[a-new-world] >>an X-MEN rpg

[Fallen]

A New World

Times are changing for the X-Men and their world around them. The humans still cringe in fear of them. The Brotherhood still attacks towns and cities in hope of spreading word to humans. Time's aren't safe for either. As the X-Men struggle for trust, the Brotherhood become more active every day.

Something is wrong...
Something doesn't feel like it should...

Can you feel it?
If you are here to stay safe, I suggest turning back now. This team might just be enough...

----------------------About the Site---------------------

This is an X-Men RPG. If you know nothing about the X-Men, then the staff can help you on your way. IT'S ALSO VERY NEW which means that there are several cannon characters and staff openings. Just look at this, see how the world for them will turn out. There is helpful, active staff who are willing to help you. XD

[glitchy bitchy]

In comparison with the Hyper Jumbo, the old 787 that took me to Tokyo seemed like a small commuter plane. Nevertheless, my flight was pleasant, and no incidents occurred to justify my newfound apprehension of flying. I arrived at Narita airport at the peak of the afternoon rush, and, once again, was lost in wonderment at the genius of the Japanese for organization and efficiency.

Pacific Rim Airlines had booked me a hotel room in downtown Tokyo, and to get there, I had the choice of taking the levitating bullet train or the underground airplane. Or I could have waited for the bus and spent the next two and a half hours watching commuters leave Tokyo by road, but I decided to cut short all delays and go high tech one more time. The train seemed like the less oppressing alternative, since it traveled above ground—I've never learned to enjoy flying through a tunnel at 375 miles an hour.

Ten minutes and 45 miles later, I got off the train at the Shinjuku station, just a brief walk from my hotel. I knew the area well, having stayed at the same hotel several times earlier during visits to the head office of the company I had worked for. Still, the tall building now seemed somehow alien to me. This time, I was here to relax, observe, and listen. No longer was I ruled by a tight schedule and the demands of business efficiency. Determined to make the very best use of the week's free stay in Tokyo that PRA had bestowed on me as a parting gift, I shouldered my rucksack and joined the throng of business people in dark three-piece suits heading in the general direction of my destination.

The clerk at the registration desk recognized me and gave me the best room available. As I was installing myself in my room, the automatic windows were closing and getting lighter for the night. The room computer, a miniature entertainment center that also acted as an interactive high-definition TV set with a video camera and a microphone built in, greeted me in flawless English and inquired into my wishes for entertainment. I told it to give me the news and a beer, and sat down within easy reach of the delivery tray of the minibar. To my amusement, the beer was served in a glass: during my previous visit less than a year earlier, it had still been my job to open the can, find a glass, and pour the beer.

Much of the news was the usual, depressing stuff. Pollution and algal bloom had finally killed off all marine life around Japan, and the country's oceangoing fishing fleet was roaming ever further in its search for natural protein. Although reasonably priced, alternative products based on soy, algae, and synthetically cultured meat were available, the affluent Japanese still couldn't be persuaded to switch. The actors advertising the fake foods swore they couldn't taste the difference, and they were probably being honest about it. But staying with the traditional foods was seen as a matter of maintaining your status and living standard.

Wars, floods and earthquakes were ravaging the globe. The screen showed an ever-changing succession of images conveyed live by remote-controlled, airborne Kamikaze cameras at the centers of calamity, bringing the starkness of hitherto untold suffering into every living room.

Never before had those scenes so affected me. I realized that my own brush with death had cracked the callousness I had used to share with most of those who watched such happenings every day, but were lucky enough not to be affected.

The ultraviolet danger was proving worse than expected. As the northern summer approached, only patches of the ozone layer remained. The radiation, in combination with resulting, unwanted chemical reactions in polluted air made large cities such as Tokyo patently unhealthy places to live in. I was glad I was only passing through.

The political news wasn't much better. The Japanese emperor lay dying, leaving no heir. No agreement on a constitutional amendment was in sight. The shaky truce in the Middle East was showing signs of crumbling: citing terrorist activities, Israel had again attacked one of her Arab neighbors, and even her critics had lost count of how many UN resolutions Israel had already violated.

The depression in America was getting worse. An analyst explained that America had run out of technical talent: generations of belligerent fundamentalists, implacably hostile to science, had succeeded in removing or diluting the science curricula of US schools to such an extent that the country's supply of young engineers and scientists was drying up. The gifted instead became doctors, lawyers, and bonus-grabbing business executives: too many people dividing the cake and not enough bakers. While America had long been able to compensate for this trend by importing research and development staff, a point had now been reached where equal or better pay at home combined with unwillingness to risk their children's education had reversed that flow.

Moreover, as the Chinese-supported de-colonization of South and Central America cut into long established cash flows of US capitalists, many large corporations were failing. China itself, however, was running out of arable land, drinkable water, and breathable air, with Beijing gradually disappearing under desert sand. Only Europe was going from strength to strength.

The hotel provided access to a number of international TV channels, and now I tuned in my regular Sydney station. Back home, it was an hour later, and the main news and current affairs bulletin were over. I watched the familiar succession of local entertainment news, TV comedy news, soap opera news, quiz news, and rock music news. After the preview of the week's new TV commercials my favorite talkback show started.

The subject was the new "Total Experience" helmets that were in the process of replacing virtual reality body suits on the market. While sight, sound, and smell still came to you through your normal senses, the host explained, the sensations of touch, position, temperature, and movement—indeed, even that of taste—could now be conveyed with an accuracy hitherto unknown, as they came directly to your brain in the form of precisely targeted electromagnetic impulses. Likewise, your commands and movements, as well as your reactions to advertising and propaganda, were picked up from your brain. Gone were the clumsy gloves and sensors you used to have to strap to your body; all that was needed was a painless one-time injection of nanorobots into the brain, where they handled the necessary interaction with the body's own neurons. Although expensive, the helmets were going like hotcakes, partly due to the fact that they extended virtual reality into the realm of sex, something that had never before been possible.

The host pointed out the absurdity in keeping the awkward, sexless body suits on the market for so long: people were, after all, male and female. In his opinion, the manufacturers of VR body suits had come close to fraudulent advertising when they had promised what they had called a "complete sensual encounter" from a suit that simply ignored a basic human need, that of sex.

Nevertheless, the host said, it was a worry that the market was now being saturated with uncensored, clandestine software for the computers controlling these helmets. Shady vendors were busy creating virtual reality programs that made it possible to act out every conceivable sexual perversion. Traditional consumers of pornography, interacting with their helmets and home entertainment centers, could now perform and experience all the depravity they had formerly only been able to read about or watch on X-rated videos and Web movie clips, as porn sites were made interactive. Anything was available, albeit without run-time victims, from child molesting to sex with decaying corpses or extraterrestrial monsters, not to mention rape, torture, and murder. Those wanting to share such activities were free to connect with willing partners over the Internet, and weird-sex groups were now more popular on the Internet than chat rooms and role-playing games combined.

Not all such interactions had been strictly voluntary, however. On several occasions, computer crackers had illegally connected their equipment to the entertainment centers of unsuspecting women enjoying their helmets in the privacy of their homes. This, obviously, was a cause for concern. Imposing your sexual deviations on an unwilling partner in such a fashion was much worse than a mere obscene telephone call; it was more like a rape. Moreover, no such intruder had yet been traced and brought to justice.

People started calling in and voicing their opinions. Most callers thought the helmets were a great thing: being able to connect to any partner of your choice—via a computer dating agency, if you so wished—and having whatever kind of sex you wanted without any concerns for pregnancy or AIDS, was a phenomenal instance of progress. A married couple called in and reported how their helmets had improved their relationship: they were free to share the wildest of fantasies in their home whenever they wished. Or, if they wanted a change, they could swing with their friends or call the dating agency, all without the hassle of going out and getting involved with strangers.

By now four viewers and the host were shown discussing the subject. A clergyman thought the availability of the perverted software might turn out to be a blessing in disguise, since potential rapists could satisfy their needs without assaulting anyone. A woman, who had been raped, disagreed; she thought that virtual sex would only serve to whet the appetites and lead to an increase in assaults on women and children, as men with sick minds switched to the real thing, just like playing violent computer games simulating car theft and reckless driving was known to generate deadly manifestations of road rage.

Few people, however, shared the reservations the host had mentioned at the beginning. Several men had noticed that their sexual performance with the helmet was markedly better than without it, and wondered what the difference could be. That was something I knew, so I decided to call in and make my contribution.

For some reason, the manufacturers of the helmets didn't advertise the fact that the scent generators they used gave off more than just smells to make the experience of virtual reality lifelike. Those generators could also release odorless pheromones that act directly on the brain to induce a number of emotional states. Via two tiny pits in our noses, called the vomeronasal organ, such pheromones can make us feel happy, angry, afraid, sexy, and so on. Hunger, or the lack of it, can also be induced.

It was the hunger pheromone, released into the air, that made fast food restaurants so irresistible when you walked past them in a shopping mall. At home, your TV set exuded the same pheromone along with the smells of food, when it showed a commercial for, say, a home delivery pizza service. When you went into a slimming parlor and felt so wonderfully capable of fasting forever—until you came home again—it was the opposite agent at work. Since staff breathed the stuff all day long, anorexia was a common occupational disease in the weight loss industry.

According to inside information, such techniques were being used to intensify the experiences people were having while using their helmets. This would also make you more likely to come back for more, increasing the revenues of the software vendors, as if the Internet weren't addictive enough on its own. Another little known aspect of the technology was that the nanorobots were programmed to react to more generalized, longer-distance signals, as well: in shopping centers, you could induce euphoria and impulse shopping, while another code, beamed from crowd control vehicles, would produce fear and obedience. The robots would outlive their bearer and couldn't be removed, only reprogrammed at authorized outlets to add new, fashionable VR experiences and enhance their crowd control features. A hack to disable them via your own VR helmet existed, however, and could be obtained through unofficial channels.

I thought the public ought to know about all this, so I dictated an abstract of my planned comment to my combined computer and TV set. I positioned myself in front of the camera in the set and rehearsed my observations in my mind. But nothing happened.

Questioned, the computer said it had sent the abstract to the TV station in Sydney and received an acknowledgment. I had taken part in these talk-back shows many times, and had become accustomed to being on the air within seconds of throwing in my token. The station was known to favor people it often got interesting feedback from, and I found its silence rather annoying. Could there be something wrong with their computer?

So I sent in another abstract, cleverer, I thought, than the first one. Still no reaction. Quite incensed, I decided to call the marketing manager of the TV station at his home, something I felt free to do, since I knew him well and had visited him several times.

"Steve, what's wrong with your talk-back contention program?" I asked. "I have a sensible comment to make, but your computer just keeps ignoring me!"

"Hold on a moment, Greg," he answered. "I'll log onto our system and take a look."

A while later, he picked up the telephone again. "Yeah, I can see your two abstracts here. They look really good. You should have been on the air ages ago!"

"So what's the problem?" I insisted. "You never treated me like this before!"

"You aren't calling locally, are you?" Steve asked.

When I confirmed that I was in Tokyo, he knew the answer right away.

"That explains it," he said. "That contention program automatically weeds out interstate and international calls. You wouldn't believe how many people all over the country watch us over the Internet, and we just can't use their comments."

"And why not?" I inquired. "Are Sydneysiders the only people with any smarts, as far as you're concerned?"

"That's not the point," Steve retorted. "You aren't here buying anything. Our sponsors pay us for the names, addresses, and personality profiles of our viewers, and those sponsors are here in Sydney. While you were here, you were hot stuff—a well-to-do yuppie with an early adopter profile. We've made many a nice dollar on computer-analyzing your opinions, my lad. Now you're thousands of miles away and no one wants to know a thing about you. Try some local show!"

"They wouldn't care one yen about a traveler passing through Tokyo," I told him. "Can't you wheedle in my comment somehow from where you are?"

"I'd have to change the parameters of the program to do that, and we'd have a dozen people from Perth and Hobart breaking in along with you," Steve replied. "No go. That show is earning us good sponsorship money as it is, and we're not changing anything. How long will you be away for?"

"Heaven knows! A year, maybe two. I'm going around the world, and I've made no firm plans."

"Then I'll delete you from our files," Steve told me. "You don't want the junk mail piling up while you're gone, and we don't want to waste anybody's time on you."

"One more question, Steve. Why is all your news about things that don't matter?"

"I distinctly remember telling you this before, Greg, so why do I have to tell you again? The purpose of commercial media news is not to inform, it's to maintain consumer confidence. Have a good trip!"

And with that he hung up. I returned to watching the TV, dismayed at the realization that my sincere participation in shows such as this one had only served to give the marketers of consumer goods a better handle on how to sell to me. Gradually, I began ticking off in my mind what I had seen so far that evening. Apart from the world news, every bit of programming had been about entertainment of some kind. Entertainers selling their own wares? Yes, along with everybody else's: over half the program time was taken up by commercials.

What about real life? Did anybody know anything about real life anymore? Did anybody care? Even the world news seemed more like entertainment than concern about reality. Was there, I wondered, a difference between politicians and entertainers? Not a very big one, I thought.

Commercial TV news habitually presented a disconnected series of snippets about what the station management considered the in-happenings of the moment, and good for the station's ratings. Well-groomed, familiar experts, provided and paid for by the multinational business community through innocuous-sounding consulting subsidiaries of their advertising agencies, followed up with predigested views and conclusions for all to adopt. By the end of the newscast, all the thinking the nation was going to do on the subjects it covered had already been done by the performers, and public amnesia, induced by information overload and incessant entertainment, wiped the slate clean until the next newscast.

In contrast to reality, which, if you care to study it, forms a continuum of observation and reflection, TV shows a disjointed world where nothing other than entertainment and advertising matters very much. Suddenly, I understood why Laura always knew the next phrase to be said on TV: it's all fully predictable, because the programming is tailored to what the public has been taught to like and expect.

I had soon had enough of it all and went out for my dinner. Upon my return, the intelligent toilet gave me a douche, a blast of warm air to dry me up, and a whiff of cologne, and told me what I already knew: I was fit as a fiddle, all my urine analysis readings were normal, and I wasn't pregnant. Before I retired for the night, I found the switch to turn off the ever-watching computer, rather than having to tell it that I wanted none of its nightcaps, lullabies, through-the-mattress massages, scented breezes, heart beat monitoring, and soft rocking of my bed.

[Bear]

Welcome to my Name Rater!
Post some names and let me rate them!

Rules

No Kit___ing!
You can post any name.Clan,Tribe,Loner,Rogue,Kittypet,Etc.
Post only 20 names per post!

Ratings

- Not So Good... (No Kits)
- Try Again! (No Kits)
-Good! (One Kit)
-Great! (Two Kits)
-Awesome! (Three Kits)
- Love It! (Four Kits)
- One Of The Best Names! (5 Kits)
- THE BEST!!! (Hall Of Fame And A Powerkit)

Hall Of Fame

(Nobody Yet!)

Kits

Clan

Toms
Adderkit
Applekit
Stealkit
Hawkkit
Blackkit
Stormkit
Graykit
Thunderkit
Jaykit
Riverkit
Rabbitkit
Springkit
Bladekit
Blazekit
Cherrykit
Rabbitkit
Berrykit
Bugkit
Kindlekit
Whiskerkit
Ravenkit
Ashkit
Barleykit
Clawkit
Fangkit
Greenkit
Fishkit
Gopherkit
Dogkit
Stingkit
Bumblekit
Bramblekit
Tigerkit
Firekit
Flamekit

She-kits
Furrykit
Fluffkit
Frostkit
Featherkit
Spottedkit
Hollykit
Skykit
Shadowkit
Starkit
Poolkit
Leafkit
Squirrelkit
Sandkit
Bluekit
Hazelkit
Mosskit
Heatherkit
Honeykit
Mistykit
Leapordkit
Mousekit
Plumkit
Blossomkit
Seedkit
Forestkit
Icekit
Sweetkit
Snowkit
Onekit
Creamkit
Birdkit
Troutkit
Beekit

Tribe

Toms
Thunder With A Beat Of A Heart (Thunder)
Dog That Barks Loudly (Dog)
Hawk That Catches Fish (Hawk)
Cherry That Falls From Tree (Cherry)
Bug That Finds His Way (Bug)
Tree That Falls In Strong Wind (Tree)

She-kits
Moss That Lines A Nest (Moss)
Mouse That Gets Caught (Mouse)
Whisker That Gets Pulled Out Of Line (Whisker)
Water Of The Small Fish (Water)
Brook That Has Salmon (Brook)
Tail That Sways In The Wind (Tail)

Loners/Kittypets/Rogues

Toms
Bruce
Warrior
Nino
Nemo
Marlin
Crush

She-kits
Flo
Bird
Fish
River
Silver
Frost

Powerkits

Toms
Treekit~Trees
Naturekit~Nature
Waterkit~Water
Colorkit~Pelt Colors
Sizekit~Cat Size

She-kits
Frostykit~Temperature
Weatherkit~Weather
Moonkit~Moon Size
Animalkit~Can Speak To Animals
Twokit~Can Speak To Twolegs

Post some names and let's get started!