The Talent Age: New Hero Colleges

June 30th, 1908. An energy wave swept the planet and rewrote the instruction set for all living things. Humanity didn't survive it. Three subspecies did: Humanoids, Beastkin, and Plasmids. What they could do with their bodies, the things they could become, the Talents they carried, none of that existed before that day.

One hundred and eighty years later, corporations own the heroes. Legacy schools gatekeep who gets to be one. And the Undercity of Atlanta hasn't seen a hero patrol in living memory.

Maxwell Ritter is a blue-furred fox Beastkin who grew up at the bottom of all of it. The legacy schools passed on him. One word on his application: Mutt.

Hero College of Atlanta takes what the legacy schools leave behind.

HCA doesn't train through field rotations. It built something else entirely and sends its students into it every day. The crimes are scripted. The consequences are real. And nothing that happens stays off the record.

Max's Talent makes him impossible to hurt through conventional means. In a world where corporations decide which heroes protect which neighborhoods, that should make him valuable. What it actually makes him is the kind of hero nobody knows how to market.

He's been assigned to Dorm 13. Nine strangers. A shared patrol territory. A ranking that would embarrass most first years. And a weekly debrief system designed to make sure none of them can misremember what they did wrong.

The system was built to produce marketable heroes. Dorm 13 is what happens when you build something from what the system threw away.

Chance assembled them. They chose everything else.