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Channel #122 [Discussions►Cape History]
ToasterDude72 ([email protected]) [ToasterDude72] has joined the channel
ToasterDude72:
Hello boys. Been well?
EatinAss:
What happened to the paper you were stressing about? Did you manage to cobble together something before the deadline? I've been dying of second hand anxiety.
ToasterDude72:
The Professor forgot :)
So yeah, now I have two days to flesh it out more. I don't know what I was thinking when I selected the topic. Should have gone for a more general one like the New York bloc War or the Boston Shopfront Struggles. Then I could have copied bits and pieces from my friends and got a local's opinion on it by now, but now I don't have any statements from someone in the city because Cinderfell is so fucking far away.
WeebSlayer:
What are you, a troglodyte? Just use the internet to get a statement.
ToasterDude72:
Can you even do that?
WeebSlayer:
If you use the right template on your paper though keep the usernames private. If your prof sees a name like @EatinAss your work might lose all its credibility.
ToasterDude72:
Noted. So, anyone here who's from Cinderfell?
EatinAss:
@Iridium_Man you there?
Iridium_Man:
Whomst has awakened the ancient one?
Whomst.gif
ToasterDude72:
@Iridium_Man Heard you were from Cinderfell. Just need a local's perspective on Burning Halloween and how its affected the city.
Iridium_Man:
Sure. Want to open a private chat or do it here?
EatinAss:
Do it here. This is a history discussion channel.
Iridium_Man:
You sure? It'll be a wall of text.
WeebSlayer:
Yeah, do it here. I don't know much about it, truth be told.
ToasterDude72:
I'm fine with whatever.
Iridium_Man:
Ok boys, its story time.
Back before Cinderfell was Cinderfell, it was called Harbourage Port. The settlers who came from the west chose it because it had a river, and it had a lot of flat land after all the hills that surrounded it. So you got protection from the weather, and a good land route for caravans after you got past the hills and trails were made.
So yeah, it was prime real estate, and since no one had settled even close to them, everything close to it became free real estate.
ItsFreeRealEstate.png
ToasterDude72:
Just a reminder: I'm going to be using this in an academic paper, so please stop referencing dead memes. And I'm using a shit phone, so I can't see them.
Iridium_Man:
Buzzkill.
So anyway, a lot of good factors ensured that the city was bustling and pretty well established before anyone else settled close to it. And then the industrial revolution hit, and the above mentioned factors ensured Harbourage Port was a prime candidate for industrialization. It got so good that there was a lot of smog and pollution, and the snow was grey. They were proud of this, so they renamed the town Cinderfell Port instead.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Some rich dude who was apparently from London told everyone that the two cities were very similar in the pollution aspect. So people started to get real proud about being America's London, and they "modernized" the name.
EatinAss:
Why were they proud? Didn't most of them die young and didn't the lower class lose limbs and get their children enrolled in factories because they got shit wages and two people working wasn't enough? How is that a good thing?
WeebSlayer:
The guys who owned the factories are the ones who changed the name, probably. Getting compared to London must have blown up their egos. General rich asshole stuff.
Iridium_Man:
Fast-forward to modern history and metas start appearing. Cinderfell is still quite safe though. Most of the triggers are minor, and they all head to the bigger cities for lucrative contracts and work.By this point, the city has been an industrial powerhouse for a while, and so most of the city is corrupt. Corrupt cops, corrupt politicians, plus gangs who are pretty minor, owning dogfighting and street fighting rings and a couple of illegal casinos, and selling drugs. Usual gang stuff.
Then we hit the era of metahuman theatre, and super villains start appearing. Two of them, Crypt and Arson, head to Cinderfell after assassinating an entire gang in Boston. This is where the groundwork for the clusterfuck that was Burning Halloween started.
So they head to the city to lay down and the remnants of the gang hired a couple of mercenaries to hunt them down. Crypt and Arson get an apartment in Little Asia and hunker down, with a couple of well-placed bribes to cover their bases.
The mercenary teams that were sent in were professionals. They began to comb the city and bribed the location of the apartment from its owner.
They found the apartment, and decided to wait until October 31st until they attacked because the cops would distracted by all the more mundane cases.
On the 31st of October, 1995 the mercenary force assembled outside of the apartment in the late hours of the night. One of the guys the police caught, who killed himself in prison by the way, told the cops that they didn't want to risk a direct confrontation because of Arson.
So they tossed a couple of frag grenades through the windows of the apartment, and then set the building on fire.
One of the grenades clipped Arson, and he panicked and set the building on fire while trying to aim out of the window.
The flames spread rapidly and there aren't any alarms or exits because the landlords decided it was cheaper to bribe the fire safety inspector.
So yeah, two metas in a burning building, one of them bleeding out in a burning building and the other holding his bleeding friend.
No one knows what the fuck happened, but the stress and situation somehow made their powers stronger. My guess is the Forey effect kicked in.
EatinAss:
That's a stretch. No one even knows if the Forey effect is real or if it's just adrenaline allowing them to use their powers better.
ToasterDude72:
It lines up though. Arson triggered when his house caught on fire and a piece of falling debris caught him in the leg. Crypt's trigger is a bit unclear, but cops found him next to his dead mother. His mother dying wasn't his trigger though. If I had to guess, he triggered at the funeral or when his mother was bleeding out.
EatinAss:
The Forey effect isn't real.
WeebSlayer:
It is. A bunch of Norwegian researchers proved it. If you can recreate the circumstances and events that caused a cape to trigger, then their power gets fluctates, getting stronger or weaker. But I don't think it wasn't the Forey effect. Maybe they both had second triggers?
ToasterDude72:
That's tinfoil hat territory.
Iridium_Man:
Whatever happened, their powers got stronger. Arson's flames had always been...mesmerizing. They were golden, and they looked like dragon-flame out of a fantasy novel than real fire. But after what happened they went from mesmerizing to hypnotic. Everyone who saw the flames thought they were warm, inviting. So inviting in fact that they wanted to walk into the flames and lie down.
EatinAss:
OH SHIT
Iridium_Man:
Yeah. So the fires are spreading rapidly, and people are just WALKING INTO the flames. Unless you have family that warns you about the magic flames or you look away, you are quickly mastered and forced to walk into fire. Hundreds die, burning to death.
Crypt had always been the weaker of the two villians. His power was a minor master power. He was able to possess things that were dead, but only two at a time, and only if they had been dead for several days. He also couldn't possess people or things who had sustained too much damage. With whatever happened, all those drawbacks went away.
So everything that had died in a city wide radius was being brought back to life. Adding to this problem was that Crypt's power didn't really have any fine control. All his orders were simple-attack, defend, stay here, stuff like that. So he gives out a blanket order to attack.
People who have burned to death suddenly get up and start killing everything that's moving. All the first responders, the fire department and EMTs get caught in chaos.
There was some hope that the fire would die out once it hit the river, but it was night at a seaside town. The wind picks up and blows in from the sea-towards the north.
The embers are picked up and the fires spread north, but most of the people have evacuated or have headed to higher ground.
Buildings are burning, people are being attacked by dead family, so a lot of stress and trauma on everyone involved. So people start triggering.
Iridium_Man:
A 16 year old named Evelyn Campbell gets attacked near the docks along with a group of friends. She has a gruesome trigger when she's being eaten alive by a pack of rats and becomes a shifter-breaker. In a tremendous display of power, she raises several spires of obsidian like rock that seem to touch the sky. She's near the docks, however, so most of the spires are raised in the sea surrounding the port and not inland.
She still died from blood loss though.
Arson finally dies from blood loss. Crypt tries to escape, but is gunned down by the remaining mercenaries. His power still persists, and Arson's flames don't die down after his death.
The fires spread to the woods and after Arson's death, stop spreading and cling to the trees.
The giant spires in the docks and the fires around the town mean that no help can reach the town, and no one can get out. So all the hospitals and clinics are swamped and in desperate need of supplies and more beds.
Relief from the surrounding towns arrive, but the magic fires make trucks and helicopters crash a couple of miles from town.
So in the 10 days it takes for the fires to die down there are riots, lootings and general unrest. Since all the law enforcement is either dead or have deserted, the citizens don't have anyone to keep them safe. And so they turn to the gangs.
For example, in Little Asia, all the different gangs- the Chinese, the Japanese and the Koreans- came together and declared a truce. While Little Asia got the worst of the fire, in the following years, the truce meant it was one of the more stable areas.
The gangs give out food and money and keep the peace for the most part, and the goodwill thier actions gave them cemented them in the city. And a lot of thier members triggered, so they got a lot of firepower.
ToasterDude72:
This is getting long. I can't vet this much text. Wrap it up, please!
Iridium_Man:
Sure.
The effects of Buring Halloween haven't really faded away, unlike most tragedies. The obsidian spires in the sea have made the port unusable and have become a tourist attraction instead.
There's a divide in the city too. The North saw less caualities and less fatalities, but most of the recovery money went to the North because that was were the politicans lived.
The South had the most gangs, and the police can't do shit to them because everyone down there thinks the cops are corrupt assholes who don't do much for them and rely on the gangs to keep the peace instead.
The city has shifted from being a port to a tourist attraction . The money is concentrated in the North now, instead of spread out like before. Almost all the hero teams in the city are killed or leave on thier own after all the near-constant conflict. We haven't had a steady junior or main team in six months.
As a side note, most of the seniors in the town have PTSD. My grandma can't see a fire without freaking out- and they made us take classes on it in middle school.
In conclusion, the cities still fucked- its still a gang infected shithole in the south and full of rich smugbags in the north.
ToasterDude72:
Damn. Thanks for this.
WeebSlayer:
Yeah, it was a great story.*slow clap*
Iridium_Man:
Glad I was able to help.
ToasterDude72:
Well, I better get to adding this to my paper, and then go to bed. See you!
EatinAss:
Goodnight!
WeebSlayer:
Yeah, goodnight.