Talk:Officer Martinez

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

CROWBOCOP. There, I said it, so my alleged "friends" don't have to. :p

I'll admit that those were two of the strongest inspirations, but there were others. One goes all the way back to my first couple of months playing, in 2004, where I saw a Magic-origin tanker who looked just like a big bronze Oscar. The bio described a cop badly beaten by gang members and left for dead in the arms of one of Paragon City's many heroic statues; it was the last thing he saw just as lightning struck the statue. (I wish I could remember that character's name.) Another was the hapless rookie Hernandez in the opening cutscene(s) of GTA San Andreas, newly assigned to dirty cop Tenpenny, forced to choose between shooting an informant or getting shot himself. And there's some two-gun Hong Kong crime drama in there too. (If only we could have doves.)

Behold, my pistol scrapper. That should give you some idea how long I've been thinking of making this character, along with the fact that I once planned to give him Phase Shift - i.e., before the Devs nerfed that power into the ground for the sake of PvP. Now it's one of those bad Tier 4 jokes, like Whirlwind or Group Fly.

In a lot of ways he's like a dark reflection of the Star of Justice, a character I actually came up with later. Both are cops, from families with strong ethnic identities; both were mortally wounded but "came back" somehow. Star is a being of pure light, while Martinez commands the darkness. Jamie has held on to his idealism, while Juan's has curdled into a much more bitter and cynical outlook.

And now he's 50 (as of March 2012), an Incarnate, with a new reason to go on and a wise mentor to guide and assist him, and a rather unusual beat he's uniquely suited to watch over. -- Megajoule