Xaviers!

February marked the 10th anniversary of the Xaviers University boards. Because we are nothing if not prompt, we are celebrating this anniversary here in the middle of March.

The students of Xaviers University will be facing a threat that they are far outclassed for. Only the combined power of not one, two or three but four different Xaviers Universities will restore the multiverse to it's rightful order!

• The Current Xaviers, led by Ashlie Minamida as headmistress
• The Initial Xaviers, overlooking the city of London proper
• The Post-Cataclysm Xaviers, shifted to Maldon after the Big Event in Space
• A Future Xaviers, where our characters from the previous boards have grown up

These universes have already started colliding, in brief moments -- a wildcat appearing in the middle of the dorms; a strange shop popping up in downtown Maldon. This is going to keep happening at an accelerating rate, with rooms and characters from other places and times showing up for minutes, hours, even days at a time, until the reason behind it can be discovered and stopped. Is it a natural phenomenon? The result of a good-natured attempt gone horribly wrong? Or is one of the many past villains of Xaviers popping up to destroy everyone for good this time? Only the greatest teams in the history of the universe can solve these problems in...

ANNIVERSARY X

I'm hoping people will use this opportunity to bring back old characters, even for just a single post or a single thread here or there. It's a celebration of the fact that we've managed to keep these boards alive and at least moderately active for over a decade, which is phenomenal. Old characters like Ayami, Byrna or John from the London XU, or Roland, Brigid and Miranda from the first Maldon XU popping up and interacting with modern characters, even just in passing, I hope will be a lot of fun, as would alternate versions of characters interacting with one another. I'm also hoping people will take the opportunity to show characters as they would have been in the future, like Kay popping up in the shop thread in downtown Maldon. The future XU is the one Will comes from, so if you have any questions about anything that's already been established, I'm more than happy to answer questions.

I hope people just have fun with this sort of thing! I'm posting this on a Friday so people can noodle over the weekend; with Monday being the day that the floodgates really start to open up for realsies.

I'm looking forward to this, even if I don't have specific ideas for involving previous characters yet.

That's why I put this post up before the actual crossover starts happening for realzies; gives people a chance to go "hrmmm..."


And, for fun, a bit of a benefit of my research: the top-20 most-posted characters from each board incarnation (as of March 15th)

OLD XU
1. Will Stanton
2. Sara Stanton
3. Samantha McManus
4. Nailah Weaver
5. Ryan Gabriel
6. Rachel O'Brien
7. Calvin Strong
8. Victoria Valentine
9. Ayami Morita
10. Altamira Vazquez
11. Byrna Cooper
12. Janice Gilbertson
13. Chloe Grant
14. Onyx
15. Anita Fernandez
16. Nina Madaraki
17. Jayda Nightridge
18. John Hino
19. Gideon Rede
20. Michael Asters


FIRST MALDON XU
1. Will Stanton
2. Samantha McManus
3. Nailah Weaver
4. Haley Crusek
5. Brigid Plunder
6. Theresa McMasters
7. Kay Haddock
8. Miranda Weaver
9. ASHLIE
10. Ryan Gabriel
11. Sara Stanton
12. John Hino
13. Regan Rourke
14. Calvin Strong
15. Roland Sackviller
16. Stephanie Kaltiera
17. Altamira Vazquez
18. Jennifer Newgate
19. Steve Jones
20. Victoria Valentine

This is what's going on.

On one side, we have every X-Man in the board's ten year history. On the other, every villain from the board's ten year history. It's a big, bold, brazen brawl between baddies and brawlers.

This is the moment for people to do all sorts of awesome things -- there's a near-infinite number of baddies, so it'll require people looking pretty damn awesome to hold them off long enough for the tech crew to get down to the caverns, slot the captured Tomorrow tech into the mastermind computer, and blast all the baddies back to wherever the hell they came from.

On a practical level, don't feel that you need to necessarily wait for narration posts -- there's so many mooks and whatnot out there, that you can just have your characters doing awesome things without waiting for narration checks. I'll be throwing up problems and blocks from time to time, but if you go "Oh! I want John to blow up four sentinels from that issue with 100 sentinels by using his darkforce to..." just, you know, go ahead an do that thing