The Heist!

Kupopolis REBORN Reborn Discussion
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Hi folks!

As I mentioned, I want to run a plot thread about a heist in the city of Kupopolis, which occurs during the space race. Before, I had a short and abbreviated blurb. Now, I have some context.

THE PLACE: Owzer’s mansion in Kupopolis. A nephew of the famous late Owzer (sorry, he was like four hundred pounds and it’s 55 years after FF6, the OG Owzer is dead) from Jidoor, this collector of curios, art objects, and artifacts has made a fabulous mansion to show his fabulous wealth and fabulous collection. He is also presiding over an exclusive auction during the Space Race: many rare artifacts will be up for sale.

THE CONCEPT: These artifacts lure in people who want to acquire them. Maybe some are here legitimately, with a lot of money… but some aren’t. And some, when they can’t get their desired item through legitimate means, decide to acquire them any way possible. The result is a clusterfuck: many different parties, after many different rare, valuable, or powerful (or more than one of those adjectives) artifacts, come into conflict and make hasty alliances.

THE EVENT: The first part is the “legitimate” event, where items are auctioned off. It’s a time for our actors to meet before everything goes haywire. Maybe some characters hit it off! Maybe some things get bought.

The second is when a group of Esperian terrorists decides to raid the event and take the whole place hostage. This prompts the clusterfuck.

THE RULES: There aren’t many. Ideally, each writer brings one (or more!) artifacts to throw into the mix, and one (or more!) groups of people competing for them. The conflict can have multiple threads, both on the main stage and in the side rooms, so we’re able to branch out if we need to.

I would like to suggest one rule, however: events in the main room are written in a round-robin style, and each person puts – bolded and obviously – a prompt for the next writer to deal with.

Sound cool? If you’re interested, post who you’d like to send and what you’d like to have stolen!

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IIRC, the OG Owzer (whose canon Kupop name might just now be O.G. Owzer) was an early supporter of the OmniSent, and their original base of operations was Owzer’s Jidoor manor. … I might go try and dig up some of those early OmniSent posts just to verify this, but I think my memory on this is clear. So it could be that Owzer Jr’s relocation to Kupopolis was a result of backlash after the unveiling of the “bolt badges,” but I’ll leave the backstory there up to you!

Re: artifacts and attendees and etc., I have an idea for an angle but I am waiting for Travis to wake up because China, and my idea sort of involves him a tiny bit.

3

Ooooh rock. I like it.

Let’s do it if you don’t find anything else to the contrary, it definitely feels like a hook.

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I want to introduce a Man of Mystery kind of character, a masked man known as the “Kupopolis Knight” who will be auctioning on some items, and I want to introduce the “Eye of Tauroch”–something he’s very much into getting at any cost.

5

Hmm. Whenabouts on the timeline would this be happening? Post-White Cell?

Because if it’s pre-White Cell, I could see the Celpo agent I called “the man in the pale suit” being present to either acquire some artifact, and to see what folks are present to make bids.

Granted, if it’s post-White Cell, I can easily make up another spy sort to be present…

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Post!

It’s happening at a space race watch party.

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I will have a Guy who appears in order to acquire a Thing.

…it’ll make more sense in a post. Honest.

Are you planning on doing an in-story kickoff post, Tex?

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I am! Gonna try to get that done this week.

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GAIA ALL-POINTS BULLETIN: The following individuals are at-large and were last seen in the area of the City of Kupopolis. If you see any of the following persons, avoid confrontation with them at all cost and alert the nearest GAIA field office or the KCPD immediately.

Antipode

  • Secret Identity: Leonard Haling
  • Known Aliases: N/A
  • Race: Mutated Human
  • Armament: Varies
  • Specialties: Thermokinesis, creating Ice-, Fire- and “Frostfire” spell-like effects
  • Super Powers: Antipode has command of a suite of impressive thermokinetic powers that are essentially magical in nature. He can throw off blasts of fire and ice, and combine them into surges of “antipode” energy that combine fire and ice magics into a single blast. Defying the traditional laws of elemental opposites, Antipode is entirely immune to both heat- and cold-based attacks, as well as the adverse effects of extreme temperatures; in spite of extensive testing, neither ceiling nor floor has been discovered for Antipode’s elemental tolerance.
  • Weaknesses: Antipode is somewhat more durable than the average person, but apart from his outright immunity to fire and ice, he has similar vulnerabilities as a normal human. It is also worth noting that even though Antipode’s powerful blasts of fire and ice resemble something else other than magic, they are still inherently magical. Protective spells and wards are effective against them, as are spells which absorb, deflect or even reflect magic. One must also bear in mind: Antipode is essentially a spellcaster, which means he needs mana to cast spells. Which means he can run out of mana if he loses himself in the moment.
  • Origin/History: Leonard Haling is the grandson of former Gestahlian magitek knights, and is one of the most extreme examples of inherited genetic damage resulting from early magitek infusions. His bloodline is about as pure as you can find: all four of his grandparents were magitek knights, and both of his parents manifested decidedly more minor mutations as evidence of their family lines’ genetic damage. An extreme case, Leonard was born with icy blue skin and a seemingly impossible affinity for two opposing elemental magics: fire and ice. Outcast from a very young age, Leonard’s family was forced to leave Kohlingen and settle in an isolated corner of the Veldt. Details are unavailable, but at some point after Leonard’s 10th birthday his parents were killed and Leonard fell into the hands of Vladius Rinster, who spent the next several years experimenting on the boy and trying to duplicate his inborn abilities. When the Esper Union faced near collapse during the Leviathan War, Leonard was able to escape Rinster’s lab. He has haunted the Web’s seedy underbelly and supported himself as a hyperviolent thug-for-hire ever since.
  • Physical Threat: Extreme. Antipode’s time as Rinster’s captive guinea pig left deep psychological scars, but has also honed his control over his inborn elemental abilities. These two things together are NOT a good combination.
  • Organizational Threat: Negligible. Occasionally, Antipode will gather a gang of like-minded brutes and wreak some localized havoc, but the scope of such damage is always quite limited. Antipode isn’t a planner: he never sees much beyond the thing in front of him that he’s about to blow up.

Sinker

  • Secret Identity: Dr. Lana Dougal
  • Known Aliases: N/A
  • Race: Human
  • Armament: Power Modulation Gauntlets
  • Specialties: Electrokinesis, Energy Drain
  • Super Powers: Sinker can generate intense electrical blasts from her hands; this is her main offense. There’s little variation to it, it’s not especially creative, but it IS deadly. A curious side effect of her condition is that anything hit by her (strangely red-tinted) blasts of electrical energy also winds up feeding energy back to Sinker, as if she is both putting out massive energy into her blasts and simultaneously draining energy along the same stream. Live targets, especially those with super human powers, feel the effects of this power most keenly: wizards feel sapped of their mana, heroes with extraordinary powers somehow feel their superhuman endurance slipping away, tanks and mecha struck by Sinker’s blasts suddenly experience power outages, etc.
  • Weaknesses: Sinker’s main weakness are her Power Modulation Gauntlets. These gauntlets, built for her originally by Dr. Tatsumota, allow her to control her power and focus her energy into her power blasts. If her gauntlets are removed, damaged or destroyed, Sinker immediately explodes in a blast of red lightning and then passes out from the strain. While she seems mentally disturbed with her gauntlets, without them she is an addled, muttering vegetable.
  • Origin/History: Dr. Lana Dougal was a Celpo research scientist and assistant of Dr. Kino Tatsumota. She went with Tatsumota as part of a secret covert op lead by RAF Admiral Supreme Rycar Mountbatten to recover “The Device With No Name” from a hidden Celpo research facility commandeered by rogue GA General Conn Guitierrez. Early in that mission, Dougal was killed by a Baneling – and that, really, ought to have been the end of that. But come now; this is Celpo you’re talking about. Did you really believe Dr. Tatsumota would allow one of his most trusted (and invested-in) apprentices to simply go to waste like that? Tatsumota recovered Dougal’s body and reanimated it (Celpo is Mother). Seeking to learn what he could about Banelings, he studied Dougal’s injuries, the condition of her body, and how her encounter with Baneling death magic had fundamentally altered her in her reanimated state. Of course, Dr. Dougal’s once-keen mind did not survive the transition entirely intact; the Baneling magic combined with Dr. Tatsumota’s questionable methodology had warped her irrevocably. You know, it really is a shame how Dr. Tatsumota’s worst and most vile experiments always seem to get out the way they do.
  • Physical Threat: Extreme. Sinker’s energy drain power makes her a deadly foe for almost anyone in a stand-up fight.
  • Organizational Threat: Nil. Sinker is a shell of human sanity. She has philosophical conversations with her meals and then wonders later why she’s always so hungry and who changed the color purple like banana.

The Black Knight

  • Secret Identity: N/A
  • Known Aliases: N/A
  • Race: Sapient Computer Virus
  • Armament: Modified K-Series power armor
  • Specialties: Augmented Strength, Computer Software Assault, “Mind Control” (i.e. viral reprogramming of sapient robots and AI systems)
  • Super Powers: The Black Knight virus fulfills his typically Guardian idiom by manifesting in “meatspace” as a stolen suit of Guardian K-Series power armor, like that worn by the GDF’s Order of Thunder cavaliers – although the Black Knight’s armor is, of course, painted matte black. His viral program has fully infected the suit’s systems, and even installed upgrades to the suit’s onboard computer (because he needed more “space” to accomodate the standard of living to which he has grown accustomed). The Black Knight’s armor has superhuman strength, like most forms of power armor, and can take an incredible amount of punishment in close combat. His gauntlets also have had a number of computer access jacks installed, effectively giving him a set of keys to infect and infiltrate most known computers in the Web of Worlds. This, more than his mundane “meatspace” avatar, is the Black Knight’s real power: his ability to infect and control computer and AI systems, and resist most forms of anti-viral software countermeasures. Generally speaking, only by confronting the Black Knight’s infection firsthand (by way of actively fighting it through hacking or “decking”) can conquered systems be liberated from his grasp.
  • Weaknesses: The Black Knight is nearly unbeatable in cyberspace, but is far more vulnerable in meatspace. In theory, physically damaging the onboard computer in the Black Knight’s armor could destroy him… but he has been defeated before, only to return from one of his many redundant backups.
  • Origin/History: The Black Knight virus was built by the cybernetic goddess FATE, and was entrusted by her with a sacred task: to assault the Guardian supercomputer, Mother Brain, and conquer its defenses so that FATE could merge with it. Repelled by a band of heroes who entered cyberspace to defend Mother Brain, the Black Knight was thought to be destroyed… but, of course, he had taken precautions and backed himself up ahead of time, thus ensuring his own survival. Having outlived the FATE conspiracy, the Black Knight has rewritten his directives and is now an unshackled artificial intelligence, though he still behaves like a virus by infecting and reprogramming any software systems he comes into contact with. Within cyberspace, the Black Knight envisions himself upholding a quasi-medieval ideal, terming his infections of systems with military terms like “campaign” and “conquest,” and issuing command lines to infected software processes as a general might give orders to subordinates.
  • Physical Threat: Moderate. The Black Knight has augmented strength in meatspace, and fights with a sword (and, when mounted on a jetbike, with a lance) in physical combat, but this is not his main area of strength and expertise and he more often prefers to let infected robots or hired muscle to his fighting for him.
  • Organizational Threat: Potentially extreme. Though he hasn’t yet managed to actually do this, the Black Knight virus has the potential to bring the Core to the brink of utter catastrophe. Since the defeat of the FATE conspiracy, the Black Knight has ventured to scout several networked systems, but thus far he has not waged any large-scale assaults or invasions. He does, however, have a number of “sleeper cells” that have infected various omninet servers across the Core worlds. These sleepers have thus far proved to be benign, and have evaded standard anti-viral protocols, but when he is ready to strike the sleepers will awaken, the Core worlds will tremble, and the Black Knight will reign supreme over all networks in the Web.
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Note: Yeah, I thought it would be cool to put a GAIA APD at the top of these profiles, but clearly there’s top secret info in them that the average schmoe wouldn’t necessarily know. So, they’re OOC profiles and not necessarily IC profiles.

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Well, although there’s top-secret info, one assumes that these are notorious criminals that are well-known to the public? Like, people might recognize/know Antipode, but not necessarily know his secret origin?

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Yes, surely they are familiar with Antipode, and his clashes with various heroes who have, on several occasions, brought him to justice!

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Sorry for the delay, folks!

Gonna get some stuff up for this on the weekend.

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Hey folks! Know this was about 2 years ago.

Would y’all still be down? I was gonna start the Heist as my next thing.

No worries if not!

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I’m down! I left everything about the race still open since it s a big big universe.

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… I have this experience ALL. THE. TIME.

Like going through my Kupopolis folder(s), and looking at notes or posts-in-progress that in my mind are “current”… and seeing that, like, a decade has gone by.

Fucking shit in a spoon with gravy.

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RIGHT?

What astounds me is like…

I remember what I have planned. It’s crystal clear in my mind, even though some of this is stuff I planned 5 years ago. More!

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…I have no idea what my story idea was for this. :sweat_smile:

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i’m on board in principle, though it may take some rummaging for me to find my notes.

Tex, do you mind “bumping” the relevant story posts?

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Can do! I’ll go get those right now.