[continued from previous message]

burst in a puff of reddish smoke, which she drew in through her mouth.
"Ohhhhh yesssss," she whispered, holding the smoke in her lungs as long
as she could and drawing in the essence of an alien god. It wasn't enough to put her on a par with even the greater servants of the gods, but it was quite impressive nonetheless.
And to test it, there was a plan she'd been toying with for months, but never seemed to have the resources to enact.
She had them now.

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Next Issue:

Lady Sable is back, and has plans for her new power...but her new power may have plans for her, and neither set of plans is going to be pleasant for anyone in the vicinity!

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Author's Notes:

"City of Night" is a Peter Schilling song about the divided city of
Berlin in the 1980s. This is one of those arcs I've been sitting on for a LOOOONG time. Like, while I was working on City of Light (ASH #37-41, the "Paris Mirror" thign mentioned in the Christmas party scene) I decided I
wanted to do City of Night as well, with Nyx as the big-bad. But I kept pushing it back, not wanting to be too close to the previous Big Epic Thing.
I still don't think the time is right to bring Nyx herself into the game directly, but I've figured out a way to use the basic ideas of City of Night via Lady Sable instead.

The first scene grew out of a fairly simple concept: you know your
world is hosed when the guy who's been trying to destroy it shows up and apologizes because something else is going to destroy it and he can't stop
it. In Marvel this would probably be Galactus (if only Earth were in danger) or Thanos (if all reality was going to go away). In City of Heroes, it's Rularuu the Ravager. And thanks to the City of Heroes writers' bible that's been circulating, I had a pretty good idea how it would play out. Of course, others are welcome to their own explanations in-story of how (or even if!)
the world ends. A happier view would be that the reality goes merrily on and we simply lose our window on it, but for the purposes of my story...well,
happy doesn't work as well.

This issue is mostly about "rescuing" a few of my City of Heroes characters in a direct way. Lady Lawful, Doctor Developer, and a few of
their supporting cast all started as Andy's City of Heroes characters, but they're "native" versions. Ol' Jed and Sharon Venturi are direct imports, albeit with the serial numbers mystically excised. Sharon was my very first City of Heroes character, a cross between Sharon Ventura (Ms. Marvel) and the Rocketeer, while Ol' Jed just seemed like a character I could get some good story potential out of. After all, in a world where all the superhumans are twenty-somethings, an octogenarian farmer from rural New England would offer
a rather different point of view. I also deliberately left the other
surviving superhumans unnamed, so that if I later decided I wanted to rescue someone else, or another ASH writer did, they could be revealed to have been part of that group. But it turns out very few of my CoH characters are
really suitable for import...a lot are already versions of ASH, LNH or
Superguy characters, others carry too much of someone else's trademark (like
my blatant Spider-Man 2099 riff, or the Paranoia RPG character Lee-R-OYJ-5,
all the ponies, and characters who are too tied to City of Heroes lore), and
a lot are just too silly for ASH.

Because I expect to get some readers for this issue from the City of Heroes side, I tried to be a little more comprehensive in my exposition, at
the expense of sounding a bit stilted in places. There's still loads of backstory I really couldn't fit in without it being totally awkward, but hopefully there's enough that anyone who hasn't read any previous ASH stories isn't totally at sea.

Darran, who still has no last name, first appeared in ASH #47. All of
his speculative disasters are based on stores in ASH Holiday Special #1 (although the floating island is shamelessly ripped off from Narbonic).
"Cory" is based on a real person from Cumberland, I'll leave his full
identity as an exercise for the readers. ;) Hsiang, Doctor Clancey and Technician Dawes aren't imports of any specific City of Heroes characters, they're meant to be the sort of "named generic NPC" you see in repeatable content missions ("Get the Dragoon Balls and defeat Hsiang," or "Rescue
Doctor Clancy from the Rikti," that sort of thing). [Addendum: No, Tsoo
aren't 100% Chinese, they're kind of a mix of influences including Thai, Cambodian and Japanese, but Sharon's not a Tsoo scholar and probably never
even asked Hsiang.]

The repeated references to everyone looking the same comes from the fact that most NPCs in City of Heroes draw from a pool of a couple of dozen
faces. There's even a few cases of mission-granting contacts differing only
by the color of their tie. This would seem perfectly normal to the natives, who would be able to tell each other apart based on subtle cues below the resolution of the game's graphics, but to a non-native it would be kinda creepy.

And in case anyone cares, Lady Sable's new toy is a recently defeated
god of death from a pantheon that got itself banished, if you know what I
mean.

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For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art,
and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH !

To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ !

There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if
you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too).

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