The world in one breath
Behind the door lies Hero Heights — the city on the hill where heroes come from: the academy, the launch pads, the gadget vaults, the skyline every cape in every world once trained above. Snib has been calling your child a hero at every door he has ever opened; this is the world the word comes from. And today is Graduation Day — which is when the trouble arrives, by post, with a lovely wax seal: Baron von Blunder, the academy’s beloved test-villain, has mailed in his most dastardly plan yet — five numbered steps, polite footnotes — and hidden the five parts of the Great Engine, the machine that gives every hero their zoom. No Engine, no launch, no graduation — and by the oldest, silliest rule in the academy handbook, the Baron graduates instead. Your child is the cadet the academy has been waiting for. Their friends are the squad. And nothing in four worlds would make the Baron prouder than being magnificently foiled.
What the party actually does
They cross into the Training Hall on a rush of high bright air and give the academy’s oldest crossing call. They learn the Launch Count — every drill in Hero Heights ends with a landing, and heroes land together. They train down the Zoomway and raid the Gadget Vault — your rooms, promoted by the map — foiling the Baron’s plan one polite step at a time, because each foiled step reveals the next. (Nobody fights anybody, all day: heroism here is rescuing, racing, solving and sticking the landing.) They find the five parts of the Great Engine, and every find is performed with body and voice — a wind-up here, a spark there, and two or three we’re not going to spoil, because one of them is the funny one. They unfold the First Cape — the cape of the very first hero, its hem alone as long as a hero lying down — and learn how long the line is that ends at them. And at the end, at the Launch Pad, comes the Graduation Gauntlet: all together they sound the word that starts the Engine — the sky fills with capes, every single cadet graduates, and the Baron referees it himself, weeping with pride. Then: feast (the Baron caters — it’s in the rules, and it’s his one unambiguous talent), cake, and a ceremony where the birthday child is named Captain of Hero Heights and awards every single friend.
Two versions, one world
Five to seven get linear trials, pose-and-zoom play, the Baron’s (very tidy) plan carried as picture-steps, and the final word taught in a whisper and kept behind teeth until it counts; eight to eleven get squads on parallel trials, the Emblem Cipher, the Baron’s backwards footnote (all the best villains write backwards — he read it in a book), and a ten-glyph puzzle nobody can finish alone. Both end the same way: the Engine roaring, one child crowned, and a whole squad graduating — every child, always.