One more piece being preserved from the pre-release boards. This origin was originally part of Boxhead's competition. It was one of my few attempts to do a 'dark' hero and the results are, once you think about it, about as dark as you can get. Of the origins that I designed before the archetypes were known this one was the easiest to do in the game...just a mammoth tanker with superstrength and invulnerability with the robotic looking parts.
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Some days the pain is bad. Other days it is worse. At least those days provide variety.
The days when I am working seem to go easier. I always wonder, though, if that is genuine enjoyment or a feature they designed into the implants.
They should have let me die. That is supposed to be the way it is when you work high steel. You screw up; you die, or close to it. It makes you careful.
I dont know why she signed those medical release forms. I guess she did not want to have to act like she cared at the funeral. Or maybe it was just another way of getting even with me.
In the last union contract it was heralded as a breakthrough: Managed Productivity Health Care Plan. The idea was that, if they can fix you up enough to keep working the insurer would collect the disability or death benefit that would not have been otherwise paid. Even more so if they could show that they actually improved your productivity they would collect a commission on the improvement.
So some fool in a cubicle in one of these buildings did a cost-benefit spreadsheet on how much a tenfold improvement in the lifetime wages of a steel erector still in his early twenties would be worth.
I should have been dead. She signed the papers. They turned me into a machine.
It was just a fall. There really was a lot of me they could have saved. But just making me a person again was not their plans. I can just imagine the project meeting in some white-board covered conference room high up in one of these buildings...
...Real legs were not as productive as hyper-pneumatic ones that would let me leap from beam to beam and floor to floor.
...Ordinary arms were not as productive as super-strength limbs with clamps for hands that could apply thousands of pounds of force.
...Or maybe a permanently installed acetylene torch with variable spread jet?
...Oh while we are at it why not a permanently mounted hard hat and welders mask? That would save a few seconds each day!
...Stop thinking so inside the box folks! Make him armored all over to make him really resistant to injury.
...What color? A high-visibility yellow and black like all construction machinery.
...Give him quick recharge of his batteries and little need for sleep so that he can work all the overtime they want.
...Give him an enhanced toxin clearing liver so that he can never have his productivity hurt by being drunk or hung-over.
...Even a high capacity bladder for less restroom breaks.
...What about his ****? someone would have then commented half-seriously. When did that ever make a man productive some sarcastic [censored] would have sneered and the whole meeting would have gotten a chuckle. Ha, Ha, very funny. But since nobody really had an answer to that it was left off the specifications too. Not that anything but work productivity was in mind for this machine they were creating.
Maybe when I came to and saw what they had done I could have just said screw you to the whole lot of them and refused to go back to work. It would have served them right. But I would still have been a machine, only a useless machine. That would have been even worse.
So I dance the ten ton ballet called high steel; jumping and leaping among the lofty latticework of the new skyscrapers in this rebuilding city, guiding the massive beams and columns into place as they are delivered to the uppermost reaches by the crane operators. It is what I am. It is not what I chose to be but I am hardly the only person in this city who did not get to choose what they are. But I am never quite sure if that is my own thinking or something they worked into the implants.
Then late, when the jobsite goes quiet and I have no desire for sleep or drink or companionship I roam the highest and lowest reaches of this city for lack of anything else to do. Occasionally in these dark hours I come across something that requires action to set right. And I will take the action; not because of any great desire to do good but because otherwise I would have to face my inaction: That I could have made a difference but didnt. Maybe that too is something that they made part of the implants, so that I would be mindful of the safety of other workers around me and thus improve productivity. I wont ever know the answer to that either.
Posted
sorry to be off topic... but that signature is a BIT much
Posted
Signature? That is the post. I have no signature.
Posted
o, lol.. i saw the ---------'s and thought "man... that's a huge sig!" sorry.. you can delete my posts..
One more piece being preserved from the pre-release boards. This origin was originally part of Boxhead's competition. It was one of my few attempts to do a 'dark' hero and the results are, once you think about it, about as dark as you can get. Of the origins that I designed before the archetypes were known this one was the easiest to do in the game...just a mammoth tanker with superstrength and invulnerability with the robotic looking parts.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some days the pain is bad. Other days it is worse. At least those days provide variety.
The days when I am working seem to go easier. I always wonder, though, if that is genuine enjoyment or a feature they designed into the implants.
They should have let me die. That is supposed to be the way it is when you work high steel. You screw up; you die, or close to it. It makes you careful.
I dont know why she signed those medical release forms. I guess she did not want to have to act like she cared at the funeral. Or maybe it was just another way of getting even with me.
In the last union contract it was heralded as a breakthrough: Managed Productivity Health Care Plan. The idea was that, if they can fix you up enough to keep working the insurer would collect the disability or death benefit that would not have been otherwise paid. Even more so if they could show that they actually improved your productivity they would collect a commission on the improvement.
So some fool in a cubicle in one of these buildings did a cost-benefit spreadsheet on how much a tenfold improvement in the lifetime wages of a steel erector still in his early twenties would be worth.
I should have been dead. She signed the papers. They turned me into a machine.
It was just a fall. There really was a lot of me they could have saved. But just making me a person again was not their plans. I can just imagine the project meeting in some white-board covered conference room high up in one of these buildings...
...Real legs were not as productive as hyper-pneumatic ones that would let me leap from beam to beam and floor to floor.
...Ordinary arms were not as productive as super-strength limbs with clamps for hands that could apply thousands of pounds of force.
...Or maybe a permanently installed acetylene torch with variable spread jet?
...Oh while we are at it why not a permanently mounted hard hat and welders mask? That would save a few seconds each day!
...Stop thinking so inside the box folks! Make him armored all over to make him really resistant to injury.
...What color? A high-visibility yellow and black like all construction machinery.
...Give him quick recharge of his batteries and little need for sleep so that he can work all the overtime they want.
...Give him an enhanced toxin clearing liver so that he can never have his productivity hurt by being drunk or hung-over.
...Even a high capacity bladder for less restroom breaks.
...What about his ****? someone would have then commented half-seriously. When did that ever make a man productive some sarcastic [censored] would have sneered and the whole meeting would have gotten a chuckle. Ha, Ha, very funny. But since nobody really had an answer to that it was left off the specifications too. Not that anything but work productivity was in mind for this machine they were creating.
Maybe when I came to and saw what they had done I could have just said screw you to the whole lot of them and refused to go back to work. It would have served them right. But I would still have been a machine, only a useless machine. That would have been even worse.
So I dance the ten ton ballet called high steel; jumping and leaping among the lofty latticework of the new skyscrapers in this rebuilding city, guiding the massive beams and columns into place as they are delivered to the uppermost reaches by the crane operators. It is what I am. It is not what I chose to be but I am hardly the only person in this city who did not get to choose what they are. But I am never quite sure if that is my own thinking or something they worked into the implants.
Then late, when the jobsite goes quiet and I have no desire for sleep or drink or companionship I roam the highest and lowest reaches of this city for lack of anything else to do. Occasionally in these dark hours I come across something that requires action to set right. And I will take the action; not because of any great desire to do good but because otherwise I would have to face my inaction: That I could have made a difference but didnt. Maybe that too is something that they made part of the implants, so that I would be mindful of the safety of other workers around me and thus improve productivity. I wont ever know the answer to that either.