Mutant issue....

I've long suggested the Outcasts be brought in to the higher levels and expanded upon.

Arresting Frostfire may have broken up the gang, but all these superpowered punks with a chip on their shoulder are still out there, waiting for someone else to bring them under their banner. They could be a special division of the Council or the 5th Column (letting the other side have the werewolves, vampires and aliens). The Center, being a suspected mutant himself IIRC, means the Council would be a good fit.


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People keep pointing out individual mutants as if that were the problem. But there are individual mutants - there are no mutant groups or storylines beyond the Outcasts.

Can you name a mutant group other than the Outcasts?

The problem is that the other origins are essentially manufactured. Need tech minions, give them powered armor. Need more wizards, train them. Need more naturals, train them.

But you cannot manufacture mutants to fill out a VG.

The solution to this in comic books is the combined origin. Something happened and a bunch of kids born soon after are mutants.

Smallville has a meteor crash that produced a generation of mutants. Static Shock has some event that produced a generation of mutants.

I don't know how old Crey's Folly disaster was - but there could be a group of mutants that were created by that. There must be other disasters - or just make one up.

Something I always figure is that Paragon City is a very tolerant city, much like San Fransisco. This may not be true for other parts of the world. Just because there isn't wide-scale, organized "burn the muties" stuff in the streets doesn't mean the kid with blue skin doesn't get a mountain of crap in high school. And not because of any particular hatred of mutants per say so much as people finding an excuse to be petty jerks to each other.

Additionally, most mutants don't have powers that are the type that make them human wrecking machines to be superheroes. For every one walking piece of human-shaped nuclear powered artillery there are dozens, maybe hundreds who while mutants, are not all that powerful. They're the guys who can talk to fish, or have grey skin, or can see gamma radiation, or whatever. Montague Castanella, for example, has the presumably mutant power to be immune to shifts in the time stream and sense alterations within a timeline. An absolutely useless power... unless you happen to cross paths with Ouroborus.

Psychic types do seem to be the most numerous, but that might be just that a lot of organizations recruit them pretty heavily. It doesn't help that "mutant" is kind of a catchall for what's really probably a number of different origins, from some kind of mutant gene or condition to the children of two metahumans who are born with powers themselves. They're really everything that isn't natural, science, magic, or tech, and the lines can get pretty blurry sometimes.

Even of those with a bit of real power, most don't really have enough of that mix of guts, power, brains and independence to become a hero or villain. So they join up with the Outcasts or Longbow or Arachnos or some other group. Or they maybe just go about their lives, get jobs, do a 9 to 5, raise a family, and so on, because they feel no real compulsion to choosing a line of work that involves being shot at a lot.

Being a mutant does not automatically preclude putting on tights.

I do see mutants as the most numerous of the origins, however, in that while the others are for the most part anomalies, accidents, or unique cases... mutants are just born. Nobody's sure how many there are. Maybe one in ten thousand, maybe one in five thousand, maybe even one in a thousand. That'd be between 30,000 to 300,000 in the US. At most, that's less than 0.1% of the population. That's not a whole lot, especially if you assume the majority, while still mutants, are either disinterested or unsuited to getting into the super scene. But it's a LOT more than probably every other type combined, because all those others are unique, pretty improbable scenarios.

If there's anti-mutant sentiment, it's likely lower level than the X-Men style mutant internment camps and Sentinels. I can imagine a scandal in professional sports when some football star turns out to be a low level mutant, and everyone starts going "Did his powers give him an edge? Is that cheating?" I can see high school bullies giving the kid with blue skin crap. I can see people on the bus giving odd looks to the guy in a business suit with four arms. I can see harried parents wondering what they did wrong to make their kid talk to birds in their own language, and trying to figure out if their child is ill... or actually can.

I imagine it was quite the shock in the 1940s, however, with people wondering if these different children born all over the world were infected with some kind of disease. Could it spread? Could my normal looking child turn green tomorrow, or suddenly start shooting fireballs? How do I protect my child? It's a very human reaction.

It probably took a while for people to figure out what was going on. I mean, we didn't even know about the DNA double helix until 1953.

But three generations have passed since then, and now? Only the greying oldtimers can remember an age where there were there weren't any children just born different and men couldn't fly. Heck, there are mutants with grandkids these days. Some even have great-grandkids. Assuming whatever factor that causes these things is hereditary and dominant, you may well be seeing third or fourth generation families of mutants, especially if you lump in the products of mixed metahuman marriages (like the child of two Science heroes will likely be... unique).

The world of City of Heroes is a pretty weird place sometimes. I admit a fascination with blurring the line between the fantastical and the mundane, and the juxtaposition of the strange mutant... and the old lady living next door who bakes you cookies. Makes it more interesting to me.

One little detail I always notice as well. Sister Psyche says mutants didn't appear until 1938. Sister Psyche was born in 1920. My general interpretation of this is that there were mutants born prior to 1938, but they were incredibly rare. After all, there were Giovanna Scaldi and Abelard Vernoux in the 1600s, both of them powerful psychics. But they were so rare, there was no term to describe them or concept that they were connected. After 1938, their numbers skyrocketed to the point that they became a discernible, identifiable and separate group and label.

But they've always been around, in the shadows, just like the Circle of Thorns goes into 1898 and Nemesis apparently used his inventions in the American Civil War and battled General Sherman.

And that's my rambling thoughts on the matter.

I hope they don't do too much with the Nuclear 90 story, though: I saw it as a great character hook and made my own Nuclear 90 mutant, and at least a few other people have mentioned doing the same (meaning there's probably way more than 90 out there, but as long as nobody's counting... ).

But maybe something similar to the Nuclear 90 or the "Bang Babies" in Static Shock could be the premise of an issue. Let's say that, just recently, hundreds of young adults all around the world have started developing dangerous superpowers, similar to the Nuclear 90 situation. An investigation traces the phenomenon back to something that secretly happened almost 20 years ago, like an experiment by Portal Corp that seemed to have no measurable effect, so nobody paid it much attention.

Now, however, the mutants born from that event are revealed as the key to something much bigger, and the hunt is on as both the villains, ranging from Crey Corporation to Arachnos, and the heroes are trying to find them all to capture, recruit or kill them. Some of them become heroes, some of them use their powers as villains, and others just want to live normal lives, and the premise leaves the actual roster big and vague enough to let players work the conflict into their backstory and take any role they want in it.

In other words, rather than trying to take on the story of "mutants" as a whole, which could easily fall into the "X-Men did it" trap, the story could focus on just one particular group of mutants, the event that sparked their births and how both the good and bad guys react to such an event.

While not mutants, with the Rikti Invasion being followed so quickly by the Praetorian Invasion, the world is ripe for an Anti-Meta/Anti-Super movement to take place. I could easily see Malta spearheading this. Especially as part of a ploy to regain their strength with what happened to the KoA.

I mean, Praetoria and the Rikti - iirc - only found Primal earth because of meta human meddling in alternative dimensions. Do we really want to live in a world where irresponsible scientists and walking deities decide if we live or die on a whim while inviting their friends from other dimensions over for sunday morning brawls?

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