Aeon University. In the foreground left, students and faculty crowd the Black Market trucks day and night. The campus by night, looking up towards Dr. Aeon's "city of the future," Aeon City. Aeon University campus library. The blue glowing screens are Crey "Hypothetical Frameworks™." Students consult with faculty in the technomagic laboratory at Aeon University.

OK, now that issue 9 of City of Heroes and (more importantly to me) City of Villains has gone "live," I'm ready to unveil my goofy new online roleplaying project. First, some backstory. In 1930, two "gentlemen adventurers" (criminal masterminds) and their "assistants" (gang of thieves) went looking for an uncharted island in the Aegean called the Well of the Furies. What they found was an ancient alien artifact that has been draining off "samples" of human creative energy, life force, and magical energy since it got here untold thousands of years ago. During the Age of the Titans, someone found and opened it, discharging the energy inside, and creating the first generation of humans to be elevated to godhood. It happened again during the Age of the Olympians. And in 1930, it ushered in the age of the superhero (and supervillain), because not only did they open the box, they managed to actually break it. The two people at the epicenter couldn't agree on what had happened to them. Oh, they both understood that they'd been given nearly unlimited godlike power (level 54 incarnates, a level not attainable by players because we weren't there). But Marcus Cole, who returned to Providence, Rhode Island (now called Paragon City), and eventually came to be known as the Statesman and as America's greatest hero, just shrugged his shoulders and said, "What? Magic, I guess. I don't care how it works." His brother in law, Steffan "Lord Recluse" Richter, who now runs a technocratic fascist archipelago of islands north of Bermuda called the Rogue Isles, doesn't believe in magic. He has spent almost 80 years now paying the best mad scientists in the world to find some way to incorporate an understanding of the magic in the world into a working scientific model.

As early as issue 2, there was evidence that other people were trying to fuse magic and technology, too. When issue 6 came out, we found out that Carl "Dr. Aeon" Egon, the planet's greatest evil scientist had assassinated his predecessor as one of the territorial governors in the Rogue Isles by using technology to duplicate the effect of a demon summoning spell, and funded his rise to power by coming up with a scientific means to tap unlimited electrical power from the body of a demon that was entombed under one of the extinct volcanoes in the Isles 400 years ago. Now that issue 9 has come out, we have two more major developments in the technomagic plotline. One is that it turns out that the vast 3/4 mile diameter antenna array that is draped over the entire city of Grandville, Rogue Isles, is one gigantic technomagical weapon of unknown capabilities, the latest design by Dr. Aeon. But the more important one to my little project is that Reichart "Doctor Brainstorm" von Gehirnsturm, an eccentric (mad) scientist working for the Crey Corporation, has come up with a way to standardize and mass market a process for merging technological superpower enhancements with magic ones; he calls it the Hypothetical Framework™. Both Paragon University in Paragon City, Rhode Island, and Aeon University, in Cap au Diable in the Rogue Isles, have purchased a couple of dozen Hypothetical Frameworks™, offered classes in how to operate them, and made them available (for a hefty rental fee) to the super-powered communities of both nations.

Some of you may remember that when I first noticed, a year ago last October, that there was a building in Cap au Diable called Aeon University, I thought it would be hysterically funny to start a villain group called the Aeon University Cheerleaders on the Virtue (unofficial roleplayers') server, creating the fiction that the campus athletic mascot is the Fighting Coralax. And everybody I've told this to agrees that it was a hysterically funny idea. And even at peak, I never got more than 6 people to agree to create cheerleader characters, and only me and one other played them regularly. Ironically, we played them enough to earn enough "prestige" to build a fully functional supervillain base ... for, in essence, one person, because everybody else left the game or went on to play other characters. Basically, lots of people wanted it to exist, but they found it too restrictive a roleplaying concept. So it occurred to me to use the "Coalition" features to build something rather less restrictive, but tie it to the cheerleaders' base, so that everybody in the coalition can use their telepads to get around the Isles, and can use their Personal Invention Salvage vault and their Hypothetical Framework workbench, until the various groups can afford their own. So far, I've created four groups, counting the original:

• Aeon University Faculty Club
  
• Aeon University Alumni Club
  
• Aeon University Student Union
  
• Aeon University Cheerleaders

And the fun thing about this is that it's the perfect roleplaying opportunity for people with severe alt-itis. You see, most supergroups hate people with severe alt-itis, the compulsion to create way more characters than you'll ever get around to playing, because there's a cap of 75 characters per group. But with this concept, I can spin off as many additional groups in the coalition as we need. If we fill up the Student Union, we can spin off (say) an Athletic Department and a Physics Club. If we fill up the Faculty Club, we can spin off individual departments. If we fill up the Alumni Club, we can spin off the Aeon University Recruiters, or add staff departments ... thesigother came up with the Aeon University Student Loan Office, for example. And I don't have to pressure you to play any of those characters full time, because we've got this almost completely fully raid-capable base for the cheerleading squad that I can swap people in and out of as needed.

If you've got one or more villains on the Virtue server who wants to be a campus villain, just contact me whenever I'm on at global address @InfamousBrad, and I'll switch to a character that can recruit you into whichever of those four groups. If you're not currently playing City of Villains and you'd like to try it out, I can spin off an endless number of 10-day free trial codes right now, and I get free game time if any of those sign up for the game. And if you know for a fact that you intend to subscribe to the game, know for a fact that you want to play a campus villain on the Virtue server, and all that's holding you back is not wanting to pay for the client software right now, I've got a one-time, first come first serve, "buddy" code I can send out that gives you a 10-day free trial that doesn't require a client software purchase if/when you sign up for regular billing with it.