synthozoic

After a few months haitus from this section of the board, I'm back and interested in joining in with this one and contribute a subplot or two, but I do want to respect Unionverse's continuity and such.

Personally, I dislike movie remakes but, since The Terminator franchise is more or less dead, how about a remake of Colossus: The Forbin Project?

Name: Essentially unknown but this is a simplification as will be explained below.
Aliases: Alquist, Alquist One, Alquist 1, Al, A-1
Age: 2 years as a cyborg, 25 as a human
Message board threads: None yet.
Origin, archetype and powers: A technological mastermind with robotic assistants and bow launched defensive weapons.
Server: Virtue
Current thread: Whitmoore Apartments

In another universe, on another Earth, in the capital of the Global Imperial State of Praetoria, there was a mildly eccentric robotics engineer with a promising career ahead of him.

But this was cut short after an industrial accident mangled and crippled his body. Not one to accept the whims of fate and chance, this engineer, faked suicide and then paid for illegal surgery to transplant his brain into a robot body to begin a new life. After the operation, he cut all ties with his old life. He was never very happy as a human being anyway.

This surgery was illegal for several reasons but the chief of which was that it was performed by doctors loyal to terrorist groups campaigning against Praetorian authority. The surgery was expensive. The engineer owed Calvin Scott's Resistance a great debt.

Taking his new name from an obscure character in the famous Czech play RUR, Alquist One became a Resistance mole within the Praetorian Powers Division. Despite several successful missions, Alquist's subversion was discovered and he is now a criminal on the run from the Emperor's Law. Luckily, the Resistance provided him a way to flee to the universe of Paragon's Earth. There he hopes to thwart Emperor Cole's invasion plan and perhaps one day reform Praetorian Earth into a more democratic society. He is also providing his talents to aid Paragon City and the United States in maintaining order and combating superhuman crime. He hopes to prove to the people of Paragon Earth that not all Praetorians are bent on invasion, occupation and dictatorship.

Because Preatorian Earth's robotic technology is slightly more advanced than Paragon Earth's Alquist was able to secure several minor but valuable patents. He is using the money from these to build alternate robot bodies to house his brain in.

Alquist is odd. In more than two years as a cyborg, he become a friendly but mocking and often patronizing misanthrope. Which is to say, he often points out the disadvantages of the human condition, mocking such requirements as waste elimination, sleep, libido and so on. He also states his long term plan to replace all the organic neurons in his brain with artificial ones. He hopes to become a fully artificial lifeform soon and has no regrets over abandoning his old life viewing his new life as greatly superior.

Currently he has two robot bodies and to help his friends and comrades in identification, he wears a large red and white decal of the rook chess piece on his chest. This rook doesn't really mean anything. It was just a decal he had handy at the time and the tradition stuck. Because his head has no human facial features, it's often hard to tell his intent accept by vocal tones and body language. Just to be difficult, he has toyed with the idea of replacing his artificial larynx, the output of which is of superior quality and indistinguishable from a human voice, with something more primitive and toneless.

But despite all this, Alquist doesn't have any hatred for humans. On more than one occasion he has said that diversity is a good thing. If anything he seems to harbor a kind of pitying, patronizing feeling towards them, as if they were error prone children in need of his protection. Some pictures of Alquist follow:

• Alquist 1 in his early, carefree days, working for the man, before he was an enemy of the state.
• Mostly of historical interest--early tests of his combat body back in Praetoria.
• Soon after his arrival in Paragon's universe, note his lower legs and feet. These have recently been upgraded. Al still refers to the older models as his "bell bottom period."
• Alquist 1's general purpose body. Everyone will see him this one most.
• A better picture of Al's combat body.
• This one could be labeled as "Al and the Boys." But in truth, the other robots, even though he's given them names, are really more analogous to having extra hands wired to his brain. They only have rudimentary AI on board.
• This one isn't out of the lab yet, it's his third body. There are still bugs and it isn't ready for prime time.

As taken from pages on the Paragon Times website ("Because, really, what superhuman reads news in dead trees anymore?"):

So today while reading IO9, I came across a reference to a site with an interesting set of essays about superheroes and legal issues. I read a few thought some of them very interesting and thought provoking. You RP'ers or aspiring authors might want to take a look.

Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, Supervillains and the Law

So I've seen the Virtue verse wiki on the Web and am rather jealous. Is there anything like that for Infinity hosted by someone?

One of the most powerful beings in the multiverse, although he'd be the first to explain to you in exhaustive detail why he wasn't, Doubting Zack, was sitting in a diner in King's Row. It was lunch and he loved the BLTs they made in this greasy spoon. Reading the paper, he shook his head over the gossip column and celebrity stories. There was apparently a new bout of so-called superhero shenanigans over at a dance club that he could never find called Pocket D.

He snorted and thought, "Hm. I oughta go over there and explain to these idiots why their powers can't possibly work the way they think and why it just isn't possible for a discotheque to exist outside the universe."

Because you see, that was Doubting Zack's only power: He could explain away the superhuman talents of others.

Using the rigor of modern science and good old fashioned horse sense, Zack could cause Statesmen to bust a triple hernia before he lifted and threw his first car. Heat vision would die stillborn in Zack's presence. Heroes would plummet from the sky. Gods would simply vanish in a puff of logic. Wizards and thaumaturges would find their magic fled. Mind readers would draw a blank. Mechas, suits of powered armor and rampaging robots all had to be based on rock solid engineering--no handwavium about repulsor rays or arc reactors--or they'd freeze solid just as Zack looked them.

All the other supers just stayed the hell away from Zack. Zack was bad news. Just a brief exposure to Zack, or worse, one of his long winded lectures about the energy density of batteries or principles of leverage, was enough to deprive a hero of his or her powers for weeks and months afterward. These would be weeks filled with self-doubt and depression of a world gone gray, a world without magic.

Zack, the self-righteous, know-it-all, jerk, loved it.

So today, Zack thought he'd go set things straight down at Pocket D. Zack had heard about Pocket D for years. He heard that was where the elites went to party. But he was never able to find it. People would point him to the entrances but when he walked over to them, all he'd find were empty moving vans or blank, graffiti covered walls.

At the time, he thought people were just playing jokes on him. True believers don't like it when you smash their heroes. People don't want to have both barrels of reality. Zack thought the other citizens of Paragon mostly hated him and wanted to play jokes on him. And he was cool with that because within the limits of his vision, he was king. The rules of science where on his side.

But now this stuff was cluttering his daily read of the newspaper so, Zack decided to set things straight. And as the powers that be would have it, today was the day, after years of searching, Zack finally found the entrance to Pocket D.

He walked up to the back of the moving van and drew back the heavy latches on the doors. He opened the doors and, in the brightness of the day, saw the mostly dark and empty interior. It looked empty. Was this another dead end like all the rest?

Irritation and persistence drove him to actually enter the van. Stepping up and inside, he felt the gravity shift in ways that he knew couldn't be possible. Darkness fell upon him and the sounds of the street faded away. He tried to turn around and found that the entrance had vanished. He was now in total darkness and complete silence.

Suddenly he became aware of sharp pains in all his joints and a painful rending sensation all over his body. He exhaled and found that he couldn't breath in again. It was as if the air had vanished. His eardrums lanced hot needles of pain into his skull and his eyes wicked into a horrible dryness that make it difficult to move his eyelids.

He then realized he was in a floating a black infinite vacuum and he was doomed to asphyxiate as his body underwent slow, steady and painful embolism.

"For you see, we don't like killjoys," an impossible mental voice that he knew was not his own sounded in his mind, not that he was paying it any attention in the last terror and pain filled moments of his life.

((And thus the thread was saved from any more silly attempts to justify the existence of Doubting Zack.))

Okay here is a weird one: I would not like to have Forge's power. Why? Because he makes all these wonderful gadgets but has no real understanding how he does it. I'd really, really, really hate that. At least Mr. Fantastic understands the stuff he makes and can share his knowledge with others.

I'm in agreement that Preatoria is not even in the US. My theory, based on Tyrant's bio, is that its located somewhere in Central or South America. Global warming or nuclear winter or not, that forest out there looks distinctly tropical. The Hamidon Wars pretty much trashed most of the cities and civilization in the 70s and the surviors were forced to rebuild things again from scratch.

That and a lot of the architecture of the Praetorian buildings sort of remind me the newer buildings in some of the big cities of Brazil.

Thanks muchly ZM!

So this is kind of a weird question but has someone compiled a list of the musical introductions associated with various locations on the maps of CoH/V/GR? For example, when your toon first enters Steel Pier in Independence Port, there is this, to me at least, a rather kickin' gated drum track that plays. Has someone exhaustively listed all those themes by location?

And is there a list of credits for the composers of said music?