Second Intermission

Well three weeks is a long time to not update a blog that doesn't even require the author to go outside for research, but I've been annoyingly busy with various steps in the grad school application process and trying to find a new job. So in lieu of Iron Will's awkward evening in the RP nightclub with the vampire kids, here's another (shortened) super heroing test for yawl. Instead of The Centurion, your proctor this time around is the one and only Cyberman, assisted in some demonstrations by our good friend Buzz Kill.

Though he shares more or less the same color scheme and placement with the Centurion, Cyberman is a completely separate character dating back to 2nd grade, created as half of a duo consisting of Cyberman and his brother Roboman, who were alternately cyborgs or guys in robot suits depending on whether we'd more recently watched Robocop or an episode of Iron Man. Walking around in slow motion making metallic noises and pointing at things we'd imagine blowing up was a pretty easy game to play when the ball courts or other choicest bits of playground real estate were claimed. Originally conceived on paper as a lopsided guy in a black metal suit with bright orange oblongs for feet and hands, an orange sphere for a head with a black rectangle for eyes, and an orange chest thing that could have been a bra or a vest or a piece of metal, he actually looks pretty darn good in Champions if I do say so myself. Once I discovered that most of the powers I'd ascribed to him in grade school (aside from telescoping limbs, tragically) were selectable powers in Champions, I kinda had to.

Unlike the Centurion, who's an all around heroic guy, Cyberman's more of a mercenary. For varying pay rates, he'll fix your computer, repair your car, or destroy fully armed military targets. Whether the path of a power-armored mercenary is for you can be determined via this short quiz.




CYBERMAN'S GUIDE TO MEASURED RESPONSE

The world of private military, security, and law enforcement contracting is as complex as it is dangerous. Contrary to what you may have heard elsewhere, not every situation can be solved with the same simple solution. When encountering hostile situations in the field, your response must be measured and effective, tailored to the specific situation you find yourself in to deliver maximum results with minimum expenditure of resources and time.

Unless of course you're being paid by the hour and charging for all materials expended, which I always am, and this guide presupposes you are as well.





SCENARIO:

An attractive young woman needs to make her way through an abandoned mine and fears that there may be dangers along the way. She does not offer payment and does not appear to have any valuables to negotiate with. Should you...

A. Offer your services as bodyguard free of charge?
B. Attempt to negotiate a payment plan that can be enacted later before guiding her through the mine, leaving if she does not accept?
C. Accompany her halfway through the mine, and then name your price for accompanying her the rest of the way or back out?















Answer: A
Never underestimate the power of good press and word-of-mouth advertising. Also note that the civilian is specified to be an attractive young woman.



SCENARIO:

A plain-looking older woman needs to make her way through an abandoned mine and fears that there may be dangers along the way. She does not offer payment and does not appear to have any valuables to negotiate with. Should you...

A. Offer your services as bodyguard free of charge?
B. Attempt to negotiate a payment plan that can be enacted later before guiding her through the mine, leaving if she does not accept?
C. Accompany her halfway through the mine, and then name your price for accompanying her the rest of the way or back out?















Answer: B
Psh.



SCENARIO:

During a routine sewer sweep, you are attacked by a large man wielding a pair handguns that appear to fire .44 caliber ammunition. Your armor is more than capable of shrugging off small arms fire without damage. The best tool for bringing down this opponent with minimal force is...

A. Your standard issue rechargeable nonlethal electroshock stun gun.
B. Unarmed hand-to-hand takedown procedures.
C. Maintained fire from your 6000-round-per-minute multi-barrel Gatling-style heavy rotary cannon.
















Answer: C
Getting sued is a pain.


SCENARIO:

You happen upon two members of a known street gang who approach you aggressively. It is too dark to see clearly without the night vision apparatus in your helmet, and neither man appears to recognize that you are armed. Both men are unarmed and appear prepared to strike you with their bare hands, which will result in no damage to you or your armor whatsoever. The best tactic for this situation is...

A. Announcing that you are armed and will fire upon them if they continue to approach.
B. Putting up your hands and backing away slowly.
C. Twin high-powered particle beams impacting directly with an unarmored sternum at close range.















Answer: C
Time is money.



SCENARIO:

While on a fact-finding mission you are confronted by an opponent armed with a combat knife. You respond with...

A. Your bare hands. Your armor is designed to shrug off tank rounds and will not be compromised by a combat knife.
B. Your own standard-issue combat knife. Let's see who's better.
C. A goddamn chainsaw.















Answer: C
There's never a bad situation for the chainsaw.



SCENARIO:

Your team has cleared most of a building, but the last room is sealed off by a thick wooden door that has been locked from the other side. The blueprints of the building show no other way in and no ventilation ducts wide enough for a person to fit through. The best tool for getting through the door would be...

A. The automatic lock-pick gun in your glove.
B. A portable piston-powered battering ram specifically designed for effective door breaching.
C. A laser-guided anti-aircraft mini missile.















Answer: C
It's much easier to overcharge for an experimental missile than a broken lock pick.



SCENARIO:

You are charged by a mutant creature of unknown origin. Though you have tagged it with several shots already, it manages to make it within melee range without falling. Do you...

A. Just keep shooting it, it'll die eventually.
B. Attempt to sidestep it's charge.
C. Flee.















Answer: A
If brute force doesn't work, the answer is usually more brute force.



SCENARIO:

A job for a client specializing in the occult has put you into direct conflict with an unidentified fire-breathing hostile of unknown demonic origin which has managed to ignite your armor. Do you:

A. Ignore it and shoot the damn thing with a minigun.
B. Put some distance between you and your attacker and try to extinguish the flames.
C. Retreat. Magic and demons aren't the sorts of problems you can solve with guns.















Answer: A
Welcome to the 21st century, jerk.



SCENARIO:

While sabotaging an illegal weapons manufacturer, you encounter half a dozen members of a paramilitary group who engage you in a firefight. Afterwards, all combatants have been neutralized and their commanding officer is out of bullets, though he had been firing upon you previously. Do you...

A. Take the commanding officer into custody.
B. Let him go, as he is no longer any threat and cannot prevent your destroying the weapons, which are your actual target.
C. Chainsaw him through the solar plexus.















Answer: C
Dude just tried to shoot you!



SCENARIO:

You are in a firefight with a well-trained opponent armed with a machine gun. Your opponent has taken cover behind a stack of metal crates that appear capable of repelling your small arms fire. Do you...

A. Wait until he reappears to take a shot and then resume firing?
B. Destroy the entire area with a missile?
C. Attempt to negotiate his surrender verbally?















Answer: B
Better safe than mildly inconvenienced.



SCENARIO:

You have tracked down the leader of a cult which utilizes magic and other supernatural abilities. When you confront him, he begins a chant in a language you do not recognize. Do you...

A. Restrain him and gag him so that he can't complete what may be a dangerous spell?
B. Utilize your helmet computer's on-board translation program and attempt to decipher what he's saying?
C. Chainsaw in the gut.















Answer: C
God, I love this thing.



SCENARIO:

A hostile organization that you need to infiltrate is employing a small army of remote-controlled attack drones as a security force, each equipped with laser weapons but little in the way of armor. The mainframe which controls their behavior is located inside the very facility that they're guarding. You deal with them by...

A. Attacking them with your superior armor and firepower, charging your employer for the combat pay and the munitions expended in the fight.
B. Blasting through the roof and disabling them remotely by hacking into their mainframe, avoiding the unnecessary fight.
C. Blasting through the roof and disabling them remotely by hacking into their mainframe, then charging your employer for combat pay and the munitions that would have been expended in the fight.















Answer: C
Now you're getting it.






This concludes our evaluation. Results are available for a nominal consulting fee of $200.












Thanks to Buzz Kill for his help with several of the missions pictured.

Hero Games: The Zombie Apocalypse

When last we left our hero, he had been thoroughly Held and beaten in the famous Hero Games Cage Match. After such a crushing defeat, where will our ferrous fighter go next?


Alright, so, ow. Maybe cage matches aren't really my thing. Excuse me, maybe they aren't really El Fierro's thing. I feel kind of bad for him; it must be embarrassing to get beaten that badly. Not that I'd know. But there's still one more option at the Hero Games: the mysteriously titled "Zombie Apocalypse". With a fair amount of hesitation, I cross my fingers and sign up for that one.


The Zombie Apocalypse Hero Game used to be one of my favorite parts of the game before they patched it to kill everyone right away. It is my enduring hope that they'll someday repair it.

In Zombie Apocalypse, everybody is put into a cabin full of civilian survivors with the goal of going outside and defending them from an incoming zombie horde, except for one player chosen at random who starts out as a zombie. There is no difference mechanically between your normal character and your character as a zombie, except you'll be given one of about half a dozen random zombie "costumes" to distinguish yourself from the living players. This, for example, is how Iron Will looked when he started on the zombie side.


He certainly looks like a zombie superhero, doesn't look much like a zombie Iron Will. Understandable, as there are so many options available in the costume creator that trying to make some kinda automatic "zombification" costume change for each individual character would probably look ridiculous more often than cool. Anyway, as a zombie, your goal is pretty simple: make your way to the cabin and try to kill all of the other players. It seems fairly difficult at first, as you're outnumbered at the beginning except for hordes of simplistic zombie NPCs that you fairly obviously stand out from. But, each survivor that you kill revives as another zombie hero on your side. The very beginning is the toughest part as a zombie, but it's easier to take one out when there're two of you, and easier with three. Eventually, the balance shifts entirely, unless the survivors really have their act together and manage to take you out over and over again before you can get even one of them. If the survivors last for a full fifteen minutes (or possibly twenty... I don't recall exactly) and stay within a certain radius of the cabin, they win. It happens (or used to happen) from time to time, and since Iron Will is built almost entire for defense and doesn't have any terribly strong attacks and no range to speak of, I expected it might go that way. So I was quite pleasantly surprised and a little perplexed when it took me less than three minutes to wipe out the entire survivor team.


Now, I'd like to take credit for this, but there were a number of factors at work that I had nothing to do with. Most notably, some of the survivors I squared off with were already half dead and on fire from something I didn't see at all. I was on fire too, but that was because one of the players hit me with a fireball; Iron Will has no fire powers to speak of, so why the survivors were on fire too is beyond me. One I beat up until he ran away too fast for me to chase, and then dropped dead from the flames after about fifty feet, and another I knocked across the clearing and simply didn't see again, as they were presumably eaten by the supposedly-weak zombie NPCs while I wasn't looking. Really, there was only one other player that I felt I actually beat, and the rest probably would have fallen to the zombie NPCs whether I'd been there or not.


Now, I hadn't played the zombie apocalypse pvp for a few months, and this was not how it used to go. The zombies I remembered were more of a distraction than a threat, basically just there to keep players from getting automatic out-of-combat healing and occasionally to hold them or interrupt charge attacks if they were being too blatantly ignored. These zombies completely devoured the players, and somehow set them on fire. Very curious. The second time around, I'm one of the survivors. You start in a cozy little woodland cabin surrounded by terrified survivors and a few other superheroes that, along with you, are all that stand between them and a gruesome death. In this case, a cyborg woman and some kinda demon guy. We headed outside to meet the horde.


Outside the cabin is a snowy clearing and several other cabins that look abandoned; possibly, we're standing it what would be the middle of a dirt road if the snow weren't covering everything.


I actually think they did a really good job conveying the general atmosphere of a winter night in the mountains. It's deathly quiet except for the crackle of the burning barrel and the occasional low howl of the wind, and you can't see much beyond the street except for what's silhouetted against the sky. Snow drifts slowly to the ground all around and all the characters (including robots and skeletons and the like, but oh well) breath is visible in understated clouds around their mouths. Very nice, Champions.

There's also an indistinct yellowish dome around the cabin and surrounding area. It's only inside this dome that your time spent alive is counted; if you lived through an entire match but did so by hiding out in the woods at some random corner of the map or hovering a mile over everything, your time at the end of the match will reflect it. There's also a timer with thirty seconds on the clock that starts ticking down whenever nobody's within the circle. If all the players scatter, leaving the cabin full of civilians to fend for itself, they have thirty seconds (non-renewing) to get back or the match ends in victory for the zombies. Similarly, if they spend thirty seconds inaccessible... either by teleporting around or tunneling, or by flight so high that they're out of the dome... the zombies win. A player can still hide or TP around if there's at least one survivor left inside the circle holding down the fort for the team, but this prevents the last surviving character from just drawing the match out forever by staying underground or fleeing. Unfortunately, people often forget about it and will charge into the ranks of the zombies to get their killin' in, and then find that they've lost even though they're still alive and actively fighting the zombies, simply because they've gotten too far from the cabin. Although, considering the justification for the scenario is that we're defending the cabin in the first place, it makes good sense.

Anyway, for a minute or so nothing happens, and there's no sound but the crunch of snow under the feet of the nervous heroes running around in circles outside the cabin. Then, at the edge of the light, we start seeing the outlines of humanoid forms shambling towards us. One or two at first, but more and more as the first ones start to reach the clearing. The undead have arrived! Everyone goes to work; the summoners make their little circles and whip out their turrets and pets, the fliers go to strafe the zombies meandering into the circle, the guys who don't quite get the goal of the game run headlong into the horde to get eaten, and I post up by the door of the cabin and clobber any undead face that approach mine eye.

So far so good. Soon enough some of the bigger ones start filtering in. There are skinny ones that can can grab you with their tongues (WHICH IS A TOTALLY ORIGINAL CONCEPT), big fat ones that can bite you and hold you in place, and tall ogre-looking ones that can spit acid at you. I zero in on one of the big ones and deliver a sharp uppercut to his WHAT THE HELL WHY AM I ON FIRE?!?


I'm not quite sure what's happening. Two of my teammates have already died somewhere and I have suddenly burst into flames. It's not the zombie character; I'd caught them out of the corner of my eye fighting with one of my teammates, and they're definitely a power armor type using lasers and machine guns and the like, no fire powers. So I'm a little perplexed until I notice that the zombies are exploding. Over and over again. Not just one kind, either. Like, all of them.


Apparently since the last time I played the zombie apocalypse scenario somebody at the company decided that giving the survivors a chance at winning the game was stupid, and it was much more entertaining for people to start dying the second the game starts and for the only goal to be outliving the rest of your doomed companions. I'm pretty sure I strongly disagree, if for no other reason than because the premise we're working under is that we're trying to protect the people in the cabin, and making that an impossible scenario is kinda bullshit. As the last of my teammates drops, burning and presumably confused, there's really no reason for me to do anything but hightail it into the woods and let the zombies win by running out the clock, but I can't just abandon all those people in the cabin, I decide. I'm surrounded by the ravenous undead and I'm the only thing standing between a dozen innocent people and a horrible death by supernatural cannibalism. The time for half measures and talk is over. This situation calls for desperate tactics. I don't like it, but once again I'm forced to resort to...


There! That ought to...

... What? NO BALLS?! Damn you, decomposition!

And I fall.

But, I fall last, at almost three whole minutes in, which I guess is the closest you can come to winning this game, now. Pretty disappointing; they were really on to something when they first introduced it.


Alright, that was one of the most unpleasant simulations I think anyone could have concocted, but I suppose it was pretty exciting. Never been a fan of horror movies myself, though, and that seemed to be more or less the holographic simulation equivalent.

Well, it's late, I'm humiliated and borderline traumatized, and even though it wasn't real, I swear I can still smell zombie on my fists. On the plus side, I have a luchador costume that I'm definitely holding on to, so the evening wasn't a complete waste. I wander back to the Bank And Trust and fold my mask and cape into my safety deposit box as surreptitiously as I can. A luchador isn't ever supposed to remove his mask, I think, but then, I'm not a full-time luchador. In fact, I, Iron Will, have never even met El Fierro, that handsome devil. Shhh.

My brief experiment with the Hero Games over, or at least on hold, I walk back out into the Renaissance Center. I swear I'll swing by that park and bother those guys for Defender first thing tomorrow, but first I want to check out the one place on Socrates' tour that I haven't been to yet: this Club Caprice place. It looks... interesting, at least.


I wonder if they'll let me in.


Up Next: A night out on the town, the MIND-BLOWING CONCLUSION!

Out On The Town

When last we left our hero Iron Will, he had found his way back to the miraculously restored metropolis of Millennium City, and was being tasked by the mighty Defender with such vital peacekeeping duties as bothering people in the park.

Well, it looks like I'm probably going to be spending a fair amount of time in this city if I'm going to commit to the whole superhero thing. I figure I might as well; no way are they going to let me onto the football team back in school if I'm eight hundred pounds and made out of metal. It just wouldn't be safe for the other players. And really, Daniel in Geology will probably get a much better grade without me as a lab partner anyway.

So, if this city's going to be my new stomping grounds, I suppose I oughtta look around a bit. I'm sure that the possibly shady characters in the park can wait for a couple hours to get harassed. Commence the walking tour!

Now, I don't trust her as far as I could throw her (and it must be kept in mind for this expression that she's firmly planted in the ground) but I'm hoping that the nearest Socrates terminal has at least a few utilitarian purposes and might have a map of the city or something, so I head back over there, which isn't very far from Defender's little security kiosk. I kind of bow my head and avoid looking over there, hoping that he'll simply mistake me for some other metal-skinned guy. Most places this would not work, but in this town...

I'm both pleasantly surprised and more than a little suspicious when Socrates chimes in that she'd be happy to give me a guided tour.


I'm also a little curious as to how she plans to do this, since her projector is built into the ground, but sure, what the hell. She marks spots on my map to check out, and I wander around the Ren Cen, as she insists residents call it, for a half an hour taking in the sights.

Among them are an UNTIL terminal, which apparently stands for United Nations Tribunal on International Law, and which seems to basically be a fancy needlessly holographic email station. I guess as phone booths are to cell phones, UNTIL terminals are to... modern cell phones. Well, since I don't have one, I suppose it's good to know it's here.

There's the Millennium City Bank And Trust, which boasts safety deposit boxes individually shielded against radiation and arcane energies, where they've already set aside a box for me free of charge! That's actually really cool of them; I'm starting to feel welcome already. It'll be pretty handy to have a spot to leave stuff I don't want to carry around with me. Granted, so far I don't have anything but this weird communicator Socrates is talking to me through which I don't actually remember getting (SUSPICIOUS!) and a pair of torn up jean shorts. Speaking of which, there's also a line of tailors who have set up shop under a big half-circular pavilion right by the center of the... center. They appear to cater to superheroes specifically, judging by the clothing articles they have on display like ninja hoods, spandex bodysuits, and random pieces of robotic looking armor. That's convenient, I suppose, although one wonders why they don't set up clothing stores like everybody else. They seem to be doing good business, though, judging by the crowd.


There's an auction house not far away, where I can apparently buy and sell things that other non-retailers put up to bid. That's kinda cool... I don't have any money stashed away, but I could always sell random stuff that I come across on my various jobs. I bet some collectors would pay a lot for a rare Tulzorgat Fetish, marital aid of the snow demon horde recently expelled from the frozen north. That's gotta be pretty rare. I should have held on to one of those. Oh well, next time.

And last but not least, the Super Jet, which is what I just flew in on. Apparently it's a dedicated jet that's only for dispatching superheroes to crisis zones around the world, maintained by donations from various charitable parties. Now THAT will be handy. Plus, I guess the fact that I rode it here means that I'm already a superhero in the eyes of whatever nonprofit maintains and flies it. Score!

Walking back down from the Super Jet's landing platform, though, I'm distracted by a giant amphitheater with a sign reading Hero Games.


That sounds familiar... didn't someone in Canada think I should join up for those? I wander over and see what they're about.

According to the promoter, it's more or less what I figured, a sort of UFC for metahumans. Well, I figure nothing's been able to hurt me much so far, and I do kind of miss individual sports where I didn't automatically have an overwhelming advantage... sure, I'll try one. Let's see how this goes.

There are two types of Hero Games matches available at a low level, Cage Match and Zombie Apocalypse. For now, we'll be going with Cage Match. Cage Matches are fairly straightforward. Players are divided into two teams, Red and Blue, which you'd think would be auto-balanced but are usually at least somewhat lopsided, and then thrown into a ring with the rather simple goal of assisting everyone on your team and pummeling everybody on the other team. Scoring is based on kills for the entire team, and the first side to 15 wins. This can be done either by beating each of five opposing players three times, or picking on the the little one and killing him fifteen times, up to you.

Now, the problem with cage matches is that, for whatever reason, they seem to be the primary hangout of munchkins. For what seems to be the vast majority of players in cage matches (hereafter referred to as "virgins" out of pure spite), character concept or theme is de-emphasized or ignored outright in favor of the most mathematically effective hodgepodge of powers for preventing the opponent from moving. Many have spent a significant amount of time memorizing the ins and outs of the game mechanics and copying other people's characters off of forums to tweak for maximum lockdown effectiveness. You'll hear a lot of words like "builds", "spike damage", "roots", and "holds", and will likely spend the majority of each match either like this:









Or like this:















The average build for a non-you cage match gamer will be a pile of unrelated defenses, at least two ways to immobilize you, a ranged attack they can charge while you're immobilized that will do a lot of damage really quickly without exposing them to the risk of being hit themselves, and Teleport so they can flee if it looks like you might have a chance to do something. Do not bother trying to inform a Virgin that this is both lame, uncreative, and makes the fight - the winning or losing of which you didn't actually care about because career stats aren't even tallied - no fun whatsoever for half of the people involved. They will not understand.

And that's how it goes.


H... huh? Wha? Last thing I remember my feet were frozen to the ground and some cyborg was shooting me with arrows.

Alright, so that was humiliating. These guys are genuine professional prize fighters, it might have been silly to think that I could just walk in off the street and compete. I just don't have the training, the fans, the look...

... Hmmmmm...

I head back to the tailor in the middle of the center. To my pleasant surprise, they don't ask for money, as apparently superheroic reputation doubles for currency around here. Awesome. So, I'll just need that... and this... and do you have these in my size...?

...

...

... PERFECT.



I am READY. If there's one thing that Pro Wrestling taught me, it's that a star theme at least doubles your chances of victory! ... Besides, the tailor didn't have any creepy green lizard man masks.

Iron Will will no longer be competing in cage matches. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the newcomer EL FIERRO to the ring!

Let's see how they like me now!




...

Up Next: Out On The Town... THE THRILLING SECOND CHAPTER!!!

Anticlimactic SHOWDOWN IN THE FROST TOMB

Alright, enough of this. I steel my will (get it?) to resist the urge to badger Ravenspeaker about the apparent flaws in this plan and dive headfirst into the portal, glaring logic gaps be damned.


I have no idea what sort of hellish dimension I'll find myself in or what mind-bending horrors I'll behold as soon as I open my eyes, if up will still be up or if the physics of this place will be completely beyond anything my mind can comprehend, but if I keep my wits about me I should be able to avoid going insane long enough to find this demon.


Or, hey, it's a frozen pond.

At first I'm convinced that the portal must not have worked right, but upon closer inspection, things are kinda weird here. Trees and glowing rocks are floating through the air in a slow circle overhead, for one thing, and I'm fairly certain that I can see a flying bear just kind of hanging out.


I also appear to be slowly dying, so I pop on the thermal vest and turn it on. Quite to my surprise, once activated it isn't so much a vest as a fiery corona that seems to envelop my whole body and keep me toasty. That's um... well, that's actually really neat, but if Ravenspeaker had said "here, it'll be cold, take this magical heat forcefield thing" it would have made a lot more sense.

But enough about that. Up ahead, on an island in the center of the frozen pond, I can see a guy with a suit talking to another thirty foot glowing projection. What's with these people and giant glowing pictures of themselves, anyway?


There don't appear to be any other people around besides this guy, the projection, and half a dozen zombies and ice shamans, though, so judging simply by the company he keeps, the guy in the suit must be either Kigatilik, Rakshasa, or Dr. Destroyer. I head over there to throw some punches in lieu of asking any questions, but some of the ice shamans move to intercept me, so I have to go through them, first. There are three of them, and this takes approximately two and a half hours.

The lowly Ice Shaman is one of the more irritating enemies in the entire game, at least in my humble opinion. While unable to inflict all that much damage... and considerably less to Iron Will even than to an average character... they primarily switch back and forth between two moves. The first encases your character in a cage of ice for a few seconds and then knocks them back, doing a little bit of damage but mostly just keeping them away from the Ice Shaman himself. Their other move, which they bust out two or three times a fight, is some sort of localized invisibility storm that does negligible amounts of damage to your character but makes the Ice Shaman himself invisible and completely unassailable, preventing you from attacking him until the effect wears off. A character with ranged attacks can simply retreat from the storm's radius and blow them away, but for melee characters, the majority of each fight will be spent waiting for that several second window after the enemy reappears but before you get frozen in a block of ice until he can disappear again. You will spend most of your time looking at this:


The two and a half hour estimate is a slight exaggeration, but man, are these guys obnoxious.

Finally, the last ice shaman blinks into existence for half a second and I manage to drive a fist into his jaw, breaking it halfway off his face and clearing the way to the guy in the suit. Jeeeeeze. At this rate that demon guy will already have been released by the time I get there.

... Oh, shoot. He HAS been released by the time I get there. The guy in the suit reveals himself to be Rakshasa rather than Kigatilik, who was presumably the giant glowing projection that has since disappeared to go wreak havoc across the land. Well, we'll deal with him when the time comes, I suppose. Right now, Rakshasa, you and I are due for a game of Iron Will Repeatedly Bludgeoning Rakshasa With His Fists... The Game.

There's more to this Rakshasa than meets the eye, though. As soon as I get close, he sort of manifests these two bright pink glowing mist-sword things out of his hands and starts beating on me with them.


I admit that I did not see this coming.

Unfortunately for him, the pink mist-blades feel only slightly less insubstantial than they look, and once I realize that the minor burning sensation he's inflicting on my arms and shoulders isn't actually life threatening, I just sort of step through his flurry and clock him on the side of the head.


Down he goes. I'm a little disappointed. I had a significantly tougher time with Tulzorgat, and even, I think, every individual ice shaman I had to wade through to get here. Oh well. Looking around the clearing and the alter doesn't reveal anything immediately obvious that I can do to get Kigatilik back here, though, so I guess I've done all I can here.


I throw Rakshasa's concussed bulk over one shoulder and head back out the portal to see what Justiciar and Ravenspeaker want to do next.

When I get back out, Canada looks quite a bit better than it did when I went in. The storm has ended, the sun is shining, and there's not a single ice demon harassing anyone as far as the eye can see. It's still freezing cold and bitterly inhospitable to human life, but near as I can figure that's normal for this part of Canada. I head down the hill from Ravenspeaker's cabin to the Steelhead base to find Justiciar and see if there's anything else I need to do before I can get out of here.

A soldier waves me over on the way, though. I figure he might need some urgent help, so I drop Rakshasa in a pile by some crates and go over to see what's up. Turns out he doesn't actually need my help, but is just wildly enthusiastic about how awesome I am (which is exactly the kind of conversation I need more of in my life) and lets me know that I'm his favorite and he thinks I should totally go into the Hero Games. ... But what are the Hero Games, man?


So apparently it's like some sort of UFC for superheroes. That's um... that's kinda cool, I guess. I might look into that. But dude, I'm sort of in the process of saving your base at the moment, so if you don't mind...

I put the Hero Games on my to-do list and head over to Justiciar for further instructions. He gives me a pretty standard debriefing, saying that I did a good job bringing Rakshasa in but that it's too bad Kigatilik got away and that we'll have to deal with him later, bla bla bla, but good job with this mission itself. Thanks. So hey, I know there are a bunch of other people standing around waving their arms to get my attention, but I really want to leave this place and never come back. Is there anything else I absolutely have to do before I go?


Hmmmmm.

On the one hand, he's actually asked me to leave and go someplace that I'm not completely sick of, which is pretty amazing. On the other hand... erg... he wants me to go report to Defender. Y'know, that guy who keeps city-destroying superweapons in his lobby and sends civilians (albeit newly metallic ones, but still) to fight giant robots for him while he rests.

I'm not too keen on the idea, but eventually, my desire to see something other than snow wins out over my general distaste for the Champions, and I head back to the the airstrip (now complete with a mini jet!) to hitch a ride back to Millennium City. The staff at the airstrip seem to recognize me as the guy that quite recently restored their little airport to functionality, because they don't charge me or ask for tickets or anything, and I get to walk right up into the plane bound for Millennium City. I try pressing my luck and sitting in first class, and they just smile benignly at me like they're glad to have me aboard. Awesome!

I feel a little less special about the first class thing when the fully boarded plane contains only me and a guy with dreadlocks and a trenchcoat who appears to be glowing green, but hey, a superhero express plane is a pretty good perk too. Back to the city!

It is at this point that Iron Will has arrived at... the exact point where you now have the option of starting the game, since the F2P patch eliminated the need to go through the desert or Canada before arriving in MC. So if you skip the tutorial you wind up right here. That's right, after approximately seven months, this blog has reached a point you can reach within thirty seconds of firing up the game for the first time. I blame the patches, which I'll discuss in a bit more detail next time.

Millennium City sure has cleaned up nice. I think I've been gone for all of... two days? Well, I suppose it's actually more like five, two of which I've spent on airplanes and one of which was crawling through rubble, but even so. The city looks spotless. Say what you will about it's mayor, computer system, and resident superhero team, but the cleanup crews of this town are a well oiled machine.


I head to what appears to be the city center, which consists of a massive plaza filled with giant statues and surrounded by futuristic architecture and floating billboards. The whole thing is built around a massive gear that houses a portal to the Powerhouse, and the statues appear to mostly be of superheroes. Wow. This town spares no expense making life easy for it's least in-need citizens.

I head over to the spot marked on my GPS as Defender's kiosk, which appears to be some sort of tactical operations center... in the middle of the sidewalk. Huh?

Well, I guess if it works for mall security, it works for superheroic teams and day-laborers. I walk on over and try to look like I'm happy to see him. He greets me with compliments and tells me that my reputation is growing.


Wow, a fine addition to the Champions, you say? I assume he means that as a compliment, but I really don't think I'd fit in. So far, by my count, I've averted three catastrophes and the Champions have caused one. This week, at least. But I can tell he thinks that's high praise, so I avoid saying anything snarky.

"Heya Defender," I say, "I flew down from Canada to help you with whatever the situation is, here. Is the city being invaded again?"


... Oh, what's that? Shady people are hanging out in the park without hurting anyone?

Shady people are hanging out in the park without hurting anyone.

Sure, yeah, no, sure, I can get right on that. I flew down from Canada, you know, did I mention that? No big deal, it's another country, is all. But people are hanging out in the park NOT causing trouble? No, cool, I'll get right on that. You were right to call me. Don't go over there yourself, that could be dangerous. Next time you see some people hanging out not causing trouble, you call me right up, I'll catch the next plane from wherever I am and give them a stern talking to for you.

I am, not for the first time, grateful that my new metal face is pretty bad at conveying emotion. I need to get some air, I think. I walk down by the river... a nicely not-frozen river, I'll admit... and try to take stock of my new life as a superhero/park monitor. I don't know about these Champions, man, I really don't...

Wait, what the hell?

I look up and notice the Qularr mothership half-sunken in the river that runs through town, a barge nearby presumably helping to slowly disassemble it. I'd been wondering whether Ironclad survived that kamikaze mission into it's underbelly, but here it is, neatly disabled and crash-landed in the river.

IRONCLAD! DUUUUUUUDE!!!


So not ONLY did he survive being shot out of a cannon into a massive alien spaceship of unknown material composition... and not ONLY did he successfully penetrate it's hull and still stay in a condition to fight on the other side... and not ONLY did he defeat the entire crew of said mothership and completely disable the ship itself... but he managed to gently guide it down into the ONE spot within ten miles where it's landing wouldn't cause a single casualty or even any noteworthy property damage, and did so gently enough that the ship itself is intact and able to be studied by human scientists.

Ironclad... man... I can't believe I was worried you had died. This is so cool.

Alright, so maybe I don't have a problem with ALL the Champions. Just 80% of them. Well then, the sooner I can help Defender with his little problem, the sooner I can find the time to talk to Ironclad about maybe starting up a little side project with a team other than the Champions. And together we can do stuff like bring down alien motherships and stop armies of mutants and demons and stuff.

Okay. My faith in superherodom at least temporarily restored, I turn my steps back towards the city center.

'Cuz, y'know. Defender needs help talking to some guys in the park.


UP NEXT: A night on the town.

Canadian Boss: take one!

Alright. I'm tired of snow, I'm tired of snow demons, I'm even pretty tired of snowed-in civilians. It's high time to introduce this weather system to the business end of my fist and head back down south where furless organisms are supposed to exist.

First thing's first: I somewhat grudgingly give my hypothermic laser dealy back to Justiciar. It was the best thing about this job, but you know, I just don't see melting huge blocks of ice in a matter of seconds coming up that much once I've left this place. Besides, I'm still made out of metal and can jump fifty feet in the air. Being able to melt ice in a hurry would be way more useful to the poor guy whose only current superpower is being an amputee.


Maybe you should. What's next?


Alright, now we're getting down to business. Justiciar tells me that they have a suspect for the leader of these ice demon things and gives me a trinket necklace to summon the creature. His name is Tulzorgat, and he's an... ice demon.

Well, that's alright, I've beaten approximately eighty ice demons to death in the last hour, so that's not nearly as intimidating as it once would have been. He's apparently right outside the base, which is as logical a place as any for commanding a siege, so I head over there to summon him to our plane and beat the hell out of him.

Of course, he doesn't tell me HOW to summon a chieftain of ice demons, but I'm sure I can figure it out. I took that one anthropology class that one time, I own the first three seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on DVD, and I'm really good at punching things, so this ought to be a snap.

Tulzorgat's Place-o'-Power is pretty hard to miss, as it seems to be a giant circle of stalagmites (those are the ones that come up from the ground, thank-you-geology!) in a small valley just up the hill from where all of those passengers were frozen in blocks of ice. Scattered about are bizarre translucent ghost-shrubs of some kind that look a little like dead bushes with fruit or possibly skulls in them. In the exact center is a fire pit in a smaller circle of stalagmites that appears to contain a blue campfire of burning skulls.

... How long has this BEEN here?


Alright, so, figuring out how to summon a demon. The blue fire seems fairly supernatural, so I try waving the necklace in the flames to see if that might awaken some sort of hidden quality in the necklace that might provide some clue how to oh nevermind there he is.


So, if you ever need to summon a demon with a necklace, huck it in the fireplace. Good to know.

He's much bigger than the other ice demons, and appears to actually be made out of ice, unlike his scaley blue subordinates. I find this a little troubling, as ice tends to be significantly harder than weird-buff-lizard-substance, but then, so is unidentified me-metal, and he ain't half as big as Black Talon, anyway. Alright, Tulzorgat, I hate your policies regarding the treatment of plane crash survivors. Let's do this.

He starts the fight by blowing out a cone of ice shards that leave a thick coating of frost, but otherwise don't do any real damage to my metal skin. I wade in close enough to take a swing at him, but doing so brings me within his approximately 200" reach and he clobbers me with a craggy chunk of ice the size of my torso that he apparently thinks counts as a fist. I'm surprised and disconcerted to realize that this actually hurts quite a bit, and if he lands another dozen or so of those I could actually get pretty well killed. It's kind of refreshing, actually.

Fortunately, he's too tall to set up an adequate defense for my ultimate technique...


My ultimate technique is undefeatable, and his pelvis crumbles under my fists like a vital antarctic ice shelf under republican environmental policies. He falls to the ground and fades away, which I guess is a good thing.

So now... hrm. The storm hasn't let up. A glint catches my eye near the fire pit, and I notice a big icey evil-looking' treasure chest with a skull for a lock just sitting there for no discernible reason. Don't mind if I do.


No gold or silver or snowflake-shaped diamonds, alas. All the chest contains is a funny-looking scroll with some scrawled writing on it that seems to glow faintly. I'm guessing this is more magic stuff. Unfortunately, I don't know magic from... um... sleight of hand. It looks like I'm going to have to talk to... ugh. Ravenspeaker. I climb a hill and look for his giant glowing projection of himself, visible to the naked eye for approximately twenty miles in any direction, and start hiking.


After several minutes of hiking up snowy slopes, I find him standing in his underwear between his cabin and the outhouse, straining to keep the giant glowing picture of himself from fading in the storm. Um. Hopefully, he's finished researching those demon marital aides I gave to Justiciar.


Ravenspeaker tells me that the big supernatural evil lord that I just broke into a million pieces was actually just the guy who had the scroll that would let us into the Portal Of The Frost Tomb, which seems like it should have a much better name. Through Tulzorgat's portal (even that sounds better) is whatever's actually responsible for the storm.

Now, I'm no wizard... yet... but it seems to me that opening a portal into a place filled with supernatural evil of the sort that can create an inland hurricane like the one we've been dealing with all day is a bad strategy. Wouldn't it be better to try to, like, SEAL the portal? Keep giant supernatural storms from coming out, maybe? This doesn't make a lick of sense.


Oh... okay. So the mystic scroll was a mystic scroll AND a memo from the desk of Dr. Destroyer. Not one to waste office supplies, that one. Apparently it's on his orders that someone named Rakshasa, who I'm pretty sure are Hindu demons or something (Anthropology!) has gone into the Portal of the Frost Tomb to wake up a demon god named Kigatilik. This leads me to think that the Portal of the Frost Tomb is even more poorly named, as the frost tomb is apparently more of a Frost Bed than anything, and also begs a number of questions.

First, I wonder why Tulzorgat had a letter to Rakshasa that he apparently needed to get into the portal in the first place, and how this Rakshasa got in without it. Second, why is it more important for me to beat up Rakshasa than to stop him from waking up the demon god? Is he not a real threat? If he's not a real threat, then why am I doing any of this? Which leads me to Third, if this demon god Kigatilik is anything like demon god Tulzorgat, why do I have to go into the portal and stop him from being awakened in the first place? I could just wait out here and trip him when he gets out and then punch him in the balls or something. And Fourth, if we have the scroll that opens the portal in the first place, why don't we just burn it up and trap Rakshasa AND Kigatilik in there where they can't hurt anybody?

There seem to be a number of problems with this strategy. But then, as I've admitted, I don't know magic from magic ... caaaaards?... (it's this game some friends of mine played in high school... nevermind) and presumably Ravenspeaker does, so maybe blundering into a frozen hell dimension and trying to quietly beat up a Hindu demon without waking an ice demon god really is better than just closing the door.

... I really wish I could get Chief Surhoff's input on this.

Okay, well, I've got everything I think I need. Scraps of jeans, a scroll, and a thermal vest that will supposedly keep me from freezing to death in a frozen hell dimension SO cold that the guy standing in his underwear on a mountaintop in the middle of a blizzard has told me, the guy standing barefoot in a shredded pair of jeans on a mountaintop in the middle of a blizzard, that I'd freeze to death without it. With these three things I'm going to head into this frozen hell dimension containing a demon god's bed called the Frost Tomb and beat up a Hindu demon quietly enough that we don't wake said demon god, although that's apparently not nearly as important as just getting the Hindu demon beat up, and we can always deal with the demon god later. I guess. What could possibly go wrong?

Have any more advice before I go, Ravenspeaker?


... God damn it.


Up Next: The ACTUAL last battle of the Canada Crisis!