In the MNU, there’s a Visionary, there’s a Dark Visionary, and there’s even a Dark Mind and a Visionary Unleashed…but none of these four beings were actually evil or good, they were just different. Similarly, there’s a Fanatic who’s Christian judgment incarnate, but she’s not purely good, and there’s an Apostate who she hates for his constant lies and manipulation, but it’s inaccurate to just call him evil. And thus, without their influence, the MNU local office of FILTER is mostly sticking to their original mandate of stopping alien terrorism, and only occasionally gets meddled with by Felix Stone and the Block. And thus, while never granted energy powers, m.n. Paige Huntley still becomes KNYFE. She yields Flawless Execution in much the same way, but her Kinetic Neutralizer aspect is very different; CT Knyfe IS the Kinetic Neutralizer, because she neutralizes foes in a kinetic fashion, but MN Knyfe has a Kinetic Neutralizer device, which replaced some of the power armor and all of the energy blade powers, instead making her a pure armored brawler who’s much harder to kill and much less likely to kill herself, while still hitting extremely hard.
I biffed Moral Neutrality Bunker super hard, and I doubt I can fix that, but it might be interesting to look at Fantastical Five Bunker instead for this thread, and maybe just say that he was stranded in the MNU by OblivAeon. It’s definitely not worse than what I actually did. And while Mud Bunker is pretty displeasing to me, it would be interesting to see the backstory of a magical Project Ironclad, where the US MIC realizes that magic genuinely exists and does some MK Ultra shenanigans to try and work out a way of weaponizing the arcane and occult, in some way reliable enough to look acceptable on a project status report. I think there’s a interesting tension to that kind of writing, hopefully executed better than the SCP Foundation does with its lazier takes on magical skips.
It hardly needs to be said, but to try and revive this thread I’ll at least post this: MN Fanatic is exactly the absolutist Christian Templar that you expect, where she has a totally inhuman lack of compassion and just enforces doctrinal obedience. Anyone who breaks canon law gets sent to meet their maker, and anything contrary to God’s design gets erased from existence.
Since Inversiverse Dawn has a son instead of a daughter, MN Expat can be a straight up reversal of the original. Instead of a “bad person who does good things” anti-hero, Expat is a good person doing bad things" anti-villain, sort of like a smaller scale version of CT Lifeline.
Thorathians in the MNU are still warlike conquerors with Hugh opinions of themselves, but are not quite the sadistic racial supremacists of CT. The twin suns are conceptualized as representing the balance of good and evil, rather than symbolizing the greatness of the unpowered Thorathian and the greaterness of the powered one, so while they still believe they are more fit to rule a star system than its own inhabitants, they bring a degree of stewardship to the concept, being a bit more akin to the Britons in India and less to the Romans in Carthage. They generally don’t punish a species for resisting conquest by bombing them into oblivion out of spite, but rather will work to integrate the captives into a colonial government that brings technological progress and social order to societies often at a tribal level. Given this Rainek Kel’Voss’s plans to unite the galaxy under his rule could have been a boon to the conquered species … had exile in frozen Gadrion Delta not driven him utterly mad.
Based on the Shipping Episode 2: Boogaloo Harder, I’m debating killing my super weird Baron Blade and having his prematurely greying daughter Ivana take over, so that I can ship Ivana with an unmarried Paul the 8th (he’s so much more patriotic that he probably refused to marry a senator, feeling it would be inappropriate; instead he has a loveless dynastic marriage that was arranged by the parents, and thus Ivana can pursue and “conquer” him in an antagonistic way).
PS: Glamour and Absolute Zero? No no no…Glamour and Cold Shoulder!
There’s no Ambuscade, there’s no Stuntman, and also there’s no Entertainer, but Barnum is A sel’s agent, and “The Night Hunter” is a reality show akin to Dog the Bounty Hunter mixed with Extreme Survivor and various similar shows. He’s probably breaking various laws, but there are excellent lawyers and insurers covering his butt as he does all his own publicity stunts.
In the Canon Timeline, Maerinyans are a famously peaceable race of diplomats, and Tempest is an ambassador, hot-headed for his kindred and thus better able to relate to aliens. In the MNU, Maerinyans are an entire race of lawyers, pushy aggressive rules lawyers playing an endless game of Prisoners Dilemma with the galaxy, negotiating contracts founded on assumed mutual hostility, and enforcing exquisite armed politeness alongside strict enforcement of the letter of any agreement. Among the residents of that Vognild Prime, Mkk DalTon is a particularly scheming and hard-headed prosecutor, much more willing to bend rules to the very limit of their flexibility, and thus sent to hostile races to break strikes and the like, much less politely enforcing obedience to a previously established deal by threatening abeyance of far more important contracts, and so forth. With a deranged madman seeking to bring the whole galaxy to heel, the Maerinyans made the mistake of trying to keep doing business as usual, and the notorious renegade Tempest was one of the few to escape death or impressment as a mind-controlled slave soldier under Brain-Surgeon Kronz.
I said before this one was going to be hard; past the inconvenient detail of them being distinct human individuals with different jobs, how would you tell these two apart after they got similar Oblivion Shard powers, if not for the convenient fact that one is yellow, one is green, one is evil, and one is good? Well as it turns out, I found a reason to tell them apart alright; they are separated only by the fact that one is tied into OblivAeon and the other is not. Both give rise to chartreuse constructs which resemble living creatures and operate semi-autonomously on the basis of personality profiles derived from the creator’s impression of the people and creatures they’re based upon, but Captain Cosmic has a clear-headed view of those he has personally interacted with, while Infinitor’s perspective is warped by the influence of a multiversal destroyer, showing him numerous contradictory visions of the same people, so that an Infinitor-created simulacrum of a person will judder and shift erratically among different variations from different universes. CC can create a copy of Fanatic that is eerily accurate apart from its color, while Infinitor’s version looks like Hellion one moment and Seraph the next, a ghost-slayer once and a Haunted Helena then again, constantly oscillating unpredictably among various personality profiles and even radically different powersets, though as always it is only a shallow copy of the person made of a glass-like material that easily transmutes into destructive energy on contact. As the two chase each other across the galaxy, the identically costumed Lowsley brothers fight a constant chess-like battle between their construct armies, trying to prove whether sanity and stability can beat a constantly shifting throng of variations. It is unclear which is Nigel and which is Hugh, but either way Infinitor is the mad one, and his brother will drag him back to sanity even if it kills them both.
It’s important to acknowledge that in the canon timeline, where Rook City is home to an economic underclass that lives lives of desperate poverty as they are oppressed by the Organization, the c.t. Chairman’s various Thugs are not members of the downtrodden population, taking the only work they’re qualified for so that they can feed their family. The Organization in the canon timeline doesn’t hire honest hard working people trying to rise above their station; Graham Pike has no interest in seeing anyone’s lot in life improved. The Thugs are guys who beat weaker people up for fun, primarily, and only secondarily because they draw a paycheck from doing it. They are never from the bottom economic ring, nor even the second one up; guys looking to get hired by the Organization usually have decent money socked away, probably gained through crime or gambling or other dubious activities, and what additional wealth their off the books Pike Industries job nets them is typically wasted at the races or the like. These guys do crime because they enjoy violence and bullying and coming up with schemes that seem clever compared to the other dull bulbs around them; nobody should find any of them sympathetic or relatable characters at all. Even for the spider at the heart of the web, Chairman Pike itself, the money is only a means to an end; it is unquestioned power which he craves, the certainty that his word is law and there is no defense against it.
All that must be said up front, in order to understand that for the m.n. Chairman, everything the Organization does really IS just about the money. A completely amoral billionaire, and still willing to kill if necessary, the neutral Pike is nonetheless a good corporate steward of the urban ecosystem that he’s part of, doing whatever he feels is acceptable to try and bolster the economic muscle of all Rook Citians, not out of any degree of altruism whatsoever, but because a rising tide raises all boats. There is none of the carefully rationed sadism that the c.t. Chairman loves to rarely indulge, when someone makes the mistake of earning his undivided attention; m.n. Pike genuinely does not care whether people are happy or sad, so long as they line his pockets either way. Within that certainty, many members of his Organization do indeed consist of relatable and sympathetic individuals, doing the best job they’re qualified for and saving their earnings in the hopes of providing a legacy for their children, and Pike ensures that these employees, while still illegal and given zero forgiveness for any betrayal, are well taken care of as long as they remain loyal, incentivized not to consider other offers which would take them away from the stability of the status quo.
Since the dawn of time, the firmly neutral earth spirit Akash’Tubha has challenged every generation of humans to prove their worthiness to survive by demonstrating that they can master the magical power of music. If they successfully become a Virtue-Oso of the Void, they perform an Orchestration and are honored for their achievement; civilizations which do not succeed at this challenge are destroyed, and the survivors live as tribal primitives until they rediscover civilization and music.
Attempting unsuccessfully to construct an index to this thread above, as I try to remember how the coding on this board is formatted.
As I reread the article about Legacy, where I made up a lot of revisionist history details about exactly what canon Paul Parsons the VIIIth’s ancestors did during the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War and so forth, I found myself imagining a cartoon where the stories of the two men would play out side by side (similar to the “Fantasy/Reality” presentation in the movie La La Land). To make the two versions visually distinct, I figured I’d change Moral Neutrality Paul’s Legacy costume (and give historical powered Parsonses a nonstandard uniform which isn’t historically accurate but resembles a Legacy outfit). I thought about doing the blatantly obvious thing, making MN Paul’s bodysuit gray instead of white, but besides being boring, that’s also confusing in the Civil War case, where Southern soldiers have gray uniforms. So instead I’m saying MN Legacy has a costume that’s yellow and blue with a splash of red, instead of white and blue (any resemblance to Ukraine is coincidence), and to avoid the body suit matching his blonde hair I’ll make him a light brunet instead.
While I’m messing with costumes, the knowledge that Argent Adept has silver magical effects in DE slightly disappoints me, as I liked the theming of an Irish-American redhead doing vaguely naturey green magic. So I’m going to accept the DE retcon for CT Argent, but MN Argent will explicitly still have the green spells.
I dunno, I’m always wary of putting a Legacy in a yellow, blue, and red costume (which C&A also did with Boldest Legacy), as to me it always seems a bit too close to his real life inspiration.
