Re: CHAT: Introduction

On Sat, May 17, 2003 at 11:21:07PM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> With my superheroes, I tried to be a bit original.
Uhm, ouch?

> a young ex-delinquent with a past as a bitten child,
Do you mean "beaten", or did he get his powers Peter-Parker style? :)

Energie, Fulguris, Morpho, Arachnea, Feline, Hypracephal, Ether,
Lignine,  Zara,  Veloss, Leoyo, Leoya.  Quite the multilingual crew.
My characters tend to have boring English names. :)

The Emerald was the leader of a superhero team as well, but I didn't create
all the characters myself.  There was a group of my friends and I whlo
played superheroes together - at my house, which is why the Emerald
got to be the leader. :)

Let's see, there was The Laser, who was, as you might guess, able to
shoot energy beams, but he could also fly, create a force field,
and do all sorts of things related to electromagnetic energy, not
unlike Energie.  But he was, or at least had been, human. On
the other hand, Monitron was an android - always handy to have
around, basically a gadget factory, in addition to being super-string
and able to fly (everyone wanted their characters to be able to fly.
At least transportation was never a problem.)  Water Moccasin
had no super powers; he was a mercenary type who used snake-themed
equipment for no discernible reason.  (He had a plane, so
he still got to fly.)

We didn't restrict ourselves to a single character each, though.
I also had a guy named Zeekar, an entity from another dimension
who was able to travel between dimensions and thereby teleport.
He had fine control, so he could selectively teleport pieces of
an opponent; not a guy to mess with.  No idea what he looked like
naturally, but when taking human form he ended up looking
more like a Tolkienian elf: long blond hair, pointy ears and
eyebrows - but the all-white luminous eyes were his own
addition, as was his tendency to dress in a T-shirt and jeans
and travel via skateboard.  (Again, DECADES before the silly
Legolas skateboard trick in Two Towers movie! :) )

> Strangely limited inventory. Any reason for the limitations?
No, I just only had a few names to go on.  Pick four random
English proper names and see how much of the sound inventory they
include. :)

> Well, Standard Arabic does very well without /g/, so does Dutch, so there's
> no reason why you should have it.
True, although Arabic does have /G/ to fill in for /g/ in a pinch. :)

> Actually, it's not uncommon for stop
> inventories to lack /p/ and/or /g/, even when they have /t/ and /d/ and /b/
> and /k/. Don't try to make things too regular. Holes in the sound inventory
> are common and normal. A too regular inventory is actually rather
> rare (not all languages are like Sanskrit in that matter :))) ).
Well, ok.  I'll feel better about my subtractions then. :)

-Mark

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