Consensuses for Only Heroes

Leadership
We have a simple majority for a parliamentary style leader who is chosen by majority and left in his or her station until the majority no longer holds confidence in that decision. The leader has the authority to make a decision when it is evident that decisions aren't obvious, at the leader's discretion, and we all agree to suffer Alcar-deterined consequences if we, as followers, should work against the coherence of the team.
 
Of course, if a bad call was made, a vote of confidence can arise in that parliamentary fashion. Votes of confidence and other issues are handled privately "in the locker room," and not "on the field," or else you're not being a Team Player.

Maturity
Characters must look and act like adults.

Anthropomorphism Requirements
No restrictions.

Banned stuff
Within limits on the site, anything goes for the rough draft. Companion is unlikely to be allowed, for obvious reasons. (Sparkie has tried to ban divine relationship.)

Origins
The PCs are the fractured remnants of an established team that was started before the vanishing and must now struggle to persist past it. If saving the world (possibly even for the sake of loved ones) isn't good enough reason to join, your PC doesn't strictly belong in a superhero organization.

Backgrounds/Relationships
Propose backstory relationships to other characters at will.

Basic PC concepts (in terms of roles)
Caltak: Transport, Decoy, Mascot
Chaos: Healer, ranged, inventor
Fennec: ranged violence, suppression, melee/tank
Kentari: scout, diplomat, healer
 Lunchie: Unknown.

Game Time
One weeknight (undetermined, depends on lunchie) at ~6 pkm PST

Only Heroes - Editorial

METAHUMAN WEEKLY

Editorial

There has only been one story the last two weeks: where have they gone? Every major hero and big-name villain is simply gone, even those who shouldn't be. So far most of the now-major league villains are in hiding, quiet and still, expecting it to be a kind of trap or trick. But what if it's not? What if they really are gone? Loaded questions, with bullet answers.

• There have always been more villains than heroes. Some of that is because heroes retire more often, a lot is probably human nature. For the most part, the heroes were stronger and braver and held the world together, drew lines in the sand that no villain managed to cross. Do your crime, and you ended up in a MetaMax prison and almost no-one ever broke in or out of one of those.
• While officials won't answer, it seems likely that the major metahumans in them were subject to the Vanishing as well: which means they have an awful lot of room in cells now. That will keep the smarter villains in line, but as Morning Maid said in an interview years ago, the truly smart ones never become super villains. The rest may start breaking unwritten rules without anyone to hold them back.
• The government is looking into setting up the Superhuman Outreach Council again, with the goal being to find part-time superheroics to keep the number of villains down. Whether this will pass muster in Congress is anyone's guess.
• Those In The Know worry what Professor Green will do. No one seems to know if he really is a professor, but Green has been active since the 60s, shows no sign of getting older and has a staggering fortune at his disposal, all geared toward the destruction of humanity. It's estimated that over 70% of global-warming denial can be traced back to him and what he might fund or plan without superhumans to stop him is anyone's guess. (On a lighter note, when asked whether he had funded young-earth creationism, he reportedly said that he does have standards,)
• Another worry is an economic collapse owing to a certain number of large corporations being owned by superhumans: a Hall of Heroes must be funded somehow, after all, and a few titans of industry seem to have gone on 'vacation' shortly after the Vanishing, with no signs of returning to work.
• On the plus side, a lot of companies have lost their superhuman product endorsement and any hero wanting some decent pay on the side might be able to work out a deal with Nike shoes and the like. Not that the major heroes ever did that, but times might be changing ....

Only Heroes

How to tell if you are a hero in one easy step: Are you motivated by self-interest in your actions? If yes, you are a supervillain. If no, you may be a super hero. (Stanley Milgram, 1956, in the letters page of American Psychiatric Quarterly)

They have been among us since the 1950s, heroes and villains larger than life with powers and abilities to match, able to fly or survive impossible situations, destroy entire meteors or create wondrous artifacts of the world to come. And yet for every hero, a dozen or more villains would emerge whose goals were less kind, whose motivations were darker and whose desires were as wild and mad as the heroes were gallant and brave. Explanations ranged from 'the War' to human nature, religious convictions, nature vs. nurture and most everything else under the sun. The truth is that, like why superhumans exist, no one knows what motivates people to take the paths they take in life. Great men, as Lord Acton pointed out, are almost always bad men, but there were somehow always enough heroes to hold back the shadows.

The world has changed much since the days of the second great wold war: we not only have our defenders and our villains, but there are computers whose power could scarcely have been imaged in that era and the world has become both utopic and orwellian somehow at the same time. There are companies with their own private superhero, the children of superhumans with powers that put even their parents to shame and seven known alien species that have had contact with humanity in this brave new world we find ourselves living in. It is not our parents world and it is far better for it.

Or is was, until recently: a flash of indigo light filled the entire world visible to the naked eye as far away as the crab nebula, and when it cleared most of the superheroes and all the truly powerful villains were simply gone. Where, and why? No one knows. Best guess is some supervillains weapon worked better than expected [by which we mean it worked at all...] and took them all Elsewhere. Even the hero known as Walker, who could move between time and space, has not returned. They may be dead, or lost, or trapped. No one knows.

But the villains that remain are attacking banks, Walmart, Home Depot and anywhere else they can garner supplies from. There have always been more villains, but the heroes were more powerful. This is no longer the case, and for the first time people are feeling scared of superhumans, worried about the world in ways they never really were before. Oh, there have been Death Rays and Planet Bombs, but nothing ever came from them: it was as if the villains needed to be stopped, or it had all become a kind of private game for everyone to enjoy and suddenly the balance has shifted.

The only problem is the police are outgunned and undermanned and the heroes left are the ones who never ended up on teams or made the news, the ones who aren't much more than regular themselves and now the only ones left to somehow work together and keep the world from falling apart until the real heroes make it back. If they ever do at all....

Game Concept: The PCs are very much underdogs who need to work together in order to defeat the supervillains left in the city of Darwin Bay. Unlike most games, you're not as powerful as your enemies and will need a lot of luck and skill to survive.

PC Creation: BESM3, 150 points to build your PC with. You can take only ~10 points in defects. After this, you have 20 points to spend in just skills.

Your PCs will be at the upper limit of the human level in BESM bencharks, to whit: Attributes cannot be higher than 3, Combat Value maxes out at 7, Health at 90, your damage multiplier at 5.

Note: Up to 5 bonus points can be gained from creating NPCs and teams for the world: what major teams used to exist? What villains were terrifying? What ones still exist who are the new Terror? Completely statted NPCs and the like are not necessary as much as fun blurbs to explain them all to everyone else.

Note #2: Dynamic powers will not be allowed. Magic will be very limited, as this is intended to be a magic-lite setting for the most part. Companion is actively discouraged unless it is flat-out necessary for a PC concept.

Tone: This game isn't intended to be 4-colour, but neither is it grim & gritty. The superheroes and villains have an unspoken code about not killing [many] civilians. And each other, by and large, but this owes more to practicality than anything else: the death of The Atomic in 1971 left a good chunk of the Sudan radioactive. Likewise, prisons exist for superhumans than do manage to contain them, laws are observed and sentences served out for crimes.

The world: Superhumans have existed for over 60 years. This is known to most everyone and understood as such: the kid who skips too many classes is as likely to have questions about having powers as for people to wonder about drugs. A fair number of superhumans keep their identities secret, mostly due to the paparazzi and for issues of privacy. Super-tech does exist, but is mostly insanely expensive to make, operate and run.

While the government keeps no official register of superhumans, the local police are generally going to react unfavourably to unknowns: visiting the police station to introduce yourself and what you can do is generally an asset. The police do have advanced tech of their own, but it is often inferior to what villains can devise and they have a lot of red tape to go through to use it.

Terms:
Metahuman/Superhuman: any human who manifests abilities and skills beyond the ordinary. Not all become heroes or villains, after all.

Superhero: anyone who uses said ability for the good of others, by and large.

Supervillain: not a superhero. Often motivated by self-interest, and many are technically insane (though the courts refuse to accept 'supervillain' as a psychiatric condition to avoid a prison sentence).  

Vigilante: humans who get tech, armour and what have you and face down supervillains themselves. The police tend to dislike them and most don't survive all that long.

Mutant: a term for any superhuman (and alien) whose appearance doesn't fit with human norms. You can still be a hero or villain just fine, but will be received with a bit more suspicion in some corners of the world. The world has long since moved on from 'mutations are evil' and the like of the 70s but one can expect double-takes and wariness. That most mutants tend to the hero side of the spectrum helps.

MetaMax: the prisons designed to hold criminal superhumans. Built to withstand wars, said prisoners could dampen and destroy any metahuman power though the technology that made them is apparently both very, very expensive and stationary.