I’ve been working on creating my second mission in MA. This time, I thought I’d play with some of my characters I’ve been playing on CoH for years. For a lot of them, I’ve put some thought into their characters and backstories, so it makes sense to use them in the game. Starting with my main heroes and villain.
In my main characters’ backstory, I’ve ended up using a (frankly convoluted) multiverse backstory. I originally had my US character, an energy blaster called Reilly. I played him up past level 20 (to 24 I think) on the US servers before I started to move on from the game.
Then City of Heroes came out in the UK, and with my friends playing, I got a UK subscription and proceeded to recreate the character on a UK server (Union), although this time I decided to make him an ice blaster as I’d heard good things about the powerset. When I created this version of the character, his origin deliberately referred to the fact that it was the same character, however through the process of moving to an alternative dimension (ie being recreated on the UK servers), his powers had changed and so he was having to relearn them (a nice in-story way of covering the fact that he was now level 1 again I thought). This version of Reilly I’ve now played up to level 50 and is my main character that I use to revisit aspects of the gameplay I missed (such as the Vanguard missions in the Rikti War Zone), or go badge-hunting.
When City of Villains went live, I wanted to create an evil version of my main hero. This is partly from an RP point of view, in that when I’m playing characters in games like this or Oblivion or whatever, I always go for a similar visual look as I find it easier to put myself into their shoes, figure out who they are and play them. As I’d already used a dimension-hopping angle for my main hero, it made sense to make this a good, old-fashioned, mirror-universe version of Reilly.
The backstory being that this was a Reilly who had gone over the edge and conquered his world. Then when Portal tech was discovered decided to remove any “threats” to his world. My main hero had thought he’d defeated him previously (in the battle which resulted in Reilly being stranded in Union’s Paragon City), however he was only badly wounded and, now sporting robotic limbs and reliant on robot foot-soldiers, he’d followed my main hero to this Paragon City for revenge. I quite liked the idea of a battle that had spanned the worlds of both Reilly and Lord Reilly (as I’d unoriginally called him), which had resulted in both Reilly getting trapped in a new world, and Lord Reilly being so badly injured that he now not only required the robotic limbs, but that his injuries had also almost completely robbed him of his powers. This culminated in the little touch of giving Lord Reilly the super-jump power, as I figured this played well as a more limited version of flight (present on Reilly), hinting that Lord Reilly would have also had flight powers before his injuries.
This backstory also bled into aspects of Reilly’s costume design, with his second costume slot now sporting a set of armour with a tattered cape (although this was before those textures were available, so the cape is actually the VIP one styled to try and look as if its ripped at the bottom). My thinking being that during this big multiversal battle, Reilly had found himself overmatched. He ended up adopting this suit of armour, given to him by another, dying, hero to give him an edge. The tattered cape being from the remains of his own original costume that he’d added to the armour to make it his own.
However, this all got really muddied when the server transfer came online. Now, more than just playing a new version of my original character, I could now actually bring my US character across and play him once again. Obviously I jumped at the chance, but this did mean the backstory I had now didn’t quite work.
It meant that I now had two copies of what was essentially the same character (in terms of backstory, not powers). On importing my US character, he got renamed to Reilly V1 and the UK Reilly lost his backstory. So now, the UK Reilly is defined by being the version of the character native to the Union Paragon City, who shortly after gaining his powers, found himself targetted by Lord Reilly.
Essentially the initial backstory of Reilly V1 and Lord Reilly remains intact, up until the fallout of their battle which left Lord Reilly injured. Now Lord Reilly is the one who ended up retreating to the Union Paragon City in order to escape and recuperate. Once there, he gained his robotic limbs and recuperated, and now targets Union’s Reilly as he views him as the main threat to his plans to appropriate Portal technology and re-establish connection to his home universe (and thus his forces).
Meanwhile Reilly V1 realised that Lord Reilly escaped and followed him to this universe. So their roles end up somewhat switched, with Reilly V1 now chasing Lord Reilly, rather than vice versa, and Lord Reilly, rather than Reilly V1 being the one who’s trapped.
The reasoning for Union Reilly’s suit of armour stays pretty much the same though, in that he adopted it at somepoint during a large battle against Lord Reilly.
Lord Reilly invariably ends up gaining portal technology from time to time, however with Reilly V1 now permanently staying in Union to keep an eye on him, they tend to keep him locked up in Union’s universe as V1 has determined its the universe most capable of keeping him contained (for some reason).
Its a bit of a shame that what started as a neat explanation for my US character being recreated on UK servers with different powers has ended up so muddied. In DC terms Reilly is Earth-1 Superman, Reilly V1 is Earth-2 Superman and Lord Reilly is Ultraman, however the actual backstory I had in place has ended up pretty twisted now, to the point where you can pretty much see why DC had the Crisis back in 1986 
And actually, given the character’s namesake from Marvel Comics, I guess its pretty appropriate 
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