I practically bounced out of bed the moment the alarm clock crackled to life, the tail end of that inescapable sappy Seal song – you know the one, from the movie with Val Kilmer – trailing off into the station's familiar top-of-the-hour jingle.
Too excited for more than a light doze, I'd only slept fitfully, and before the announcer's first line had finished I was already up and moving.
"It's seven o'clock, and yoooou're listening to 100.3 FM W-P-L-Y, Philadelphia's number one –"
My hand slammed down, hitting the clock-radio's off button with a bit more force than necessary as I hurtled past on my way to the bathroom. The display of enhanced Speed and Agility as I dodged and weaved around the furniture in my little apartment was totally overkill for the situation, I'll admit, but I didn't think I'd ever get tired of the superhumanly-powerful sensation from flexing my increased Attributes.
I was almost vibrating with enthusiasm as I brushed my teeth, struggling not to rush through the process. When I glanced at my reflection, the face staring back at me from the mirror had an ear-to-ear grin despite the mouth full of toothpaste foam.
I was finally going to clear my first Dungeon.
I was finally going to hit Level 5.
I was finally going to lock a Core into my second Core Slot.
Today was going to be a good day.
My jittery eagerness didn't let up as I hurriedly ran through my morning workout routine; nothing terribly involved or exotic, just the usual stuff that can be done in your own home with a freeweight set. No Billy Blanks Tae Bo program for me. Push-ups, crunches, lunges, rows and presses. Make a schedule, stick to it, and keep it simple, that was my motto when it came to fitness.
I'd made sure to plan out today as a light day well in advance, anyway. The exercises were just intended as a warm-up, rather than to build endurance or power – the small-p kind, not Power, of course everyone knows you can't raise Power by doing push-ups. Want to raise your Attributes, Hero? It's Levels or nothing.
The feeling of building anticipation still hadn't subsided by the time I finished my breakfast.
Pushing back my chair, I stood a little too quickly, stretched with more deliberate slowness, and clicked off the murmuring television. I hadn't been able to concentrate on the morning news at all, the stories just going in one ear and out the other as I inhaled a bowl of cereal.
Jersey swept Detroit in the Stanley Cup finals, I think they'd mentioned, and some avant-garde artists had wrapped a building in Germany with a bunch of tarps to make a statement about... something. I did perk up at the breaking report of a Level 9 Dungeon Portal that had opened up yesterday, in Canada right across the Maine border. It'd be a long drive, but I was still considering how I could work it into my already-tight schedule for sometime next month while I scrubbed the dishes and stacked them in the drainer to dry.
Did you need a passport to get into Canada? I couldn't remember.
That same dumb tune had been stuck in my head since I woke up, too, looping over and over the whole time. I caught myself humming it under my breath as I locked the apartment door behind me and headed out to my car.
"...bay-bee, something something something, a kiss from a rose on the plane, ooooh..."
Maybe it would be my lucky song, I mused. After all, it was the first thing I'd heard today, and today was the day I would take the first big step of the Hero's path I'd set myself onto less than a year ago.
Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory. Like Doctor Jones, that's what I was after. Although, I amended, unlike him I wasn't going to let my ticket to fortune and glory fall into a river and get eaten by crocodiles.
I tapped on the steering wheel in time with the music in my head as I drove. The underpowered engine of my dumpy little Geo Storm whined plaintively, the way it inevitably would if I had the A/C running and stepped on the gas.
More than a few times, I'd been tempted to replace the car – I certainly knew that I could afford to, if I wanted – but some part of me rebelled at the idea. It was cheap, it ran, and it got me from point A to point B; that was good enough for my needs.
I'd never gone in for flashy, extravagant displays of wealth. No, functional and efficient had always been my style – and that didn't just apply to my taste in transportation.
I glanced at the time on the dashboard clock (8:53, right on schedule) and a moment later, I saw my exit approaching. The turn signal ticked rhythmically, seeming to be keeping time with the song in my head, ba-da-da da-da-da, as I pulled off the Schuylkill Expressway (yes, it's really called that).
The shuffle across three lanes of rush hour traffic to reach the offramp was as hair-raising as I remembered it being.
I could just imagine the headline: PROMISING YOUNG HERO DIES IN FIERY TWENTY-CAR PILEUP AT GIRARD AVENUE INTERCHANGE. It would probably be buried on page three, under the fold and sharing space with a story about a troubling rise in graffiti on downtown storefronts, or maybe some minor gaffe Vice-President Gore had made at the world economic summit.
Because for now that's all I was, just another aspiring low-Level Hero.
Sure, we weren't exactly a dime a dozen – the annual figures the Selective Service System put out estimated that only one in every two thousand people would eventually awaken, give or take a few. When you first hear the figure, that might not sound like a lot, but there's two hundred sixty-six million people in the United States alone. That means there could be a hundred thousand of us awakened Heroes running around the country at any given time.
You could say I was a little fish in a big pond.
For now, that is.
With those numbers, I thought as I drove, it really was kind of a miracle that the nation had weathered the crisis as easily as it did.
That wasn't to say there were no hiccups. A lot of property destruction and loss of life accompanied the first opening of the Dungeon Portals in '89, before humanity had figured out how to manage them.
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And quite a few people took exception to the government using the old mechanisms of the military draft to register and track the so-called Heroes who'd appeared among the population at the same time. Some few of them thought that maybe because they were Heroes, they should be the ones in charge.
But inertia was a powerful force, and I've always believed that people crave comfortable routine above anything else. Before you knew it, life had (more or less) returned to normalcy in the good old U.S. of A., and it was clear we'd been fortunate in that regard.
There were parts of the world that had gotten hit a lot harder by the monumental events at the end of the last decade, and many of them still hadn't fully recovered. For some, it seemed unlikely they ever would.
Having said that, even for us it was a return to normalcy with a few obvious new additions. One of those additions stood before me as I turned off the Interstate onto a little tree-shaded side road.
A mobile roadblock sprawled across the street, the checkpoint manned by bored-looking National Guardsmen with rifles slung over their shoulders. Beside them was an attention-grabbing white billboard, blazoned with the words ACTIVE DUNGEON PORTAL AHEAD in huge block letters, 100% ID CHECK and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT fighting for attention beneath. To one side, smaller yellow signage declared things like THREATCON BRAVO – cryptic messages surely meaningful to the military men, but they may as well have been written in Kiswahili for all that I could comprehend them.
Field fencing was set up on both sides of the concrete barriers, the seriously heavy kind with big coils of concertina wire on top. Behind it, some sort of imposing-looking armored vehicle was idling in the treeline, its grumbling engine consuming who-knows-how-many gallons of taxpayer-funded gasoline per hour. The thing's numerous floodlights were turned on and pointed at the road despite the hour, backlighting the uniformed man who stubbed out a cigarette and strolled over to my stopped vehicle.
I rolled down my window and smiled up at him. "Morning, sir."
"ID?" he asked, leaning against the frame of the open window and holding a hand out disinterestedly.
Watching my careful, deliberate movements reflected in his mirrored aviators, I reached into the car's center console, withdrew my wallet, then handed him my driver's license and selective service registration card. I'd never heard of a Hero getting blasted by a jumpy soldier at a checkpoint before, but I didn't want to be the first. Superhuman though I might be, I most certainly did not think my current Resilience of +2 was up to the challenge of bouncing a point-blank handgun round.
He glanced at the license just long enough to compare the name against the one on the registration, and the picture to my face, before handing it back. The registration card he kept in one hand, pulling out a plastic clipboard with the other and then flipping through the pages attached to it.
As he did, a younger-looking uniformed trooper paced around my car with a mirror on a long pole held out in front of him, pushing it underneath the vehicle at various points to check for... bombs, or something? I'd never heard of someone car-bombing a Dungeon entrance checkpoint either, and I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to, but I supposed it was better to be safe than sorry.
"Alright," the older man finally said, apparently satisfied with whatever he'd read. He snapped his clipboard-holder shut and passed me back my card. "You and your group are on the access list for the twelve o'clock slot – you've got plenty of time yet. Stay to the right when you drive over the spike strips or they'll blow out your tires. Parking is at the end of the road, just pull off to whichever side you want. The officer in charge down there will direct you the rest of the way to the Dungeon entrance."
I nodded at the appropriate points while he talked, not really needing the directions; the Valley Forge Dungeon Portal had stayed open for an unusually long time, and this wasn't my first visit.
As he backed away from the car, I gave him a friendly farewell wave. I was firmly committed to the idea – today was going to be a good day, and on that point, nothing would be permitted to upset my conviction. He shook his head resignedly in response before returning the gesture.
"Good luck, son," I think I might have heard him say as I drove past him.
The rest of the ride was uneventful. I parked in the designated area, careful to avoid a repeat of my first offroading experience when I'd almost immediately gotten the wimpy front-wheel drive hatchback bogged down in a patch of muddy ground. Even working together, Sean and I hadn't been able to push it out, and we were eventually forced to ask some passers-by for help – an embarrassing story that I was increasingly certain Naomi was never going to let me live down, given the relish with which she retold it at every opportunity.
I grinned at the memory, despite myself. Naomi had been in the driver's seat, feathering the gas, leaning out and looking back to shout encouragements at us while we shoved ineffectually against the rear bumper. "Mush! Mush!", like we were sled dogs, but it was her smile I remembered. She'd always been more girl-next-door cute than beautiful, if I was being honest, but when she was happy her features lit up in an unforgettable way. Seeing that smile was worth a little discomfort.
As if summoned by my thoughts, an elderly Pontiac 200 came into view around the corner. The station wagon's slablike off-white body and peeling faux-wood side trim made my little Geo look like a luxury car by comparison when it rolled to a stop alongside, the brakes letting out a drawn-out creaking groan worthy of a Hollywood zombie flick.
I was out of my car and opening the passenger-side door for Naomi before the decrepit vehicle had finished grinding to a halt. She slid out with her usual Attribute-enhanced grace. Sean clambered less elegantly out of the driver's-side seat, the wagon visibly rocking up and down on its shocks as they were relieved of his considerable weight.
Sean and Naomi. My party.
I grinned widely at them, today for once not caring about how I would look.
Naomi was as I'd described her, certainly good-looking but not quite at the level you'd call gorgeous. Her medium-length brown hair was done up in trendy Mariah Carey curls. This morning it was worn loose, framing a pale round face with lively gray eyes, a pert little button nose and an impish smile. She had a dainty figure, and although she was a year my senior at twenty-one, even standing on her tiptoes I didn't think the top of her head would be able to reach the level of my chin. It suited her personality, though – and the obvious difference in our sizes sparked some deep-seated primal possessive urge that I hadn't realized I was capable of before meeting her.
Stupid caveman brain.
Sean was in most ways her polar opposite. He was my cousin, two years older than me, and when we were younger we'd often been told we looked alike. That was no longer the case, though, no matter how hard you squinted. At a few inches taller than my six-foot-even, he had at least a hundred pounds on me, almost all of that muscle. The man was built like somebody had stood a refrigerator box up on its side and painted a crude human-looking face onto it. It made him a reassuringly-solid presence in the party, but I imagined he would be pretty intimidating if you got on his bad side.
His features did still resemble mine in a rough way, sharing the same straight black hair, medium-tan skin and dark eyes, but if we were both statues, he would be the one the sculptor hadn't quite finished working on. The nose was bigger and more aquiline, jaw and chin wider, brow lower and heavier. His ruggedly angular appearance made a good match for the serious, brooding looks he always wore, and apparently he had his fair share of female admirers, but in the privacy of my own thoughts I would have to say that genetics gave me the better end of the bargain.
Both were dressed more or less as I was, in loose-fitting athletic attire: t-shirt, drawstring shorts and sneakers, clothing that wouldn't interfere with the wearer's movements and, more importantly, wouldn't be identified as non-Item armor rejected by the Dungeon Portal.
Everyone knew at least the basics of how the system worked by now, but you still occasionally heard about some bonehead trying to walk through the Portal wearing steel-toed boots or leather pants or whatever... and discovering that while they had entered the Dungeon, their clothes were left sitting outside.
The pair looked ready and determined, even though they hadn't taken any of their Items out of Inventory yet. I was sure they were both awaiting today's events almost as eagerly as I was.
"So," I began, clapping my hands together. "Who's ready to clear a Dungeon?"