Before Its Time

You think it'll last forever - people and cars and concrete - but it won't. One day it's all gone, even the sky. My planet's gone... before its time.

--The Doctor

Sarana and Her Amazing Friends

Citrus Shocker at the End of the World

The End

Well, actually, I'll probably post some more pictures here. I've got a bunch that I always meant to post with some kind of article that I never got around to writing. I said, "the end" because I wrote this bit about the end of City of Heroes:

http://www.christinalea.com/2012/11/requiem-for-paragon-city.html

Why post it there instead of here? I don't know. Get outta my face, kid; ye'r botherin' me.

Who is Void Razor?

After a mysterious shadowy figure was seen carving up Longbow in the shadow of Fort Cerberus, everyone is asking, "who is Void Razor?" Sources indicate that she has been seen many times coming and going from Fort Darwin, possibly taking orders from Kalinda. Even more ominously, the shadowy killer's appearance in the Rogue Isles seems to coincide with the disappearance of the former heroine Bright Wing from Ziggursky Penitentiary.

Bright Wing's fall is a tragic story. "She was as good-hearted and inspiring as her name implies," says Paradigm, one of her former comrades. "She was just a little headstrong, and the one serious mistake she finally made just snowballed into... I'm sorry... that's all for now."

After charging into a villain conclave without clearance, Bright Wing seriously injured an undercover Longbow operative. She was, of course, suspended pending a hearing where it was to be decided whether to discipline, fire, or prosecute her. She never made it there. Corrupt elements within the Hero Corps organization tricked her into thinking she was to be escorted under guard. They then kidnapped and sold her to a Council laboratory on Striga Isle, where she was tortured and experimented upon for months. She lost most of her powers during this time, including her ability to fly.

She eventually began to mutate on her own, however, surprising even the mad scientists who caused her transformation. Because they weren't prepared for her new powers, she was able to escape and return to Paragon City. Unfortunately, word had gotten out that she was coming to kill the mayor and perhaps several prominent figures in the Hero Corps bureaucracy. This was not true, but it was enough to put Longbow and the heroes of Atlas Park on alert. Although she probably would have been able to convince them of her innocence at this point, Bright Wing was terrified of being captured again - by anyone - and resisted arrest violently. This time, she was sent to Ziggursky.

There, both her mind and her body grew darker. Her journals indicate that she blamed not only the Council agents, but everyone she felt had failed her, even civilization itself. And then she was gone, vanishing in an Arachnos raid on the prison along with several other super-powered inmates.

Could the shadowy blade-wielder shown here be the fallen Bright Wing? For now, no one is sure.

Unbeholden Forever

"The Unbeholden? What Unbeholden? Beasty Boy was their heart and soul, and he's gone solo. Mistress Terror or Terrorist or whatever she calls herself, the so-called leader, has gone into hiding. The rest are strictly small time. Trust me, the Unbeholden are just a bad memory. It's groups like the Angry Bees or the Technocratic Dominion that we need to be watching, not those has-beens."

-- Captain Jerry Tooley, November 2007Longbow Senior Staff Briefing,

It seemed, for some time, that Captain Tooley was right. When they were in the news, the Unbeholden were plagued with rumors of internal upheavals, interspersed with recruiting surges and reunions that sounded suspiciously like canned press releases. Even Beasty Boy's rampage in the summer of 2007 seemed unable to stir them into action. Then events began to unfold that suggested the Unbeholden's lethargy had been a smoke screen all along.

It started with a single picture of what appeared to be Sarana, long believed to be Mistress Terror's personal assassin, taking down a mob boss in Port Oakes. Other pictures followed. Sarana battling snakes, fighting her way into Fort Hades, even defeating the Ferocious Flambelle in an Atlas Park bank robbery. Flambelle has, thankfully, recovered and was a key factor in positively identifying the elusive swordswoman. There are rumors that she was seen with Beasty Boy at some point as well, but all our sources seem to have disappeared.

Mistress Terror, meanwhile, was rumored to have been captured while trying to assassinate Ghost Widow. An Arachnos informant even released the following photo:

Then, on January 24th, the big news hit:

Mistress Terror, aided by familiar cronies Hanoi Jane, Nightmare Pixie, Erith, Plague Dog, Exterminus, and Screeching Harpy, made a spectacular strike on Atlas Park, targeting not the bank, but Wentworth's Consignment House. Then, at long last, she spoke to the press. Our Rogue Isles affiliate, possibly but not definitely that guy who puts the secret notes for villains in the newspapers, conducted the interview at night, under a bridge in Port Oakes.

"I hate Wentworth's," Mistress Terror explained. "That, and Plague Dog has been working wonders in the interplanetary contraband industry, and nothing makes him happier than a pile of weird junk."

Asked about the group's long quiescence and what might be next on their agenda, Mistress Terror replied, "For one thing, I wasn't trying to assassinate Ghost Widow. In fact... well... never mind. We've been gathering artifacts, researching the origins of our powers, making new friends, and... do you really expect me to tell you everything?"

Our plucky reporter followed Mistress Terror the next day and snapped one more surprising photo in Aeon City. After a tense pause during which she seemed to be considering teleporting him over the ledge, she offered the reporter a brief statement: "What can I say? The Unbeholden are back in action, and we are everywhere. Don't mess with us."

Sarana Returns

After a spectacular breakout and crime spree with Erith and the Killing Clown back in 2006, the mysterious assassin Sarana seemed to disappear. After years of apparent inactivity, however she seems to have reappeared. While conducting covert surveillance on "Slappy Jack" Pirelli in Port Oakes, an undercover Longbow agent snapped the following picture:

"It was uncanny," the agent said, on condition of anonymity. "One second, Slappy was smoking a cigar. The next, a couple of civilians walked between me and him and then he was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. I didn't get a good look at the girl until I developed the film. She was only there for a second, then she sort of stepped sideways into the shadows and was gone."

If Sarana has returned, can the rest of the Unbeholden be far behind?

Shocker Saves Halloween

Press Release
While other heroes went about their oblivious trick-or-treating, Scrap Pile commander Citrus Shocker saw a danger and took action. It started with a message from some of the team's junior members (see previous article) and a ghostly ship floating through the streets of Talos Isle, where the brilliantly unconventional super-hero was posing as a shopper to lull criminals into a false sense of security.

"Actually," adds the modest hero, "I really was shopping. Then I saw the boat and thought maybe I should check my voicemail, and there were like 800 messages from Freefall Brawler and Ex Astra and some kind of squeaky gremlin thing that talked too fast to understand."

The courageous Citrus Shocker immediately took action. All the evidence gathered by her loyal crew had pointed to something sinister rising out of the fog-bound streets and cemeteries of Dark Astoria and engulfing Paragon City, perhaps the whole world, in eternal night. She even reserved a room there, allowing villains to believe that she was planning to meet Capt. Scrappy there to celebrate her birthday, and went undercover as a trick-or-treater.

Blasting her way through hordes of zombies who apparently saw through her clever ruse, Shocker eventually found that there really was some strange evil afoot.
"Yeah, it was just like last year. Sometimes you open the door and get a treat, sometimes you get a rock, and sometimes you get mobbed by jack-o-lantern men and witches and stuff like that."
The cunning Shocker quickly assembled a team of other brave heroes and tracked the evil to its source deep in the cemetery zone.
"Yeah, those guys were freaks," Shocker adds. "But they found Eochai for me and it was kind of neat assembling up on the war wall like that to plan our attack."
The darkness faded only a few days after the defeat of the avatar in Dark Astoria. "I guess he wasn't really doing anything, but he was still... you know... magic. I hate magic."

Junior Scrap Pilers Go Trick-or-Treating

Junior Scrap Pile members Speed Lightning, Freefall Brawler, and Ex Astra (clockwise from farthest) meet up in King's Row, having noticed that the Sun seems to be gone.


Prince of Scorpions from the allied super-group Eye of Horus joins up. "Hey, was that a zombie with a musket?"


Consulting with HallowJack, who agrees to get some of his impish friends looking into things.


Oktoberfest convenes in Atlas Park: HallowJack, GremlinJack, and Obsidian Wind.


Obsidian Wind and GremlinJack.

To be continued...

Slime Creatures from Outer Space

Atlas Park goes green:

Impending Disaster (and I'm not talking about the bomb):

Thanks a lot, Blue Steel:

Nova Sentry holds Steel Canyon (with some help):

Row in King's Row:

On the edge:

A bad place for the beet boosters to cut out:

Ki Rin Back in Action

Readers may recall the disappearance last year of Interpol's junior commander and token magic hero, Ki Rin. An angry Circle of Thorns coven ambushed her on her way out of Pocket D and, in the ensuing battle, she was knocked through a freak space-time rift into a dark matter dimension from which it was believed she would never return. This weekend, however, she popped up in King's Row with new powers and a particular taste for throwing heavy objects at robed mystics. The only explanation she offered was, "I just had to figure some things out."

After rescuing younger sister Mazzy Stardusk from the Hellions and taking down warehouses full of Council and Arachnos soldiers, Ki Rin followed some Circle of Thorns mystics from their Tuesday night LARP on the rooftop back to their headquarters. There, she learned of a plan to conduct a secret ritual in that most sacred of locations, the vault of the neighborhood bank.

"Yeah, those Circle of Thorns guys are a real piece of work," Ki Rin told reporters. "I mean, who conducts a sinister ritual in a bank? I guess they were just hard up for cash and wanted to try and make it look good. To think, I used to use some of their grimoires! No wonder I was always getting pushed around by Skulls in the old days."

Circle of Thorns High Priest of Greater King's Row, Zarkod Torkmoz said, "Ki Rin is a liar and knows nothing of the true lines of mystic power that cross Paragon City! She's not even a member of a real coven! She's unattractively thin! Soon the Darkness will come for her! I shall have my revenge!" After listening to a whispered comment from his lawyer, Torkmoz added, "I have a trial to attend to! This interview is over!"

Having wrapped up the mystical bank threat and dismantled the altar, Ki Rin left to go and rescue her sister again. "Seems Mazzy just can't resist a guy in a bandanna."

Superheroes on Striga Isle

What seemed to be a violent but mundane raid on a Council base went wild yesterday when a fallen fascist suddenly transformed into a werewolf and the two commandos fought back with previously unrevealed super-powers. Who are these low-key heroes? What's happening on Striga Isle?

Scrap Pile Updates Its Image

Having cleared up the vast Outcast conspiracy to smear the team's image, members of the Scrap Pile set out to improve their public relations in other ways. Captain Scrappy, shown at right in Atlas Park, recruited two new, clean-cut science heroes. Golden Song and Speed Lightning have already made a name for themselves cleaning up the streets of King's Row.

Citrus Shocker, meanwhile, established a strong working relationship with Agent Eckman of Bloody Bay and patrolled the region. Rumors that she only did this to enjoy the seaside view and maybe hook up with an Arachnos Arbiter are, "just mean-spirited" according to the eccentric heroine.

Citrus Shocker also cleaned out the old Rikti bunker in Perez Park to find Hero One's time capsule, a move which earned her some credit with the Atlas Park administrative crew, and developed some flashy new technology including a sparkly laser tracking drone and a compact LCD cloaking device which is "much better than the one they give you in Bloody Bay and not at all derivative of their patented design." When asked if she planned to sell the devices or at least share the design with Longbow, Shocker responded, "Well, they're kind of, um, lightning-powered. I'm not sure there's much market for that."

Finally, Shocker appears to be sporting a new, much flashier costume, as seen in her recent encounter with spectral villains and mages in the sewers of Steel Canyon. Citrus Shocker seemed less than eager to talk about her new look, however. "It's still experimental," she explained. "I'm really not that comfortable with spandex, but it seems to be what everybody's doing these days, and I was tired of hearing from Starbryte that my normal costume looks like something her grandmother would wear. Hey, how about those ghosts, though, huh? I hate ghosts. Good thing Master Imhotep was there."
Master Imhotep, as readers may know, is the leader of the Eye of Horus team, which shares a long-standing coalition with the Scrap Pile. "Tep helps us out with annoying magic stuff a lot. He's like a brother to me."

The more conservative Master Imhotep, looking somewhat uncomfortable, replied, "Yes, my friend the Citrus woman is like a sister who dresses in underwear and speaks blasphemy to scandalize our family."

Finally, the team leaders made a significant move toward updating their long-neglected base, despite Captain Scrappy's position that, "all you really need is a place to watch TV and dump all that junk the criminals drop when you slug 'em." New team member Recycled Man has already begun making plans for the new base.

"He's a little eccentric, but he comes highly recommended," said Citrus Shocker of her new recruit. "His cybernetics are made entirely of post-consumer materials and, as you can see, his brain is enormous."

Scrap Pile Gets Needed Boost.

After the private citizens Dr. Olivia Chung, Petra Chalker, and Cat Hermes unfolded ties to current unfavorable media reports about the Scrap Pile with various members of the Outcasts criminal gangs, it did not take long for Captain Scrappy and Citrus Shocker to take the lead in the following investigations. The Scrap Pile, as you may remember, has been embroiled in scandals involving pictures of them consorting with known criminals, as well some unheroic behavior among its members of late.

Citrus Shocker, the current leader of the Scrap Pile, has tried to maintain her calm during the claims. She has pointed out that not all superheroes in Paragon City get along, so some personal animosity even among crime-fighters. And that many heroes have used assistance from what would be considered evil-doers at various times in their careers. And then she threw herself into breaking the story open.

"If I did anymore investigating," Citrus Shocker stated, "I'd need a badge or medal for taking so much more damage."

"I think someone actually gave me a badge." Capt. Scrappy interjected, with his trademark wide smile. "A couple of them even. I hope they look good with my uniform."

After finding the memos revealing the planned "Anti-Scrap Pile" media smear, Captain Scrappy thanked the private citizens, specifically Olivia Chung, for her help in, "Getting the record straight, dammit."

After an impromptu press ceremony with Dr. Chung, Capt. Scrappy and Citrus Shocker were off once again fighting crime.