"Fifteen minutes!" one of the soldiers called over to me, a welcome interruption to my reverie.

I gave him a wave of acknowledgement and trotted over to where the rest of my party remained immersed in their studies.

"Wrap it up, folks," I announced. "Show's about to start."

"Finally," replied Sean, levering himself to his feet with a grunt of effort. He gave the notes scattered around him a last look of disgust before turning away. They're just papers, man, they can't hurt you.

Tucking the more organized handful of sheets Naomi passed me under one arm, I stooped to gather the rest of the pages into a pile. Like the creepy giant talking owl in the commercials says: "give a hoot, don't pollute."

I tossed them all haphazardly into the backseat of my car, then locked the doors. It struck me as somewhat unlikely that anyone would break into a car parked behind a military checkpoint, and frankly I didn't think there was anything in there worth stealing in any case, but I'd lived in Philly long enough that the action was pure reflex. Develop good habits, then maintain them, that's all there is to it.

Sean rolled his neck, working out the kinks from sitting on the ground with an audible series of pops that made me wince.

Beside him, Naomi seemed to have the same idea, lacing her fingers together, then raising her arms as high as she could – a motion that caused all sorts of interesting things to happen under the loose-fitting Chicago Bulls t-shirt she wore. I glanced back up guiltily a moment later and realized she was watching me out of the corner of her eye.

When I met her gaze she gave me a cocky little half-smile, the kind that says "yeah, I saw you staring," and pushed her chest out a bit further. This time, I was the one to blush and look away first.

I wasn't exactly sure how to classify my relationship with Naomi. We were close friends, obviously, and had been for years at this point.

Naomi and Sean were my closest friends, actually, not that there was a lot of competition for that spot.

My parents had insisted on sending me to exclusive (and, it goes without saying, expensive) private schools. Given the horror stories I'd heard about the Philadelphia public school system, I shouldn't complain too much, but I'd never got on very well with my cliquish spoiled-rich classmates. I'd been a bookish, quiet kid, if you can believe it, more interested in studying than the frivolous socializing and "networking" that my peers seemed to treat as the real reason they were attending.

Sean had been a godsend.

I'd met him at one of the big New Year's Eve parties we'd throw for the whole extended family, a dour-looking boy about my own age sulking against the veranda railing in what were clearly hand-me-down clothes.

My folks were pretty comfortable financially – more than comfortable if I was being totally honest – but they were new money, and most of our relatives weren't quite as well off. It was part of the reason my parents insisted on hosting every year.

I wouldn't say I hit it off with my cousin immediately, but we found each other's company tolerable enough that night, and after the ball had dropped I invited him to come back and hang out sometime. Upon learning that I had a brand-new NES courtesy of Santa Claus and needed somebody to play it with, he grudgingly agreed. In hindsight, I'm sure the allure of the Nintendo did more to sell him on the concept than my charming personality had.

When he did eventually show up again, I discovered the invite had been a package deal. There was a tiny little girl holding his hand in a death-grip, huge gray eyes peeking out curiously from behind him. At the time, I hadn't been thrilled by this development. You know how it is. She and Sean were practically joined at the hip, though, so I didn't complain too loudly about her continued presence.

There were others who joined our little group from time to time, of course – I wasn't a total loner in school – but those friendships had always been passing things, and ours wasn't. We were together for the long haul, even through the turmoil of the crazy months after '89.

As I got older, I also started to appreciate Naomi's company more. Again, you know how it is.

By the time I graduated high school, I was fairly sure that I had real feelings for her. Life got in the way, though. I was headed off to college, she wasn't; even though we promised to stay in touch, I knew that whatever might have existed between us had ended before it got a chance to begin.

I'd thrown myself into my courses, a challenging dual-major in civil engineering and architecture, signed up for way more than the required credit load, tried every extracurricular I could find – even ventured out into the campus dating scene. Probably, I was hoping to distract myself so thoroughly that I would stop thinking about her.

It hadn't really worked.

Then, at nineteen, I awakened as a Hero. The day it happened, I dropped out of university and never looked back – learning to be an engineer suddenly didn't have as much appeal now that the alternative was learning to shoot lightning bolts out of my hands. I headed back home, already busily formulating all sorts of plans for my new career.

Plans change. I showed up at the government-run training course and ran into Naomi on the first day. To my shock, I learned that she'd awakened shortly before I had. At that point, how can you even argue? It seemed to me like the hand of destiny, or something like that. Fate. The Force. Divine providence. Whatever you want to call it, it was looking out for us.

Sean's turn came just a few weeks later. I'm convinced he simply willed himself to awaken with the power of pure stubborn contrariness.

I know, I know – all three of us? What are the odds? Well, I actually ran the numbers once, and they came out to something like ten billion to one against. And yet, there we were. Reunited. The Three Musketeers, together again and ready to take on anything.

As we struggled to learn the ropes with the rest of the trainees, I reconnected with Naomi. We spent a lot of time together, and not all of it work-related. The two of us even went on something that maybe could have been considered a date. That night, I told her how I felt about her.

She demurred. She had feelings for me, too, she'd confessed, but she didn't want to risk the party breaking up if things didn't work out between us. Ask me again later, she'd said, once we've found our footing as Heroes. Intellectually, I could perfectly understand the logic, even agree with her decision.

But that didn't make it any easier for my heart to accept.

As I watched her playfully continue her stretching routine, I made a promise to myself. After we clear this Dungeon, I vowed, I am going to take her out on a date, a real one this time. An unambiguous romantic evening for just the two of us.

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"Ten minutes!" came the warning.

"Alright," I said to my party, "let's get our game faces on."

Matching deeds to words, I pulled up my own Inventory with a thought.

Simple thought commands were enough to manipulate the various menus, although you could also navigate the system by touching the intangible transparent display windows, or by using a mix of the two if you preferred.

A Hero could even speak the necessary commands out loud, if they desired, but doing that would make you look like a crazy person talking to yourself. I'd tried it once in the privacy of my own home – yelling words like "Status!" and "Inspect!" to watch the appropriate screens pop up – purely in the interest of proving to myself that it really worked, and then resolved never to do it again.

You couldn't shove just anything into your Inventory, of course – it would only accept Items, the loot obtained from completing Quests, killing Monsters and clearing Dungeons. Despite that limitation, it was one of the Hero's most useful tools.

One Item per Level could be stored in Inventory, vanishing into some sort of pocket storage dimension or parallel reality and remaining there until needed. While in the Inventory, Items had no weight, no detectable physical presence at all, appearing to simply slide into or out of thin air on demand. As was the case with every phenomenon surrounding Heroes and Dungeons, any scientist you asked had their own bizarre pet theory about the underlying mechanisms by which the process worked.

A few quick thoughts were enough to bring out the Items that I would be depending on to keep me alive in the Dungeon.

Item: Shortsword (Copper)

Type: Weapon, One-Handed

Rank: D

My sword was just a regular sword, nothing fancy – although without the Dungeons, I supposed even a regular sword would be a really weird thing to own. It was 1995, not 1095. Holding it and giving it a few test swings made me feel like I was some kind of time traveler from the past, or one of those ren-faire types. I spun the sword in a quick figure-eight, admiring the flashing reddish-silver blur it produced. Maybe closer to Arnold in the Conan movie. Damien, what is best in life?

The sword had a straight double-edged blade, the Roman style historians called a spatha, although I was pretty sure those were traditionally made out of iron. It was about two and a half feet long, most of that in the blade, with a comfortable ridged wooden grip and a round matching pommel. The copper shortsword was the first Item I'd gotten, my first Quest reward; I'd picked it from a bewildering list of choices, some of them extremely exotic. As usual, I'd opted for what I thought would be the most practical option. Sword and board, baby. Can't go wrong with that.

Item Rank seemed to be some sort of holistic evaluation of how well-constructed a particular piece of equipment was. Don't ask me how the system went about determining that. Whatever the mechanism, Rank D usually meant an Item that was plain, but serviceable.

And while the material Tiers of Items didn't come any lower than copper, that was to be expected given that I was still Level 4 myself. Nobody liked using copper weapons – they had a nasty tendency of bending or shattering at inopportune moments during fights – but if the alternative was venturing into a Dungeon bare-handed, I'd take the D-Rank copper sword, thank you.

For the Monsters in the Level 5 Dungeon we were about to enter, I was confident it could do the job.

Item: Bulwark (Bronze)

Type: Weapon, Shield

Rank: C

Ability 1: [Steadfast]

Now we were talking. «Bulwark» was a so-called named Item. Even though it had a low Rank and Tier, it was still the single best piece of gear any of us owned. Which was fitting, in my opinion, since I would be the one putting myself between the rest of the party and Dungeon Monsters that wanted to eat us for lunch. I was grinning at the thought as I shoved my arm through the leather straps on the back.

«Bulwark» was a big, heavy kite shield, teardrop-shaped, with a round top tapering down to a narrow pointed bottom. The whole thing was made of bronze, from the riveted rim to the boss in the center, all polished to a mirror sheen. I'd considered painting it; some Heroes liked to personalize their gear and decorating an Item, within reason, didn't seem to cause any issues with putting it into Inventory or bringing it through a Dungeon Portal. I just hadn't decided what I wanted to put on it yet. Maybe something funny, like a smiley face or a peace sign.

Named Items were a unique variation on a standard Item, less commonly found and, consequently, much more valuable. They looked exactly the same as their unnamed counterparts, unless you Inspected them. Because they always had either an Attribute bonus or an Ability, they were extremely desirable Items, and it was fairly unusual that our low-Level party had any. [Steadfast], the Ability provided by «Bulwark», had been a life-saver – quite literally – on more than one occasion.

Ability: [Steadfast]

Description: While «Bulwark» is touching the ground, you cannot be pushed, pulled or knocked down by attacks or Abilities.

There was one last Item left in my Inventory, of course, but that one would have to stay where it was for now. I shot a final longing glance at the Core awaiting me, and then willed the display to close. Soon.

Now armed and armored, I turned to face my party.

Sean was fully equipped, the massive bronze axe-mace thing he'd picked up on our last run balanced over his shoulder and making him look like he'd escaped from a Frazetta painting. Axe-mace admittedly wasn't a great name, but it was the best I could come up with to describe it, a big metal pole with a crescent axe blade on one side and the round flanged head of a mace on the other. The system called it a tabar-shishpar, and Sean still hadn't worked out exactly how to use it properly... although with its considerable weight and his impressive +5 Power he could do a lot of damage just by flailing it around.

He also wore a pair of copper vambraces, metal armguards that covered elbow to wrist and featured a little hinged plate that extended forward over the backs of his hands almost to the knuckles. Apparently not as beset by indecision as I was when it came to personalizing Items, he'd painted them matte black. His ancient-looking arsenal made an odd contrast to the black mesh basketball shorts and plain white t-shirt he wore.

Naomi didn't look quite so medieval, unarmored and armed with nothing more than a pair of matching copper daggers. The only thing marring the uniformity of her athletic attire was an old nylon Army-surplus ALICE harness, into which a half-dozen more knives and a few small pouches of tools – the nonthreatening basic sort that could pass through a Portal – had been inserted. E- and F-Ranked copper weapons were relatively cheap on the market, luckily, so buying a bunch of them for her hadn't broken the party bank.

Normally, throwing a knife at a Dungeon Monster wouldn't do much, even if you managed to time the spin just right so the pointed end hit your target instead of the hilt. She'd been practicing the skill obsessively, though, and as her Agility went up she'd started getting uncannily consistent at putting them right where she wanted them. If nothing else, having a sharp metal object flying at one's face was distracting.

Two minutes before the government scientists had predicted, the Portal opened.

One second the ominously-glowing oval hanging in the air was red, the next it was blue, with no sign given beforehand and no transition between states. The soldiers surrounding it stepped back warily, calling out warnings to one another and leveling their weapons, even though a Dungeon Break so soon after opening was incredibly unlikely.

As they backed away, we stepped forward, moving past them towards the entrance. This was what we'd come here for, after all.

From up close, the Dungeon Portal looked even stranger than it had from a distance. It was a flat ellipse, around nine feet high and three feet wide, and seemingly formed out of solidified azure light. At this distance, it became apparent that the surface wasn't as static as it first appeared, the gradated border constantly rotating in a slow and almost hypnotic clockwise spiral.

You couldn't see anything through the Portal from either side, but it was entirely two-dimensional – if you stood directly at a right angle to it, it simply disappeared. Apparently they had no discernible depth at all, even when examined under an electron microscope. Just another one of those strange little physics-breaking Dungeon quirks that made researchers studying them tear their hair out in frustration.

The first person who decided to try sticking their hand into one of these had been pretty brave, I mused as I stared into it.

Then, with a last "follow-me" gesture to Sean and Naomi, I stepped through.