Description/Story: When the mysterious SPECTRUM-ZERO recruits a hero, his condition is that hero must sever every link to his life and past: all identities, public or private, must be erased from you. What SPECTRUM-ZERO provides his organisation are highly individual custom battlesuits that focus and magnify every aspect of one's abilities.

Super-Power Enhancement, Containment and TRansit Unit Mark-01 gives the master swordsman who wears it vastly enhanced strength, allowing him, amongst other things, to use a 100kg katana, forged from ultra-density neutron-manipulated titanium alloy, as easily as he would a kendo stick. 01's monacle provides thermal vision keyed to the circulatory system, but is hit-or-miss against freaks and monsters. The servos of the armor fine-tune the wearer's katas to pre-programmed perfection, but during the absolute toughest battles he has been known to switch them off and go by his instinct and training alone. That plus painkillers and bioengineered hormones administered by the suit to further push the limits of human capability.

Additional Information: All members of SPECTRUM-ZERO's organisation are equipped with links to a Recall Matrix located in their headquarters, allowing them to summon each other when needed. Common tactics include spreading out to search for objectives, then whichever one finds the target summons the others for a massed assault. Though each suit is highly individual in its capabilities and workings, they maintain their secretive but uniform appearance with matching helmets, and the distinctive lines of the suit units. The members do, however, differentiate themselves with their gloves, highlight colours, and various and sundry armor or weaponry additions.

Description/Story:A Norse wizard from an alternate Earth, Vajetar sensed a dimensional gate created by Portal Corp, and passed through it in search of the legendary Helm of Valhalla, with which he hoped to save his people from the troublesome ancient "gods" of his world.

Appearing amidst the baroque machinery of an early portal prototype, he was confronted with the unexpected spectacle of a team of costumed heroes tasked to safeguard against unfriendly invaders. After scanning his mind quickly, Vanguard teleparth BarCode cleared him for entry to our dimension and to Paragon City, but warned him that what he sought may be unattainable - the helm is in the posession of Statesman, and is essential to the safety of this world as well.

So Vajetar, accustomed to the much colder conditions of the Northern lands of his world, acquired refrigerated powered armor, and using that combined with his frigid magic, his quest is now to earn sufficient acclaim and trust to meet and converse with the bearer of the artifact he seeks... the Statesman.

Additional Information: Often mistaken for a pure technology hero, Vajetar's moniker only adds to the confusion. However, his new armor serves only as physical protection and as environmental protection from our much warmer climate - his icey attacks, his chilling aura, his flight and his speed all come from within, from his mystic powers. He still retains his heavy storm scarf and the tundra coloration of his gloves and boots, to show that he hasn't forgotten his roots in an alternate dimension's northlands.

Here's a puzzle for the next two, Anorexia and The Steam Golem. These two characters are both pretty cool, both are on different servers, but I only play one of them now because they unfortunately use the same power sets (both with very different and good explanations for them). Try to guess which one I still play (in other words, which one is higher level):

Description/Story: A survivor of one of Dr. Vahzilok's twisted experiments, Anorexia's body will no longer accept food as nourishment. Rather, her metabolism is gradually consuming her from within, converting her flesh into energy and flame.

Thus she is dying, even as she breathes. Already covered in bone plates suffused with the dark energy of Vahzilok's creations, in order to extend her tragically shortened lifespan, Anorexia is forced to replace more and more of her body with cybernetics. But she has found that she can also take some energy from parts of Vahzilok's minions to preserve her body for another hour or two. All she can hope for now is to track the Doctor down and either wring the true cure for death from him, or at least eviscerate him and end the cycle.

Additional Information: Anorexia is very angry and very violent. She is in constant pain and lives only for a confused mixture of justice and revenge. Dr. Vahzilok is well known to all CoH players; his search for a "cure for death" has lead only to unspeakable abominations, zombies andf worse, and has created a cult of almost religious followers, drawn mostly from medical fields. Tracking him down will not be easy though, because his organisation is huge and powerful. Furthermore, Anorexia's quest will be no more "storybook" than her name; it will be a dark tale of gore and violence, and the battle between her disease/mutation, her attempts to fight it with cybernetics, and her fundamental humanity which looks likely to loose either way... if she even survives.

Description/Story: In the aftermath of the Rikti war, a machine was discovered within a very old basement which had been exposed by the destruction of a skyscraper. The machine fell into the hands of a fledgeling but gifted engineer who quickly determined that the machine was an automaton constructed in the early 1920s - before anyone used the word robot.

After replacing the rusted outer shell, the engineer reactivated it since the insides were in near-perfect shape. Using an efficient steam drive (now augmented with a concentrated synthetic coal substitute) the Golem was surprisingly powerful, and its axe swings were augmented by compressed air shells. But it also seemed to posess a deep intelligence that could neither be expressed by its primitive harmonica-like vocal device, nor explained by the clockwork brain.

Once activated, it began fighting crime autonomously, and could even "heal" battle damage by welding shut cracks in its lead-alloy shell with a burst of intense heat. And it seems to know friend from foe...

Additional Information: The Steam Golem is an actual roleplayed character. He has very rarely uttered an ooc word, and then only in tells prefixed with ooc. His primitive speech systems result in ALL CAPS COMMUNICATION. Most in his interaction is actually carried out through macros. 90% of his dialog is him describing his actions (such as "INTERNAL TEMPERATURE EXCEEDING ACCEPTABLE LEVELS: VENTING EXHAUST NOW" every time he actives his protective flaming aura, or "FUSING CRACKS IN OUTER CASING" whenever he uses fire-self-healing), or very terse communications ("NO TIME. ON A MISSION", "I CONCUR", or his tileset specific macroes such as "TREES IMPAIR NAVIGATION" for the ever popular unmapped maze of Perez Park).

This is all really convenient when I want to be antisocial. I also refused to take any real movement powers for him, since jumping across whole city blocks seemed wrong for a big clunky multi-ton tanker like him, and flying, teleporting or superspeed was even more out of line. Therefore, he has Sprint and Hurdle powers increasing his basic run speed and jumping height, and that's all he has for getting around the city. Which is somewhat less convenient.