Are we going to to use Seer's idea to have a missionary?

I'm not sure, actually.

It's been discussed before, but I want to (again) raise the question of how we're going to handle the shared universe.

Once one of us writes a story actually set in Crystal Falls, any details about the city, other people, etc., would become cannon. So we need to have a lot of details about the city and relevant people already worked out.

Also, I think that we do need to have a structure or plan of some kind in place to bring our heroes together into shared story arcs. We can't keep writing the heroes as standalones if they are living and operating in the same city.

Organizing into phases might be good. I have a tentative proposition that we can debate, play with, or throw away.

Phase One: Finish planning the city, the initial set of heroes, create any shared heroes/characters we need to tie stand alone stories together, etc. Anyone who wants to begin writing their heroes in other places than Crystal Falls could also release their stories at this point.

This begs the question of what to do with the stories. I'm thinking we could have them posted on the blog. It would certainly boost activity there.

Phase Two: The first stage of stories with all the heroes. There could be some standalone stories, as long as the don't deal with any huge, cataclysmic events or villains who would attract the attention of more than one hero. But hopefully many of us will be willing to co-author story arcs dealing with multiple heroes.

At that point maybe we would lead into a phase three of a story arc involving all the characters leading up to some huge showdown. We could possibly even see if Katie wants to involve some of her super villains.

That makes good sense, Neil. Let's get those details worked out so I can get on with my superheroes' story.

Good stuff, Neil.

Elizabeth (Shawn) and I have mulled over the idea of our two heroes knowing each other, but neither of us have had the time to do much of anything writing related, much less brain-storm together on this.


There can be no explicit connection to Katie's series (in her universe there are no superheroes), but this could work on an easter egg basis. (I would love the idea of Floyd showing up for an extremely obscure cameo. )

Yep, those sound like good ideas, Neil. I think we were just waiting for a city map or some idea of where to start.

Yes, they're welcome on the blog.

A lot of people have wanted to see how Floyd would react to a real, bona-fide hero.

Hi guys, I am working on a introduction for my hero (Terror) but I don't where exactly I have to post.

Okay, cool. You can put it in the story excerpts section and link it here.

Good ideas, Neil. It feels so official, having Phases.

*sporfle* Floyd showing up as a cameo would be hysterical. I agree, I think that sort of thing would have to be on an easter egg basis, though.

Last night I learned a bit more about a different character that I think ties into at least one of Mika's stories, but I still don't know much yet.

*cracks knuckles*

Right, then. College classes are finished. The ACT is over. Let's write some superheroes. The phase system sounds good. We have a good cast of heroes now, so the NASCs (Non-Author Specific Characters) and villains are next, and they acn probably be worked on as we work on the city.

How many parts of the city do y'all think there should be? Big-picture areas, like manufacturing, residential, business, and so on?

How many parts? I honestly don't know. It depends on population size.

For instance my hometown of Tucson has... 1.4 million people, I think. And any 'parts' we have are mostly internally defined (ie, we made them up). So we've got Downtown (university and oldest buildings), South Tucson (which isn't south, but is crime and illegal immigrant ridden), the Base area (DMAFB, Border Patrol HQ and associated environs), the Northwest side (hoity-toity, really the entire north third of the city). And anywhere else is just referred to by direction or cross-streets.

Perhaps we should define our population size first. Then figure out how old the town is, what street planning looked like, etc.

That's probably a good idea. I can't remember if we discussed that or not. *thinks*
I have no idea what a medium size city would be.

Still alive! Kinda!

I believe you originally said it was about the size of Boston, Varon.
Sorry about the city map. Life hijacked me. I can try to throw something together real quick over the next couple of days, but I'll probably need someone to poke me. One thing that struck me is that almost all major/big cities (especially ones the size of Boston) have interstates connected to them...so do I need to invent a new interstate or just plop it on one?

Ok. I know it's lousy and needs lots filled in, but it's enough to get yall started. Sadly, I'm not sure life will let me help out much more than this. Anyways, the dark blue is the major freeway/interstate encircling the city and the dotted line is the city limits. The light blue is pretty obviously the river and the green area is the park.

I've created a thread for my superhero, Rebecca (superhero name still pending). Link

Okay, cool. It's a good start and we can definitely work from there. No worries about not being able to do much more. We might want to split it up into sections then, and work on one at a time, with references and basics in the others too.

*prods*
I'm still around. I wasn't expecting to take classes this semester but that's what has happened. I'm still working on Invictus since his backstory occurs outside of Crystal Falls.

Excellent, then, excellent. Glad to hear it!

*delicately pokes thread with a highly-charged wire* is...this project still doing anything, or do I need to use my technopathic skills to make defibrillators?

It's doing things... slowly... I'm still working through my intro of Wisp. I got distracted by a shiny picture though...

Yeah, those shiny pictures get me every time too...

Similar problems here. I'm working on a serial introducing Invictus as he makes his way to Crystal Falls from Eastern Europe, but between work and school, writing time and inspiration are rare.

Okay, cool.

My main question is this: If Crystal Falls is a place for heroes, then could my MC's parents send him somewhere in CF for 'rehabilitation'? His power is the result of an incident which also gives him a handicap, so it would make sense, because his memories previous to the incident are warped, and his parents think he's gone slightly insane. Upon hearing of CF could they send him there, possibly to the hypothetical missionary character Seer suggested?

Sounds feasible to me. Especially if he's one of the heroes who comes to the city later-on.

Progress report: Um... slow and steady! xD College precludes me getting much work done on writing. Despite that I have made some progress in figuring out my hero.

I've made some progress in figuring out Mika's character, and particularly her backstory (which I think is outside of CF). There's more worldbuilding there than I anticipated.

Here is an introduction to the character of Night Wisp.

Awesome!

Abi and I have developed a few of our characters, and discovered that they live at a mission/boarding house for people with super powers (no word yet on if the public knows supers live there or not). The place is run by Jim and Holly Gardener, but we haven't come up with a lot of characters that live there yet, so if you think your character would be one to need training, counseling, or just a roof over his head, let us know. They'll probably end up being background characters in out CF stories.

That sounds pretty cool, Rin. Similar to my idea, actually.
The mission would probably come into existence later in the continuum since, in the beginning, the city's superpower negating effects are just slowly starting to weaken.

Yeah, I sort of stole your idea because we wanted them for our stories.

Do we have a model for the waterfall?

No, I do not believe so.

So… I know it’s been months since I last showed my face in this thread, but in that time I’ve come up with what I think are some really cool developments in the backstory of our universe. I’ve said for years that I’m more of a worldbuilder than a writer, and there were some things about the way we had things set up that kept nagging at the worldbuilder side of me. And as I set out trying to find a way to solve one of the problems, it wound up solving some of the others.

It started with trying to figure out where Crystal Falls would be located. It needed to be near a river (hard to have a waterfall with no running water), and I wanted it to be in the more forested/mountainous area because of an idea I had.

I was also less than 100% contented with the backstory we came up with. It just wasn’t sitting quite right with me yet. Partially, because Varon wanted to have a heavily anti-superhero culture in a city where there hadn’t been any super-powered people for several decades. In a small town that’s plausible, but in a large city where people are constantly moving to and away, the odds are that most of the population wouldn’t remember the super-battle that created the Falls and wouldn’t really think much about people with superpowers since there aren’t any in the city. Beyond that, most comic universes waited a couple of decades before addressing the anti-hero theme. Felt weird to just jump right into that theme when we were still trying to create heroes.

And lastly, we never really addressed the issue of how super powers became possible. Every comic ever has explained it some way or another, be it extraterrestrial heritage, evolution (aka the X-men), radiation, super-drugs, or magical artifacts. And most comic universes in the process of connecting their storylines and explanations, wind up a developing a complex mythos that completely erases the possibility of God existing in their universes. We’re a Christian writing forum, if we don’t ask “in a universe where God created everything, where do superpowers come from?” then who will? For example, one hero that was mentioned somewhere in this thread gets his powers from a mask that feeds on fear or something like that. But how is such a mask possible?

Beyond that, we don’t really have a name for them. We’ve been calling them “supers” but that was used in The Incredibles.

So with all of those questions bubbling around in my subconscious, and with me researching an answer to the first problem of location, I stumbled across an idea that wound up solving all of them in one fell swoop. I wasn’t 100% sure of the best way to explain the idea(s) to you guys, but I settled on bullet points.

• The city of Crystal Falls is built near the ruins of Gladstone, VA, which was destroyed in the Battle that created the Falls.
• The Battle that created the Falls was not a showdown between villain(s) and heroes, but rather between members of a secret super-hero military program. One member of the team had recently returned from Vietnam and suffered from PTSD. One day, he had an episode, went on a destructive rampage, and his teammates were sent to stop him. The resulting battle wiped out the small nearby railroad/farming town of Gladstone and created the Falls. The battle ended when the reality-warper Sentinel set up a neutral zone that negated/suppressed all super powers.
• The Battle of Gladstone/The Gladstone Incident revealed the existence of super-powered individuals to the public, and established a negative public attitude toward them.
• The City of Crystal Falls was established in part in memory of the battle, but also because of the Neutral Zone. A prison for super-powered criminals was set up in the heart of the Neutral Zone.
• The Neutral Zone is why so many super-powered people are drawn to the city. People who struggle with their powers move there to have a life free from the burden of their abilities. Parents send their children to special schools and programs in the Neutral Zone (some are geared towards teaching control/suppression, others are more like alternative schools or military schools for super-powered kids).
• The Neutral Zone is anchored/generated by the Sentinel Stone (aka a giant rock (maybe statue) that Sentinel warped reality around so that it created the Zone).
• Over time aka ITB, the Zone starts to weaken, which is why see powers start to pop up in the city.

That’s the major overview of the backstory and setup for the universe, but there’s more that I came up with for the cobhaic background of the existence of super-powered people. This centers around the science of Dynamology, which is the branch of science that studies people with super-powered. It comes from the Greek word dunamis which means “power, strength, ability, etc.” From that science came the politically correct names for people with powers: “dynamically gifted individuals” and/or “dynamics”. But more vernacular terms would probably include things like “soops” (from “supers”), “freaks”, and “dynos”. Below is a working run-down/history of dynamology and its role in the universe… and of course, it’s in bullet points too!

• Dynamology was born out of the work of physician Donald MacGregor, often called “The Father of Dynamology”.
• During the early 1930’s Dr. MacGregor was always fascinated by performers at traveling carnivals claiming to perform impossible feats. The idea of people with remarkable abilities intrigued him as a physician.
• One day, he saw a strong man perform with the stage name “Hercules” and it took him back to the Greek myths that he used to read as a child. This awoke in him the realization that mankind has always had tales of heroes performing impossible feats.
• Partnering with childhood friend Marcus Blackwell, who taught classical literature and languages at the University of Virginia, MacGregor began analyzing ancient hero tales and comparing their similarities. From this research was born the MacGregor-Blake Dynamic Theory.
• MacGregor theorized that throughout the course of history there have always been rare individuals with exceptional strength, speed, and skills that exceed those of normal humans, and that ancient tales of mythical heroes were inspired by such individuals. He pointed to the Genesis 6 passage about the Nephilim who were called “heroes of old, men of renown” as Biblical reenforcement of hist theory, although he was reluctant to emphasize the reference to their potentially celestial parentageHe was rather unconcerned about that reference because most heroes in ancient myth were often attributed with divine or otherworldly parentage or origins..
• Though convinced that the degree of such phenomenal abilities were terribly exaggerated and distorted by time and myth, MacGregor became determined to find such dynamically gifted individuals and study them to see what secrets they could reveal about human potential.
• As rumors of war began to grow in the late thirties, he saw an opportunity to pursue his obsession and approached military officials campaigning that dynamically gifted soldiers would give the US army a decided advantage just as their mythical counterparts often won decisive victories in the ancient tales.
• After years of campaigning, as growing tensions in the east prompted the urgency for finding military upper-hands, his efforts finally paid off. The same day that the Manhattan Project was authorized, the much more secretive and lower-budgeted Argo Initiative (named after the story of Jason and the Argonauts, in which the hero Jason recruits some of the most renown heroes of Ancient Greece to join him on his quest for the Golden Fleece) was authorized to begin the hunt for dynamically gifted soldiers.
• The Argo Initiative was the original form of the military program which decades later would bring together the heroes involved in the Gladstone Incident.
• Many advances were made in the field of Dynamology during those decades, but all of it was kept under wraps.
• After the Gladstone Incident, when the existence of dynamics became public knowledge, the field grew in leaps and bounds with researchers of almost every discipline seeking to gain insight into the phenomenon.
• In the decades after the Gladstone Incident, several specialized sub-branches of dynamic theory were born including psycho-dynamology (the study of the relationship between the psyche and super powers), bio-dynamology (studies the biological causes and impacts of powers), eco-dynamology, socio-dynamology, and many more.
• None of these branches ever succeeds in definitively identifying the source of superpowers.
• Though much of MacGregor’s theories and ideas were eventually corrected or disproved after the Gladstone Incident, he and Blackwell started one major contribution that immortalized them in the fields of folklore and dynamology alike: the MacGregor-Blackwell Index of Mythical Abilities, a list of common abilities attributed to heroes, demi-gods, and even some deities in myths and cultures around the world. The purpose of this list was to aid in the discovery of which abilities were most likely to exist and to aid in finding people with these abilities. Over the years, it would be expanded and revised, which to this day has been the ongoing work of the field of Classical Dynamology.

So that’s dynamology and my attempt to explain superpowers (i.e. - There’ve always been supers, even in Bible times, and their origins are unclear). Another big development was the idea of the role reality-warping abilities play in the cobha of our universe. Basically I started thinking, “What if reality warping was like any other talent and different warpers had different specialties in how much of reality they could change and what kinds of changes they could make?” For instance, the reality warper Sentinel who fights in the Battle of Gladstone is only able to warp reality around himself enough to give himself abilities that he otherwise wouldn’t have (the creation of the Neutral Zone was a fluke that I’ll explain in a moment). So he can give himself powers like super strength and speed and the like, but within his own personal limits.

So spinning off that idea I came up with a way to use reality-warpers to explain the mystical artifacts side of origin stories. Throughout world mythology there are stories of mythical smith heroes/gods/races who forge weapons with impossible virtues. So what if there were reality warpers whose talents specialized in warping reality around objects in such a way as to give those objects properties that they could not realistically possess? Dynamologists come to call these warpers “warp-smiths” or “wonder smiths” and their creations are called “warp relics” or “warp artifacts”. There’s a warp smith who joins the the Argo Initiative towards the end, which verifies the theory. Through him, they discover that a warp-smith cannot create an artifact that permanently endows non-dynamics with super-powers. They can create warp-relics that can grant their wielders special abilities while they use them, and relics that can awaken latent or dormant abilities in dynamics. But they cannot create a warp-relic that permanently gives normal people superpowers. Sentinel tries to learn the art of warp-smithing, but only succeeds once: when he creates the Sentinel Stone in the Battle of Gladstone. This extraordinary feat also permanently drains him of his powers.

I know this post is already monstrously long, but like I said, I’ve had months to come up with this stuff and I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to share it. So be patient with me just a little while longer as I unload some important details about the Argo Initiative.

• The Exceptional Soldier Research Initiative, codenamed the “Argo Initiative” was birthed around the same time as the Manhattan Project and like it, was under the supervision of the OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development).
• The research side of the project was originally headquartered in Charlottesville, VA near the University of Virginia, with support personnel from nearby Fort A. P. Hill.
• The initial purpose of the AI was to discover and train an entire regiment of Hercules-type soldiers. The theory was that since many heroes shared the same basic traits (strengths, speed, etc.), they could find a bunch of these people and train them into a super-unit.
• During WWII the AI succeeded in finding 5 individuals: a carnival strongman, an acrobat who could see in the dark, a guy with super-speed, a swimmer who could hold his breath for up to 2 hours, and a bullet-proof mobster. Each of these found their place in the war effort, but because their abilities were so drastically varied, the hopes of a super unit of super strong soldiers was crushed.
• With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, MacGregor feared the army would pull the plug on the project.
• However, during the Cold War, with the rise of espionage and the increased need for specialized individuals, the AI (which got re-vitalized and renamed to something else) was tasked with recruiting dynamics from around the world.
• Along with the nuclear arms race, a more secret race took off as each nation sought to discover their own special operatives before they could be snatched up by other countries with better offers.
• In the 60’s and 70’s a more individual-based training approach was developed, which officially integrated codenames, which had been a tradition up to that point, but were not officially recognized.
• Original codenames were very mythically and classically inspired due to the nature of MacGregor and Blackwell's research.
• The US “recruited” many gifted individuals from “red countries” with the promise of asylum and…other tactics….
• Specialized teams of dynamic operatives were deployed in both the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.
• It was one of the Vietnam teams that was responsible for the Gladstone Incident.
• The team member who went nuts and had to be stopped was code named Trident and he had seismic powers that drew his strength from water sources.

Well… I think that’s enough for one monster post. I’m sure there’s a thousand and one little other details that I’ve left off. But I think this should be enough to give you a good grasp of my ideas. What do yall think? Does this sound like a direction we want to go in?

Far from tangling up the notions I already had in place, this canon actually fills in a few blanks for me. I don't know if I'll set significance on a prominent researcher sharing a surname with Carmen "Night Wisp" Blake. We'll see...

Well...his name is now Marcus Blackwell instead of Matthias Blake, so I don't think you could set significance on it even if you wanted to.

Okay. Good to know.

I love this. It makes the foundation much, much better and ties everything together excellently.

Havent been on here in a while too much writing i suppose...

Seer i read that post and loved it, not to mention i love the whole idea bout Crystal Falls!!..

Its so funny, i was inspired to work on my own superhero Gotham, Central City like universe, and then i come across this post. Needless to say i have barely anything other than names, powers, and possible story arcs. But Seers explanations just gave me more of a reason to explain the existence of superpowers in my own universe. I like the idea of crustal falls in general seems different than your normal story lines, and there are lots of possibilities.

So...now that we have a location, I can finally start working on maps of CF. Also...now that we know where the Falls are, we can come up with a model for what they look like!!!

Hope to have the map finished by the end of the month, but we'll see.

Wonderful! Thanks so much for all your work, Seer!

Okay, this is really, really, cool.

I have no idea if I'll be able to write anything but I have a potential character to add to the mix if someone wants to use him (or if I find time for him...).

His name is Thomas Cathar (for now) and he's a firefighter.
He is also an elemental super with power over fire. Either that or he has a super-tech suit that essentially gives him that ability...all I did was draw a picture of the dude so I have like zero backstory or super powers worked out except they have something to do with fire...and ironically enough his alter ego is a firefighter.
I thought it would be neat if he hates fire, and yet that's his power. It might come off as too much like Batman though. Dunno.

Also, he may have moved to Crystal Falls because he hates his powers and realizes that there's something special about the place that annuls them. So he gets a job as a firefighter...but then when the power-block is broken (maybe the rock breaks from the stress of keeping back too many powers over too big an area???) he has to face himself once again.

I'm thinking he would be an essentially good guy with a ton of inner turmoil that causes him to make bad decisions that he hates himself for afterwards.

Potential backstory is that when he discovered his power, it caused a fire that killed someone/people that loved...maybe wife and/or family? That would really give him cause to hate his power.

Just a character that might work in this world! I'll see about getting that picture of him on here...

Areth,
Karthmin

So that little snippet got me excited about this character and I sat down and wrote out this guy's backstory and general character arc.
Because I really don't know if I'll be able to do any real work with him, I thought I'd put it up here for everyone to see. If I have time, I'll try to get something done, but if not, oh well, I guess. If I die or something, maybe someone can take him and run with him if he/she wants.

I'm thinking Flame as a name, but I'm totally open to more ideas. His real name is (again) Thomas Cathar.
He was a young, very successful businessman in the spy products industry, working mainly for the government, but with some private contracts as well (may have been a foreign country, but not sure; it's not totally relevant). Anyway, he was CEO of a sub-branch of the industrial giant [insert name here]. His business sub-branch was named after him (Cathar Industries) and specialized in making nearly invisible, high-quality, long-lasting spy cameras.
At the beginning of his arc, Thomas went to a circus with his fiance, where he saw a fire-breather perform. This really caught in his imagination for some reason. It kept popping up, and he kept dreaming about it. He was the performer in those dreams. And he wasn't just breathing fire. He was making it.
Fast-forward to Christmas (or any major holiday, for that matter). Thomas went home to his parent's house, still troubled by his dreams. The night of Christmas eve, he had the most vivid dream ever about making fire. He wakes up to smoke billowing in his bedroom, and the house in flames.
The blaze is so far progressed that no one is able to escape, but Thomas is unaffected by the fire.
He realizes that he must have caused the fire. Just to make sure it really was him, he tries to burn the fence in front of the house by concentrating on making it burst into flames. It does. He is horribly affected by this and blames himself for killing his family.
He runs away from the still-burning house on foot just before fire-fighters arrive.
Charred remains of all the members of the family present are found, except Thomas'. However, several personal items of his are recognized amid the debris and it is assumed that he perished.
His fiance is totally cut up about this.

Thomas, desperate, stupidly steals a car and gets in a car-chase with the cops (at night). He blows up one of the cruisers by combusting the gas-tank and escapes to his fiance's house, which is nearby.
She is not home. Thomas realizes that since he caused the fire, he shouldn't tell his fiance anything, but he plants three cameras in her house so he can keep tabs on her.
Then he goes into hiding at Cathar Industries' regional headquarters takes advantage of the availability of spyware and spy technique to create a false persona.

During this time, his grief for having killed his family bursts out in semi-crazy times when he goes out into the city and starts fires as a release. At this stage he is very morbid and unhealthily self-abasing. If he's a murderer already, he feels twistedly justified to continue on that path and lets out his rage and frustration at himself by starting fires. He experiments with his abilities with fire and finds that he has a broad range of them (projectilizing, shielding, existing within, directing...etc.)

He is drawn to return to his fiance, this time in his false persona. His persona is dark and mysterious, but very handsome and winning. He succeeds in capturing his fiance's heart all over again.

The night he's going to propose to her, he decides to tell her everything. So he lights the candles just by looking at them, etc. He does a few more things, she asks what's up, and he starts to tell her about his powers with fire (but not his real identity)
As he feared inwardly, she rejects him and in his grief he does not tell her his real identity, but instead takes out his anger and frustration on a neighboring house, causing it to burn down. He walks into the burning house and drags out the people inside, then leaves.

He goes far away, searching for a place to stay. Periodically, his rage at his own mistakes and his anger against his power cause him to break out in mad rages of burning things.

Then he hears about Crystal Falls (not sure how exactly) and he goes there, immensely relieved that his powers are negated in the city.
As a sort of atonement, he becomes a devoted, almost fanatical firefighter.
In his spare time he researches about how and why he has this power, and most importantly how he could get rid of it - all so he can go back to the woman he loves, who rejected him because of his power.

His only safe place where he can't hurt people with his power over fire is Crystal Falls, so until he's healed of his power, he won't leave the city. But the cameras he planted in his fiance's house still work, and he sees that she's still single.

Then the Zone breaks.

Thomas realizes that his power has returned. It shakes him up completely and he goes on a burning rampage again. The people at the mission for superheroes hear about it, hear the rumors about a man dancing in the flames, shooting it around and stuff......and decide to investigate. They find him, take him in, train him, he becomes part of the team and starts to change and be able to deal with his power, through the first big obstacle that they encounter as a team, and finally when he does learn to control his power, he goes back to the woman he loves and tells her everything.
She loves him still and he takes her back with him to Crystal Falls, where they get married.
Thomas continues to work with the superheroes of Crystal Falls....

So his driving force is his desire to be rid of his power and to get back to the woman he loves - in a condition in which she will accept him.

Personal appearance: Face: see picture. Build: big (he's a firefighter), totally fit, very agile; but no physical augmentations (at least initially...)

Character: Very taciturn, introverted, so much that he comes across as surly because he's very tight about himself. Many comments trigger emotionally destructive memories for him, so he becomes snappy seemingly out of nowhere quite frequently. Character color: dark red (weak attempt at essence...) He has deep emotions that don't show on the surface. But they boil down in there, and when they break free, beware! He becomes a very different person. Reckless, rash, almost insane. Burns things, no regard for human life, etc....After these outbreaks, which is caused by all his pain and guilt and recriminations for all his wrongs in the past, he goes back to blaming himself and it just starts building until the next outbreak. They're pretty infrequent, actually. But awful.

As a firefighter, he has no friends. He lives alone in his apartment, watching his fiance, working out, or researching how to be freed of his powers when he's not on the job as a firefighter (he's kinda fanatical about firefighting, btw).

A large part of Thomas' training may be him learning how to control and stop fires. So far he only knows how to start fires and make them burn out of control. This is partly why he hates his power. So I think it would be great if he learns how to stop fires. This would be a huge character turning point, because it would radically alter how he looks at his power.

The suit he's wearing in the picture would be developed when he becomes part of the superhero team in CF, I think. Or he might have it made for him because of his connections to the huge spy-ware company (Cathar Industries survived the 'death' of its CEO, btw, so he knows how to get into the system and has a lot of contacts he can move around to get himself a custom order... or maybe this just isn't feasible.) Whatever the case, I think the suit should be able to burst into flames, but also have a lot of stealth and spy features, given Thomas' background. Also, the F on his chest should be replaced by a flame of about the same size.

So that's Flame, aka Thomas Cathar. I hope you like him!

Areth,

Karthmin

Hey, so... I'd love to start work on the wiki, but I'm not talented at the coding aspect of it (creating dynamic content boxes for each category and the like). Do we have anyone around here who's got some experience working in-depth with Wikia?

Not me, unfortunately. The writing aspect would probably be the only thing I'd be of any use to help with.

(Yeah, I'm still here. I've just been silent for, like, seven pages because I never really had any input or helpful suggestions, so I didn't want to interrupt the flow of good ideas with something that overall wouldn't help. )

Excellent character, Karthmin! He adds a lot of story potential and conflict to the CF, especially in group dynamics and the theme of redemption and atonement. Looking forward to seeing where you take him! He makes a really interesting counterpoint to Red Ryder who works with fire through machinery because she's hiding from a government wanting to take her firefighting suit. Those two could be really interesting together.

Has anyone claimed the mission house couple yet? I role played them for some development of other characters, so I would be happy to take them on.

Not as far as I'm aware.

If you're referring to the mission idea I had, I'll probably let you have it, but I have a couple of worldbuilding/canon things to iron out before I turn you loose with them.

I created the wiki page, but have no real prior experience with Wikia. However, my personal response in situations like this, when I have something I'd like to do but lack the skill is to go to google and teach myself. So in the spirit of that, below I'm posting links to Wikia tutorials.

Video tutorials
Wikia University tutorials