"Why I Love..." - Rainier

I love Forte. That’s pretty obvious, isn’t? You might have noticed all the web pages I’ve built centered on Seattle’s favorite heroes? I love it for a lot of reasons. Being a part of it from the start is one. Helping create it, being there to watch it grow, back when it began as Champions game in a suburb of Sacramento called Roseville. I love that it lasted as long as it did. I love that it carried on after it seemed to be over, and was reborn on the net to live on and on. I love all the grand adventures, the exciting super-hero stories that make up the epic Forte legend.

But like most long-lasting works of popular fiction – like successful TV shows, novel series, big movie franchises, comics – what makes a property stand the test of time and turn into something that touches people’s souls and makes them want to live in its world forever – it works because of its characters. Many a lame property has missed that simple fact, and tried to get by on flash and special effects and plot twists and over-marketing. But for a property to truly become alive, it needs to center on a group of dynamic, breathing, interesting, loveable, identifiable characters. Characters that may look very different from us, and do things and go places we could never imagine, but that we can easily see ourselves in. When we care about what happens to them – when we become them – the connection is made. That’s when we’re part of the story. That’s when the magic happens.

Forte has been flush with amazing characters, from the earliest heroes that started it all to the ones who stepped in and carried on the legend. Oh, yes, the stories have always been amazing. But as Forte creator and gamemaster K.C. Ryan will be quick to tell you (from experience), all the plotting and all the villain-making in the world won’t mean a thing if you don’t have the right characters to make it all come to life.

I’m such a huge fan of Forte because I love ALL the characters – not just my own that have been on the Forte roster through the years. They’ve all got their own unique worldviews, their own style, their own amazing stories to tell. I write as many Forte stories as I do just because I love exploring the characters and watching what they do in a given situation, and how they interact with each other. The stories often practically write themselves, because the characters seem to just take over. Great characters will do that.

I decided to start a new feature on the official Forte blog where I talk about each of the Forte characters, and why I love them so much. As I said, they’re not all mine, so I don’t have all the insight their creators have as to what makes them tick. But like any comic fan, I’ve got my reasons why I love reading about them, and I have my opinions on them. So these won’t be definitive works on the characters – just my reasons for still smiling every time I see a new piece of art of one of them, or go back and read an old Forte update, or read a new Forte story.

I thought instead of jumping back to the beginning, I’d start with one of the latter-day Forte heroes, once of the ones born in online fiction – never part of the original game, but an important part of the ongoing Forte universe.

So let’s start with Rainier.

You can read the origins of “Forte 2000” elsewhere in the ForteUniverse sites (most prominently on the Forte 2000 page), but I’ll sum up here. After the game had ended, living on only in occasionally annual get-together games at gatherings like Comic-Con where some of the old Forte players would gather, I had this thought – what if all the original Forte players, and the GM, were to suddenly be living in the same town again? What if the game started up again, and it was still Forte, but instead of just playing the old familiar characters, the players made all-new heroes for an all-new Forte team? What kind of characters would these be? What character would each player make?

I posed this question via email, and the others of the original four – Kaye, Jeff and Tim – answered the call and played my supposition game with me. We all made new heroes, the ones we’d want to play if this thing really happened. The resulting characters were just so good, and so perfect together, I just couldn’t let things stop there. The Forte 2000 site was born from those four, and I wrote the origin story, taking the characters my friends had created – and taking over (borrowing with respect) K.C.’s Forte world and re-igniting the legend. A new Forte for a new millennium! From that origin tale grew the dozens of stories you can now read on the Forte 2000 site, ones that continue to expand the Forte timeline.

Tim came up with a hero named Rainier. We both had the same theme in mind for our characters (quite accidentally), making them very Seattle-centric. Where I created Seahawk (not believing that K.C. had run a game in Seattle for all those years and never thought to use that name for a villain, at least), Tim went with Seattle’s local Mt. Rainier as a starting point. He envisioned a giant rock hero, one with volcanic powers. But instead of making him some brainless hulk, he decided to make him very brainy – an archeology grad student with an emphasis in native American history and myth. He wanted some kind of local tribal myth involved – some item that gave this grad student (Davis Alexander) his powers. From that idea, Tim drew up what Rainier would look like. And then he left the rest to me. As Tim and I have been working as a writer/artist team for many years, that’s a familiar pattern for us.

I loved the idea, and had a couple of wrinkles to add to it. I decided he came from a very rich family in Washington, but he really cared nothing for the family money. This wasn’t some I-hate-my-evil-rich-parents kind of thing, which has been done to death. He was just obsessed with knowledge and history, and that was his life’s calling. He didn’t care about the family business – he didn’t despise it, it just wasn’t for him. And his parents, happy to see their son finding his own path, supported him in this choice. They had worked hard to make sure he’d have those kinds of choices in his life, and though not always understanding where his head was at, they were proud of him and encouraged him. I took a little twist on this from a documentary called “Born Rich”, which included a wealthy family that didn’t want their son to ever have to work. In the case of the Alexanders, they just wanted their son to have the life he wanted without his dreams being shackled by financial need. So their (very) brainy son got to follow his brain.

I figured that his brain led him to a fascination with the local indigenous peoples in Washington, a subject that fascinated him from his youth. This led him to his eventual double-major in anthropology and archeology, with his particular area of expertise being religious life of the local tribes. I imagined this become an obsession in his life.

But as this was a super-hero “game”, I needed to focus, first, on the hero origin. Tim had wanted some kind of Native American legend involved. Not being THAT good of a researcher, I decided to create my own. I wanted it centered on Mt. Rainier in Washington, to go with the character’s name. I did research the mountain, and found that its original name, given by the peoples of the land, was Ta-co-bet (it was renamed Mt. Rainier by whitey). I ran with that idea, and created a local legend that the Creator carved a spirit being from that mountain that came forth in times of need to defend the local tribes. As the legend went, a particularly nasty British captain showed up with his ship and tried to enslave the locals, only to be routed by this spirit (called Ta-co-bet, after the mountain). He later returned with three witches, who used their black arts to bind the defender spirit and trap it inside a coal urn that was buried deep within the mountain. There it remained until Davis Alexander discovered it while doing some field work for his grad program, following this mostly-ignored legend. Upon finding the urn, he was overwhelmed by a compulsion to smash it against the wall, and when he did so, the spirit was released and inhabited him, turning him into the giant rocky being that could shoot lava from its hands. So, hey, super-hero right? Uh…no. Once Davis finished freaking out, and realized he could change back, he told no one of this, and didn’t quite know what to do with this information. He was no hero. He was a scholar. And now that he had validated one of his theories – tracking the legend of Ta-co-bet, one that his fellow academics scoffed at – he couldn’t tell anyone about it because of what had happened to him.

So an origin had formed, one that would lead up to his reluctant hero debut in the first Forte 2000 story. That’s very much how I saw him, as someone who had no aspirations of being a hero. There was still something missing though, and he wasn’t quite clear to me, personality-wise. I’d decided that we should do actor casting for Forte 2000, as we had done with fun results in my APEX game. One day while sitting around thinking about Rainier, it hit me – I saw Michael Shanks, or, specifically, the character of Daniel Jackson from Stargate: SG1. There was my Davis Alexander. The minute I had that in my head, the character started really coming to life. Quirky. A bit nerdy. Socially awkward. Not much of a sense of humor (and therefore often the butt of jokes of others). Someone brilliant and fascinated with history and other cultures. Every hero team needs its smart guy. Rainier became that guy for the new Forte team. A genius, a diplomat, someone to fill the role that Vanguard had played in the previous Forte incarnation (uh, except maybe the diplomat part…). He’s that character in the comics who explains all the ancient writings on the temple walls, who figures out what the alien being is trying to communicate and stops it from blowing up the city. And he’s the one that keeps the level head when everyone else wants to start punching, who sees the big picture and becomes the voice of both reason and morality on the team.

I added a few extra quirks to him just to mix things up and keep him from getting too one-dimensional. I decided he had a thing for motorcycles – building and riding them. And with his family’s money, he’s got quite a collection, I figure. I decided he liked chess, and also that he was a bit of a chess celebrity as a child. I decided he needed a bit of an artistic side as well, and made him an accomplished photographer and (nod to his creator Tim here) an artist – both skills he uses mostly in his archeology work. And I pegged his worldview. He doesn’t just profess, I decided, but lives a respect for all men, no matter what culture or race or religion. He became a guy I liked very much – even without the super-powers.

But as for the powers, he did have to start using those to get on a Forte team, so I wrote his first experiences with that into the three-part origin story of the new century’s Forte team. One of the main pieces of that tale involved the existence of a lost race of mystic peoples living below the waters of Washington. His search for yet another legend considered crazy by most dragged him into an all-out inter-dimensional invasion, and into the path of three other local heroes. It was here that he met Seahawk, Tinker and Max, and had to join with them to stop what was coming. Which he didn’t QUITE succeed in, since the invasion of the Karrigon did happen, but using his still-new abilities, he fought with these heroes to turn it back. And he used his brain and cultural skills as well, speaking passionately to this Karrigon’s brother race – the Cassians (that undersea race mentioned before) – and convincing them to join the side of humanity and help save Seattle (and the Earth). There was my definition, in the first arc, of his role on the team. He would be the one who always found that third alternative, who helped them think their way around situations, always thinking outside the box. And he would have an unshakeable moral compass that always pointed to the right thing to do, even if the other thing might be easier.

His earliest appearances, in the stories “31 Flavors” and “The Keys” showcased his “butt of everyone’s jokes” thing nicely. “Flavors” was a good humiliation moment, and a chance for him—having fallen off a building into an ice cream truck—to reflect on how strange his life had become. “The Keys”, with the new team’s first day alone at the classic Forte base (the final vote of trust from the old team, once the new team had earned it), showed him not hanging out and watching football with the other guys, but obsessed with reading through the Forte archives and finding out all the different hidden civilizations they had encountered, and their time travel adventures, and musing over the idea that the world should know all this stuff, but that maybe the world wasn’t ready to know it (a thought that goes against his basic beliefs, but something that he, now, as a part of the exclusive and secretive super society, has to deal with). And I like his consternation that no one else seemed to care about the race of plant people living beneath Seattle.

But something was missing with Rainier, and I knew it, though I couldn’t initially put my finger on it. I found it when I decided that my fondness and fascination for the former Forte heroine Moondancer—mostly due to my never being around when the character was played, so she was such a nice mystery to me—meant that I wanted to bring her into “modern” Forte continuity. The minute I decided that she and Rainier were going to hook up, I struck gold. Here was someone completely different from Davis Alexander in every way—angry, impulsive, unpredictable, violent—and that totally spelled stormy romance drama for me. I introduced her into “current” (at the time) Forte 2000 continuity, but established that this wasn’t the first time she’d been around. I decided there was a history we missed in early (unwritten) Forte 2000 issues, where the two of them hooked up and started a very heated on again/off again romance. And with her being Moondancer, I decided it was very physical, very sexual. Which was something really unexpected for Rainier. Like so many seemingly doomed relationships I’ve seen happen in life, it was something that became an addiction for him. Logically, this was not the woman that fit into his studious, logical life—but the connection between them became too strong. I think part of the initial heat was his “fetish” with all things Native American – and here was the embodiment of that (and someone who really put the “body” in “embodiment”). And this was also something new in his life, this very carnal kind of physical, intense relationship, and that became part of the addiction, too. Bringing her into things added a number of layers to him, and their relationship let me explore more things about him, and the nature of such irrational but powerful attractions. I was unexpectedly pleased to see that bookish Davis was “getting some” with one of the hottest women on the Forte Earth. She gave him the emotion he was missing, the messy humanity vacant from his sane existence. It just worked, and worked great. And one of their earlier, happier moments of their relationship – told in flashback in the tale “Pastels” – really made me love the two of them together, and let Davis be a very different person that we’d become used to.

I got to carry this along during her return as the Anubis stories began. As I mentioned in backstory, their last parting had been a bad one, with Moondancer being her usual self-destructive self that pushes everyone away. This time, instead of just fighting with and storming out on Davis, she screwed things up with the whole team, and even got into a fist fight with Tinker. The fact that Dyna Girl and Tinker both hated her was an obvious thing, but I liked adding the twist (I’ve seen this in my life with friends and their relationships) that even though she was a psycho and was, to his teammates, bad for Davis, the gals knew they couldn’t speak badly about her around him. Her return was a twist, though. During this break, she’d had a moment of clarity during a visionquest, and came back a new person, trying hard to make amends and become a better human being. Davis, being hurt, didn’t trust her at first, but she allowed him space and took the time to prove herself. Over the course of these issues, I got them back together as he slowly started to believe that she’d changed, and her change even finally won over Dyna Girl, who came to believe the transformation was real and gave her another shot. The destructive Moondancer/Rainier relationship blossomed, finally, into admitted love, culminating in the (I think) really beautiful scene in the “Interlude” story. Ah, finally. Happiness.

And then, of course, I killed her.

Heh heh heh.

This was one of my favorite Rainier moments, during that final battle in Forte 2000 #148. Separated from the fallen Forte team (who were stuck in Chicago), he had to stand with Moondancer against a godlike villain, Anubis, a villain who had just taken out two hero teams. I got to pull out all the stops on Rainier. He used his brains, trying to reason with the villain, first. When they failed, he had to go to the fists, and they fell into an EPIC battle that destroyed the UNCLE building. Everything he’d learned in two years of being a super-hero came into play. It was one of the favorite fights I’ve ever written, and he got to fight it with his true love at his side. But when Anubis finally took him out, Moondancer was left alone. And this was the moment where she came full circle – both as a person, and in her love for him. With Tinker, from Chicago, screaming over the radio for her to get away, Moondancer refused to leave the man she loved alone, and faced an impossible battle, knowing it would be the end of her. She fought bravely (I actually got choked up writing her big fight with him), and there was even a glimmer of hope, but in the end, the result was never in question. Just as Rainier was started to come to, he saw the woman he loved killed before his eyes, her lifeless body thrown to the street in front of him. Here was another defining moment for him in his reaction. He didn’t think of vengeance. He didn’t fight on. All he could see was his lost love as he cradled her there in his arms. Phantasm would have thrown himself at the villain and gone out fighting, unable to contain his rage. Same with Dr. Jackal. Seahawk. Many others. But all Rainier saw was loss. He’s not a man of violence. And yet, thrust into this violent life against his will, he’d just lost his one true love to it. His immobilization, culminating in his finally screaming his agony to the sky after Anubis’ easy departure, felt so right that it seemed to be writing itself. As for the changes this loss will have on him, what it will do to him as a person, and a hero? Sadly, that’s got to wait for me to EVER get back to finishing the tale. There will be repercussions. Trust me. A man cannot survive something like that and walk away unchanged. There’s darkness on the way.

Other highlights have included the very fun “R.C.D.G.” short story, where Dyna Girl is innocently (yeah, right) torturing him over the fact that he, the one so obsessed with cultures and peoples, DIDN’T get to go out into space and meet dozens of alien races like her. I loved the girls talking him into being teleported into the apartment of the dudes who were crank calling the Forte hotline in “Hotline 3: 976-FORTE”, reluctantly putting the fear of god into him, and the classic scene where he orders the dudes to go to college. He had another great “joke butt” moment in the “Stakeout” story, a tale that’s special to me because it has all eight Forte heroes in it (that’s happened so rarely, since Seahawk had been absent during the whole Anubis epic), and shows his tired annoyance/patience with Seahawk. Rainier is just fun to write. I like him because he’s so logical, so emotionally together, so “ask questions first”. That kind of worldview speaks to my nature, and makes me want to aspire to be more like him. He’s a very unconventional super-hero in almost every way, and I love what he brings to the team dynamic because of it.

There’s still much to come for Rainier. We have yet to explore his childhood and his family, and I can’t wait to find out what life growing up as an Alexander was like. In the course of the timeline he’s gone from grad student to college professor, and I definitely want to explore that more, and see what he’s like with his students. And very importantly, I want to explore his bigger story – the Ta-co-bet part of him, the otherwise quiet spirit, manifesting as his powers, that will slowly start to feed him more visions and lead him down what I hope will be a path of great stories of tribal mystery and ancient evils. I’m far from done with Rainier, and in some ways feel like I’ve just begun. I can only hope that Forte fans love him as much as I do, and are looking forward as much as me to seeing what surprises he’s still got in store for us.

To learn more about Rainier, be sure to check out his character page on the Forte 2000 site (where you’ll also find his gallery), and, of course, dive into the all the Forte 2000 adventures!