Chapter II
Which tells of the first sally of our hero and his sidekick and the adventure of the pillbox.
After traveling for a time in the renowned, treacherous zone known as Bloody Bay, they came in sight of seven or eight turrets that rise from a rough hewn installation, and no sooner did Don Terr1fic see them than he said in team chat: Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Gud, thirty or forty afk stalkers? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich, for this is righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service Statesman will bless.
wut stakers, asked Teh Gud Healor.
Those you see over there, replied his mentor, with their stacked stealth powers; some of them have them well-nigh three layers in depth.
wut r u sying, cried Gud. tohse r not stakers but tureds n tehy dun have sords
tehy r conans wihc shot u f u get 2 cose.
It is clear, replied Don Terr1fic angrily, that you are not experienced in PvP. Those are stalkers, and if you are afraid, turn aside and pray whilst I enter into fierce and honorable combat with them.
Uttering these words, he toggled on group fly, without heeding the cries of his sidekick, Gud, who warned him that he was not going to attack stalkers but turrets. But so convinced was he that they were stalkers that he neither saw his sidekicks tells nor did he notice what they were, though he was very near them. Instead, he rushed on, spamming on broadcast: Fly not, cowards and vile caitiffs; one hero alone attacks you! At that moment he entered agro range and the great cannons began to move. When Don Terr1fic saw this, he shouted again: Although you flourish more swords than the villain Scirocco, you shall pay for it!
Saying this and commending himself most devoutly to his super group leader, whom he begged to help him in his peril, he toggled on maneuvers, set flurry to autofire, flew as fast as group fly would take him, and rammed the first turret in his way. He stood there valiantly performing the flurry animation, but at that very moment a genuine stalker struck him with assassins strike with such violence that it knocked three red enhancements from their slots and dropped their owner flat on the ground, the ragdoll corpse tumbling over and over towards the coast until it landed softly in the water.
d00d!!11 cried Gud. i tol u 2 b carfull
no1 cud hav thot tehy wur stakers unles he had staker n his brane.
Hold your peace, good Gud, replied Don Terr1fic. The affairs of PvP are, above all others, subject to continual change. Moreover, I am convinced, and that is the truth, that the super villain Arachnos, the one who robbed me of my base and guides, has changed those stalkers into turrets and used recall friend to bring in that reinforcing knave to deprive me of victory; such is the enmity he bears against me. But in the end his evil arts will be of little avail against my doughty sword.
mabe teh devs wil fix taht, cried Gud as he handed his mentor an awaken, and waited for him to turn group fly back on, his endurance yet to be fully recovered.
Gud then bade his mentor consider that it was now time to buy more inspirations, but the latter told him to do so whenever he fancied. As for himself, he still had several respites. Gud had no sooner obtained leave of his mentor than they both suffered a map server disconnect, the valiant hero raining blows upon his keyboard in vain and cursing the villainous Arachnos.
((As a belated disclaimer, this satire was meant in fun. My personal stance on the eternal PvP elite vs. carebears debate is fairly neutral. My characters sacrifice a lot to their themes and generally arent able to survive against the elite in PvP zones. I go in knowing this, and just try to have fun there. As far as my politically incorrect criticism of certain powers which in practice do have an actual use, especially in the character development department (flurry for example), its all in good fun. I even have jumpkick on one character.))
[edited for clarity in some places]
((What follows is a satire of Don Quixote, in a CoX context. Much thanks to Cervantes for the original Don Quixote, and Walter Starkie for the monstrously thick, unabridged translation this was roughly based off of. I started working on this after reading about PvP honor and it grew longer than originally expected.))
Chapter I
Which tells of the madness and beginning of the quest of the famous hero Don Terr1fic of Atlas Park.
In a zone of Paragon City, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those heroes who are wont to keep a broadsword in the rack, a red damage resistance enhancement, a suppressible travel power, and a collection of badges. They say his surname was -Amazing or .Fantastlc (for there is much dispute on this matter, and whether his name included in it a period or a hyphen), but we may reasonably conjecture that his name was Terr1fic.
You must know that the above-mentioned gentleman in his leisure moments (which was most of the year) gave himself up with so much delight and gusto to reading guides to archetypes that he almost entirely neglected the exercise of the patrol and even the management of his coalition affairs. Indeed his craze for this kind of literature became so extravagant that he sold many of his bases decorative items to purchase guides to badge locations, and he carried to his base as many as he could possibly find. Above all, he preferred those player guides written with perfect diction, syntax and grammar, and when he found the tactics within lacking in the arena against his fellow heroes, he would often utter expressions such as: The reason for your unreasonable treatment of my reason so enfeebles my reason that I have reason to complain of your honor.
These and similar player guides bewildered the poor gentlemans understanding, for he racked his brain day and night to unbowel their meaning, which not even Atlas himself could have done if he had been raised from the dead for the very purpose. In short, he so immersed himself in those guides that he spent whole days and nights over the forums; and thus with little sleeping and much reading, his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason.
At last, having lost his wits completely, he stumbled upon the oddest fancy that ever entered a madmans brain. He believed that it was necessary, both for his honor and the service of Paragon City, that he should become a hero-errant, roaming the PvP zones with his group fly and flurry in quest of adventures and practicing all that had been performed by the heroes-errant of whom he had read. And thus excited by these agreeable delusions, he hastened to put his plans into operation.
Before boarding the tram to Skyway City, Don Terr1fic made overtures to a certain struggling n00b, a neighbor of his and an honest fellow, but with very little wit in his pate. In effect, he broadcasted and spammed invitations to him and made so many promises that the poor wight resolved to set out with him and serve him as sidekick. Among other things Don Terr1fic told him that he should be willing to go with him because some time or another he might meet with a contact that would earn for him, in the twinkling of an eye, some Hammi-O, and he would find himself owner of it. With those and other promises, Teh Gud Healor (for that was the fellows name) left his team and engaged himself as sidekick to his neighbor.