In the world of VRMMORPGs, the sword and sorcery genre was by far and away the most popular. Well, of the mainstream games, at least. If you included the strictly 18+ games, then you would find that games like World of Porncraft were the big hits, both in copies sold and time played. And then you went into the deep fetish worlds. I’d played a bit in a game called ‘Erenisch Online’, which was based on the comics of a guy named Erenisch, who had a whole universe where most countries had something called the Compulsory Female Slavery Law. Yeah, it was as pervy as it sounds, but it made for a good diversion from the rest of my life.

But that was just a fantasy world, and all the players knew it wasn’t real. It is the same as watching a horror movie. Does watching a bunch of twisted serial killers butchers stupid teenagers in the forest make you a bad person or a psychotic murderer? No. So why does slipping into the role of a submissive slavegirl make me some kind of slut in real life? Ugh. Still have issues with idiots who can’t understand the difference between fiction and reality.

Now, these days I worked as a graphic designer for a big-name marketing firm. Such a wonderful use of an art degree. But there’s not really anything I can do about it, you know? My art isn’t good enough to sell in galleries or anything, and that landlord consistently wants to be paid at the end of every month. So that left me stuck working a dead-end job that I didn’t hate, but didn’t like either. Drifting.

In VRMMOs, I could be something other than boring old Jackie Jones. I could be a warrior princess, or the beautiful maiden, or anything I wanted to be. I was even a dashing pirate captain once! Of course, I thought about playing as a guy from time to time, or even as a herm in the games that allowed it, but never went for it. Even in games, I held myself back, it seems.

So I’ll admit it, I was in a rut when the news for City of Champions Online came out. The Superhero MMO thing had been tried a few times back in the pre-VR era, but it never quite worked out. Sure, the graphics in games like City of Heroes, Champions Online, or DC Universe Online were pretty, for their time, but they just didn’t capture the spirit of superhero stories. The idea of gangs with enough goons to be starting trouble on ever street corner across the city, just to get repeatedly beat up by a bunch of supers wildly firing powers in the area, and the city not going up in flames stretched any sort of credibility.

That would be why I hadn’t paid much attention to it, at first. It was only later, as more details were announced during the Beta, that I started really getting interested. First, even though the game was named ‘City of Champions’, the game world was huge. It literally spanned the entire globe, and players who started in their home town were surprised to find familiar landmarks. One picture of an Atlanta-based heroine named Glamazon showed her game character sitting in a remarkable copy of the Varsity, smiling at a camera while the poor guy behind the counter smiled at her ample (and open) cleavage. Seems the devs figured out quickly that it just wouldn’t work to have all the heroes and villains in the same city.

Then there was the system. The developers decided against going the typical MMO route, and creating a level-based, class-based system, where you unlocked powers as you got higher. That was one of the things that had annoyed people in the past. You could make a character with wings right out the gate, but for some reason they couldn’t fly until you hit level 14??? Yeah, lots of people weren’t thrilled with that.

So the second thing that caught my attention was that the development company was owned by the same people that owned the rights to several old tabletop RPGs. The devs decided that, instead of remaking the wheel, they’d just modify an old edition of one of those RPGs to work on a VR rig, and use that as the rule set. Game shops across the country had a surge as VR gamers suddenly clamored for copies of the old Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition game rules.

M&M, as it was known, didn’t bother with any of that race, class, or level shit. It was what people called a points-based, effects-based system. In other words, the only difference between a shotgun, an eyeblast, and a Kamehameha Wave was the descriptors and how the attack looked. Well, that and the amount of points put into it affecting how strong it was. This gave players a lot of freedom in how they made their characters, and you could do a lot with ‘joke’ powers if you got creative. Like the guy in the Beta that picked up ‘Nacho Cheese Control’, and then used it to fly by sewing packets of nacho cheese into his costume, and using his powers to lift it.

The third thing, and the one that really sold me on the game, was that it was going to be a hardcore world. Death was permanent. If you died, you had to start over, though you would get some bonuses to your new character. And the world wasn’t all Star Trek-y. All the problems you saw today, with prejudice and hate and corrupt politicians and the like, were all in CCO, but with super-powers added. There were people who got pissed at certain types of supers, and there was definite discrimination against ‘nonhuman’ characters, especially the ones that weren’t ‘pretty’. A cute catgirl would be fine (mostly), but someone who looked like a werealligator? They were fucked.

This was a living world of superheroes, like in the comics. There was good, bad, and ugly, just like the real world, but it wasn’t so fragging NORMAL and boring like the world I knew. Naturally, I bought the game, locking in some pre-order bonuses while I was at it. What can I say? Getting some bonuses for buying something you were already going to buy ahead of time just makes sense.

Finally, finally, FINALLY the months of waiting were over! Oh, I wasn’t just working and waiting, of course. I was enjoying a fantasy game that came out a few years ago called Age of Anarchy Online for a while, and even got to be a level 100 Monk/Monk. Yeah, kindof silly to double up on monk, but I went with two different specialties, and it made my unarmed damage truly insane. I was one-punching people out there! Especially after I got that race change to an Iron Golem.

Anyways, I was ready to start my new life, in a superhero world. I was already lying in my dive pod, ready and waiting for the servers to go live. Ok, so most people didn’t use the pods, but I went for long term immersion. For most things, I was able to send in my design work and so on from the virtual office, which meant I could work in the time dilated space, and look like a bloody miracle worker instead of a lazy bitch that spent half her ‘work’ time gaming. I just needed to hop out every week or so and refill the nutrient packs. The pod did the rest.

Now I was in the ‘Lobby’ of my VR space, the pod augmenting the Chip that everyone was implanted with at birth, giving me higher resolution and faster processing speed. Oh sure, it was supposedly for the whole ‘work’ thing, but most of it went towards my gaming. I wasn’t a streamer or pro gamer or anything. I just liked having the best tools to play with.

Quickly, I went over my thoughts on what kind of character I wanted to create. I’d played tanks and damage dealers for my last few characters, so I wanted to do something different here. And one archetype you rarely saw in superhero comics for some reason was healers. So I’d be making someone who could heal wounds and regrow limbs. With this being a hardcore world, I’d be very popular.

I was on the balls of my virtual feet in anticipation. Of course, the time dilation made everything go by slower, but who can remember details like that when there are new games waiting to be played? A whole new, completely unexplored world that is completely NOT normal! There was no way I wouldn’t be excited as hell about the prospect of finding a chance to be my inner superhero.

Come on! Come on! Come on! COME ON!

“Enter City of Champions Online!”

Everything went black, and then I heard a voice. “Greetings, traveler. The world you are about to enter is very different from the one you live in. It is a world of heroes and villains, a world where magic lives, and mad scientists create devices that warp the rules of reality. A world where anything is possible.”

“In this world, the dawn of June 30, 1908 marked the birth of the Neo-Heroic Age, though few realized it at the time. Two alien races fought in the skies above Earth, invisible to our technology at the time. One of the ships attempted to make a crash landing in the region of Russia known as Siberia. However, it was destroyed in the lower atmosphere, in what has since been called the Tunguska event.”

“Unknown to any at that time, the destruction of the alien vessel caused certain exotic particles to spread throughout the Earth’s atmosphere, giving rise to the first Mutants. Barely six months later, the first confirmed Mutant, Karanlik, was instrumental in putting down a group of loyalists to the old Ottoman Empire regime, who were attempting a coup to return to power.”

“With the world sliding towards war, all the major powers rushed to identify, recruit, and train these Mutants, hoping that they would give them an edge in the war. During this time, Magic users and supernaturals stepped out of the proverbial shadows, revealing their existence as well. When war came after a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, what followed was a war unlike any the world had ever seen.”

“In the end, the death toll was the highest of any single war humanity had yet waged. Eighteen million souls laid to rest, whether through artillery and machine gun fire, or through mutants and mages unleashing their military-trained powers upon the trenches full of very mortal men. In some countries, the death toll was over 30% of the pre-war population, the majority of them the young men that formed the backbone of the economy.”

“The road after the War to End All Wars was neither straight nor smooth, however. For better or worse, the genie was out of the bottle (literally, in the case of Lahab Almawt, the Flame of Death). There was no way we could go back to what had been, all the ‘super-humans’ had been too visible to sweep under the carpet.”

“But fear and prejudice are deeply ingrained traits within humanity. Tensions grew as some governments attempted to ‘control’ the superhuman population, while in other places superhumans led coups and took over governments by force. As the Great Depression caused more suffering around the world, the flames of war were fanned again. This time, superhumans would be on the front lines, as much propaganda pieces as weapons of war.”

“The Kriegsherren, the pride of the Nazi war machine, clashed against the superhuman forces of the Soviet Protektory in the East, and the Verteidiger Kader stood against the American-led Avengers in the West. All while the Madman of Berlin led the Thule Society in the ritual that had required the deaths of millions to fuel.”

“As Berlin fell, and the armies of the Allies closed in on the final bunkers, the ritual was completed, and a gateway to another dimension was forcibly opened. Demons poured out of the rift, consuming all in their path, even those that had released them. The Battle of Berlin became a battle for the fate of the world. The Avengers, Protektory, and even the remains of the Nazi teams joined forces to seal the rift, sacrificing Nachtdämon by using his body and life energy to form the seal.”

“The year is now 2017, seventy years after the last World War ended. There have been many conflicts since then, some involving supers, some not. The Cold War that raged between East and West also included supers. Technology has advanced remarkably from the time of the World Wars, resulting in both super-science and magitek coming into their own.”

“This is the world of City of Champions Online. Are you ready to join us?”