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Second Week of January 2012 Christmas and New Years were not a particularly meaningful holiday for Sharl, lacking a cultural understanding of the holiday and a chronological mindset that made the change between one year and the next relevant to his day-to-day life. It wasn't even like he'd gone onto a new grade at Claremont yet, something that made all this talk of school years seem terribly archaic. But things had gone pretty well for him; he'd gotten a house upgrade from Miss Americana that he was still customizing; the incredible, sinful luxury of another five rooms to himself, not to mention a simulated animal to tend to, was still something he was trying to wrap his mind around. Home and how different it was from Claremont had been on his mind lately: he'd managed a trip back home during the school holiday to visit his family in Tronik and to do some more superheroing in his home city, where the "mysterious Citizen" had gotten a chance to pull off some pretty impressive feats of derring-do, culminating in a spectacular rescue of a sinking exploratory ship on its way to visit the new set of islands Leroj had helped raise at the end of the previous month. No one on the outside had seen that, and maybe none of them would care, but he'd still felt good about it coming out. And that, he thought, had been that until Mr. Summers had summoned him and all of Young Freedom into his office the first day they were all back on campus after the Christmas break. Even with Mrs. Harcourt, by no means Sharl's favorite teacher, as their chaperone, Sharl was inordinately happy: they were going back to the Sanctum, the place that held his home, and with any luck his friends would be able to see it for themselves! With his usual laptop as his companion, Sharl put aside his house and went to work studying the school's files on the Sanctum again, heedless of the Arctic winter outside their jetplane window. After all, the Sanctum was one of the great repositories of super-tech on Earth, as well as the home of his home city: he'd better know something about it!

Another school year had finished, but at Claremont Academy, attention had already turned to the coming semester. The private school, secretly specializing in teenagers with superhuman abilities and the starting place for many new heroes, was looking at one of its largest groups of new enrollees ever in the coming year, leaving Headmaster Duncan Summers with a few logistical challenges even before they arrived. A number of the school's most accomplished students had graduated, but in the process a few of their younger peers had proven themselves to be trustworthy and able leaders. It was thus that Eve Martel and Corbin Hughes were assigned a most unusual extracurricular assignment. Summers tasked the pair with picking up four new students before the new school year, traveling across the globe to gather them together. Luckily, the first of the would-be-Claremonters was already in Freedom City, and was to be found at the Lab in Hanover. Inside the lobby of the expansive center for experimentation and learning, a well groomed man in a sharply professional outfit manned the desk, scanning a number of monitors in front of him and greeting new arrivals. The headmaster had been somewhat vague about the abilities of any of the students Eve and Corbin would be retrieving, supposedly as a matter of privacy and security, but the remainder of Young Freedom got the distinct impression that the entire trip was also something of a test for all involved. Of course, when Summers was involved most things were. Now that they were there, the telepath and ringbearer had little to go on besides an unusual name: Sharl Tulink.