Sorry about taking a few days to post (and for the crazy long message!), but I needed to find a night free to type it all out, and to grab some screenshots. With that in mind, I don't have much in the way of altitis, but I poured a lot of myself into my characters and they all felt a little like children; they had lives of their own, personalities, and I loved watching them grow, develop and surprise me at times with the directions they might take as the game's own arcs helped bring their stories to life. But to pick the favorites, I'll go with the four characters who inspired me to write fanfics of some kind about, whether AE arcs or Roleplaying stories, and tell the stories behind their stories. I'll include links to those threads as well since, if I don't share them now, then when?
"An angel of justice and heroic resolve, preserving the past and fighting for the future! Legendary radiant... Sparkly Soldier Yuki! Protector of Innocents!"
Quote:
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some get knocked flat on their backs by talking plushy cats from the future. Yukiko Yoshida was an ordinary schoolgirl until Mira, a psychic time traveler from a devastated future, found her projected mind accidentally stuck in the body of Yuki's toy cat. When the bewildered pair came under attack by Mira's alien pursuers, Mira hastily transferred all her remaining psychic energy to Yukiko, where it manifested as the magical girl powers Yuki's always wanted. Remembering that her mentor Seraphea, the future champion of the human resistance, used to joke about receiving her powers from a talking cat, Mira realized that Yukiko is destined to become that heroine. Now Yuki splits her days between fighting evil, learning how to master her newfound powers and worrying about boys.
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Yuki was the second character I made and the first to capture my imagination, and yet she ironically started off as just an offhand example character I made for a friend. We're both fans of Sailor Moon (though she much moreso) and I had trouble convincing her to try City of Heroes since, and I quote, "I don't read comic books." In an attempt to convince her that the character options were far more versatile than just spandex heroes, I quickly put together an homage to Sailor Moon reimagined as a young psychic girl in Paragon City, complete with her own talking cat mentor.
But something happened: her story started blooming with hardly any effort. Mira leaped out at me as the perfect name for her mentor, and as I read about the Kheldians, the Nictus quickly emerged as the aliens who rule the future Earth, and the nature of the future apocalypse became clearer: a disaster called the Shadow Storm (no relation to the Coming Storm) struck the world, casting it into endless night and reshaping the environment to allow them to possess most of the population. The name Seraphea emerged as Yuki's future self and from there the story just kept building on itself. I wound up publishing my first AE arc as Yuki telling the player about her origin story, with flashbacks to the post-apocaypse, the day she received her powers and her first attempt at fighting crime.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=283166
And Yuki kept growing as a character in my imagination. She embodied everything cheerful, wholesome and idealistic about both the magical-girl genre and Paragon City's own optimistic atmosphere, and more and more details came to mind, from the introductory battle speech she'd have spent all night coming up with (complete with badge and title references) to the attack names she'd shout. I wrote a story about her nearly taking a life and becoming a vigilante after her harrowing journey through First Ward, and began work on two more AE arcs, a trilogy culminating in the final battle of the future war. Three more stories about Yuki as a post-Batallion adult, a hardened but still idealistic Vanguard officer leading a Nictus-hunting team of heroes in an effort to change history, emerged and other details about her life came to mind that I would love to have immortalized in story form, given the chance.
As for that friend who thought she wouldn't like City of Heroes because she loves anime and "doesn't read comic books?" As a Premium player, she's spent far more money and earned more points than I have as a year-long subscriber... and her main character is a very Silver Age-style mutant with fire powers and a spandex outfit to match.
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Astorian Shade, birth name unknown
Necro/Dark Mastermind
"The fog whispers your name..."
Quote:
Atlas Park - December 13th
"I know we're all stretched thin with the Galaxy City disaster, but the Hellions are a menace. If you know of any heroes who can help with them, anyone at all..."
"Well, there is one hero... sort of. Dial this number. When you hear a click like someone picking up on the other end, say that you want to see Astorian Shade. You won't hear any answer, but she'll appear by nightfall."
"But this area code's in Astoria. Won't it be disconnected?"
"According to the city, it has been for years. Now, you should be safe so long as you're a law-abiding citizen. But she's not very friendly and, well, she's not always a pleasant sight. Nonetheless, I think she can help you."
"I 'should be' safe? What is she, exactly?"
"She comes from Dark Astoria. I'm afraid that's all we at MAGI know for sure. Good luck, Detective Habashy."
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Long before I'd actually tried City of Heroes I'd heard about a place in it called "Dark Astoria," mostly from MMO-savvy friends who knew I liked atmospheric horror games like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame. The screenshots had always made me curious, and one of the first things I did upon reaching a survivable level with Yuki was go to Talos Island and find out what exactly lay behind that misty gate to the east. What I found, of course, was a place where superheroes fought Silent Hill... and Silent Hill won. The exploration badges told a fascinating story and I only regretted that there weren't more arcs involving that abandoned, haunted corner of Paragon City.
And then the news came that Dark Astoria was being revamped for incarnates.
Even if the revamp turned out to be amazing (and it did), the hauntingly atmospheric Astoria I loved seemed to be going away, and at that point there wasn't any guarantee we'd have an Echo. So, before Issue 22 came out, I vowed to create a character as an homage to the old, foggy Astoria. An idea for a Croatoa-based fairy queen summoner hadn't panned out (the powersets that would have made her feel right at home, Beast Mastery and Nature Affinity, simply didn't exist yet) and the idea crossed my mind of a ghost summoner, a vengeful spirit that summons the undead to her aid. From there her spectral form emerged, and then a human guise to justify her talking to contacts, and then a story.
The first attempt was just a vaguely poetic explanation of her background and it lasted hardly a week before the much livelier idea of presenting it as a dialogue came to mind. The question then arose of how did MAGI know about her and what's her connection to them, and as the answer grew in my imagination, it became less and less about her and more about Dark Astoria's own background. Eventually it turned into its own AE arc, a murder mystery and sort of introduction to Dark Astoria before the changes that were already being unveiled in beta...
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=283167
Her character soon began to grow into something more, and surprised me with how it developed through the story arcs. The most memorable moment was at the end of the Atlas Park arc, when she had to choose what to do with Aaron. I'd anticipated that choice thanks to playing it twice already, and imagined her being spooky and malevolent even as she spared him.
But when the time came, everything he said about heroes abandoning their duties struck a very deep nerve for her, and as she heard her own vengeful philosophy repeated back to her, she realized how wrong she'd been. And so rather than the threatening taunt I'd anticipated, what came to mind instead was her dispelling her minions, changing back into her human form and then softly and sadly saying "you're wrong" before turning her back on him and walking away to let the police handle things, and then smiling for the first time as a ghost while talking to Matt and his wife.
She was the one character to really have a narrative climax within the game, that of awakening her dormant incarnate nature, returning to Dark Astoria and challenging Mot itself for the fate of the world. I just hope I can race her through the game fast enough to get there.
During the first week or so of floating around Atlas Park as a ghost, another player ran up to her, stared for a moment at Shade with her bandaged eyes and oversized axe, and responded with a local "O.O". That may be the best compliment I've received on a character design.

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Virginia Dare, aka New World Daughter
Electric/Storm Corrupter
"Stay thy hand, or else lose it."
Quote:
"An eternity seemed to pass within that purgatory before the rift appeared. The elders sent me to learn its secrets, but instead the wind snatched me from the hilltop and flung me into a sky crackling with sulfurous light. I awoke in a place called Salamanca.
"The ones who found me, the ones who call themselves Midnighters, say that since I was the first born, the magic pulled me back first. They say it has been four hundred years since our settlement was taken by the Red Caps.
"My mother remains trapped in Croatoa. My father's blood calls out for vengeance. More of the Cabal have begun to appear in Salamanca; perhaps they will be of aid. But whether my sisters choose to fight alongside me or to bar my way, I will free my mother and avenge our family.
"My name is Virginia Dare. I am Roanoke's last daughter, the last Cabal born under a blue sky. And I will destroy the Red Caps, so that none others share our fate."
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Croatoa was another zone I'd heard all about long before playing the game, and my very first character was a detective from Salamanca. But once I learned of the Cabal, the Roanoke colony's connection to Paragon City, the idea of the real-life Virginia Dare as one of the Cabal seemed too perfect to pass up. To my amazement, the developers hadn't explored that idea at all; I have a theory that Katie Hannon was written as Virginia at one point, but got changed for some reason, perhaps because Marvel's 1602 also used her and the studio just didn't think it'd be worth the headache. At any rate, it did leave "Virginia Dare: Cabal Sorceress" wide open for the players, and as a North Carolina native, the Roanoke story and the story of Virginia Dare held a special significance for me.
Alas, I spent the next month just trying to think of a fitting name for her. Weird Al certainly didn't do me any favors: it took most of that time just to chase "Dare to Be Stupid" out of my head! Then one day the phrase "new world daughter" popped out of nowhere, and a few hours later Virginia the rogue Cabal sorceress and fledgeling Paragon hero was taking her first step into Atlas Park.
The background I'd written for her character in the game gradually evolved into a much more detailed story involving her arriving in modern Salamanca and quickly being recruited by Midnight representative Ashley McKnight and MAGI representative Gregor Richardson, and it became the first story I posted in Roleplaying, and the first fanfic I've written in, oh lord, let's just say a few years...
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=293110
Veteran powers like the Blackwand and the Blue Wisp Pet really helped bring the image of her as a Cabal witch to life, and, once she returned to Salamanca at level 25 to find the rest of the Cabal running wild and the eternal war threatening innocent people, her story gained a symmetry with the game that just left me amazed at times.
From her disastrous first fight with a group of Cabal girls as they shouted "how dare you stand in my way" and "you won't take this one from me," to her changing into modern clothes and going by "Ginny, from MAGI" to avoid admitting to Mayor Bower and Skip that she's one of them, to a ferociously epic battle above the rooftops with a Sorceress of the Winds wielding precisely her powersets, the game really seemed to unfold as her story. A seek and destroy mission against the Fir Bolg quickly turned into a stealth mission when she overheard "why is she tormenting us?" and "maybe she's in league with the Red Caps," and was painfully reminded that she used to be their allies and they don't understand why she's turned on them, and the level gap between Skipper and Kelly, from 26 to 30, became a one-woman, forest-sweeping war against the Red Caps.
I'd looked forward to seeing just how a level 50 character with the Cabal's electric blast and storm summoning powers would play, but for now, I'll be content to just finish Croatoa, run the Katie Hannon Task Force (the battle between Virginia and Mary MacComber would just be so perfect from a story perspective... if agonizing from a gameplay one) and maybe, if time allows, earn the Geas of the Kind Ones accolade so her adventure can come to a proper conclusion.
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Eric Grayson, aka Shadow Ecliptic
Warshade
"Nobody ever picks the easy way..."
Quote:
Eric Grayson was just a lowly DATA mechanic until the day the Peacebringers came to Earth. The Nictus sent their own emissary to welcome them: the Kheldian assassin Hibernal Dusk, who possessed Eric and tried to use him to destroy City Hall and the arriving Peacebringer envoys. The attempt failed when Eric regained control and shut down the overloading Longbow portal, but his success came with a high price; by using too much of the Nictus's energy absorbing powers to stave off the explosion, he'd initiated the bonding process. Faced with an inevitable bonding that could drive them both insane, and with Hibernal Dusk's own growing doubts about the Kheldian war, the two willingly merged together into the Warshade Shadow Ecliptic, the incarnation of Eric's promise to show Hibernal Dusk what it means to be human.
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I'd already learned a lot about the Kheldian lore thanks to Yuki's backstory, but it took one friend asking me to make a low-level toon to run through the game at her pace and another friend singing the praises of his newly rolled Peacebringer character to convince me to give the Kheldians a try. Originally I'd intended to simply roll a Peacebringer character I'd written for Yuki's stories, but when every permutation of his name turned out to be taken, I went with a brand new Warshade instead. His look actually came before anything else, and that helped inspire a story that went through several twists and turns before settling into its final form.
At first I imagined an unwilling bond leading to antagonists sharing the same body, sort of Ash and his evil hand from "Evil Dead 2" starring in a buddy cop movie. That gradually turned into a more dialogue-driven concept of a human and unwilling Nictus as partners, somewhat resembling Light and Ryuk from "Death Note," and then the thought of GLaDOS and Chell crossed my mind. And the moment I imagined the Nictus having a female mental voice, his entire character snapped instantly into place and I spent the rest of the night on a caffeine-fueled typing bender to get the story that had suddenly flashed through my thoughts down on paper. Early the next afternoon, the finished story was posted. In his case, the full fanfic story actually came first, and his character background is a very, very truncated version of it...
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=294857
I haven't played him very much, since I was just arriving at Croatoa with NWD at the same time, but playing a Warshade had turned out to be immensely fun, even solo, and Dark Nova's won over even the most jaded WoW fan on the basis of "okay, I've gotta admit that looks really cool." Since his story ends with an appearance by Keith Nance, I guess I'll aim for "Twisted Reflections" as his chance to prove himself once and for all a hero, along with wherever Shadowstar's missions have led him by that point.
Anyway, those are my four biggie characters and the rambling stories of how they came to be! Here's to hoping the game can be saved somehow - I really want to find out how all their stories end.