This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
Shout out GO WHOA!
—A powerful transformation
BAM BAM into space!
—Plunge forward!
Fight!! Transform!
Go ahead and be reckless
Using the courage of the night,
—Rise up!
When stars connect
You should kiss the moon!
If you’re here,
—My dreams will surely come true
When all our smiles become one,
—The future will be won!!
“Nice suit.”
“Thanks, my mom gave it to me.”
High flying kicks and martial arts strikes wedded with the sharp, earsplitting crack of sound like a cicada that knows how to murder you with its hands. Nightbug is a very obvious hero when he’s fighting, and very subtle when he’s not: he’s either going loud or going unnoticed.
Some heroes have complained about his sound-based martial arts, but, as he points out, they are directional, and he avoids using them when they’ll cause friendly fire. People just need to stop diving into the path of an explosion and complaining about the shrapnel.
Nightbug isn’t a hero possessed of a wide skillset. He can fight – and he can really fight, famously capable of making a space hostile ‘walls to walls,’ or a technique he calls ‘hella bullets.’ This ability to make an entire space completely inescapable is a big part of what he brings to an investigation – he shows up in a place, as part of a squad, and he’s the one that you ask to flood the space while pinning single people down and keeping them from getting away. Because of this relative lack of expertise in non-combat areas, Nightbug loves to work with other people. His skills are limited to ‘getting places he shouldn’t’ and ‘making those spaces awful.’
Nightbug thinks of himself as a classical style hero, the kind he doesn’t see much of and doesn’t deal with in his own community that much. His suit covers him completely, his mask hides his identity, and he does what he can to not give away any of who he is, because that stuff is meant to be private. The hero Nightbug is a specific identity, and he manages and maintains Nightbug as if he is a persona with his own needs and public voice.
Nightbug doesn’t give up much about who he is under the mask. He’s mentioned a mom he’s very proud of, and he seems to get a bit cringey about extremely weeby people, but the actual person under the hood is pretty well hidden.
Rigley, the guy under the mask, is the son of a shrine maiden who is, as best he knows, from another dimension and disappeared at some point after having him. He regularly goes to a shrine he built out in the woods that he hopes she can find, to leave her letters and messages, which are sometimes missing when he comes back to them.
Mechanics
Nightbug is a Sonic Control/Sonic Assault dominator. Now, things have been a bit of a moving target for him because a new page just dropped, but at last check this build hasn’t been changed by anything much. Sonic/Sonic is relatively new, and not something I have a lot of experience with – well, aside from Nightbug.
Sonic Control is a pretty sweet set, but it lacks for precision. You can’t approach a Sonic/Sonic, in my opinion, as if you’re going to be surgically targeting things and taking out the correct target at the correct time, picking specific targets. I think the best way to do it is to just make sure you have Domination, then make sure that you are firing hard and covering as many surfaces with control.
Up close, Earsplitter + the sonic aura one shots equal-con minions, which is a really notable power hit that Dominators don’t normally have access to.
Nightbug’s build is a smashing/lethal defense based one with a lot of recharge to ensure Domination and Hasten are up as much as possible. His build has:
- 45% smashing/lethal defense
- Permanent hasten and Domination, with a total global recharge of 290%
- A whopping four area control powers, which then are doubled up by his pet Reverberant, and sleet which is a knockdown rain, and Ice Storm, procced for knockdown
If you want to look at the build, mids still won’t do links, so I guess contact me (which nobody does).
History
Nightbug was made because we got a new dominator powerset and I didn’t know anything about it. Best way to learn about it was by doing something with it, and the something with it was to make a build in the character builder and then spend a few hours fiddling around with looks in the costume creator. I liked what I made, and started looking for names and themes for things that could be noisy/sound based that weren’t related to music somehow.
Nonmusical sound stuff led to crickets and cicadas, and after checking to make sure I wasn’t dealing with some particularly racist slang, I grabbed the name Nightbug. The look fit a Kamen Rider style character, and I was off. I even made his bio a reference to an anime theme I liked, the opening titles of Transformers Super Link. The big bold ‘sakebe GO WOW!‘ still sticks in my head as a sound of enthusiasm without necessary sense.
Then I looked around for what a nightbug was and found that she was a Touhou, which gave me the origin space for Nightbug’s whole vibe. There’s no strong social connections for him, just that I have friends who love Kamen Rider and friends who love Touhou and the overlap of their interests, in my mind, looks like this: A good natured, well meaning boy who can fight very hard and make any space he’s in incredibly, comprehensively inhospitable.
In the great context of ‘your OCs and my OCs should be friends,’ he absolutely would make friends with a Touhou-inspired character. Even if that meant bullet helling at each other while they learned what made each other tick. He believes in justice deeply, and wants to make things better for people – though his sense of justice is very much oriented towards ‘finding people who did terrible things and got away with it, before kicking them so hard they explode.’ And of course, in his day job, there’s a lot to work with as a guy with a fairly mundane day job who periodically goes to shrine in the woods to visit his mom – there’s religious meaning, the idea of a spirituality and ancestral connection that is much more immediate and less ethereal than great and grand bloodlines.