Champions Online Character Development

As a fighting unit, they were a pretty solid team.  Nothing brings people together to work as a team quite like the act of wholesale carnage.  While technically there was no one in charge of their little group, the fact was, the half-dead abomination calling itself Akiva was the defacto leader.  He tended to brow-beat the other miscreants into something resembling an effective crime-fighting force.

The next member of the group was, more or less, the angel no one wanted.  Banished from the light for who-knows what reason (it may have had to do with the mountains of beer cans and porn mags stacked in his apartment, and the ever-present haze of drunkeness around him), Castiel hoped his use as the part-time healer of this group of superheroes would, somehow, erase the stain of his heavenly mishaps enough to re-enter the pearly gates a few centuries early (good behavior and what-not).

The muscle of the group, who had since attempted to wash his hands of his involvement by becoming a recognized individual superhero in his own right, was the steel-skinned goliath known to the world as Colos... I mean, Duel Blade.  Although, why he was named such, when the man never touched a weapon to save his life, was anyone's guess.  Most think it was probably a spelling error on the clerk's part when entering his name into the superhero database.

Certainly last, and, on most accounts, least, of the group was the walking pile of self-absorbtion and vacuous melodrama known as Capt. Croton.  After years of chasing the same man, and after years of repeated failings to capture him, Marcus Croton decided to over-compensate for his lack of apparent success by beating the ever-loving shit out of every scum-sucking moron and badguy he came across; often gunning them down without a second thought, no matter what their crime was.

And so, this group of wayward idiots and self-important assholes ventured forth to battle injustice and, just as often, themselves.

***

As would often happen around their base of operations, Croton and Romra were having their annual drinking contest, which had turned into a weekly event.  Castiel would often laugh at their preparations, and make fun of his "lightweight compatriots" at the amount of liquor they had purchased, but would instantly become depressed when he remembered that the AA meetings were always held on the same night as the group drinking games.

It started off pleasantly enough.  On Romra's insistance they were watching the entire Shirley Missouri marathon, and there was no way Croton was "watching that shit sober."  Around hour number 6 or so, Croton, grossly inebriated, made an off-hand comment about the fact that it was obvious Shirley had most likely been "around the block," despite her assertions otherwise, "many times, probably."

"She's a pure soul!  Chaste and innocent!" Romra roared.  The next thing Croton remembered was walking out of the Superhero hospital, his left arm entirely replaced with a cybernetic prosthetic.  "At least it's my offhand," he told Romra, trying to wave off his bigger friend's half-slurred apology, although Croton figured it was mostly the half-handle of Jack-and-coke Romra had imbibed just prior to picking him up that was talking.