It’s gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight.
This took a lot of effort. I’ve been having a lousy couple of days — mourning the loss of a video game, of all things.
City of Heroes was my home for eight years. It was the first MMORPG I genuinely liked, since it divorced character appearance from gear, letting you look like anything and do anything. No “you’re a tank, you must wear these horrible yellow shoulder pads.” You could be a cowboy. Or a robot. Or a goth girl. Or a cowboy robot goth girl. You could make any character you want and as you can imagine, I took a particular shine to how it let me express myself creatively.
I met a swath of friends there, friends I still call friends today. This was our clubhouse. This was where we went every week to enjoy playing games together. And thanks to some shortsighted corporate bean counters at NCSoft, an ocean away, it got shut down forever because it wasn’t making fantastic amounts of money, merely amounts of money.
I took that negative energy and channeled it into my writing and you’ll see how when you read. This was always going to be the way the story went — from preplanning notes months ago, before the City of Heroes execution was announced. It’s just irony that there’s so much synchronicity, I suppose.
But, this isn’t really about Heroes, it’s about Angles, City Of. In the end, I found the place I needed to be to write, and here you have this week’s draft update. I’d love to hear your thoughts so far on it. And bonus points if you can identify the cameo character.
My pre-reading cameo prediction is that it will be the witch that lives in the Internet (Gwen, I think).
Nah, I mean the DJ was the celebrity cameo. (Real life celeb, not a crossover.)
Oddly enough I DO have a possible multiversal crossover in mind… for later. And for VIPs.
I guess I can’t take back that blunder of calling her Gwen, but I’m predicting the witch-who-lives-in-the-Internet.
NOOOOO! GEE BEE! I was really liking him! Waaaah!
Wow. And he only had like four lines of dialogue. Guess I did my job well there, then.
Wow. I have no idea who this is, but you’re making me very glad indeed that I’ve paid no attention whatsoever to dubstep.
And I could tell this fellow was going to break as soon as he was introduced. The word “flicker” kept popping up, and then there was the way he went from completely disengaged to active.
Sorry about CoH. Things have their time and place, but I hate it when it’s greed that kills good stuff.
I may actually embellish the description of his Picasso-ing a bit more, because there’s an amazingly accurate depiction of the movement in one of his music videos. Creepy as hell and possible squick warning; and for yuks, Slenderman pops up near the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cXDgFwE13g
That’s true, it hadn’t really occurred to me that the way this goes for Vivi is sort of parallel to you losing CoH. Maybe it helps your story, at least.
Sounds like dubstep guy is having a real bad day. Which means bad day for Vivi and Hollister. Great sense of urgency at his arrival here.
Good dubstep explanation through the Vivi filter, too.I bet it’s even more chaotic than usual considering the guy’s state.
“through the bedlam.” — heheh…
“battered on all sounds by” — on all sounds? On all fronts?
“so many of his face” — what a great turn of phrase. >:D
“Because I could hear it.” — AIIIGH! This is extra horrifying. For Vivi but it’s also an excellent nightmare-fuelish reveal about how Picassos work. They really *aren’t* talking… well, they might be, but they do this too. None of the hearing characters have commented on that because they perceive it as audible. But this. This means they get IN your head at least that much, just being in their vicinity. No wonder it’s memetically contagious.
That whole scene was lovely in the disorientation factor of being Vivi-filtered. Well done, man.
Typo patrol: language ye, arguement, revelling, vynil, one armed (add hyphen), revelling (again)
Now that I’m at the end, I realize that “the way this goes for Vivi” is really about what happens with the DoS in the next scene, not this one.