Sparkly Soldier

No, he's not. "Not guilty by reason of insanity" is a valid, if rare, verdict for a reason, and the Clockwork King is one of the few villains out there for whom it's not just an excuse. He doesn't know that he's hurting people and he doesn't know that he can control his actions. That's textbook legal insanity.

And the worst part is, that sounds exactly like him.

Based on the description of them devouring wells and worlds, and the Shivans being the amorphous remnants of their Battalion-consumed homeworld, I kind of picture the Battalion like the Phantoms in "Final Fantasy: Spirits Within": a whole ghostly ecosystem based on every useful creature they've ever absorbed, from alien dragons and sandworms to more conventional troops and humanoid legions, perhaps all led/summoned by a Rularuu-like incarnation of the conglomerate wells who has to be killed to dispel the whole thing.

Although...

I hear they tried to give a proper warning once before, with disastrous results...

I don't know about the boards, but it's really easy to create anime-style characters as it is. We have multiple forms, customizable battle auras, eastern costume pieces, oversized weapons, summoned allies (including ninjas!), improbable hairstyles that can be any shade of color on the spectrum and so on. Anyone running around, literally, as Son Goku would probably get as little respect as a caped, blue-and-red themed hero named "Superguy," but if you wanted to make a modern-day, superpowered teenager with a sword who fights demons, in the style of Ichigo, he'd fit into the game so well that most people probably wouldn't even think of him as an anime character, just as a teenage hero with a sword who fights demons. The only thing missing is the stylized anime "look," which even anime itself has drifted away from lately.

My thoughts exactly.

This sums up precisely what I was about to type. One thing that bothers me about the natural origin is that all the origins are "natural" in the context of CoH's fictional setting. One could even legitimately argue that magic is a natural part of its fictional universe that humans simply use to their advantage, and therefore should either be considered natural for magical beings or science for humans - and in doing so, we've eliminated "magic" entirely as an origin. Natural makes intuitive sense for a character like Batman, but by also squeezing characters like Superman and concepts like the energy-alien Peacebringers into it, it gets seriously muddled. If Superman's abilities are natural, how about a dragon and its fire-breathing powers? If a dragon fits too, then what about a fairy? That's why, in choosing origins, I worry less about the technical origin and more about the story genre the character fits into. Ghosts, for the most part, would count as magic to me simply because their origins are supernatural. Part of the beauty of the game, though, is being able to pick any origin for any character to create your own unique take on it.

That's what I'd heard too, and it sounds like a really intriguing premise. On the other hand, it's going to be hard to milk a premise that bleak for B&T-style comedy. Still, I'm cautiously... um, curious, at least.

Well, no... he instead asked for suggestions on how to make it more fun, which is even better. Really, this has to be the friendliest, most interactive staff I've seen in any large-scale online game, and they deserve serious credit for that.

"Grab him," one of the guards shouted amid the chaos, "keep him restrained!"

"I've got his arms! You two, get his ankles!"

"Keep him subdued, don't let him get his arms loose," one of the Longbow technicians barked as he scrambled down from the overhead catwalks into the heart of the City Hall sub-basement, toward the swirling, crackling lilac glow of the portal and the small crowd of security guards wrestling with a single lanky-haired figure, "if he gets loose we're dead!"

"You're already dead," the blonde-haired man snarled at the elderly scientist, nearly twisting one arm loose from his military jacket and casting a glowing, crimson-lit gaze across the steel-plated basement, the tangled mass of pipes and conduits overhead and the burly guards fighting to pin his wrists behind his back, "all of you are dead! You sealed your fate when you sided with them! We'll slaughter every last... oh god, what's happening to me?"

His voice sank into reeling confusion, the burning red glare fading away into the frightened, wide-eyed gleam of his own brown eyes, and his arms went slack for a moment as he gave a bewildered look around the shadowy DATA laboratory, the spinning gyroscopic rings of the dimensional portal on the far side of the room and the crowd of researchers and agents swarming around him, their faces ranging from pity to fascination to white-knuckled fear. Then his stare shifted to another presence in the room, a lithe young woman clad in leather armor: the black buckles matched her dark shoulder-length hair, her pale white skin contrasting the fiery gray wisps of her eyes as they met his own fearful stare with a focused, conscious steadiness.

Shadowstar, a Warshade. They'd met once before, briefly, when he had to drop off a research file with SERAPH. Her implacable calm seemed a little creepy then, and he'd made a quick excuse and retreated back to his own job in the basement, keeping the Longbow portal calibrated and running smoothly. That was last week. A lifetime ago now.

"You've been possessed by a Nictus," Shadowstar's voice calm, soothing even through the undercurrent of tension twinging each word, "it tried to take control of you and sabotage the generator, but you fought back. You've saved many lives today, and..."

"Traitor," he suddenly screamed at her, yanking both of his arms free of his jacket and lunging across the room for her as the guards dived uselessly for his shoulders. His eyes glowed crimson again, a hellish blood-red light streaming through both his clenched fists.

"You turned on your own kind," he growled, "you led them here!"

The disheveled man stopped short hardly a foot away from her, his raised fists trembling above her head, his body quivering with electric tension... and then his glowing eyes faded back into their ordinary brown hue again as he flung himself sideways across the floor to surrender himself to the guards. Two of them quickly snatched his shoulders again, a third one snapping a pair of handcuffs around his wrists and lifting him upright for the team of paramedics mingled with the technicians and military officers. The cold green light of a scanning laser swept across his face, then another beam flashed harmlessly across his eyes, casting the young doctor holding the neural scanner into an emerald silhouette. She turned toward the woman in buckled black armor and the two of them began to talk in quick, hushed whispers he couldn't make out.

"Talk about your splitting headaches," he muttered with a wryly apologetic smile to the wary guards around him, and then he shook his head clear and tried to focus on those two whispering figures, on the hand-held device in the doctor's hands, the tip projecting a glowing green hologram of a human brain with several fuzzy dots blinking within its lobes.

"We'll need to get him sedated," Shadowstar was saying to another one of the paramedics as she gave a distracted glance at the hologram, "once he's secure in the SERAPH lab we can isolate the Nictus's energy signature and begin a quantum extraction..."

Then the Warshade stopped in mid-sentence and looked back at the image.

"Oh," she whispered under her breath as she stared at the blinking dots, "oh no..."

"What," his voice trembled with badly-concealed panic as he tried to make sense out of the rotating, translucent hologram of his brain, "why 'oh no?' You can fix this, right?"

"Yes," she suddenly answered him a firmly reassuring voice, lifting her face to make herself look into his eyes in spite of herself, and his heart instantly sank into his gut. He knew that look from the way the doctors had made themselves look into his eyes two years ago, while telling him that his father might live a long healthy life. It's the look of a terminal diagnosis.

"I promise we'll find a way to help you. Just relax and let us take care of the rest..."

"I don't want your help, Warshade," he suddenly snarled, ruby light flooding his eyes again as he frantically twisted his arms against the steel handcuffs, "treacherous filth!"

"I wasn't talking to you," Shadowstar coldly answered that crimson glow, and then she nodded to another one of the paramedics standing beside him. A needle shot into the man's left arm, plunging deep into a hidden vein, and in another moment the woman in buckled leather, the steel basement and the crowd of guards, technicians and attendants all twisted together into a kaleidoscope blur and then faded away completely into unconsciousness.


"Of course I know he's dangerous," Shadowstar paced back and forth among the marble panels and mahogany bookshelves of the otherwise deserted SERAPH office, her voice tense and impatient as she lifted the cell phone closer to her ear, "I of all people know that. But we're also the only facility within a thousand miles, maybe a thousand light years, that has any chance of helping him. We'll keep him under lock and key, and I'll be here day and night."

"Somewhere more secure," she asked after listening for a moment, stopping to look through the soundproof windows lining the hermetically sealed laboratory that occupied the bulk of SERAPH's office in City Hall, silently studying the unconscious figure draped atop an examination bed within, "where would you suggest? ...the Zig? Tell me you didn't just say that."

The office intern who'd stepped into the room with a clipboard full of papers in hand knew better than to interrupt, and waited wordlessly as the Warshade stepped away from the window and leaned over her desk, bracing the phone against her shoulder as she logged into her computer and began clicking back and forth between several neurological charts.

"It's already 10 o'clock," she muttered into the phone, "so no matter what we decide, he'll have to stay here tonight anyway. We can figure out the rest of it tomorrow."

She hung up the phone before the voice on the other end could begin a counterargument, and closed her eyes for a moment, the ethereal gray light of her eyes blinking away for a moment before opening again on the freckled SERAPH intern, a boy working on his Master's degree at an age when most wouldn't even be thinking about where to go on their senior trip.

"I can't believe they'd attack City Hall," his voice piped nervously, "possessing a DATA technician and trying to detonate the Longbow portal? That's... well, that's big."

"The Nictus are scared," Shadowstar answered quietly as she set the phone on her desk, "for thousands of years, the Peacebringers arriving on Earth has been the one thing they've feared most. Now that it's happened, they're desperate, and very dangerous."

"Guess so," he replied, rubbing the back of his head with one hand as he glanced over her shoulder into the sealed white laboratory. He looked down again and then suddenly remembered the clipboard still clutched in his left hand. He handed it to her.

"I pulled up his personnel files like you asked," he shrugged a little as she flipped through each of the pages, "his name's Eric Grayson, one of the mid-level portal technicians with DATA. Twenty-eight years old, never married. No family, no criminal record, nothing unusual about his resume, his education or his work history. As far as I can tell, he's just a nobody..."

"That 'nobody' saved thousands of lives," she grimly cut him off, "including everyone in this building. I would think you'd talk about him with a little more respect."

"Of course," the intern nodded apologetically , "I didn't mean... it's just, there's nothing in his records to suggest he'd be especially resistant to the Nictus. But we're lucky he was. If it'd possessed anyone else, like, if it was me... I don't know what would have happened."

"We were lucky," she said softly as she zoomed in on one of the images on her computer monitor, pulled up a calculator in another window and and typed in a quick flurry of numbers, only to mutter a soft curse at the results flashing on the screen. They'd spent the last few hours scrambling to strip the interior laboratory of its surgical instruments, equipment, anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon, and even now Professor St. John-Smythe was busy upstairs, stuck in a conference call with his own FBSA superiors in Washington.

"I just wish," she continued as she watched their captive patient through the window, his breath quick and ragged even in his sleep, "we could say the same for him."

"Can't we just extract the Nictus? You've done it before, right?"

"This is different," she shook her head a little and turned away from the laboratory window, yanking shut the pale green exterior curtains they'd been hastily adorned with as she turned back toward the young intern, "Eric used the Nictus's own powers to siphon off energy from the portal generator. That's what gave him enough time to fix the damage. Forcing the Nictus to use its powers in spite of itself, actually using them himself - attempting such a thing would have broken many people's minds. It didn't break his, but he didn't emerge intact.

"He connected too deeply with the Nictus. The neuroelectric barriers that normally separate a Nictus and its host collapsed. He triggered a Kheldian bond."

She gave a hopeless glance back at the swaying curtains before continuing.

"This isn't just possession anymore: they're becoming one. And once the process has started, I don't know if there's anything in this world that can stop it."

He's sort of an outsider, but he did host quite a festival under the pyramids.

I think he's gonna bomb a town... get down!

Hey hey, that's what syndication and Youtube clips are for! And that's my favorite one, though they're all great.

So you're saying click the Walk toggle, right? Will do!

Sounds like exactly what I was saying: play along long enough to get out alive, and worry about getting revenge later. Virtual reality trappings aside, this is precisely the same situation that Bane had Gotham City in during Dark Knight Rises: the villain could kill thousands of people instantly, so people have to play his game until they can secretly figure out how to fight back without dying instantly. If "playing his game" in this case gets them out faster than playing along until they've outsmarted and beaten the villain, that works too. They're not mutually exclusive plans.

Take out all the sci-fi stuff about VR and neural connections and an MMO, and what we basically have is a hostage situation. The criminal has a gun, a bomb, something that gives him life and death leverage over everyone at no risk to himself, and he's telling them that if they want to be released, they have to jump through his hoops.

On the one hand, we should always be looking for a chance to wrest power from him when he least expects it and escape that way. But on the other, if a criminal has a gun drawn on you and says "dance like a chicken and I'll let you go," would you really choose to instead let him pull the trigger, just to make a philosophical point about free will? This criminal went one better than most hostage-takers by giving his hostages a way out, so I'd focus on keeping everyone safe and taking advantage of it, so 10,000 people can then march right over to his real-life house and give him a collective beatdown.

On the third hand (hey, it works for Zaphod!), this troubles me...

If the developer's willing to meddle with people's interactions above and beyond the rules of the game, then he's not playing by his own rules. I haven't read anything apart from this thread and the Wiki article on SAO, but that suggests he can and will interfere with any mass escape plan that gets too close to succeeding, even if everyone's following his rules. In that case, we'd keep playing the game (after all, he's still holding a gun on 10,000 people), but the game becomes even more of a pretense for hacking the system from within, secretly coordinating with people on the outside, finding exploits that screw up the engine or some other method of breaking his hold on the situation.