Academy City. A sovereign city-state, renowned globally as an institution dedicated to the furtherment of science and education. Located in a walled enclave of Tokyo, Japan, its population of 2.3 million (of which 80% are students) are spread out across 23 School Districts, learning, growing and thriving for the neverending cause of advancement that has allowed the city to stay thirty years ahead of the rest of the world. Of course, an individual of said population (such as you), might not particularly care much for the specifics of something as vague as scientific progress, especially when it's really more of a footnote to Academy City's main attraction:
Psychic powers.
You see, the purpose of the city is to study psychic powers by creating beings known colloquially as Espers. These beings, usually members of the student population, have unlocked their potential to make use of a wide variety of extranormal abilities (some pretty cool, some useful, and some as pointless as a Creative Writing degree) thanks to the efforts of Academy City's local researchers and scientists. Ostensibly, the continued development of these abilities is core to the success of this "Power Curriculum Program", but the truth is that the students still continue to participate in a reasonably normal (albeit high-tech) school life, with regular testing by the institutions being the only difference to education anywhere else in the world.
Except when you've gathered up an entire technologically advanced city full of superpowered students, anything can happen, even if it may seem completely unbelievable. Strange happenings, shady organisations, and rumours coming true, all of these are almost "normal" in a place like Academy City.
For beneath its veneer of respectability, there are many dark mysteries waiting to be solved ...
Introduction
Academy City is a place of stories. No, let's try this again. Stories take place in Academy City. From the big to the small, the students of Academy City do things, whether they're powerful Level 4 Espers doing whatever a teenager does with immense power or a scrappy lower-levelled punk hoping to rise through the ranks or just being an overall drain on society. They do things, have their own little stories and whatnot, and sometimes, very rarely, these disparate folks have their tales intersect.
What causes people from different parts of the City to come together?
An incident, of course.
By some quirk of fate, all of you have met up at the exact same point at the exact same time on the exact same night, brought there by the exact same thing. It would probably make a funny story to tell to your other pals on the weekend or something, but unfortunately, there's nothing exactly happy about this incident.
A mangled corpse in a gutter is never happy.
And sadly, it's probably not even the only thing that'll force all your paths to cross.
What is an Esper?
Of course, you may also be wondering right now: what exactly is an esper, and what is this level thing you're yapping about? As the name suggests, espers are those who possess extranormal abilities, but to be more specific, espers in this setting are those who have undergone the Power Curriculum Program and cut themselves off from regular reality through drugs, surgery and other experimentation, thus giving them access to their powers.
Espers possess their own personal realities, and through the mysterious energy field they emit (known as AIM), they impose their own reality onto that of the world. Powers differ from esper to esper (although some types can be common, such as telekinesis), and each can only possess one type of power. These are ranked from Level 0 (essentially powerless) to Level 5 (of which there are only seven in Academy City) depending on their effectiveness. In this RPG, no characters are allowed to have already reached Level 5.
Final Words
If it hasn't already occurred to you, this is an RPG set in the world of the Raildex franchise (with A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun being its main representatives). You're all going to be students in Academy City (powers possibly optional, given the presence of numerous Level 0 Espers), hanging about and in most situations, enjoying your everyday springtime of youth as usual.
However, because it is Academy City, mysterious abound. And whether it be by your own free will or not, you'll be dragged into whatever mess crops up that week. And you'll have to try and solve with every other misfit who turns up too. Even right now, there's a corpse in front of you, so a quiet life certainly is out of the question.
But all of you are of the realm of Science, so it shouldn't be too hard to ferret the truth out, right?
Character Sheet
Name:
Nickname/Alias: (Optional)
Age:
Gender:
Appearance:
Biography:
Personality: (Likes and dislikes optional)
Esper Power: (If your character's an Esper, what is their power and what level is it from 0 to 4)
Skills: (what are they good at?)
Extra:
