First, but not Foremost
October 5th, 2018
Perhaps the first super-hero character I ever made anywhere, quite possibly for the old Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game, was Firebomb. This guy was born with, yes, psionic abilities, but they were more physical than mental in scope. He could either move things or catch them on fire with his brain, sort of a telekinetic / pyrokinetic combo, I suppose. And I dug the character a lot.
Which is probably why he's wound up in most incarnations of most super-heroic things I've written, at least eventually. Strangely enough, I haven't directly plugged him in to my Variant Earth 13 material, though he's actually got a place there, in the form of the Universal Squad team. Yeah, I know, they really need a better name. But, sometimes, I fall flat there. Sorry!
So, naturally, it was a cinch that he wound up being the very first character that I built to roam about in the City of Heroes, back when the game was originally brought online. I mean on its very first day! Oh, sure, I didn't pre-order the thing, so I didn't get to play in its beta, or its pre-release event, but I should have if only to shut people up who thought that a badge of superiority.
Sometimes, I really hate nerds. Anyway, I found that the name I wanted for Firebomb was, in fact, taken. This was a bit of a conundrum, so I wound up calling this fellow Captain Char. The screenshots I took of him way back in the day are pretty awful, and they were taken before I knew how to edit out all the interface bits from the game. Which is why they are zoomed in and so pixely. Sorry about that.
The reason I went with an actual, different name was that one of my biggest pet peeves in this game, or any other online game, or even every single digital community I have ever belonged to, is when people just can't let a name go that someone else has already taken. I absolutely, positively despite seeing a name with random punctuation appended to it, or surrounded by Xs or Os.
You know the type. You'll be wandering around some forum or digital landscape, and you see some guy calling himself Han Solo' or xx Sephiroth xx or -Wolverine or whatever. I always make a point of 'pronouncing' the little extras in their unoriginal names when talking to them, which seems to irk them to no end. I guess unoriginal clods hate having their unoriginality waved in their cloddy faces.
The punch line, here, is that this is where the name for Dash Apostrophe came from. And, being the ultimate showboating loudmouth, everyone on the Infinity server saw his name - and his gibbering - just about everywhere. Thus, people who felt the same about those unoriginal names got a good chuckle, those who didn't were extra butthurt about it, and fun was had by, well, me.
But I digress. As per the norm. In time, I eventually abandoned Captain Char to play Crazy Hate, who had a completely broken power that wasn't nerfed until I had exploited it for all it was worth. I'm awful, I know. But the point is this guy fell by the wayside. I eventually rebuilt an actual Firebomb on a server outside Infinity, the one I created most of my folks on, once the name was freed up on the Freedom server.
Fitting, eh? I powered the revived Firebomb to level 50, and then once his name was freed up on Infinity, I moved him back over there. I guess whoever had it there had since deleted their own. So, I finally came full circle, and this guy once again became my primary blaster - that being a character who excelled in dishing out ranged damage, but was relatiely frail otherwise. The 'glass cannon', as it were.
Installments in this series: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14