Soul Train

Kashaye returned to the small office that she's settled Mallory into, bearing a pitcher of water, a couple of granola bars, and a small clipboard and a pen. She rattled the knob. Odd. She hadn't thought the door would lock.

Then she saw the card scanner to the right of the doorknob. Of course.

Leaning to the right, she got close enough to the reader plate so that the ID card pinned to her hip would register.

The pad made a cheery -bleep- noise, and the door unlatched and swung open on its own. Hands full, Kashaye bumped the door open further, prepared to step through...

Off the top it sounds interesting...

but underneath is sounds like yet another iteration of Defiance.

Not holding my breath as to it ever being useful.

(( utter......


total.....




AWE. ))

(( It won't. I have a new post notify set on it. Just waiting for our young lady to respond. ))

((Oh no no no. Not to push you into a role where you're overshadowed. Not at all. To the contrary, Defenders synergize REALLY WELL with each other, especially ones with the same primary. Those effects stack... and as a result, a team of as few as three or four can steamroll over something that one of them, plus two other archetypes, might have difficulty with. Think of it. Not much melee, but a lot of status protection/healing/debuff/buff abilities, AND multiple ranged-fire platforms. It is a thing of beauty. And as far as respect from one's peers is concerned... no one will respect your abilities more than someone who is intimately familiar with them.))

heh.

I'm not in an RP supergroup.

I'm in a supergroup where the members RP.

I THINK there's a difference....

((Holy .... !! you guys are good! ))

Very good guide, Impkin. And yes, thanks go to all those that have provided assistance.

(My /DA scrapper doesn't give me a headache anymore, yay!)

(( Very good. You do realize of course, that if all these 'dispossessed' Defenders team up... the results would be formidable, no? ))

"Thanks. It's just... well... I got a lot goin' on, is all. Some of it good, some of it not so good."

She sighed, and turned to look at the bartender.

"Ever have one of those times where you didn't know if the sun was gonna come up the next mornin'? It's one o' them times for me right now."

(yep. Respec Blues. )

[ QUOTE ]

A hundred feet from the building, Mallory finally got up the courage to ask the question that burned in her mind. She tried not to let fear or concern trace into her speech as she asked,
"So... what is it that you want me to do?"

[/ QUOTE ]

Soul regarded the girl. Yes, she was afraid. Well, not like anyone could blame her. She'd been clobbered by a car, chased by what she assumed to be a goon squad, nearly blown up... and now had someone teleport right in front of her. Tread lightly, Kashaye.

"Mallory... I am a scientist. A physicist. And I've been trying to figure out... well, something, that could mean a much better life for everyone in Paragon. In the world, really. But I need data. Data that, well, I don't have. See that building? That's the company I work for. They've set aside a lot of money and time and manpower to unlock this big secret... but someone else has a head start. Crey Industries. You've heard of them, yes?"

Mallory nodded.

"Well... I wasn't always like... well, this." Kashaye indicated her costume. "I was normal. Then something happened, a reactor at the science lab I was working in... well, it broke or something. I don't know exactly what. But I got saturated with energies no one understood. And I changed."

She paused, looking at the girl.

"My first power was almost exactly like what I saw you just do. And if I'm right... you will be able to help me figure out what exactly it is WE can do."

Mallory looked confused. "But.. I didn't do anything! Honest! I just... "

Kashaye saw the expression change on the young girl's face. "I... I just... I got hit by a car..."

"Mallory, look at me. Look at me!!"

"Yes'm?"

"You're fine. There's nothing wrong with you. You just ... well, you flared."

"F...f..f..flared?"

"Yes, flared. You have superpowers, dear. Or at least one. And I think that car just caused it to trigger. Come on inside, sit down, relax a second. I'm sure this is a lot to think about."

Don't know about ubergamers.

But we got a whole bunch of good players. All levels. And yeah, RP is pretty strongly rooted, hardly any griefing or dissing of RP'ers.

(Did have a level 1 wander around Skyway tram station last night, repeating "dorks" and "gonna get me killed" in broadcast... uh.. what was that about???...)

Virtue is the only server where you can RP all weekend and not be looked at as strange.

(Well, we got a whole bunch of missions in too... but we managed to maintain the RP thread during all of them, which I've never been able to pull off. Plus I got the Advisor badge, because I had a lowbie SG member on a 'leash' for 14 hours...)

What Starstruck said (and yah, newbie here too, after a fashion.)

The 'rules' I usually go by are fairly similar to in-game RP.

Don't write actions for other people's characters without discussing the 'plot' with them first. Many people use MoonEdit (a free 'collaborative' word processor/editor) to co-write stuff that involves multiple people. Personally, I Just write what my character does, and 'hand off' the plot to the person with whom I'm interacting.

Don't go godmode. There's a bit more freedom in defining your experience level/powersets, but it doesn't make sense that someone would have level 50 abilities without ever having interacted with level 20 game elements.

If you write an 'attack' scene, limit it to ONE attack chain, and make it an attempted attack. We tend to take some liberties with this one, assuming autohits and such... but leave the other author some room to wiggle out from under.

Other than that... take what other people drop as plot elements, and have your character react to them, interact, try to solve puzzles, etc. Or, you can write up more social type stuff. Gal's Place and The Whitmoore are two threads that tend toward more 'downtime' type material... although The Whitmoore has a lot of battle scenes woven in.

Someone of your creative abilities shouldn't have any difficulty.

Soul exited the front door just in time to see the girl start to run. Wonderful. She rose into the air... but something was wrong.

She couldn't get any speed... it was as if she'd forgotten how to fly! All she could do was hover in place.

NO! She KNEW that her radiation dose inside the TV reactor would cause issues... and here was the proof!

The girl had made it to the corner, and turned left. She could go into any building, and disappear. NOW was not the time to have her abilities crap out!

But... she felt a twinge. And then a wrenching sensation.

And she wasn't where she had been a second ago.

Instead she was hovering two feet off the ground, in front of the girl.

Surprised, she dropped, and fell flat on her back. The girl skidded to a stop and just stared.

(Ouch! Gonna have to watch the re-entry... wait, did I just.. TELEPORT myself??)

She pushed herself to her feet, and stuck out a hand.

"Hi. You don't know me, but... my name's Kashaye Parker.. and ... I could really use your help with something."


((OOC: yeah she got respec'd. We'll see what else got changed/deleted/improved as we go. No more Flight, but she's got two of the teleport power pool now...))

Kashaye happened to be headed towards her lab when the energy monitors installed around the building went off.

"Perkins! Taylor! Was that the reactor?"

"No Ms. Parker! It's outside, in the street!"

What? The energy signature was almost identical to what the reactor put out. This didn't make any sense...

"Entrance cams on monitor, I want to see this."

"You got it."

The monitor showed a crumpled car with a man struggling to get out of the driver's side window... and a teenage girl getting to her feet, seemingly unhurt. She looked... extremely confused.

"Oh my... she's the source, see? Roll the footage back.. There!! That flash. That's our energy signature."

Kashaye thought for a nanosecond. "Send the in-house medics out there, take care of that idiot that ran her down, and bring her in for a workup. If she's anything like I was when MY powers flared... she's gonna need some help. And notify Ms. Feynman!"

Kashaye changed into her costume for the second time in three hours.... well, she wanted research data... looks like she had some.

OK. Here's a question.

Is it legal to put a /bind command INTO another bind command?

Here's the issue:

Currently my "follow" command has an added text string that indicates that I'm following, and names the target. However, Follow is a toggle. So I want to have a different message for when Follow is turned off.

i COULD load in a 1-line Bind file that reloads the F key...

but why not just re-bind the key directly?

Thoughts? Yes it sounds wacky.

(( this thread has been dormant for awhile, so the following story is not related to previous posts.))

Kashaye Parker sat at the bar, nursing a beer, only partway paying attention to the TV news. It wasn't the best place to do her thinking, but it was better than being distracted at the lab, and her apartment, although nice, was little more than a place to store her stuff.

She was at a crossroads.

Down one path led camraderie, purpose, a sense of belonging. However, there were pitfalls. She knew it would be rough, because she had been on her own for so long, she'd gotten used to counting on herself, and after the blow-up with Arvin two years ago, she'd never truly trusted another human soul with her heart. Plus, there was the question about what gender she preferred. She wasn't sure if she wanted to face it... but she'd have to, if she wanted to continue. She couldn't deny the attraction she felt, and toward one of her most stalwart companions... and was scared out of her mind that it wasn't mutual and would never be reciprocated.

Down another path led uncertainty. It meant returning to being on her own, something she could fall back into, but all the same not something she looked forward to. It meant she could devote more energy to her new job as a researcher at Physiks... but all of a sudden the 'job' wasn't all she wanted in life.

And to top it off... she was worried.

She'd accepted an assignment to beat back an assault on the Terra Volta nuclear reactor. And the team she'd been part of did their job. The Sky Raiders hadn't been able to take it offline. But in the process, she'd been exposed to enough hard radiation to kill a normal human, and she had no idea how this would affect her, as a subatomic radiation leak had been what changed her initially. She wasn't sure if her powers would change, if some of them would fade, if other abilities would manifest....

And she was concerned about what it had done to her ability to have children.

She'd scheduled a doctor's visit for later on in the week. But until the scans were done and the test results returned... she didn't know.

And she didn't know which answer she wanted to hear.

If she were still viable... did that mean she should find a man, settle down, have a family, put the superhero gig aside? Somehow that seemed... selfish. Plus that meant she'd have to get over her aversion to relationships... especially her aversion to ones with men. That thought scared her; Arvin had been... less than kind, and he'd let his fists do the talking as often as he let his words become weapons.

The day she'd discovered her abilities had been the only time she'd successfully fought him off... and was also the day he'd packed up all his stuff and left. She took some satisfaction that PART of what made him leave was the fact that he'd lost his hold on her. But he'd also taken her self-esteem away... and no one had ever tried to help her get it back.

If she were not viable... then all of those questions went out the window. She would be free to pursue whatever life she wanted. However, it also meant that Kashaye, an only child, would be the last of her line. And this wasn't an easy thought to hold. There WAS always the possibility of adoption - there was no end of orphans from the Rikti invasion. So... that brought her around to, did she do it alone, or find a partner?

Impasse.

She downed the beer, and ordered another.

Maybe, at some point, the chaos in the world would start to make sense.

(( OK. We'll treat him as 'on assignment'... feel free to jump back in if you want to later. Thanks for providing some interesting reading up to this point. ))

(( OK, starting to get complicated. We seem to have a new major faction on the board besides Crey, Physiks, Legion... and their agents are all incarnations of the Seven Deadly Sins. Aside: bringing Fat Ba5tard into MY buffet, shirtless? FOR SHAME!! Where was Security? Oh that's right, Lust had them in thrall. Nevermind! ))

Kashaye sat down in the meeting room Clarisa had chosen for the debrief. She tapped her fingers idly against the conference table... was she up first? Well, nothing for it. She described the situation as she'd seen it to Clarisa, from the moment she opened the door to find two defeated Crey scientists and the device, and ending when they had all re-entered the building. At the end of her recap, she looked at Clarisa with a rather pained expression.

"I'm not going to get much time for research, if this kind of thing keeps up, am I?"

I don't know about canon.. but it's pretty good regardless.

[ QUOTE ]
After a year's absence, I've returned to play CoH. I did a lot of binds back then, and discovered they had been saved on the server even after reinstalling CoH. The problem is, I don't have a clean default keybinds.txt file anymore (I had changed and saved an altered version to replace the default one), and I need to know the bind command for readjusting the camera angle to the center (i.e., not looking up or looking down) . I vaguely remember it was bound to the Page Up or Page Down key or something or other. Would someone please copy that command line for me? I'm so rusty with this and only managed to do binds before thanks to others' expert advice. /grin Thanks in advance!

[/ QUOTE ]

YOu should be able to export a default keybind file if you roll a new toon, and then type /bind_save as soon as you hit Outbreak. It'll be saved to keybinds.txt . Once saved, you can edit it or rename it, and load it with ANY character by typing /bind_load (for default keybinds.txt file) or /bind_load_file (filename) for a renamed bindfile. NOTEPAD FTW!!

As for the key to recenter - it's PgDn. Hold PgUP (or middle mouse button/scrollwheel) to move camera around your character.

PAGEDOWN "camreset"
PAGEUP "+camrotate"

Mistress Ohm felt her head clear even further at the new arrival's touch. It was ... she was tempted to compare it to something more carnal, but no, this was better. It was bliss, straight up, no chaser. She couldn't help but sigh. And when the glow throughout her being had passed, she felt no aches, or stings, or even the stiffness of muscles that have healed.

Her first thought was to the girl... but she saw that the new arrival seemed to have that in hand (more or less) and would probably be able to get her out of this area and to someplace safe.

And it was evident that the girl WAS the statue. Beatrice felt a little guilty of touching it, no HER, earlier. Had the girl been aware of it? Would she have objected? How long had she been in that state?

"Sir... thank you for your assistance. If you could, please... tell her I am OK, and let her know that she has a friend here. I would say so myself... but I do not know Russian."

She got to her feet, walked slowly over to the other two, and tentatively reached out a hand to stroke the same cheek that she'd touched on the statue. Such a pretty girl... the mystery surrounding her was almost tragic in its scope.

As the two figured out how well they could indeed communicate, she waved, rose into the air, and headed for her apartment. Serge... well, she'd deal with Serge. The party wasn't a total loss... at least she'd got an adventure out of it. The uniform... well it could be fixed.

(( thus endeth Mistress Ohm's involvement in THIS thread... but seeing as Tasenka and Ohm have friended each other in game, there may be more tales to tell! ))

OK. Lusca must work differently.. because there is NO WAY that I did anywhere close to 25% of her HPs in damage, UNTEAMED... I sniped a tentacle twice (and got slapped!), energy torrented another (and got one-shotted with her Dark attack), and after that just debuffed and healed other heroes with Kinetic Siphon abilities.

Yet I still got the badge.

Me. An unteamed defender.

Perhaps the debuff/buff 'damage increase' was credited? Or were those two snipes and a torrent enough to get me on the board?

(( I noticed. But I thought I'd let you know why she's not reacting like the others. ))