrible surveillance-check on the population."

Or alien centipedes.

This is a City of Heroes and Villains.

All this changes is that there are now heroes using a potentially amoral power for a righteous purpose. Villains will do what they will with power, as they always have.

An amoral, infinite source of power means less than nothing. Ultimately, wanting power means nothing in a purely moral sense. The pure will want power to uphold good. The wicked will want power for more personal freedom. Whether the good will be corrupted by this power is up to the individual, rather than to the popular "absolute power" idiom.

Statesman has not been corrupted. (Arguably.) That he is using a power source that is amoral means nothing - He had no prior knowledge of said amorality, and he has no way to escape its grasp. So he is doing the best he can with it - and in the end, even with an incompassionate and amoral god, good can still exist in a City of Heroes and Villains.

That is all.

No mutable 616 canon then? Amatus would be furious if he knew - mutation is vital to the process of evolution. It is not goal-oriented, nor always beneficial, but it is logistical.

Elsewhere, the moon Titan...

Running away from an A.I. in cyberspace without a viable escape route is slightly more difficult than outrunning a bullet train while wearing cement shoes. Outmaneuvering said A.I. without an artificial sim running backup and calcs was slightly more difficult than performing a u-turn in zero gravity while traveling at relativistic velocities and without any form of propulsion. Finally, there was the issue of countering heckles thrown up by an A.I. Normally this was not a problem since A.I.s were always trapped behind their own ice systems, but the two currently trailing behind Tenor were not. That being said, countering the heckles they set up to trap him was only slightly more difficult than trying to stop an irresistible object with a strand of straw. In essence, both A.I.s could have flown circles around Tenor while also creating new ice networks from scratch around him faster than he could perceive them being constructed, assuming they decided to not just flatline him upon contact.

And yet, somehow, Tenor was managing it. He suspected that they were both mostly tied up countering each other. If anything, it looked like the rampant A.I. was slowly shutting down its last captor, who in return looked more like it was coincidentally running away in Tenor's general direction. Taking a gamble, Tenor decided to take his chances moving off to the side and establishing a new escape line. Maybe the two cyberspace black holes would be too enthralled in their own fight to care about him escaping. He veered off from his current platform and started opening drive routes in a twelve-site string that would launch him further away than either A.I. would be able to travel in a day. Then he could cash out, burn his deck and then attempt to acquire transit to the next system over as fast as humanly possible.

That did not happen. One of the A.I.s suddenly blipped out of existence. The winner slammed into him faster than he could react, and then he woke up in the real world.

Tenor blinked. He was still laying on his deck, tubes and wires all screwed in. The private room he had rented was exactly the same as he had left it, and his insurance man was glancing up at him. Scratch that - the insurance man was just now glancing over at the deck, halfway through the portal.

'Oh. I've flatlined. This is a nightmarish hell in my head conjured up by the clasm to torment me.'

An alien voice spoke in his head. #Not quite#

And then the deck fell through the portal entirely, snapping shut moments later.

Amatus did not even bother up, merely crawling over to the Skulls before the tendril started moving again. The three split ends extended and seemed to fuse with the back of each thug's neck.

Hey, the Crossing is a card table where everyone is playing a different game using decks with unique artwork. Go for it - Just remember that the King of Hearts is wild.

OOC: The Blackhawk .44 scoped? Isn't that complete overkill? >.> BIC:

Amatus was not that much a hulk, standing at six feet (although the winter gear was a little bulky). The man gave the offered pamphlet the same look one would give an oncoming locust swarm.

"...I sincerely doubt that." He said, finally reclaiming his grip on stability for the moment. "No, much much easier if I just ask these simpletons instead..." He muttered, turning to the three collapsed Skulls. Now he saw what had actually happened - he had been dropped here by accident, if what the woman in conjunction with the drone were saying was true. Attacking or accusing them would be foolish, but since he had already disposed of the Skulls...waste not.

"Unconscious memory is perfect, after all..." He muttered. He yanked the knife out of his chest, blood staining his white clothes, and dropped it on the ground. The wound had apparently already stopped bleeding, for no additional flecks of red appeared to blemish his outfit. He then stood over the three thugs, and brought his hands together. There was a sharp cracking noise, and a ball of buzzing golden light formed between his hands...