Embracing the abyss(Your fictional swan song)

Hi all,

Since we all await the impending blackhole of corporate destruction, I was wondering from a story-wise or creative standpoint of how (You're) world will end with the game. Please post some fiction on the end of days for your characters.

The swan song for 2 of my favorite characters, Atshen (my first 50) and Vindictive Wife (my second 50) are written here, along with my RL son's first 50, Axing Questions.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=296250

I'm think I will write final stories for one or two of my other characters, but likely not all of them. Some of them will simply slip away, too consumed in the fight to notice the impending destruction.

I honestly can't bring myself to kill off Exo-buster, Gaela, and Tyrannicus...and would probably just end up taking the character concepts and transplanting them into play by post and chat based role plays should City of Heroes or a superhero game of similar quality be unavailable. That being said, I might just come up with a story of how they leave the CoX multiverse, either of their own volition to escape the impending collapse, or brought against their will by the laughter of thirsting gods.

There's no impending collapse. The world is not ending. My characters will go to sleep on November 30th just like they do every day after making the world a better place. They saved the world, and for once, it stayed saved. Strangely, there will be no new crimes, no supervillains, no world ending threat to call them to action for a while. They get to hang out in their favorite spots of the city in their civilian identities, taking a well deserved break.

And maybe, in a few months or a few years, they'll be called to action again. Either by Paragon City, running in an alternate universe thanks to the efforts of server emulator programmers, or in a completely new setting, when someone figures out what made COH great and decides to make something just like it, but different enough to avoid the ultimate evil in the world: lawyers.

It's not the end of the world. It's just a vacation.

I think the best in universe reason to explain why everything stops on november 30th is that because Lord Recluse doesn't rule the world, as Mender Silos said is needed for the Earth to survive the coming storm, when the Battalion comes, they get us all to bite down on the curb and then stomp on our heads, drink the well of furies dry, and then mind control all incarnations of humanity across the CoX multiverse. So I think I'll go with that to explain why my characters tried to flee the multiverse.

Sure they try to put up a fight, but honestly, what can we do against a species where every member is as powerful as statesman and lord recluse at the very least if not a lot more powerful? One that's likely going to vastly outnumber us too. Realistically, most of us would go down swinging though, just like how we'd want our game to.

My characters will still be around in one form or another, after the credits roll on CoH and the servers shut down.

Some will be recycled into other medium- Mellissandria, for instance, will just finally fix her timeship and go off into new adventures with her husband (In game, she married 'Father' Roy O'Bannen. Yes, we already talked about it, myself and Roy's player) Another character, I'm going to keep writing about, see if I can make a coherent story about her..

Others will be quietly retired- Eg: Rhiannon Archer (or Sailor Bast) will end her story, with luck, riding on the back of Reborn Healer's motorcycle in her wedding dress, casting off her veil as they ride into the sunset...and still others will quietly fade into the background or morph into other characters in other stories or MMOs.

While I want to believe that CoH will survive, something tells me that it may not. However, it might return at some point in that grey area where 'abandonware' MMOs go to live as a private server. Perhaps some of my toons will turn up there...or somewhere else.

In the world in my characters live, there will be no apocalypse; because of what happened when Tyrant was finally confronted, the future was changed. Lord Recluse, on seeing what happened to Tyrant, quietly turned his claws towards the cause of peace instead of domination. The Rikti have seen the errors of their ways, and work with the humans to rebuild the worlds. Because the future is changed, the 'coming storm' never comes to be, and the Well goes quiet....but when the call goes out for heroes, they will still be there to answer it. Especially those like Oryo and the Mystik Paladin, who are basically career superheroes. Even peace has to be defended, and those purse snatchers never do seem to learn...

But that's just me.

The world doesn't end for my characters, because that's not how superhero stories end. In the end, the superheroes *save* the world.

So after Nov. 30, my characters go on fighting Rikti and Tsoo and Banished Pantheon ... they'll continue responding when the world needs a hero, because that's what they've always done.

November 30 won't be any special day for my heroes... because *they* live in a world where, in the end, justice is always served.

Their world is always saved. Because they are superheroes. And that's what they do.

Well, if I wanted a swan song for my guys, I could just go play The Beating Heart of Astoria: A Play in Five Acts by The Cheshire Cat over at Mission Arcitect.

I mean, it could serve as a creepy metaphor for a server shutdown, especially the ending.

But I don't plan on having my guys go down with the ship. I'll be playing with Little David, Corrupted Haruspex, Wildfire Pete, and all my other City of Heroes-born characters in other places. I may take them to roleplaying communities, for instance.

Yep. No swan song for my heroes. The universe they live in is not dependent on a few bits streaming through a server someplace. They'll get up on December first and do the same things they do on any other day.