Golden Age

Dynamo City, centered in Santa Clara, California, is where most people would consider the center of our current Golden Age. The age of heroes, the one in a million Golden individuals blessed with otherworldly powers.  In 1922, an asteroid flying towards Earth had the unlikely trajectory of catching a stable orbit around it.  About 60 years later, a NASA project to study this mysterious asteroid resulted in a devastating explosion, killing the scientists working on the project and scattering pieces of the asteroid around the globe.  The energy put out by these asteroid shards is what is commonly attributed to the otherwise random seeming development of superpowers in individuals everywhere.

These days most superpowered individuals, or the Golden as they're known, are tracked and managed by a nonprofit organization called Aurum, founded in San Jose, California.  The sudden influxes of super geniuses and other people with amazing abilities created an economic boom centered around there that grew it to more or less pick up the entire Silicon Valley.

We still don't fully understand what allows one person to gain powers over another. A few years ago it was approximately one in a million people on Earth that had become Golden, and that number is slowly increasing.  Still, the politics of "some people are just literally better than you" has been rough, and not everybody wants to wait for the possibility that it'll be everybody some day.  Some people think that could only be a disaster anyways.  Some maybe enjoy the automatic fame and fortune that comes with superpowers a bit too much to want to share it with the rest of the class.  But mostly, they're just people who have won a particularly weird lottery and are trying to navigate their way through whatever that means.

Formerly titled 'Abberant' after the White Wolf game before I started retooling it as a more original setting.