synthozoic

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It's not like the only two options for female clothing are burqua and bikini. I think there's plenty of high heels and lingerie already, and I'd like to see more armored outfits and boots with cleats. Or, y'know, more lingerie for male models. Either of those is good, really.

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I'm a DIRL and all the female characters I've built in this game so far have all been very firmly of the armor and cleats school. Why? Because they're "Bob" darned superheros! They get shot at with guns, flamethrowers, nuclear weapons and worse! It's just pragmatic. "Bikini girls with machine guns" might be a fun song but is definitely not something to guide the sartorial decisions of gals who want to be in the super business!

And no, I ain't building any superguys in lingerie either. Sorry gals.

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The last country to give up Imperial measurements will be the US. We're so addicted to Miles, Feet, Yards, and the like that we're still fighting tooth and claw NOT to use metric.

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Well that may be true for the US as a whole but not for me. I perversely use SI units in all my communication and avoid any mention of Imperial Units in casual conversation. I just love to have my fellow Usans scratching their heads!!

Name: Unknown, the corpse's name was Amanda Wilkerson
Aliases: Quark Zombie, which is a codename assigned to her on the US Military Threat List. The entity that inhabits Wilkerson's corpse, seems unwilling to volunteer any names of its own.
Age: The corpose appears about 30, but really, this is kind of hard to discern as she is now a horrifically scarred, mummified, radioactive corpose animated by hyperspatial forces outside current scientific understanding.
Message board threads: Chateau Rouge
Origin, archetype and powers: A radioactive corruptor, a freak of science with death ray eyes and the ability to manipulate negative space-time curvatures, inertia, potential and kinetic energy at will.
Server: Virtue
Threads: Chateau Rogue, (abortively, The Crossing.)

Screenshots:

• Cold and astronomically remote, the Quark Zombie stares at us in terahertz light.
• Moving among creatures it doesn't want to kill with ionizing radiation, the Quark Zombie dons a full hazmat suit, with boots, gloves and mask.
• Able to summon large amounts of negative mass and energy, the Quark Zombie levitates, glowing with Cherenkov light.
• Its death ray eyes as its preferred weapon, the Quark Zombie kills with injurious vision.

In a world full of superhumans, Quark Zombie's origin is so cliche it's almost mythic.

Amanda Wilkerson was an experiemental physicist, part of a team of specialists working with the new ULTIMA apparatus outside Fargo, North Dakota. ULTIMA, which stands for Unified, Large Tensor Instantiation Array, was a giant high energy physics tool built to test predictions in the Extended Standard Model.

There was a freak occurance during the first ignition of the array and a fire broke out in the main scintillation counter assembly, just after the primary laser cooling stage. Wilkerson, the chief scientist on the team, went to investigate the damage directly. She wanted to understand what was destroying that last four years of her work, of her life.

What she found in the fire is still a mystery but, the evidence found in the aftermath was truly bizarre. It caused Wilkerson's colleague Professor Othiambe, upon seeing it, to mumble and shake his head in fear and then fall silent. When questioned, he'd only say, "No, it is fruitless and irresponsible to speculate what happened here. Mathematical methods aren't mature enough. I will not give the press lurid spook stories." He later completely changed the focus of his research, abandoning 10 years of prior work. The other members of the team reacted similarly. And in the two years since then an unspoken decision was made by the global community of physicists not to pursue research similar to the ULTIMA project.

Here is what they found in the wreckage of the fire. The assembly housing, where the fire took place, was inexplicably and intensely radioactive. The source of this radioactivity was unknown and wasn't due to any expected effects of ULTIMA operation. Cables, struts and braces, holding and cooling the instruments surrounding the reaction vessel, were sheered away in a near perfect sphere, some four meters accross, almost as if something had taken spherical bite out out of the machinary. The material that would have existed in the volume of the sphere was nowhere to be found. There was no ash, slag, rubble or debris of any kind. The material had completely disappeared.

And, at last, Amanda was found in radiation of that strange scene, dying rapidly. Her colleagues, in hazmat suits, pulled her from the wreckage as fire fighters put out the blaze and contained any toxic residue. After such intense radiation exposure, she was given a day at most to live. She should have died.

But she did not. In a special intensive care room at a nearby hospital, her body struggled its last. Then suddenly the radiation in the room intensified enormously, killing a doctor watching over her. She was the source of this radiation, that grew and grew until her bones glowed with an intense nuclear heat that should have incinerated her instantly. She rose from her burning bed with her eyes glowing with the speckles of coherent light interference. Her eyes were something not to be stared at for fear of your own blindless.

She strode across the room, body glowing with light, to the door and, with five minutes steady effort, her eyes burned right through the lock, the door handle and the door itself.

She had inhuman power. She walked slowly through the hospital leaving death in her wake. A security guard tried to shoot her and scored a hit before he collapsed dying in his own vomit. The bullet did nothing. She was not a creature of flesh and blood now. She strolled out into the night, into parking lot outside and was not seen again. The radiation trail she made ended abruptly there. It was suspected that then she performed her first space warp and teleported herself far away. In the months that followed she made further sudden apparences, gathering supplies, stealing equipment, perhaps getting her bearings for whatever plans lurked in that truly alien mind.

Her appearances become more frequent but at that point, a year since the fire, she'd fashioned a suit that contained her intense radiactivity and the death of bystanders diminished. The deaths did not stop because she had power and she had an unknown agenda. She seemed completely unconcerned with human life. We were ants for her to burn, poison and crush.

And her power appeared to be growing. Most frighteningly of all, she began to communicate with us. It was not the communication of a human mind.

Name: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
Aliases: V. I. Lenin, N. Lenin, R. Lenin or, as he is well known in Paragon City as, Robot Lenin.
Age: This is complicated but appears to be in his mid-forties.
Message board threads: No threads yet.
Origin, archetype and powers: A technology blaster with a sophisticated assault rifle, defensive devices and piston boots which give him running speeds of up to 80 kph
Server: Virtue

Screenshots:

• Raising the political consciousness of the robot masses
• Dismissing the reactionary propaganda of crypto-fascists
• Discussing fine points of US Federal Law
• Guest lecturing at Paragon University
• The Vanguard of Change
• Mao says, "Revolution sometimes comes from the mouth of a gun."

Robot Lenin's origin is rather complicated.(0)

Robot Lenin is not from the universe or Earth of Paragon City(1) but from a universe(2) with a similar historical background but radically different physics. For example, in Robot Lenin's universe, magic and psychic forces simply don't exist and, he has had some trouble getting used to their existence in Paragon City. Nor is Robot Lenin from our real universe(4) either. The history of his Earth departs from ours in 1924, the year of Lenin's death. His arrival on the Earth of Paragon City is quite by accident. Portal Corporation(5) scientists tuned into his universe in their attempts to seal off alternative routes from the Rikti Universe. Just before the moment of his discovery and transference to the Portal Corporation labs in Paragon, Robot Lenin was aboard a Russian space colony writing a lengthy treatise on the subject of rights for artificial organisms.

How is it possible for a man, who died in 1924 from his third and final stroke, to be found on a space station orbiting Venus in 2085?

Let us start with this obscure historical fact from early Soviet history:

After his death in 1924, Soviet cosmists, Leonid Krasin and Alexander Bogdanov proposed to cryopreserve Lenin's body and brain to resurrect him at some future date. In our universe, on our Earth, in the real world, nothing came of this.

But imagine, on the Earth of Universe Xi Xi 23-72, an allohistory where this project, buried in deepest secrecy and bureaucratic obscurity, was actually put through! Imagine if this project survived Stalin, World War II, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Imagine if the vacuum bottle containing Lenin's cryonically suspended brain passed out of the hands of a corrupt former KGB officer to a minor party of eccentric Russian techno-anarchists? Imagine if they kept this brain cold until the rise of nanotechnology and the precipice of a Vingian Singularity. Now, imagine an android Lenin reborn in a Russian space colony, armed with Gordeyev 74 piston boots, a Kalashnikov 217 rifle and a few new subversive tracts he's written, fighting to free all sapient artificial life from the hands of its organic oppressors!

This is a quotation from Robot Lenin's journal soon after his arrival in Paragon: