Lakewood City, 2nd Guild Branch, Orientation Room: The orientation room was set up to hold forty or fifty people, however I was the only person in it. I'd been brought in and asked to sit down wherever I felt like. It wasn't too long before a door near the front of the room opened and a constumed Hero walked through it. The Hero had a full head of gray hair and manly stubble down his jaw, and he wore a 'domino' style mask on his face, covering his eyes and most of his nose. It did nothing to cover his upper or lower head. His costume was tight and had metal plates affixed in multiple places and some exposed gearing. His right arm and leg were artificial, though they moved with a fluidity that aped natural movement admirably.

"Ah, my first class," he said, catching sight of me. "Welcome to Orientation."

"Um.....where is everyone else?" I asked. "I'm not the only member of the class, am I?"

"Normally there'd be twenty or thirty of you," he said. "But in this case, you managed to impress a Team enough to bypass the weeks of tests the other candidates are going through, so yes, you are the only class member this time. In fact, come sit up front. Let's make this more of a conversational class than normal."

"How should I address you, instructor?" I asked.

"Well, since I'm in uniform, you can call me Mecha", he said. "I was a big deal back in the day. I ran with a wild bunch called the RatPack, until a dungeon run got too dangerous. Lost my right arm and leg, and most of the RatPack, too." He pulled off his domino mask and his entire head changed, as the hair went from graying to pure white and the stubble disappeared even as a mustache appeared. "And now you can call me Travis."

"Thank you, Travis," I replied politely. "My name is Jon Maxwell."

"Oh, I know," he said. "Shank is still a bit pissy about you getting on so early. She's a planner, and you've thrown her timetable off. Also, I think she was hoping for a lass to join the team. Anyways, Orientation is going to get you up to speed on what being a Super is about. When I'm done, you'll be about as knowledgeable as anyone else in the Guild except top brass."

"Okay," I said. "What are we starting with?"

"History, Jon," he said, pulling out a remote and pressing a button. The room's lights dimmed and the screen behind the lectern lit up.

"This," Travis said, waving at the screen, "Is asteroid BD2052, better known as Apocalypse, or as the newspapers termed it, 'The End of the World'. We first saw it as it emerged from behind the sun. It was travelling about half the speed of light, which is faster than we've ever seen any object travel. The asteroid was about four times the size of Jupiter and denser than any substance we've ever seen, even today. We have no idea what it's made of. The scientists' best calculations said it was going to hit Earth and blow it apart on the way past. On its way past Mercury, it pulled the planet out of orbit. Mercury now orbits the sun much farther away. It passed by Venus too, pulling a substantial amount of gasses out of Venus' atmosphere. It's still deadly and extremely hot, but it's now a much thinner atmosphere and the planet moved farther from the sun as well. It was at Earth too fast for us to do anything, but for some reason, it passed far enough from us that we didn't lose atmosphere or our orbit. Instead, we were bombarded by seven meteors, each of which is twice the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs."

"Seven meteors?" I asked incredulously. "Wouldn't that wipe out life on Earth?"

"It should have," Travis said, clicking from picture to picture. "Earth should have gone through a decades long nuclear winter that killed off almost all life on the planet."

"Obviously it didn't," I ventured. "So what happened instead?"

"Dead Zones," the old Hero told me grimly. "The impacts killed millions, and the ash and dust clouds killed millions more. The asteroids that hit Earth were twice the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and much more dense. Somehow that increased gravity pulled the dust out of the air in months rather than years. There was still widespread death. Animals died of starvation, fire, lack of water, disease, you name it, it was a factor. In some bizarre, completely counterintuitive way, the asteroids actually cleaned up the world. Homelessness is no longer a problem, as most of the homeless died. We didn't want them to, but they did anyways. Obesity has gone away, mostly. Food was rationed based on weight. All the social justice that seemed so important gave way to pure survival. Large areas of society were transformed almost overnight."

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"At the cost of millions of people," I pointed out.

"Agreed, lad," he said. "I'm certainly not defending it, merely acknowledging what happened."

"So what happened next?"

"What happened next, was powers. Some people began exhibiting powers that according to physics, shouldn't be possible. One of the first was a man named Walter, who was able to consistently see through matter. He....got in trouble due to seeing through people's clothing. A lot."

"Why am I not surprised that humans get super powers and the first thing they do is something perverted?" I asked rhetorically.

"Anyways, it was about that time that the government actually got enough free time to go attempt to study the meteors. While the meteors were still there, the government found the craters to be the problem. There was no life in the craters, but there were.....dungeons."

"You mentioned dungeons before," I said. "What are they?"

"You got me, kid," Travis said, shrugging. "The best our eggheads have been able to determine, the meteors have ripped the dimensional fabric in the craters. They theorize that dungeons are actual doorways to small dimensional spaces."

"So, what's in the dungeons?" I asked curiously.

"They vary quite a bit," Travis said. "Some are underwater, some are in caves, some are on the surfaces of foreign planets. Every dungeon has different rules, somewhat different physics, and they usually defy expectations. I don't think I ever saw the same dungeon twice, unless I went back to a dungeon that we hadn't managed to finish. They also have their own inhabitants, and those inhabitants do not like others."

"So, what's the problem with dungeons?" I asked.

"Good question," he said. "The problem is that the dungeons aren't one way portals. The portals go both ways. The dungeons do have inhabitants, and those inhabitants do come out. The governments of the world quickly found themselves on the back foot, struggling to defend their countries from wave after wave of invading creatures, none of whom were willing to be peaceful. So, around every meteor crater in the world, there were waves of hostile creatures spewing out of dungeon portals and killing everything they came across."

"That sounds.....bad," I said, belatedly, as I realized that I'd been staring. "So, they got supers involved?"

"They got supers involved," he confirmed. "They asked the super community, as individuals, to volunteer to help stem the tide. Then when we pushed the hordes back, they asked us to try to close a dungeon. One of our more intellectually minded supers discovered that there was a power source inside the dungeon that was forcing the portal open. We sent supers into the portals to destroy that power source and discovered that there was a limit to the numbers of people that could go into the portals. We were limited to five supers or fifty-seven normal soldiers. We succeeded in closing two portals in one week."

"Oh, so we can get rid of the dungeons?" I asked. "Are there any left? It's been fifty years, right?"

"Oh, there are plenty left," he said, grimly. "As best the super community can tell, the dimensional rips aren't healing. Dungeons continue to pop up. And there are incentives for supers to continue to dive them."

"What kind of incentives are there to dive into other dimensions to fight genocidal creatures?"

"Because," Travis said. " We discovered that when you were in a dimensional space when the power source was destroyed, it strengthened your powers and allowed them to grow and evolve."

"So....the supers diving the dungeons become more dangerous and powerful?" I asked.

"Oh yes," he said. "That's how the Guild became the Guild. We had to because the government started hiring supers for individual dungeons, and some of those supers became powerful and then turned that power against citizens. Those became the first Villains. Some of the others stood up against them, and they became the first Heroes. Those Heroes who survived banded together to form the Guild, the governing body that monitors and checks the super community to prevent the enslavement of normal people."

"So, we just run dungeons?" I asked. "What about the fights in the cities? I've never heard anything about dungeons, only about the Heroes defending cities."

"Dungeons are a source of power," Travis acknowledged. "And they are also the source of the creatures that escape and end up attacking cities. The world's governments partnered with the Guild to lionize and highlight when Heroes defend cities and to minimize talk about dungeons. The simple fact is that except for a few very weak exceptions, no dungeons are safe enough to expect our non-powered citizens to enter and be able to close them, so supers are required to close dungeons. But they also empower the supers, and if that part gets widely distributed, I have no doubt there will be calls to tax heroes for diving them, or companies attempting to claim dungeons for research, and that will ultimately result in fewer closed dungeons and more attacks on citizens. The reality is that dungeons continue to propogate faster than we can close them. Villains and Heroes continue to close dungeons, but we are falling behind. The military is trying to stopgap, but we need more heroes. We need more groups. That's what the Second Chance program is about, actually. We're trying to get non-combat oriented supers into dungeons to level up and become new members able to run dungeons and contribute."

"Okay, so I'll just be running dungeons, then?" I asked. "In that case, do I need a suit? Can't I just go in body armor or something?"

"No, you'll need a suit too," Travis said, putting his domino mask back on. "A super whose identity is known is a super who can be bribed or blackmailed. Trust me, after the Sunset Incident, nobody wants a super to be blackmailed."

"What's the Sunset Incident?" I asked.

"You don't want to know," Mecha said as his hair and face reverted. "Now let's go get you fitted for a suit and we'll explain your life from here on out."