A hero team up spearheaded by Starbreaker and Neku have started doing some investigation into the music plague. This is the information they will recieve, when investigating possibly culprits. Other characters may reasonably come upon this information by their own means, but we do encourage you to help boost the existing effort!


( THE SHORT LIST )

You may remember that mysterious crystalline substance that was found at the bottom of the sinkholes and has been mentioned in the news a few times since. Your character might have been one of the people who took a fragment for research purposes, or maybe just as a souvenir.

Throughout the current in-game day (February 20th), all of the purloined crystals will hatch. Or, well, sort of hatch – it’s more as if the crystal itself unfolds and rearranges itself into something new, and – inexplicably, something larger. The creatures that emerge from the crystals will be made of the same clear, hard, colourless substance as the crystals themselves. Their forms vary but are affected by the emotions of the people who have taken the crystals.

Creatures that have emerged from crystals exposed to love and happiness will be fluttery, flying creatures – they may vaguely resemble butterflies or birds or something in between. They are friendly and easily tamed.

Creatures that have emerged from crystals exposed to anger and frustration will be aggressive and scuttly, and may have sharp claws or stinging tails, or both. They will actively seek to attack people and destroy things around them, but they behave enough like animals that they can be distracted or will give up pursuit if their target gets away from them.

Creatures that have emerged from crystals exposed to sadness and depression will be armoured and fearful animals that may resemble tortoises, beetles or hedgehogs. They will avoid people.

Creatures that have emerged from crystals that have not been exposed to a lot of any specific strong emotion will be vaguely reptilian and behave like ordinary animals, albeit rather curious ones – they can be sort of tamed and will not attack anyone or tear your house apart if you try to keep them in there, but they will not listen to you very much and will probably rifle through your stuff.

The forms of the individual creatures will vary and you can decide whatever you like about the specific details of the creature/s that emerge from your character’s crystal. Depending on the emotions of the people around their pre-hatched crystal, they could combine traits from more than one of the described types. Typically they will be at least the size of a loaf of bread, but creatures exposed to particularly strong emotions may be larger, and they will get bigger in time.

They are unaffected by intense heat and energy weapons, but can be shattered by blunt force if enough of it is applied. Once shattered, the pieces will remain motionless and will not re-hatch.

If you tame one, you are absolutely welcome to keep it as a pet (although you may need to conceal that from CONDOR).

Hey guys, just a quick note that the bidding on auctions should be wrapping up today and tomorrow, and that people should feel free to start planning any date threads they'd like to play out!

For characters that didn't get bid on much, you can feel free to assume the final bid ended up being more than what happened in the thread - just pick something reasonable, and discuss it with any player characters that bid on you. After all, superheroes are realistically a pretty hot commodity.

February 14th is technically occurring on Monday/Tuesday the 3rd/4th but feel three to post date and start early if you like!

Remember, for all dates there will be CONDOR operatives and city police on hand, if required, to make sure nothing goes wrong in terms of vulnerable celebrities.

Also, you can use this post for planning!

We've just put up a post for people to submit their own news stories to the LA times, if that's a thing you're interested in doing! If you have a plot thing you want to get in the news or just want to throw in some background worldbuilding, please do, we would love to have your contributions!

If you have any questions feel free to ask them here or on the FAQ – comments to the news submissions post itself are screened.

Those of you who read the newspaper will be aware that a Celebrity Singles Auction is being held for Valentine's Day.

We don't have to account for every single celebrity who's up for auction but we are hoping to be able to see a few dates threaded out! SO,comment here if you have a character who would submit themselves to this stuff, OR you want to make up a public figure to NPC as for the purposes of the auction! Feel free to use this to discuss stuff too.

The auction itself will be taking place this IRL weekend, and the actual dates will occur around Valentine's Day in-game (so a couple of weeks from now IRL). For the auction we will also be allowing and encouraging people to NPC auction winners to thread out dates with other people's characters, but of course player characters can also bid for other player characters. Not all the dates have to take place on the same day, so characters who are up for auction can bid for other ones if they want.

Heroes submitting themselves as celebrities will be allowed to do so without revealing their secret identity, and can attend the actual date in costume. Unregistered heroes are welcome to participate as well as registered ones – CONDOR tends to discreetly look the other way in circumstances like this for the sake of their own public image.

If you end up wanting to app your NPC celebrity or bidder, you can of course do so – but these NPCs should be OCs rather than existing canon characters, although we may make exceptions for characters who are tied to ones you already play, if they are sufficiently obscure.

Hi gang! Now that we've got our first six people actually accepted into the game, I thought we should make a post to welcome people on board! The game proper will start on the 28th, and in the meantime we'd like to encourage everybody to get to know each other and work out which characters already know each other and stuff like that. We'll be putting a post up for establishing pre-game CR and stuff like that in the imminent future, so keep an eye out for that.

Feel free to use this post for OOC mingling and introductions. We're really excited about running this game, and also to get to know you guys – that is, those of you we don't know already!