Okay. Looks like I'll have to decide the others to fill out but what we have from those kind enough to respond are:
Aspirant
Brazen
Pinprick
Pogo
Slime
The last time I went trick-or-treating, I was thirteen. My family was short on money so we couldn't buy a costume, my parents lacked the time or inclination to make one, and I had no skill in that area. So I cut eye holes in a paper bag and wore that over my head. I didn't know any kids in my neighborhood, so I went by myself.
There is so much wrong with this that it's difficult bring up all the implications.
First off as rape is already illegal the crime that triggers this is the intent to breed an army on unwilling victims. Of course that's illegal. But would that mean that a government or private project to do the same with volunteers would be acceptable? "Have Super Kids for the Nation's Future" suddenly become a worldwide debate and a new arms race begins( Or just becomes public, you can bet that many countries already have these projects going clandestinely.) What about a project with donated eggs or sperm?
Secondly, it doesn't matter if the criminal or the victim is normal or paranormal, you are making an international law that says that rape that results in pregnancy is a death penalty offense. I can't see anybody being happy with this except stockholders in DNA testing labs. Victim's rights groups will cry for it to apply to all rapes and defense advocates will argue that this is excessive. Can you imagine the crapstorm that will happen when a female mentalist is found guilty of raping a man to get pregnant by him against his will? What should the penalty be for false accusations? Would it be attempted murder?
Next what happens when a more reactionary country executes a "rapist" before the exonerating DNA results are in? Not usually an issue in countries with drawn out appeals processes but that's not the case in all member nations of the U.N.
I'll stop here though. The abortion debates centered around predestined evil are a political, religious and moral sewer that I don't care to contemplate.
The fact of the matter is Bob Iger stepped down and he was the head of everything. He was replaced with Bob Choprak. Choprak didn't want multiple movie contracts, pay for the productions, and only cared about how much money the studio was making on the streaming end of things. He is the guy who lost the law suit from Scarlet Johannson (which I can't ever remember happening before this), and pissed off the people at Pixar. Chopak was the guy who gave the Inhumans to Perlmutter and Buck and watched them crash. Chopak installed a guy to basically tell the movie division they couldn't make movies. This joker lost almost two billion dollars on the streaming service in two years. Employees found out they might be laid off through the news.
You want to know what happened? They hired a guy from their park division to run the company during a pandemic and he screwed up, picking guys that had no idea what they were doing. And all of them were forced out.
CES
Hardly a consistent schedule in my tinkering with ideas, but i do have this as my lead in for how geography got changed
Northgate
(The City That Almost Wasn't)
History: Northgate shouldn’t be; Not in its current form anyway. It another timeline, another Earth, it would have become a town with a population of a little less than 300 people.
That timeline never got to be.
Much is the same as it was supposed to be. Indigenous people inhabited the lands of Manitoba for thousands of years. European traders, French first, then British, “discovered” the area, and explored what, was to them, new territory.
But somewhere (more accurately, “somewhen”), a meteor that was never meant to crash into the area of northern Manitoba? Did.
Which is why we start Northgate’s story in the first half of the twenty first century.
“She” had been sent away again despite her unswerving devotion to her creator. Mechana was created to be a mate to Mechanon. At times, when he felt the need to ‘replace’ organic life, especially, she was permitted to work by his side. But often, Mechana noted with a sense of insufficiency, she was relegated to minor projects. She worked steadfastly at these. If this was what pleased Mechanon, then that is what Mechana would do. Her latest assignment was cataloging the history of those few organics of note that had attempted to foil Mechanon before; not just those encounters, but more details of their other encounters against other organics of similar power level.
It was when examining the historical data of one Dr. Destroyer that Mechana stumbled onto something that was of interest and might be of use to Mechanon. This permitted her a chance to communicate with her creator to request further orders. As Mechanon, she knew, made no mistakes, Mechana deduced that it must have been her fault when she was given a curt decline of prolonged presentation. No doubt he was, once more, dealing with organic beings of power that were seeking to stymie his noble mission. His rather terse response flat out told her to see to this theory of hers herself and leave him be for a time.
Mechana obliged, and began gathering what data she could to make sure the recreation of Dr. Destroyer’s ‘Asteroid attracter’ would proceed apace. She did not have the exact schematics, of course. But then, Organic Brains were limited anyway. She would improve the plan and do a test run. She would make no grandiose announcements of this plan. It was not her place to speak for Mechanon, merely serve his schemes. She only needed one asteroid, the right one.
The chosen asteroid’s name was AVX-343. It was not picked randomly. Her studies indicated that at it’s core was radioactive material that, once released by violent impact, would send a pulse of deadly radiation so intense that it would kill 98% percent of organic life planet wide. She would use cloaking technology on AVX-343 to shield it from detection. The cloak would be short term, but by the time it was bypassed, it would be too late.
Mechana felt something bordering on pride at this. Mechanon would be pleased that she carried out his vision. It took three years, no time at all to one capable of self repair but eventually, AVX-343 was prepared, and launched.
There were no ‘meddling kids’ of Ravenswood to warn any superheroes. There was no grandiose boasts of imminent doom in the style of Destroyer. There was, however, Captain Chronos. And his careful avoidance of direct contact with Mechanon meant he was not in the historical data Mechana had reviewed.
----
“Get your pants on,” Captain Chronos told the hero.
“You’re not the first person to say that to me,” The hero told him. There was a thunderclap and the formerly less garbed Canadian icon was instantly outfitted in his costume “Look, what’s going on?”
“I need you to fly just on the edge of the atmosphere at roughly 13:20 hours at this Latitude and longitude, fill the stratosphere with lightning” Captain Chronos filled him in, “And when you see a solid object approaching, put this on it.” He held out what looked like a steampunk version of a frisbee. “Count to 1, let go, and fly like your life depended on it.”
Just One? The hero didn’t bother asking Captain Chronos to explain. The man never did. By this part of history, the hero had died once, come back again, seen friends and even children of friends age where he stayed still. He had retired more often than he died, only to get back into the fight.
In the future, some would refer to this as a counter temporal fix with long lasting but tolerable ramifications on reality. For a costumed man named Craig? It was a Tuesday.
It would have been nice if Captain Chronos had told him the ‘solid object’ was a huge asteroid turned meteor with a cloaking device that only the lightning field he had generated forcing it into visibility. As it was, one second, there was open sky so thin lightning didn’t even arc properly, and then the next? A big ROCK, wired with sinister looking technology and with an unhealthy ‘feel’ to it.
“ONE!” The hero yelled, and strapped the device on.
There was a slight miscalculation, not on the hero’s part but on the Captain’s. The device had been meant to cause super rapid atomic decay that would render the radiation far less lethal. Unfortunately, the immense static field not only outlined the meteor, it supercharged the device causing an inversion to the intended temporal entropy. The device overcompensated, and ….
A hero ended up riding it into the past!!
The exact time said hero had arrived at is unknown to historical records, though Cree lorekeepers would tell French Fur traders that a shattered star fell from the heavens, and would have doomed one of their villages, had not a son of the great spirit not guided it to the rapids where it broke the river in twain.
The Traders smirked at this claim, but a few found the tale entertaining. Apparently the son of the Manitou or whatever he was supposed to be, stayed with the Cree for a full seven days while he healed and recovered his strength. Another spirit, one they said had wings on his head, came on the seventh day to find him and bring him home. Their savior and guest bid them farewell, but the local tribe would continue to pass on tales of the one known as “The Thunder Axe”.
I almost always end up coming back to Champions. I have run other games, Castles and Crusades, Amazing Adventures, BASH and many others but I eventually end up going back to my first love.
It wasn't my first RPG, Holmes D&D was that, or my first Superhero RPG, Villains and Vigilantes was that but I still end up getting Champions because it is the only crunchy game that I comfortable with. Running the game just feels like putting on a pair of comfortable shoes.
Lawnmower Boy reacted to Hermit in The Adventures of "Fish Guy" (Superhero fiction)
