Avatar Academy

Maximizing Potential Since 1991

Congratulations. You are about to join the world's elite.

Here, at the Avatar Academy, you will learn to call upon your special gifts with confidence and control. Where family, friends, co-workers, or classmates may not have understood, or even feared you, the staff and students of the Academy know your story because they have lived it. Every individual inhabiting the Academy's campus is a member of the genetically gifted.

Our world-renowned educational program will not only prepare every student for the career of their own choosing, but also train each Avatar to master their gifts. As widely publicized, the Avatar Academy is, in many ways, both training facility and proving grounds for some of the most powerful public and private Avatar organizations on Earth. Those individuals whose talents, skills, and gifts set them above their peers may well find job opportunities spanning the globe.

Have no fear that one possessing more subtle special abilities will find him or herself swept aside by "rising stars." The Academy staff, from counselors to instructors, have no prejudice. Our one, and only, goal is to ensure that you, our student, grow into the very best you can possibly be.

Welcome to the Academy.

Overview

Funded primarily by the Prometheus Project, the Avatar Academy's city-sized campus occupies five massive, artificial caverns far below the permafrost of the Antarctic landmass. Known as pods, each of these enormous chambers contain the living quarters, training centers and laboratories of the Academy.

While a large percentage of SPBs attempt to play hero and do "good," the great majority end up doing more damage than the perpetrator they were attempting to apprehend. Sometimes innocent people are killed.

Enter the Academy: Confused youths displaying awesome power with little or no control will be educated in the use of their abilities. If an individual wants to play crime fighter, they will be invited to the Academy for law enforcement education and training. The Academy provides housing, meals, recreation, and fellowship with other extraordinary individuals, some of whom will be instructors. All of this will be provided free of charge.

Construction of this school will cost more in both resources and manpower than any other undertaking of humanity. Supernormal beings present a very real threat to every citizen of this world, and it is the citizens, SPB and baseline, who will sacrifice for security.

The predecessor of the Academy was founded shortly following the second World War and was primarily financed with government slush funds funneled through paper corporations. This occurred in almost every nation as governments struggled to come to grips with the advent of real superhumans.

In the interests of neutrality and world peace, the groundbreaking ceremony was held during a brisk Antarctic summer. With the help of superhuman construction crews, the first Academy was completed in less than a decade. The original structure is now the central administration hub. Since going public with the project, and opening the doors, in 1991, the Academy has grown exponentially, with four wings, or pods, being constructed through the end of the decade.

Completed in 1990, the residential pod was large enough to hold a major metropolitan area, and does. The founders of the project had intended their brainchild to unite the world and so dubbed the residential pod Olympus.

Clarification: These pods are Big, capital 'B'.

During the Antarctic summer, great reflective tubes allow the sun in. Each is equipped with an iris mechanism to facilitate day/night transition conforming to sunrise and set times as measured by Greenwich Mean Time. In winter, full-spectrum lighting is projected onto the domes and is controlled in a similar manner. The Academy is a semi-sealed system. Most of the food is produced locally. The Academy is powered by a massive cold fusion reactor. While there is no natural wind (great fans stir the air) solar and geothermal energy are abundant. Six months of sunlight provides for ample energy surplus and the pods are mere miles above the mantle so the temperature remains constant and comfortable for most.