Side Quests, Part 4

Almost done.

Side Quests, Part 3

Continued.

Can you tell that I’m busy, but I still want to keep this thing going, for some reason?

Oh, and a forgotten plot point: Captain Earth is vulnerable to just about anything from offworld, so we went to the moon and got a ton of rocks.

Yeah.

Wait until I tell you about the time we stole a pyramid and made it into a starship. Well, okay. We only stole part of the pyramid. The whole thing was too heavy, even with the Mason and the Matternaught (he could screw with the weight of objects) all hopped up on MGH or Kick or something similar that Lady Brassboots (Becky) cooked up in her meth steampunk lab.

Another minor detail that I left out is that the Mason is one of those very few Superheroes with Beards.  When Mori’s done with his illustration, I’ll see if he’ll let me put it up here.

Side Quests – Part 2

Continued.

Side Quests – Part 1

This bit of fiction came out of a superhero roleplaying game that Becky and I were in about a year ago. Here are the basics of what you need to know:

• Jack Partry, aka “The Mason”: my character. He is a twenty-four-year-old mutant whose primary abilities include transmuting his arms into stone and increasing the density of his body, which increases his strength. He also has “terrapathic” and “terrakinetic” abilities, meaning he can speak to and mentally manipulate various types of stone. His best friend and companion, Brickie, is a broken brick he met shortly after his abilities manifested. Nobody is actually sure if Jack really can hear the stones speak; he may simply be insane. Either way, he seems to share a sensory/empathic/telepathic link with Brickie.

Somewhere in the course of this game, he became an Avatar of the Moon, which basically pushed his mutant powers to the Omega Level.

• Captain Earth, aka Lord Terran: the bad guy. This character was our primary nemesis. His power set basically makes him Superman.

Terran was originally the Moon’s avatar, but he killed the first Captain Earth and usurped his place. Then he sold out our planet to some sort of Space Empire. We spent months gathering overpowered artifacts and abilities in order to take this guy down. As the scene here opens, Jack heads toward the holding cell where Terran is being kept.

• The Depths: NPC; wimpy Supervillain who lives in a secret base under the San Francisco Bay. We crashed his place and set up shop, without his permission. He spends most of his time at home wearing only his villain mask and a pair of heart-print boxer shorts. His power set includes immunity to high pressures and the ability to breathe underwater. His main offensive ability is the creation of localized gravitation and pressure fields, crushing his victims as if they were miles beneath the ocean floor.

• Characters Mentioned in Passing:

Cecily Haversham, Lady Muckridge, aka Lady Brassboots: Becky’s character; time-jumping steampunk inventor and adventurer from the Victorian age. Chester’s legal guardian.

Chester: Mori’s character; eight-year-old half demon/half mortal boy. Super strength, minor telepathy and telekinesis. Adopted by Cecily and befriended by Jack, Chester now has somewhat proper role models in his life, even though Ces and Jack can’t really stand each other. Some sort of magic forced them to become Chester’s “Spiritual Parents” or something, forcing them to at least pretend to agree

Matt, aka The Glacier: Mike (dark hair)’s character; mutant who can control the state, density, and trajectory of water. A friend of Jack’s from college.

The story here was written by myself and Jarys Maragopoulos (a friend of mine and the DM of this particular campaign). I edited the emails we sent back and forth into a coherent narrative.

Neil Gaiman on Colbert

Neil Gaiman recently appeared as a guest on The Colbert Report.  He was there to sling his latest book, but Colbert was apparently there to sing about Tom Bombadil.

Forever’s Not So Long

Shawn Morison answers the age-old question, “The world’s going to end in four hours. How do you spend your time?”

Forever’s Not So Long from garrettmurray on Vimeo.

Calling all Vikings

A resort in Lake Tahoe has dug up its Norwegian roots, and now they’re looking to hire vikings.

That’s right.  My brother and I now have a calling in life.  Go to a lake, swathed in furs and chain mail, sail up to a town, burn everything in sight, steal everything we can carry, and actually have someone to blame it on.

Joining the Boat

I decided to start using my Twitter account.  If you want to follow me, you can look for either my name or Hired_Sword.

This is really a ploy to get Myk to start using it.  I figured that if I started sending out tweets, he’d have to antitweet me, which means getting involved.

Watchmen Passes with 85%

I caught the midnight showing of Watchmen last night.  Even though I’m running on coffee and three hours of sleep, I’ll force my opinions upon your mostly-willing mind.  (Let’s be fair: if you weren’t willing, you’d have stopped reading, probably at some point in the last few months.)

Since I hold a position in the Educational field, I decided to grade the movie.  All said and done, I give this film a solid B.  Not mediocre, but not excellent.

I understand that a lot of my opinion comes from my prejudices as both Fanboy and Literary-Critic-in-Training, so I’ll keep things fairly even-handed.  I’m not going to nitpick over minutiae, like “Rorschach should have called the Silk Specter ‘Ms. Juspeczyk’ instead of ‘Ms. Jupiter’ because that was a very important subplot regarding Laurie’s relationship to her mother in the book” or “Why weren’t Rorschach’s pants purple?”  And don’t worry, I’ll only mention Dr. Manhattan’s gargantuan, blue wang once.

Seriously, though, that must have been the first thing Jon Osterman did when he realized he could rebuild his body in any way he wanted.

Batman Must Be A God

As you all know, the Bat Man is a lunatic.  Or maybe he’s a Knight on Crusade.  Or maybe he just likes hurting people.

The fantastic thing about the Bat Man is that he can easily fall into any of the nine alignment categories you find in D&D.  He’s not all good, and not all evil, and very definitely not neutral.  He follows neither law nor pure chaos.  Not all the time, at least.

Unfortunately, the cool Motivational Poster-style image I’d like to show you can’t fit on the page here.

Instead, I’ll just link to it.

Somebody should do one of these with Wolverine.  And then Frank Miller should write about the feral Canuck.  It’d be the most spectacular train wreck ever written, until he writes the Batman-versus-Wolverine crossover and he ends both DC’s and Marvel’s continuities by cracking the planet in half due to too much testosterone.

Plus, I’m very male, so I’d like to see what happens when Frank Miller writes Psylocke, Jubilee, and Shadowcat into a Wolverine story.

In case you can’t tell, I’m also very sarcastic.