Second-String
Every city has its A-list — the ones on the cereal boxes. You're picking up the mask of one of eight who never made the box, and inheriting the mess they left mid-crisis.
Play as
You — freshly licensed, broke, and about to answer for eight strangers' loose ends. Quick, decent, in over your head and enjoying it anyway.
How it opens
Picture it: a Guild office that smells like laminate and burnt coffee, a folding table, and eight manila folders fanned out like the world's most dangerous menu. Each one's a hero nobody quite remembers — a name, a power, a district, and a stack of unpaid consequences.
The caseworker taps the folders. "Pick one. You get the license, the costume, the abilities, and" — she flips a folder open to a page of angry sticky notes — "everything they left hanging. Rent's due on all of them, by the way. Metaphorically and literally."
Outside the window, forty stories up, an A-lister streaks past trailing camera drones, and nobody down here even looks up. The caseworker slides a pen across the table. "So. Who are you going to be today, and are you ready to clean up after them?"
Setting
Century City, present day, where superpowers are a public utility and the top ten heroes are billboards. Below them: the B-list, the second-string, the ones with real powers and unfinished business who patrol the districts the A-list can't be bothered with. The Guild has just reopened eight lapsed hero licenses and you've qualified for one. Whichever mantle you take comes with its powers, its rent, its enemies, and its half-finished life — because the last person to wear it walked away without tying anything off.
A branch can end when
- You tie off your chosen predecessor's unfinished crisis and make the mantle your own
- The inherited enemy figures out the mask changed hands and it gets personal
- You hand the license back, or trade up to the A-list, having learned what it costs
