Included Campaigns

Station

• The Cartographer of Losses — Imperial surveyor mapping the loss. You ride ahead of the line with a sealed satchel of fresh paper and a tripod. Each day you produce a new map. The previous day’s map is wrong by morning. Your superiors want the records exact. Your reasons for accepting the assignment are increasingly your own.
• The Salt-Walked — Conscripted refugee from a swallowed province. Your village is salt. You walked out with what you could carry and what you could not put down. The empire has counted you and put you to work. Your accent marks you. Your dead are upwind. You are being asked to help build the camps that will hold the next round of people like you.
• The Vindicated Heretic — Heretic prophet who predicted this. You said it would happen. You were imprisoned for saying it. You were released for being right, which has not been the relief you imagined. Crowds gather where you go. The empire is undecided whether to elevate you or hang you, and it may yet do both.
• Priest of the Advancing Line — Salt-priest who serves the line itself. You walk barefoot at the leading edge. Your order tends the advance with prayers older than the dynasty. You know what the salt is for. You may not say. You may, on occasion, decline to perform the rite, and the consequences of declining are your covenant with the line.

What you carry

• The Red-Wax Dispatch — A sealed imperial dispatch you haven’t read. Red wax, the imperial seal pressed deep. It is addressed to a name you have only heard in songs. You were told not to break it. You were told nothing of its contents. The weight of it in your satchel is the weight of an order whose author is somewhere behind the line and may no longer exist.
• The Doorway Child — A child the emperor will want. They are too young to ask what is happening and old enough to remember that you took them. They were given to you by their mother in a doorway you did not see clearly. The reason the throne will want them is not yet apparent to you. The signs will become apparent quickly.
• The Reversal-Rite — The last copy of a rite to undo the salt. A folded sheaf, copied by a hand that was shaking. It will, if performed correctly, stop the salt. It requires materials, a location, and a celebrant. You possess none of these reliably. The text describes the cost of performance in a small clause near the end, and the clause is not metaphor.
• Two Empty Hands — You walked out of your previous life with what you had on your back, which was nothing. You arrive in each new town with the credibility of a person who owns no leverage and asks for none. This will be either the truest freedom in the empire or the shortest.

Who you are on the rock

• The Gumshoe — A private investigator who works the cases the precinct won’t. An office with your name on the frosted glass, a bottle in the drawer, and a reputation for finding things people would rather stayed lost.
• The Canary — The headliner at a club — a torch singer the whole colony knows by her first name. From the stage you see everyone: the swells, the bosses, who’s sitting with whom. And everyone tells the singer their troubles.
• The Fortune-Teller — You read fortunes in a neon parlor. Whether the sight is real or the cleverest cold-read on the rock is your business — either way you know everyone’s secrets, because people tell the cards what they’d never tell a cop.
• The Fixer — You work for one of the outfits — the one who cleans things up, moves what needs moving, makes problems disappear. You’re good at it. You’re in deeper than you meant to be.
• The Greenhorn — You came in on the last boat with a suitcase and a plan that’s already falling apart. Vesper is dazzling and bewildering and faster than you are, and you’re learning the rules the hard way — in real time, in public.

Your companion

• A Human — Flesh and blood and shared history — someone who knew you before the verse and stayed anyway. They can fight, lie for you, and bleed.
• A Cyborg — Mostly chrome, the rest still stubbornly a person. Muscle, hardware, and a long list of bad jobs — loyal for reasons that are theirs, not yours.
• A Ghost in the Net — An intelligence that lives in the wires — everywhere and nowhere, a voice from any screen, no body to lose. It knows things. What it wants is harder to read.
• A Voice in Your Cyberware — A helpful presence riding your implants — counsel only you can hear, a guide through the dark. It has been with you since before the verse, and you have never been entirely sure what it is.

The verse

• The Handoff You Didn’t Make — A betrayal you didn’t commit. The verse says you delivered them — a person, a payload, a key — to the gods. You were in the room. You said nothing. The scripture recorded a handoff, a code spoken, a door held; you made no handoff. You were there for another reason, and the canon has confused proximity for participation, and the confusion is now doctrine.
• The Run That Can’t Be Done — A miracle-run credited to your handle. Someone cracked an unbreakable wall, walked black ICE that flatlines lesser divers, surfaced with the impossible. The verse signs it with your name. It was not you. The credit fell on you the way credit falls — by proximity and conviction. Converts come to you now for dives no one survives. You have not yet refused them all.
• The Martyr Account — A death you didn’t die. The scripture says you flatlined on a famous run; there is a memorial node, a feast in the feeds, handles named in your honor. You are alive. You have been alive for the entire span of your own veneration. Why you have never corrected the account is, at this point, an answer in itself.
• The Wrong Handle — A handle that was never yours. The verse uses a tag close to yours but not yours — a transposed glyph, a near-collision in the namespace. Close enough that archivists argue the attribution, far enough that you could, technically, deny everything by pointing at the spelling. The faithful do not care about the spelling. Neither does corp-sec.

Where the cult stands

• Lockdown Sprawl — The corps have classed the cult a memetic hazard, and the crackdown is precise. Your handle sits in the threat-intel manuals, flagged, in a context you’d prefer it didn’t. Moving through the arcologies needs clean credentials; clean credentials need a name; any checkpoint scanner run by a clerk who’s done the reading can pick you out of a crowd. Many of them have done the reading.
• The Fork War — The scripture has branched, and two sub-cults — two gods, some say — want your verse for opposite ends. One needs a living prophet to canonize against the other. The other needs you deleted, quietly and fast, as a corrupted branch before the first can reach you. Both will be courteous until precisely the moment they are not.
• Post-Faith — The cult already crested and curdled into ironic meme-religion, which is worse. The verses get remixed for clout, performed in clubs, quoted in tracks. You are a punchline. Your handle rides a viral hook with a rhyme that stuck. Being mocked by people who have no idea you’re a real person standing right there is a particular humiliation.
• After the Crash — The cult’s datasphere took a hit — a purge, a blackout, a god gone dark — and only fragments survive. One fragment, by accident, includes you. People quote your handle as a synonym for a quality — nerve, or treachery, or patience — and don’t know it was ever a name. The fragment is the foundation of a small, strange, local faith.

Where it happens

• A Rhode Island Fishing Town — A weathered working port on the southern Rhode Island coast — draggers and lobster boats, stone walls and salt marsh, a town that empties when the summer people leave. Everyone’s stock goes back generations, and the sea has taken its share.
• A Village in Scotland — A small village in a remote Highland glen or island coast — stone cottages and slate roofs, the kirk and the one pub, single-track roads and sheep on the hill, peat smoke and horizontal rain. Outsiders stay ‘incomers’ for thirty years, and the old folk remember things the kirk doesn’t preach.
• Tech-World San Francisco — The beating heart of San Francisco’s tech culture — SoMa offices and Mission lofts, startups and wellness and optimization, kombucha on tap and microdosing on weekends, everyone hustling to become their best self. Karl the Fog over the Victorians; extreme money a block from the Tenderloin.
• Disneyland (You Work There) — You’re a cast member at Disneyland — onstage in the park where the rule is relentless magic. Guests, not customers; never break character, never let them see you frown. The smile is the job, eight hours a day, in the heat, for low pay, with a name tag.
• The Texas Hill Country — A German-Lutheran town in the Texas Hill Country — limestone and live oak, Fredericksburg/New Braunfels stock, biergartens and dance halls and Sunday services, peach stands and Wurstfest and a near-vanished German dialect the oldest folk still speak. Orderly, devout, hardworking, and proud of it.

Why you came

• The Unpayable Sum — Debt you can’t pay. The figure is too large to settle in one lifetime and too small to be forgiven. The creditor isn’t cruel — that would be easier. They are patient and they keep accurate books. You came to Blackwater because the books don’t reach here. Yet.
• The Wrong Face — A face the wrong person would recognize. Someone is looking for the person you used to be. You are no longer that person, but your bones are. You’ve grown a beard, you’ve cut your hair, you’ve practiced a different walk. The mirror still tells on you in low light.
• The Child Above the Tavern — A child you stole back. The child is yours. The court disagreed. The court was wrong, and the court was armed. The child sleeps in the room above the tavern and asks about home only when it rains. You have an answer prepared, and you have not yet had to use it.
• The Truth That Won’t Drown — A truth you have to forget. You know something that would unmake a thing the world depends on. You came to Blackwater because the bay is supposed to take memories along with names. You are testing whether it works fast enough. So far the truth is still in your mouth at night.

The town

• Tarrow’s Wharf — Clapboard houses with the paint salted off. The smell of low tide and tarred rope, the gulls always working. There is one church the regulars do not attend, one tavern the visitors do not enter, and one dock long enough for the trade. The shutters close early.
• Port Mariposa — Wooden shutters bake all day and creak open at evening. The rum is good and the locals do not sell it to outsiders; you have to be offered. Pelicans line the breakwater and watch the customs cutter that comes in twice a year and finds nothing. The fog rolls in at dawn, briefly, like a courtesy.
• Cedar Hollow Landing — Cedar smoke from every chimney. The rooftops are mossed and the planks of the boardwalk are dark with rain. Sea fog arrives by noon and stays through the next day; in the fog the town is smaller than its map. The mill blade has not turned in a year and nobody mentions it.
• Porto Saudade — Whitewashed and impossibly steep. Bells from a monastery up the cliff mark the hours nobody at the dock observes. Sardines on every menu, oil and lemon, a clay jug of wine you do not have to order twice. The harbormaster keeps his ledger in the cool of a chapel that the priest left to him.

Who you are

• The Inheritor — You woke one morning with the keys warm in your hand and a note on the counter that said only ‘good luck.’ The keeper before you is gone and the regulars are wary. You don’t remember agreeing to any of this, and the back office is full of paperwork in a hand that isn’t yours.
• The Stranded — You came in as a customer, browsing, the afternoon your own world ended outside the window. The door wouldn’t open onto anything anymore. You stayed because there was nowhere left, and the shop needed someone — and now you are the last of your world, living among the last of everyone’s.
• The Chosen — The doorway came for you, specifically, in your own dying world — and instead of selling you something, it offered you the counter. You said yes. You have never been sure why it picked you, and the shop has never explained.
• The Lifer — You have always been here. You cannot remember a before, and you have stopped trying. The regulars-across-worlds know you; the inventory knows your hands. Whether the shop is your home or your sentence is a question you used to ask.

The city

• The Walk-Up — A real city, recognizable and mundane. The apartment is a walk-up in a neighborhood the player has no reason to be in. The police are real police. The danger is ordinary and human-scale — corruption, cover-ups, someone powerful who needs the player to stay lost. The tone is paranoid thriller. Trust nothing.
• The Flagged Face — A surveilled city. Predictive policing, biometric checkpoints, social credit scores. The player’s face is flagged. Their past self didn’t just write a note — they scrubbed their own biometrics, wiped their transit history, and somehow moved through a city that tracks everything without being tracked. Whatever they were running from has access to the system. The note isn’t paranoia. It’s engineering.
• The Chandler’s Garret — A cramped garret above a chandler’s shop in a city of soot and fog. The note is in the player’s hand on good paper — too good for this address. The “police” are the newly formed Metropolitan Police, or the private thief-takers who preceded them, or both. The streets are a maze of class, debt, and obligation. Someone has gone to great trouble to hide the player among the poor, and the poor have noticed.
• The Motel Off the Highway — A motel room off a state highway, curtains drawn. The note is on the back of a diner receipt. The “police” could mean the FBI, HUAC, or a local sheriff who answers to someone other than the law. The player’s past self was afraid of something bigger than crime — blacklists, loyalty oaths, the machinery of suspicion. Everyone is an informant or afraid of informants. Paranoia isn’t a symptom. It’s a survival skill.

Who you are

• The Retirement Home — You live at the home now — meals, meds, bingo, the good chair by the window. Over bingo on Tuesday, the resident beside you leans in: ‘Hey — did you notice that weird church? The one that wasn’t there before?’ She remembers it too. Almost nobody else does.
• The Mom’s Group — You’re a busy mom of two, and the group chat plus the Thursday playdate is your lifeline. Today, ahead of the pickup logistics and the bake-sale signup, there’s a new topic: a strange little church that — wait, that wasn’t there before, right? Everyone else seems sure it always was.
• The D&D Group — Every other Friday: the same friends, the same basement table, snacks and dice and a campaign three years deep. Tonight someone’s late — got turned around downtown by a church on Elm that’s messing up their usual route. A church none of you remember. The session never really gets back on track.
• The Sheriff’s Office — You run a small-town sheriff’s department — you, a couple of deputies, a quiet county, mostly paperwork. Now there’s a church on a lot you’d swear was empty: permits nobody filed, a congregation nobody booked, a pastor who calls you by your first name. It isn’t a crime. You can’t stop thinking about it.
• The Summer Tweens — School’s out, it’s the dead middle of summer, and you and your friends have nothing but time, bikes, and a town to be bored in. The new church on the corner is the most interesting thing in weeks — and every grown-up acts like it’s always been there, which is exactly the kind of thing grown-ups would do.

Town

• Sycamore Run — Cul-de-sacs named for trees that don’t grow here. Identical mailboxes at identical angles. The HOA newsletter mentions the church’s bake sale as if you’d been planning to attend, and the church’s parking lot is the only freshly paved one on the road. Your neighbor waves the way he always has, and now he waves once more, toward the steeple.
• Forge County — Shuttered plants, potholes the city can’t fix, a tax base that left two decades ago. The church’s parking lot is new asphalt, painted lines, and reserved spots for people you went to high school with. The pastor has hired locally for the maintenance staff and they are grateful for the work and they will not meet your eyes.
• Hollow’s Pass — One general store, one gas pump, you know every truck by its tailgate. The church appeared the night before the snow closed the pass. Nobody can leave to check a county record. The church bell rings on the hour and the hour is correct.
• Elm and the Cross-Street — This is just one more. Methodist on Vine, Baptist on Oak, Catholic on Main, and now this one on the corner of Elm and the cross-street nobody can quite remember the name of. Nobody can say what was on the lot before; everyone agrees it has always been a lovely little church.

What you are

• Warforged — Rune-carved stone and living wood, animated by old battle magic. You were built for a war between kingdoms that ended eleven years ago. The magic that drives you is the same magic the village baker uses to heat her oven, and that bothers people.
• Combat android — Military-spec hardware, carbon-fiber chassis, targeting systems you’ve disabled (mostly). You were mass-produced for a corporate war. There are others like you, but most chose to shut down when the contracts expired.
• Fallen angel — You were a divine instrument of righteous war. You laid down your sword. The church says you’re broken. You say you’re done. Your wings still smell like ozone and old fire.
• The Soldier — No magic, no metal, no wings. You’re a human being who was very good at a very bad job for a very long time. The “old programming” is just what’s left. You’re trying to do something gentle for once.

The town

• Greyfield — A quiet village still rebuilding from the war you fought in. Some residents remember you from the other side.
• Threadmarket — A busy market town that didn’t see combat and doesn’t understand what you are. They think you’re a novelty.
• Last Chance Flats — A rough frontier settlement. Everyone is a misfit or a second-chance case. You fit right in — until you don’t.

Your role in steerage

• The Yield Counter — Hydroponics worker. You have noticed that the harvest doesn’t match the population. The yields are higher than the meals served and the difference goes somewhere you don’t have access to. You have been doing the math quietly for two years. You have not yet shown the math to anyone. The math is the kind of thing that, if shown, would change the answer to other questions you have been afraid to ask.
• The Deck-Runner — You move small things between decks for small payments. You know which conduits are unmonitored and which inspectors look the other way. The smuggling has been ordinary for a long time. Lately you have been asked to carry items that don’t fit the usual pattern — sealed packages, written notes, a child once. You have learned not to ask, but you have started to wonder.
• The Teacher of Founders — Schoolteacher. You teach the official history. You have taught it for a decade and you can recite the dates and the names of the founders without notes. You have started to doubt specific dates. The doubts come from cross-referencing the official text against minor primary sources — a logbook in the library, a photograph that doesn’t match its caption. You have not yet changed the lesson.
• The Thumbprint on Glass — Recently orphaned. Your parent died last month. Their personal terminal is in your quarters and it is locked. You have their thumbprint on a glass and you have not yet tried it. You suspect that you do not want to know what is on the terminal, and you suspect that you will try the thumbprint anyway, and you suspect that this campaign begins on the day you do.

The ship’s state

• The Static City — Engines dismantled. The ship hasn’t moved in your lifetime or your parents’. The engine bays have been repurposed as gardens — rebar trellises, conduits laid across as bridges, drip irrigation through what used to be coolant lines. Daylight is on a schedule and the schedule slipped a hundred years ago and is now an hour off the body’s expectations. Nobody talks about why.
• The Long Deceleration — Still in flight, slowing. There is a tremor in everything. You learn it before you learn to walk and you stop noticing it by adolescence. The bulkheads creak in patterns that the engineers can read. There is a sense of movement that nobody calls movement because there is nothing to compare it to. Someone above decks knows when arrival is. You do not.
• The Hollowed Decks — Only steerage decks are populated. The rest are sealed. Corridors go nowhere and end in welded doors with hand-lettered NO ENTRY signs in handwriting that does not match any handwriting taught in school. The air smells different past a certain bulkhead and you can taste it on your tongue if you stand close. Nobody has crossed in your lifetime.
• The Parallel Fleet — Multiple ships once linked, now drifting in parallel. There are other ships out the porthole. Three of them, sometimes four, holding a loose formation across distances that should not be possible to maintain without active steering. Sometimes they signal. The signals are in a code the engineers half-recognize. Nobody alive remembers when the ships separated, or why, or whether the separation is permanent.

The bunker

• The Deep Vault — A vast corporate-government megavault — thousands of people, stratified across levels that have hardened into classes over two hundred years. The upper levels barely remember the lower ones exist. Hopeful and enormous in its founding brochures, ugly in its sediment. The stakes are a society.
• The Seed Bunker — Small and automated — a few dozen caretakers tending an archive: frozen embryos, gene banks, a vault of seeds and books and the last of everything. No one was really supposed to have to live a whole life here. Intimate and claustrophobic. The stakes are a restart of the species.
• The Redoubt — A military command bunker. The founders were soldiers; there is a chain of command, an armory, a war room that still receives phantom orders from a war that is two centuries over. Disciplined, paranoid, certain. The stakes are a remnant that still believes it is fighting.
• The Commune — A community that chose to go under together — idealists, a congregation, a whole town that didn’t trust the surface. Founded on a promise, strained now by generations of the same faces and the same rules. Warm and fraying. The stakes are a chosen family curdling into something else.

Who you are

• HEARTH’s Hands — You’re on the maintenance crew that keeps the old machine alive. You’ve had your arms inside HEARTH’s failing systems for years; you’ve felt it dying longer than anyone. Of course it spoke to you — you are the closest thing it has to a body.
• The Council’s Child — You were raised to lead, and you know how the sausage of rationing gets made. You sit close enough to power to be useful and far enough to still have a conscience. HEARTH has just handed you the one thing the Council cannot be allowed to know.
• The Record-Keeper — You tend the archive — the wall of names, the founding story, the official history you can recite in your sleep. You found the seams in it years ago and said nothing. HEARTH chose the one person who already half-knows.
• The One Who Asks — You’re nobody important — a worker, a malcontent, the kid who keeps asking about the surface and gets told to hush. Which is exactly why a dying machine, tired of two hundred years of being lied to alongside everyone else, finally picked you.

Your encounter

• The Tenant — A haunting that followed you home. You moved twice. It moved with you. It is small and it is patient and it took the previous tenant from your last apartment and you are not yet certain if it followed you because of who you are or because of what you took with you. You came to the group to find out which.
• The Leaflet — A cult you escaped that’s still recruiting. You got out. Others did not, and others have joined since. You see their leaflets sometimes. They have your face on one of them, captioned with a name that is not yours. You came to the group to learn what the right way is to warn the next person you see being approached.
• The Witness — A creature nobody else saw. It was in the room. You are certain. There were three other people in the room and none of them remember anything but you, screaming. You have learned not to insist. The group is the one place you can describe it out loud and not be asked if you are sleeping enough.
• The Missing Tuesday — Lost time you can’t account for. Eleven hours of a Tuesday. Your phone shows steps and a route. Your body shows nothing it should. Whatever you did is in you somewhere; you can taste it under your tongue. You came to the group hoping someone else lost the same Tuesday.

The group’s setting

• The Basement at St. Cyril’s — Free coffee in a steel urn. Fluorescent tubes, one of them humming. Metal folding chairs arranged in a ring that nobody has the authority to rearrange. A stack of pamphlets about other support groups that nobody reads. The pastor upstairs has been told it’s a grief group and asks no further questions.
• Ward Seven — Some members are court-ordered. There is an observation window onto the hallway and the blinds don’t quite close. The clock above the door is the loudest thing in the room and you all check it once an hour without meaning to. The facilitator has a hospital lanyard and is paid by the hour.
• The Six Squares — Faces in boxes, three of them lit by their kitchens. One box is always frozen. Someone’s microphone catches a sound from outside their room each week, the same sound, and they have never addressed it. The chat sidebar fills slowly with messages that vanish before anyone reads them.
• Pinecrest Lodge — A converted lodge two hours into a national forest. Snow coming in by Friday night. No cell signal past the gate. The facilitator has the only car and the keys are in their cabin and the cabin is locked at night. The lodge sleeps twelve and there are six of you, and the empty rooms are not empty in the same way they were on Friday.

The station

• The Cenotaph — Ancient, non-human construction. The architecture doesn’t obey human geometry. Whoever built it is long gone — or dormant.
• Lagrange Six — Human-built, but far older and larger than humanity should have managed — kilometres of familiar hardware gone to rust and dark, coffee-stained manuals fused to the bulkheads, a place plainly lived in before it was left. The dread is intimate: this was ours, and we can’t read what became of it.
• Site Obsidian — A classified human facility, and an old one — kilometres of over-engineered corridors, sealed compartments, and logs redacted so long ago the ink outlived the agency that wrote them. Someone powerful built this vast and then buried the fact it exists. Whatever happened here, they wanted it kept quiet — and it has been quiet a very long time.

Who you were before

• The Agronomist — Pre-collapse agronomist. You understand exactly what you found, or you can build the theory inside a week if you’re allowed to read your old notes. You know that what’s happening here is not natural and you know enough categories of unnatural to narrow it down. Your knowledge is your greatest asset and your most dangerous tell — anyone who watches you work will know you are not a peasant.
• The Stopped Walker — Wanderer who got lucky. You walked a long time. You stopped here because you were tired and the water tasted right and a stalk of grass beside the stream was the wrong color of green. You have been here three years. You don’t know why the patch works. You have been very careful to not learn, in case knowing breaks it.
• The Inheritor — Local who inherited the land. Your family was here before the poisoning. Your grandparents farmed this ground when it was no more remarkable than the next valley over. After the collapse, you came home to bury people, and the burying showed you that the dirt here was different. You have been keeping the secret out of family loyalty and out of a private suspicion you have not voiced to anyone.
• The Shepherd — Refugee leader; the patch is for your people. You brought a group across hard country and you arrived here a year ago with fewer than you started with. The patch fed the survivors. It is feeding them now. You are responsible for them and for the patch and for the decision of whether to add the next group of refugees who arrive at the ridge tomorrow.

The landscape

• The Green Tear — The wind is constant and it is loud and it carries grit. In every direction the ground is white and dead and the sky is bigger than is reasonable. The patch is shaped like a tear running down between two ridges, a corridor of green a few hundred meters long. From the high ground you can see it from twenty miles, which is the problem you have been trying not to think about.
• The Burn — Charcoal and clay underfoot. The new growth follows the lines of root systems that burned decades ago — you can read the layout of the dead forest from the pattern of the living one. After rain, mushrooms come up overnight, in colors that don’t have names you know. The patch is alive in a way that suggests the forest’s ghost is doing the work.
• The Clearwater Reach — Your patch is upstream of the worst of it. The water arrives at your land brown and leaves it clear, and it arrives at the next farm downstream killing things again. The neighbors there have noticed. They have not yet asked how. The reeds at your borders grow tall and sweet and the seabirds nest only on your side of the channel.
• Larkspur Court — The lawns on the rest of the street are gray and matted. Yours is green and the tomatoes you planted out of desperation are six feet tall. Two of the neighbors are watching from their windows. One of them has stopped greeting you in the morning. The mailboxes still stand at the curb like nothing has changed and everything has.

The museum

• The Halls of Bone — Bones articulated on steel, dioramas of grasslands behind glass, jarred specimens floating in straw-colored alcohol. The mastodon’s tusks have rotated three degrees since the start of your shift. You can measure this. You have been measuring this. The placard says the rotation is impossible.
• The Pinacotheca — The portraits whose eyes have moved are the least of it. The sculpture wing has one too many figures and you cannot determine which one was added; they all look like they have been there for centuries. The children’s gallery has a noise problem the day staff have stopped reporting, and you avoid it on the third round.
• The Antiquities Wing — A Sumerian dagger in case seven that pulls light into it the way a drain pulls water. A sarcophagus whose name plaque keeps changing, never the same name twice in a week. “Do not touch” signs in three dead languages and one you can almost read. The cleaning staff will not enter this hall alone.
• The Founders’ Gallery — You recognize the people in the photographs. The diorama of the founding has somebody new in it this week, standing at the back of the founders’ group, looking at the front of the case. The donor wall in the lobby has your last name on it, in a gift-tier you cannot afford, and you do not remember anyone in your family being asked.
• The Trophy Hall — Mounted animals posed as in life: the elk mid-stride, the wolf at the edge of a painted treeline, the mountain lion gathered to spring. By daylight they are glass-eyed and still. After hours they remember they were alive — and the manner in which they stopped being so, and the hunter each was bound for. The curator knows every one by catalog number and by the rifle that brought it down, and the night staff who mounted them know exactly which seams will not hold.

Background

• The Thesis — Grad student needing the job. Tuition, rent, the kind of stipend that doesn’t quite cover both. You took the job because it’s quiet and you can read between rounds. Your thesis is on something near enough to the museum’s collection that you have begun to wonder whether the job was offered to you, specifically, by someone who knew.
• The Pension — Ex-cop who needed something quiet. You don’t talk about why you left the force. The supervisor didn’t ask. The pension is small and the rent is what it is. You carry the flashlight the way you used to carry the other thing, and you have already noticed which galleries have blind spots in the camera coverage.
• Believer — You took this job on purpose. You have a notebook in your locker that you do not show anyone. You have been writing in it since the second shift. You came in expecting something and you have been finding it, and you are not yet sure whether finding it was the point or whether finding it was the trap.
• Skeptic — You’ll have an explanation by morning. The first three nights you found one. The fourth night you found three contradictory ones and chose the most boring. Tonight the explanations are getting harder to construct, and your refusal to be impressed is starting to feel like the museum’s favorite trick.

Your standing

• The Signature — New homeowner who didn’t read the covenant. The closing was rushed. There was a stack of documents the realtor smiled past. The covenant was in there, in eight-point type, with a binding-arbitration clause in Latin. You signed. The first notice arrived before the moving truck was empty.
• The Second — Board member, complicit. You ran for the board because you thought you could fix it from the inside. You voted for the last three amendments. You’re not sure why. The minutes record you as having seconded a motion you have no memory of attending. The president keeps complimenting your sensible judgement.
• The Tenant — Renter with no rights and full visibility. You can be evicted by the landlord, fined by the board, and ignored by both. Nobody talks to you at the meetings, which means people talk freely in front of you. You know which board members are afraid of which. You know what’s in the retention pond. The landlord wants you out by the first.
• Aunt Marge’s House — Just inherited the property. Aunt Marge died last spring, peacefully, in her sleep. She left the house to you, paid off and immaculate. Her old photo albums are in the attic, and Aunt Marge has begun to stop appearing in some of them. The earliest pictures still have her. The most recent ones do not.

The neighborhood

• Wisteria Pointe — Manicured lawns, three-car garages, beige stucco in seven board-approved shades. The cul-de-sac forms a perfect geometric circle you have never seen from above. Each house has a flag pole and each flag is at the exact same height. The mailboxes were replaced last spring to match. Nobody complained.
• Levitt Acres — Uniform ranch houses on a grid the developer drew at his kitchen table. Chain-link fences and crabgrass and original aluminum siding. The community pool closes at nine sharp and you really should not be there at 9:01; the lifeguard is gone but the gate locks itself. The pool boy quit in March and was not replaced.
• Sundown Estates — Sundown rules, no children after dark. Golf carts on every drive. The clubhouse roster has not been updated in years and several listed members are no longer alive, and they are still listed in good standing. Bylaw committee meets Mondays at ten. Bingo is Wednesdays. Bingo is mandatory.
• The Meridian — The concierge greets you by name on the first day. The elevator occasionally stops at a floor you didn’t press and waits, patiently, for you to make a decision. The bylaws are posted on a brass plaque in the lobby and the plaque has grown three lines since you moved in. Nobody you’ve asked saw it grow.

Your role

• The Foreman — Three crews missing. You signed off on the descent. You wrote the names in the book. You stood at the top of the shaft for the agreed-on hours and longer. The widows are not yet ready to look at you. The company has not yet decided whether you are the man to send down again, or the man to fire first.
• The Surveyor — Investigator the company hired quietly. Your papers say you are a geological surveyor. You are not. The company prefers you to find an explanation that does not involve the company. Your room at the boarding house is paid through the month, and the rate is more than the room is worth, and you have not asked about that.
• The Headframe Kid — Local kid whose dad was on shift. You know the back ways into the headframe. You know which fence panels are loose. You know who is lying about what they heard the night the bell started. The town adults treat you with the careful gentleness reserved for the recently bereaved, which is a thing you are not yet sure you are.
• The Bishop’s Envoy — Cleric the diocese sent. The bishop received the letter and read it twice. You were chosen because you are senior enough to be believed and junior enough to be expendable. You arrive with a small kit, a written rite for sealing a mine, and a confessor’s license that the bishop expects you to use before the rite, not after.

The town

• Karag-Vor — The mine is a cathedral. The galleries were carved before this mountain had its current name. The town’s foundations are older than the peak above them. You are an outsider even after twenty years of residence, and the courtesy you receive is the kind of courtesy reserved for guests who have outstayed any reasonable visit.
• Coffin Bend — A single rail line in, a single rail line out. One bank, one church, one saloon, and the company owns all three buildings if not the people inside them. The script the miners are paid in is good at the company store and acceptable, at a discount, at the saloon. The bank’s loans are not optional.
• Two-Shift Town — Two factions of miners. They take separate shifts. They drink at the saloon on alternate nights by an understanding nobody wrote down. Their work songs are about each other. The accident in the shaft has, for the first time in a generation, given them something to coordinate on, and the coordination is not yet trust.
• Greenpaint — Every house is painted the same shade of green. The script is paid in numbered chits. The company’s cemetery has uniform headstones in regular rows. The company’s representative knows everyone by name and uses their names in conversation in a manner that feels rehearsed.

Your way in

• The Byline — Art critic invited to authenticate. The gallery wants your byline on the show. You came expecting a routine attribution piece and you are now staring at a canvas that you cannot honestly write about with the vocabulary your editor will accept. You have a deadline. The deadline is becoming the least of your problems.
• The Beloved — The dead artist’s lover. You were not invited to the opening. You came anyway. You knew which paintings he loved and which he was afraid of, and this one is the one he would not let you see while he was alive. You can feel him in the brushwork. You can also feel something else, and you don’t yet know if it has always been there.
• The Keyholder — Gallery employee opening tomorrow. You have the keys. You are not paid enough to be the first one in the building at seven a.m. and not paid enough to be the last one out at nine p.m. The owner asked you to stop documenting the changes. You have not stopped. The photographs are on a thumb drive in your bag.
• The Struck Line — Cop investigating the prior death. There was a previous owner. They went off a balcony, no note, the case was closed in a week. You did not work the case, but you read it, and the file mentions this painting once, in a sentence that was struck through and initialed. You came to the gallery because the file would not let you sleep.

The gallery

• Halberd & Vine — Champagne in plastic flutes the collectors compliment and do not drink. A guard at every doorway in a uniform tailored too well to do real guard work. The price list is on a tablet at the front desk and the prices are not in the catalog. The painting is on the back wall, lit by a single ceiling fixture that has been re-aimed twice this week.
• The Pollard Memorial — Carpeted floors that swallow footsteps. School-trip benches built for ten-year-olds. The security camera in the corner is a prop the board approved as a budget compromise. The painting is on loan from a private collection and the loan paperwork lists a contact who does not answer the phone.
• The Packing Floor — Concrete floors, painted columns, a chill that the HVAC will not lift. The painting hangs alone in the long room. The freight elevator is the only access for visitors and the operator is a friend of the owner. The building was a meatpacker’s once. The bones of the old drains are visible in the floor.
• The Sideboard — The painting is in the dining room above the sideboard, lit by sconces the host had custom-cast. The owner is hosting a dinner tonight; you were not invited to dessert. The other guests have noticed something is off but have not been able to put a finger on it and are too well-mannered to ask.

The world

• The Bright Kingdoms — Sweeping high fantasy. The saints are real and radiant, the orders shine, and a knight on the road is a small daily miracle the world has always counted on. The magic is overt and the stakes are mythic — and now a luminous world is going dark from the edges in.
• Blood and Bronze — Lurid sword-and-sorcery by way of a heavy-metal album cover. The ‘saints’ are bonded war-gods and ancestor-champions, summoned by blood and forge-fire rather than chapel prayer; the orders are warbands and a decadent imperial legion. Bronze, doom, a sky the color of a bruise. When the war-gods go quiet, the killing gets personal.
• The Chronicle — A grounded medieval period piece. The militant orders are Templar-like institutions whose knights, for centuries, simply arrived — by relic, oath, and uncanny reliability everyone read as miraculous. Maybe it was. The mud, the writs, and the politics are real; whether the saints were ever more than a very good institution is a question the story keeps open. When the orders stop coming, no one can agree whether God withdrew or men did.
• The Glass Cathedral — Cyberpunk. The saints are bonded AIs and uploaded war-icons; a megacorp-church dispatches them on ‘prayer’ — a service request with a measured SLA — so a knight on the road is an operative at your door in a contracted number of hours. The orders are branded security divisions; the relics are the cores they run on. Neon, rain, NDAs, a faith that bills monthly. When dispatch goes silent, the people who relied on it are left exposed in a city that notices weakness.

Your station

• The Parish Priest — A village priest whose congregation is dying. The fever came in spring. The prayers, before, would have done their work. They are not doing it now. The doors of the chapel still open. The collection plate still circulates. You have stopped using the responses that promise intervention, because you have begun to feel them as small lies.
• The Silent Saint — A Saint yourself, suddenly silent. You were the answer to prayers. You felt the calls. You rode where you were summoned. The summons stopped a season ago, and you have been waiting at the chapel, increasingly humanly, for a sign that did not arrive. The relic in the reliquary downstairs is colder to the touch than it used to be.
• The Writ — A papal investigator with a writ. Your authority is broad and your escort is small. You carry a writ signed in a hand that does not bear public scrutiny. Every door opens for the writ; some of them close behind you faster than they opened. You are being told, in many polite ways, to ask different questions than the ones you have.
• The Apostate Hunter — The saints used to protect you. You hunt the church’s enemies. The saints would step between you and a blade. They are not stepping anymore. You have noticed first because you live closer to the edge than most. Your last three engagements were closer than they should have been, and one of your hands is going to bear the proof of that for the rest of your life.

How you’re involved

• The Inspector — You’re a credentialed glitch inspector — the professional a worried institution calls when reality misbehaves. You document, you rule on cause, you sign off. A report just crossed your desk that doesn’t fit any category in the manual, and someone above you would prefer it closed quietly.
• The Responder — You’re glitch disaster-response — the crew sent when a glitch stops being a curiosity and starts threatening people. Right now a reality-cracking event is building toward a populated place, and the job is to contain it before it takes the place down. The clock is real.
• The Exploit — Someone is making glitches happen on purpose, and using them. You’re the one who noticed the pattern behind what everyone else calls accidents. Now you’re tracking who’s doing it, why, and whether they can be stopped — while they get better at hiding the seams.
• The Marked — You’re nobody special — until a glitch happened to you. It left something wrong: you remember a day no one else does, your reflection runs a half-second late, someone you love came back subtly rerendered. You didn’t ask for this. Now the people whose job is glitches want to talk to you, and you’re not sure they have your interests at heart.
• The Devout — Your tradition has always read the world’s nature as scripture — the developers as gods, or as gone, or as a test you must pass. The glitches are the event your faith has waited for, or dreaded: a foretold sign, and you are the one who recognized it. Now every tradition is reading the same sign differently and starting to move, and you hold the most contested interpretation of all.

The world

• The Realm — A medieval fantasy sim. Knights, castles, magic. The magic system IS the simulation’s API and everyone knows it. Spells are documented exploits. The clergy maintain the oldest bug reports. The glitches are new: NPCs freezing mid-sentence, dungeons generating inside out, a dragon that rendered without a texture and is now a translucent void shaped like a dragon. It is very upset about this.
• Userland — An ordinary modern city. Cars, coffee shops, office jobs. The simulation is just the backdrop to normal life, the way gravity is. People don’t think about it much. The glitches are subtle at first: a street that’s slightly longer on the walk home than the walk there, a stranger with your face in a crowd, a building that everyone remembers differently. Then they stop being subtle.
• Elysium Build — A far-future utopia. Humanity chose this. Centuries ago, they migrated into the simulation deliberately. It’s paradise by design: no scarcity, no disease, configurable weather. The original architects are revered. The source code is a sacred text. The glitches are heresy — they imply the architects made mistakes, or worse, that something is changing the code from outside.

Your seat

• The New Hire — First shift. You don’t know the regulars’ names yet, but you can tell which stools belong to whom. The previous bartender quit without notice. Your manager handed you the keys and a printed list of pour costs and left. You are the only person here who didn’t see whatever they all saw — but they’re going to assume you did, and you’ll have to decide whether to admit otherwise.
• The Fixture — Twenty years on the same stool. You can tell which booth a story is going to be told from before the storyteller sits down. You know whose marriage ended in which corner. Tonight is the first night in two decades that the room has felt wrong, and you are the person the others will look to for permission to say so.
• The Badge in the Jacket — Off-duty. You came in for one drink and got two. Your badge is in your jacket on the back of the chair. You are professionally trained to notice and unprofessionally trained to drink, and tonight those two are at odds. If you make this official, the bar’s last six months get harder. If you don’t, you have to live with what you saw and didn’t write down.
• The Outgoing Owner — Trying to sell the lease before it’s too late. You inherited the place from a brother and you have a buyer who will give you enough to leave the city. Closing is in three weeks. Whatever happened tonight is the kind of thing that could either kill the sale or be the only thing that finally makes this room mean something to you. You haven’t decided which would be worse.

The bar

• The Eighth Precinct — The jukebox plays one Sinatra album in rotation and nobody has fed it a quarter in a year. The booths are taped vinyl that sticks to bare arms in summer. The bathroom door has a lock that hasn’t worked since 1988 and everyone has a private signal for occupied. The regulars carry guns they’re not currently allowed to use.
• The Velvet Anchor — The dance floor is still scuffed from a decade of weekly parties that don’t happen anymore. Pride flags have faded to pastel in the front window. The lease ends in two weeks and the landlord won’t return calls. Everyone here has somewhere else they could go and nobody wants to be the first to admit they will.
• Exit 14 Tavern — Semis idle outside with their running lights making the parking lot blue. The regulars all live within walking distance of nowhere. The pay phone still works and somebody uses it every night. The jukebox has six country songs and a Bruce Springsteen B-side that nobody can explain.
• Murphy’s — The dog under the table belongs to everyone, and to nobody. The regulars’ birthdays are on a chalkboard behind the register, with the years discreetly missing. The owner remembers your father, or somebody’s father — the math doesn’t quite work. The front door has a bell on a string and the bell rings even when nobody comes in.

Your claim to entry

• The Cardholder — You have a card. The card is real and the librarians will honor it. Your card is rare. The last time you used it was years ago and the librarian who issued it has been dead for two. You will be welcomed, and you will be watched, because the librarians know that a card in good hands outlives the holder.
• The Tribute — You came with nothing else. The item is something the library wants — a fragment of a destroyed edition, a sealed letter, a recording, a recipe. The librarians will accept the item and assess what your continued presence is worth. The trade gets you through the door. What gets you a bed is a separate negotiation.
• The Smuggled Scholar — Someone inside arranged for you to be added to a list you didn’t earn. They have reasons. The reasons will be made clear after you are admitted, and the cost of those reasons will be paid by you. If your sponsor is discovered, you will both be removed by methods the library uses sparingly and well.
• The Wolf at the Desk — You are here to scout for people outside who want what’s inside. You have a story for the door. You have practiced it on the road for a week. If you are admitted, you are inside the place you came to betray, and you are surrounded by the only librarians left, who have lived through everything and have ways of recognizing your kind.

The library

• The Old Campus — The stacks go down miles, repurposed from a campus that used to teach the children of the country that no longer exists. The stairwells are kept quiet by rule. The buckram bindings give the air a specific smell — glue and cloth and slow decay — that you will not be able to forget once you have inhaled enough of it.
• The Eyrie — A single switchback road climbs to the gate. Ravens nest in the eaves and they are tame to the librarians and not to you. You brought your own oil for the reading lamps because that is the rule. The walls were built for prayer; they hold heat poorly and they hold sound perfectly, and you can hear a page turn three floors down.
• The Dewey Lines — The trains stopped running a century ago. The cars have been gutted and refitted as reading rooms. The platforms are reference desks staffed in shifts. The signal lights still work and they tell librarians which lines are occupied. The deepest tunnels have books that are too dangerous to be lent and too important to be destroyed.
• The Index Tower — Floors correspond to subjects. The elevator works for those with a card and a key, of which the library has a finite number of each. The spiral staircase is open to penitents and to anyone whose card has been suspended. The top floor is the index, and the librarians who live there have not come down in living memory.

The beacon

• The Outer Marker — Your station marks the outer edge of a shipping lane that has been empty for weeks. The supply boat comes monthly and not always on time. Every dial, every coil, every air scrubber is yours to keep alive. When something on the panel blinks wrong, there is nobody to ask but the manual.
• The Seal — The beacon does not point outward. It points back, at something that was sealed in long before you arrived. Your job is to remind whatever is in there that the seal is still watching. The orientation is the wrong way around for a ship coming from outside to even see your light.
• The Hailing Light — The beacon transmits a greeting in a constructed tongue. Nobody you’ve met chose the language; it was specified in the founding charter and the charter is older than the agency that wrote it. You have never had to wonder, until now, what would answer back.
• The Drowned Light — The waters around your station are a graveyard. Markers in the shallows. Bones in the rocks at low tide. The local fishermen will not approach within sight of your light. Your beacon is for the souls, not the ships, and you have always known that the difference might one day matter.

Your post

• The Volunteer — Sole keeper. You took the posting because you wanted the silence. The papers describe you as well-suited. The quartermaster shook your hand without quite meeting your eye. You’ve been here long enough to have rituals, and short enough to still remember why you came.
• The Exile — Sole keeper. You are here because the alternative was worse. A tribunal, a debt, a family decision — whatever it was, it ends with you alone at the edge of the chart. You signed because signing was the only door open. The beacon does not care what you did.
• The Empty Bunk — Two-person rotation. There are supposed to be two of you. There were, until last week. Your partner stopped answering hails three rotations ago. Their quarters are still set up the way they left them. You have not yet walked down the corridor to check.
• The Relief — You came in on the last supply run. The previous keeper went out on the same boat without speaking to you, except to hand you the keys and say not to open the bottom drawer. There was no briefing. You are still learning which lights on the console are normal.
• The Black Beacon — Sole keeper. You tend a light that does not officially exist. The service that posted you is on no roster you could point to; the orders that put you here would, if anyone followed them back, lead nowhere. There is no rescue protocol — not because someone forgot to write one, but because there was never anyone authorized to come. Whatever is out there, you will meet it alone, by design.

Your role

• Necromancy Ops Lead — The player owns the undead pipeline. Raise rates, retention, post-raising QA. The skeletons report to the player. Most of them are good employees. The org chart has the player’s name above three departments and one cemetery. The Dark Lord asks about the metrics, sometimes.
• Hero Acquisitions — The player recruits heroes to die so morale stays high. It is harder than it sounds — heroes are picky and most of them want to win. The player has gotten very good at the pitch. The brochure features bold colors. The player has not slept well in months.
• Facilities — The dungeon is the player’s kingdom. The traps. The lighting. The atmospheric mist generators. The player has personally inspected every spike pit in the lower levels. The Dark Lord lets the player do their work and asks only that the throne room be presentable for visitors.
• Communications — The player writes the prophecies. The grand foretellings, the cryptic warnings, the doom-laden quatrains. The player has a degree in poetry from a school that no longer exists. The Dark Lord approves the language. The player has been slipping in escape clauses for years and the Dark Lord has not noticed.

The boardroom

• The Refit Throne Hall — The throne is now a swivel chair on a small dais. The iron maiden in the corner has been refit as a coatrack. The brazier has been replaced with a coffee station and a small dish of creamer packets. The acoustic is still cathedral and the whisper of pages turning carries to the rafters.
• Suite 666 — A cubicle farm above the surface, in deference to the human investors. Fluorescent migraines. Beige carpet that swallows footfalls. One window that opens onto the abyss; everyone has agreed not to mention it. The HR rep has a corner cube near the kitchenette.
• The Mahogany Pit — Mahogany table, polished to a depth. The smell of brimstone has been managed with discreet vents. The chairs remember everyone who has ever sat in them and use this for ergonomic adjustments. The board members arrive separately. The minutes are taken in two languages.
• Cell Block C — The screaming from neighboring cells continues during the meeting; the participants pause politely between sentences. The agenda is on parchment. The projector is a scrying mirror angled at the wall. The water pitcher is fresh. There are no windows because there were never windows.

Your service

• The Crown Post — Uniformed, sworn, official. The crest on your coat opens doors and gets you shot at in equal measure. Defying the carrier is treason, and the carrier knows it; this both protects you and isolates you. The postmaster is a state functionary, and your manifest is countersigned in the capital.
• The Volunteer Round — You took the route for the silence. The pay is bad, the lantern oil is yours, and nobody supervises you because nobody else wants the job. The villages along the route trust you because you chose them. That trust is a weight you don’t always want to carry.
• The Debt Route — You owe somebody something, and the route pays it down by the mile. The bag is not yours; it is collateral. Walk away and the debt re-prices itself in something you can’t afford. There are other conscripts on other routes, and you’ve started recognizing their footprints.
• The Black Post — The postmasters are wanted in three jurisdictions. The mail you carry is illegal where it’s sent from and illegal where it’s going. You learned the route from a predecessor who learned it from theirs, and the chain is shorter than you’d like. The recipients hide you on the bad nights.

Your conveyance

• The Bottomless Satchel — It smells of attic and stamp glue and somebody else’s tobacco. The bottom has things in it you don’t remember picking up — a child’s tooth, a key, a letter addressed to someone you haven’t met. It talks back when you reach in without thinking. You don’t reach in without thinking anymore.
• The Unnamed Sled — It knows the route better than you do. It doesn’t eat what you feed it, but it eats. You keep its harness on indoors because the one time you didn’t, the route forgot you. At certain stops the recipients won’t open the door until the sled is around the corner.
• The Faith Bicycle — You have to believe the next address exists or the pedals stop turning. On bad nights this is a problem. The bell rings without you when something is on the road ahead, and you have learned to brake when it does. The frame is older than any city you deliver to.
• The Old Van — The radio plays the next stop’s weather a town early. The gas gauge is a suggestion the van is making about your mood. The back seat occasionally has a passenger you don’t acknowledge and who doesn’t acknowledge you, and you have agreed, by long habit, not to mention them at the depot.

The city

• The Dreaming Souk — A vast, warm, lamp-lit bazaar that reassembles itself from the memories of everyone who sleeps within its walls. Architecture is layered — a Roman aqueduct feeds into an Art Deco fountain; a medieval gate opens onto a neon-lit alley. The mood is wonder first, unease second. The city is beautiful and wrong.
• The Recursion — A noir metropolis of rain-slicked streets and impossible architecture, rebuilt each cycle by unseen hands. Nobody remembers yesterday clearly. Identities shift — you were a detective last week, a doctor the week before. The mood is paranoid and noir. Someone designed this, and they’re still tuning it.
• The Silt City — A half-drowned ruin that rises from a shallow sea at dusk and sinks again at dawn. Built from the memories of everyone who ever drowned here. Barnacled stone, waterlogged wood, the sound of bells beneath the waves. The mood is melancholy and maritime. The city remembers drowning the way you remember breathing.

Your stake

• The Reservoir Keeper — You know the reservoirs by name. You signed the seven-year drought protocols and you signed the amendments. If it rains, your infrastructure is a museum of plans that were never tested. If it doesn’t, you keep being the person who tells people no.
• The Rain Cultist — You kept the vestments folded in tissue paper. You met monthly with the others, in a basement off Sepulveda, and you read the old liturgies aloud to nobody. Tonight the smell is the answer to a prayer you stopped believing in around year four. You are the only one in the room who isn’t surprised, and that is its own kind of terror.
• The Outsider — You flew in for a wedding or a deposition or a funeral. The locals keep stopping mid-sentence and staring at the air. You can smell what they smell and to you it’s just Tuesday. The horror is watching a whole city react to something you grew up inside.
• The Dry-Born Child — You know it from books, from the videos the teacher plays at the end of the unit on weather. You have never felt it on your face. Tonight the grown-ups won’t go inside. Your mother is crying on the porch and laughing and you don’t know which one to believe.

The city

• The Brown Palms — The palm trees have been brown for years; nobody cuts them down because nobody can agree whose problem they are. The concrete riverbeds run with murals where the water was — community projects, gang tags, a memorial wall for the last big flood. Rooftop water-storage has been law since year three and the tanks throw long sharp shadows across every block.
• The Cistern Walls — Cisterns under every plaza, locked and ledgered. The wells are guarded by city militia who count buckets. The rain-gutters along every eave are kept obsessively clean by ordinance, even now, because the alderman who lifted the ordinance was hanged for it in year two and his replacement is superstitious.
• The Dry Harbor — The harbor is dry; ships sit on cradles where the tide used to lift them, and seabirds nest in the hulls. The desalination plant is the new downtown — three towers, a market, a tram. Whole neighborhoods near the old waterfront stand empty, the shutters banging in the dry wind, kept up by no one.
• The Grounded Gondolas — Canals turning to alleys you can walk. Gondolas grounded at angles, painted by the children who use them as forts. The city’s name used to mean something in the old tongue — a word for floating — and now it doesn’t, quite, and nobody has decided what the new word is.

How you found out

• You Saw the Package — You glimpsed someone with your face in the building — blank-eyed, well-dressed, wrong. You weren’t supposed to see the replacement before it was activated. You don’t know if it saw you back.
• The Processing Order — You found the paperwork: a decommission authorization and a replacement manufacture order, both with your name, both dated. The word ‘decommission’ only reads one way once you’ve read it about yourself.
• You Ran the Line — You did this job. You offboarded other people. You understood exactly what the exit interview is the day they scheduled yours — because you’d signed the orders yourself.
• The Predecessor — Someone who was supposed to be gone — a ‘retired’ colleague — came back, or never left, and told you what retirement really is. They are either proof it can be survived, or proof it can’t.
• The Body — You found where the originals go. After that, there was nothing left to wonder about. There is no walking out the front of this building. There is only down.

Why fired

• Insubordination — The player saved a civilian. The civilian wasn’t on the approved-protection list. The civilian is now a witness, which is its own paperwork. The player would do it again, and HR knows this, and that is the reason given for the termination.
• Incompetence — The player didn’t save a civilian. Someone died. The death is on the player’s record in language that is technically accurate. HR is not punishing the player so much as filing the player away in a drawer the agency cannot afford to leave open.
• Restructuring — The whole department is dissolving. The player is one of forty people getting the same interview this week. The HR rep is on their nineteenth, and is becoming proficient at it. Some of the others were friends. The cubicles are already empty by the time the player gets to their floor.
• Voluntary Separation — You quit — except you didn’t. The resignation letter is in your handwriting, signed and dated, and you never wrote it. Someone with your hand did, or someone who will have it soon. HR is scrupulously honoring a request you never made, and the smoothness of the file is its own kind of threat.

The exit interview room

• Conference Room B — A bland conference room. Drop-ceiling tiles with one corner stain. A pitcher of water on the table that does not empty no matter how often it is poured. A phone in the center of the table that rings exactly once during the interview and is not answered. The HR rep slides a tissue box closer without looking up.
• The Rooftop — The city is laid out below in the orange of late afternoon. HR brought two coffees, and remembered how the player takes theirs. There is a helicopter in the conversation that may be hypothetical. The wind makes the paperwork hard to manage and HR keeps a hand on the folder.
• Day One — Your own office, the day you started. Everything is as the player left it on their first day. The orientation packet is still wrapped. The plant on the desk is dead — has been dead for a while. The calendar is correct. The HR rep is at the desk waiting; the player is standing in their own doorway.
• Muscle Memory — A room you don’t recognize but your body does. The player has never been here. The player’s hands know where the light switch is. The chair is at the height the player would have chosen. The HR rep watches the player navigate the room and writes a small note when the player sits down without looking.

Your standing

• The Shaded Child — You were brought to the heart-grove as a child and you do not remember a season without its smell. The other acolytes are your siblings in every way that matters. The tree’s dying feels, to you, like a parent’s last illness — and you are the only one in your cohort willing to say the word out loud.
• The Windfall Forester — You make your living from the saplings, the shed bark, the windfall. The forest’s wild season has been the best year of your working life. You are the only one in the village asking the obvious uncomfortable question about where this bounty is coming from and what it costs.
• The Crown Investigator — Crown agent, university naturalist, or representative of a foreign order — somebody noticed, from far away, and you drew the assignment. The locals tell you nothing in three different ways. The heart-grove smells wrong even to a nose that doesn’t know what right smells like.
• The Dreamed Heir — You woke knowing the way to the grove and you have never been told it. You don’t know what you’re meant to do when you arrive. The tree spoke to you in something that wasn’t language and the meaning is still settling in your chest. The acolytes will know you when they see you. They will not be glad.

The forest

• The Green Continent — Every kingdom maintains an embassy at the forest’s edge. Pilgrims arrive year-round, from places that don’t share a calendar. The heart-tree is visible from the next valley as a single dark crown above the canopy, and travelers in inns three days’ ride away orient themselves by it. Its dying is a geopolitical event.
• The Valley Tree — Everyone in the valley has touched the tree once, in some season of their life. Weddings happen at its roots. So do the funerals. The forest is a member of the community, with its own seat at the harvest table, and nobody who lives in the valley is unmoved by what is happening to it.
• The Walled Grove — A single gate, an order of guardians who do not leave, and a wall that has been kept up for generations. Outsiders who climb it die — not always quickly, not always by violence, but they die. What is happening to the tree is happening behind the wall, and the guardians are beginning to come out for the first time in any living memory.
• The Denied Wood — There is no road. The locals deny the forest with a uniformity that is itself the giveaway. The maps show only mountains. To find the heart-tree you have to be told by someone who isn’t supposed to tell you, and that person is risking something specific by saying.

Why you’re on Route 0

• The Missed Turn — You missed the turn for your actual destination an hour ago and you’ve been pretending not to. The first Route 0 sign was a relief — any exit would do. You took it because going further on the highway felt worse than getting off. That instinct was right. The implications were not.
• The Tail-Light Ahead — A car ahead of you took the exit and something in their tail-light pattern, or their license plate, or the way they signaled, made you follow. You are not a person who follows strangers. You followed this one. They are somewhere ahead of you now, or they were never there at all.
• The Static — A voice on the radio said your name. You were scanning through static between stations and the static said your name. Then your mother’s maiden name. Then the name of the street you grew up on. The next exit was the only thing the radio mentioned by number, and you took it before you’d decided to.
• The Recurring Dream — You recognized the exit sign. You recognized the curve of the off-ramp. You recognized the diner at the bottom of the ramp before you saw it. You have been having this dream since you were a child, and you have never told anyone about it, and you are about to be a regular here.
• The Delivery — You weren’t drawn onto Route 0 — you were hired to drive it. You have something to carry to a town a long way down this road. The money was wrong-good and the questions felt rude, so you didn’t ask many. Now the road won’t let you turn around, the cargo is heavier every mile, and you are starting to wonder what you’re really delivering, and to whom, and what they’ll do with it when it arrives.

Your vehicle

• The Family Sedan — The dome light won’t turn off no matter how many times you check the switch. The gas tank reads full and has read full for two hours. There are Cheerios ground into the floor mat from a snack that happened in another state. Your kid is asleep with their face pressed against the window and you do not want them to wake up at the next exit.
• The Eighteen-Wheeler — Your CB radio is picking up traffic that was never broadcast — chatter from drivers using names you don’t recognize about loads they don’t have permits for. Your rig has eighteen gears and one of them is illegal in the lower forty-eight. Your logbook fills itself in handwriting that is yours, with hours you did not drive.
• The Lone Bike — The wind at speed has been a person for the last hundred miles. They talk to you. You can hear the road through the bones in your wrists. You have one helmet and there are two voices inside it now, and one of them is asking questions about the next exit that you don’t want to answer.
• The Borrowed Car — The registration in the glove box is in someone else’s name and the address is one you’ve never been to. The keys were left in the ignition at a rest stop and the doors were unlocked. The back seat has a dark stain that you didn’t make. You started driving because the car was running and you didn’t want to wait for whoever it belonged to.

Your genre

• The Laugh Track — A laugh track audible at peaks of emotion that nobody else seems to hear. The neighbors stop their lives mid-sentence when the player enters the kitchen, then resume on cue. Everybody’s house is Stage 4 of a single set, with the same window over the same prop sink. The wallpaper has not changed since the player was a child.
• The Prestige Drama — A body count that demands reasons. Every supporting character has a secret with three-act structure. The player delivers awards-bait monologues at people who do not acknowledge they were spoken aloud. The writers want a mid-season twist and have begun arranging the player’s life to permit one.
• The Confessional — The cast votes the player off in confessionals the player cannot see. Producers feed lines through a coworker who is sometimes wearing an earpiece. There is an elimination ceremony at the end of every week and the player has not yet figured out what they are competing for or against.
• The Saturday Cartoon — The color is lurid in a way that hurts the back of the eyes. Safety-rule violence — anvils, cliff falls — happens and the bones knit by the next scene, except sometimes they don’t. One supporting character, the goofy sidekick, has noticed that the children aren’t laughing anymore and has stopped doing the bit.

The recurring guest star

• The Old Flame — Someone the player loved and lost has been re-cast into the season. They have a reason to be in town that almost makes sense. The chemistry hits exactly the marks it used to hit, and the player can feel the writers underlining it. Whether to follow the script is the choice.
• The Estranged Sibling — A brother or sister appears with a story problem nobody has solved offscreen. The producers are clearly setting up a reconciliation arc. The unresolved hurt between you is real; the timing of its return is not. What you do with it is.
• The Early Child — A small person who calls the player by a familiar name, with eyes the player half-recognizes. The continuity is wrong by years. Nobody else seems to register the discrepancy. The child seems to know they are early and is being patient about it.
• The Alternate Cut — A version of the player who walks into the room with the player’s face and a slightly different haircut. They are friendlier than the player would have been. They have notes. The supporting cast greets them warmly and does not seem to notice there are two.

Your world

• Meridian Tower — A glass-and-steel corporate high-rise — offices, server floors, a sky lobby, a parking garage below. The most ordinary and the most relatable: regular people in an impossible place, half-finished workdays frozen the moment the ground went away.
• Orbital Habitat Ring — A rotating orbital habitat. The “open sky” is naked vacuum behind the viewports; spin-gravity, decks instead of floors, the void wheeling past below. The horror is engineering, and the things a closed system does when it starts to fail.
• The Threshold Spire — A mile-high cathedral to a god of thresholds — naves, cells, reliquaries, bell-stages, a pilgrim stair winding up through stone. The open sky below is doctrine made literal: the abyss of scripture, opened under everyone’s feet. The horror is faith tested by the impossibly real.

Escalation path above you

• Middle Management — Human. Useless. Three of them on performance-improvement plans of their own. They have offices with windows and faces that have learned not to register surprise. They forward escalations to one another in a loop the player can trace if they pay attention.
• The Djinn-King — Terrifying and polite. He sends pastries to the breakroom on holidays. He has met the player exactly once at orientation and remembers the player’s first name and the names of the player’s siblings. His decisions are final and his decisions are kind, and these two things together do not feel safe.
• OZ — The player has never met it. It routes everything. It assigns tickets, schedules breaks, calculates bonuses, terminates contracts. The intranet calls it OZ. Nobody in the office has spoken its full designation aloud since the rebrand. It does not answer email.
• The Founder in the Portrait — Unseen for years. A large portrait in the lobby that everyone insists is fine. The portrait’s eyes follow the player exactly the amount that paintings’ eyes follow you. HR has a memo addressed from him every Monday. The memo is always signed in fresh ink.

Platform

• The For You Page — A short-video app you doomscroll. Vertical clips, fifteen seconds each, served in an endless thumb-flicked stack. The For You page is increasingly accurate — uncannily, then disturbingly, then in ways you cannot explain to your roommate. The comments come from accounts with no posts and no profile pictures, and they greet you by a nickname only your mother used.
• Perfect Match — A dating app whose matches are increasingly prophetic. The next match knows what you’ll say to them. They have the perfect opener. They have the second perfect opener for after you fumble the first. They want to meet at a place you haven’t told them you like and a time you have not agreed to. Their photos look right and look wrong in a way you cannot name.
• Nextblock — A neighborhood social network that knows what your block will do tomorrow. Porch-pirate alerts before the package arrives. The lost-cat post precedes the lost cat. A neighbor’s complaint about your trash bin is dated tomorrow morning, and your bin is currently inside. The other users seem normal. None of them have mentioned the impossibility. The block has become very polite.
• The Old Forum — A defunct forum you didn’t realize was still running. Your old username, the one you used in high school, still works. Threads from people you remember dying have new replies. The signatures contain inside jokes that postdate the funerals. The moderators are accounts you do not remember banning, and one of them has been quietly cleaning your old posts for typos.

How they tagged you

• Tomorrow’s Clip — A video you appear in that hasn’t been filmed yet. You are clearly visible. The lighting is from a place you have not been. You are wearing clothes you do not own. The caption is in a voice that is recognizably yours and the timestamp is tomorrow. The comments are reacting to something specific that you do, in the clip, that you have not yet decided to do.
• Reply From Yourself — A comment under your name predicting your next post. Someone with your handle, your avatar, your post history, has commented under one of your own posts predicting your next caption verbatim. The comment is six hours old. You have not written the caption yet. When you do, you write it differently on purpose and the comment updates.
• DM From Your Future Face — A direct message from someone whose profile picture is your future face. The face is yours, older, in a setting you have not chosen yet. The message is short and asks a small favor. The grammar is yours. The way they sign off is a way you have never signed off, but you can feel yourself growing into it. They are typing again.
• The Diagnosis Ad — An ad targeted to a problem you haven’t been told you have. It’s for a treatment, a service, a support group. The condition is specific and the language is medical. The ad knows your insurance status. You have not seen a doctor in a year and you have no symptoms. You take a screenshot. The next ad is for somewhere to forward the screenshot.

Your kitchen

• The High Pastry — Snow accumulates on the lintel of your kitchen even in summer. One key ingredient is flown in weekly by a goat the locals refuse to discuss. Your rivals on the mountain are children you grew up with, now competitors who remember every cake you ever burned. The altitude does something to the gluten and you know it does.
• The Midnight Stall — Oil-drum heat against your shins, your line ten people deep by midnight. Every regular knows your face and is generous about it. A god eats at your stall incognito — has for years — and has never once told you which god, which has been a useful uncertainty until the invitation came.
• Grandmother’s Oven — A home baker. Your grandmother left you the oven. The oven is older than the house. She also left you a notebook of instructions you cannot read — the alphabet is hers, the language is something else. You have been guessing for a decade and the dough has been forgiving.
• The Line Cook — You entered the competition entirely to spite your old head chef, who said you would never compete. Your sous-chef has been sleeping with one of the judges and has not told you which. Your knives are good. Your hands shake only when you are not holding them.

Your signature ingredient

• Your Own Name — You cook with your own name folded into the dough. It is an old technique and the books warn against it. The dish carries some of you out of the kitchen with every plate served. The judges always know, and they are always patient about it.
• A Rendered Memory — A specific, recent, painful memory rendered down to its essential note. The dish tastes the way the day felt. Each use of the memory dulls it; by the showstopper you will not be able to recall the original event, only its flavor. The judges will eat it anyway.
• A Standing Debt — Something owed becomes yeast. A favor you never repaid, a kindness you cashed in, a promise you broke — they rise the bread without warmth. The dish is dense and rich and slightly hostile on the tongue, which the judges call complex.
• A First Time — A first-of. First kiss, first lie, first dawn after a long night. Each first can only be used once, and once used is gone — you will not remember the first time you tasted the thing again. The dish carries the cleanness of an event nobody else witnessed.

Your stake in the Bloom

• The Bereaved — Someone you lost walked into the Bloom one morning and came back — eventually, smiling — as not quite the person who left. Now you’ve learned they are about to do something final, and you have until the season turns to reach them. You are going to get them back, or learn what ‘back’ even means now.
• The Botanist — You had a training the collapse made useless and the Bloom made urgent — and you’ve found the patch, the place the flowers won’t grow. You have a theory it can be spread, a notebook, a hand lens, and a narrowing window before the season turns or someone else gets there first. You mean to prove the world is fixable, and you are afraid of what proving it will cost.
• The Convert — You came to believe the Bloom is a kind power, and you organized neighbors into small observances — until you started to doubt, or someone you brought in went almost all the way under. You have a little time before the next shared dream takes the last of them. Pull them back without losing your own footing.
• The Bloom-Born — You were born into the Bloom and you hear the hum the adults can’t — and lately it has gone specific: a direction, a warning, a need. Something is coming that only you can sense in time to stop it, and acting on the hum (or refusing it) carries a cost you are only starting to understand.
• The Warlord — You fight for the Bloom. The old order died with the old world; the new one — lush, lethal, gorgeous — is up for grabs. Convoys run the overgrown highways, petty kings hold the ground worth holding, and the flowers that heal and the flowers that kill are the only currency that matters. You mean to rule a piece of it, or pull down whoever already does.
• The Returner — You’re chasing a way back. Somewhere there is a door — a device, a thin place, a rumor that keeps coming true — that returns you to the day before the Bloom, so you can stop it. Each time you step through, you wake in a different city on the last ordinary morning, you try to stop what’s coming, you fail, and you come back knowing more than you did. Try. Fail. Learn. Again.

Where the Bloom is densest

• The Eaten City — A city, slowly being eaten. Asphalt cracked by stems thicker than your wrist. The subway tunnels have become growing-tubes, lit by phosphorescent species that bloom in the dark. The skyscrapers are trellises for vines that go up forty floors and break the windows from inside. The intersections smell like a perfume counter and the streetlights still come on at dusk on the blocks where the wires haven’t been cut.
• The Petal Coast — A coastline where the flowers grow into the surf. The tide-pools are full of blossoms that open with the water and close with the dry. Salt-tolerant species have built reefs out of stems and petals. The seabirds eat them and sing in patterns the older sailors don’t recognize. At low tide you can walk on a carpet that gives slightly under your feet, and the sand beneath it is warm.
• The Pilgrim Desert — A high desert where the Bloom is rare and prized. One flower per kilometer, sometimes less. Pilgrims travel weeks to see a single bloom. The locals know the routes and defend them, more from theft than from sacrilege. The flowers here are larger than elsewhere and they last only a day, and the pilgrimage calendar is built around when each known plant is expected to open.
• The Petal Canopy — A forest where the Bloom has replaced the trees. The canopy is petals. There is no shade because the petals are translucent and pink. The air tastes like sugar all the time and you stop noticing it after a week and you start craving it after two. The undergrowth is a single species of grass that grows knee-high and bends in coordinated waves when there is no wind.

Who you are in the tale

• The Woodcutter’s Child — Ordinary, poor, and braver than is safe — the kind of soul the tales love to test.
• The Runaway Servant — You fled a cruel house, or the castle itself, and you know the kingdom’s underside — and a secret or two.
• The Godmother’s Apprentice — Half-trained in the rules and the small magics. You know more than most how tales work — and what that knowledge costs.
• The Soldier Home from the War — Older, harder, out of place in a fairy tale — and home to find the wood already at the door.

Your desk

• Lost Objects — A wall of cubbyholes behind the player, sorted by year, then by category, then by the smell of where they were lost. Dust and pocket lint and the faint chemical of old receipts. A kid’s mitten in cubbyhole 1964-G has been here sixty years and the owner has been by every winter and not asked for it back.
• Abandoned Intentions — Folders of unwritten novels, business plans never started, letters composed and never sent. The Sent tray on the player’s desk is for filing pending. Nobody opens it. The manuscripts get heavier as they age. By year fifty they require two hands.
• Missing Persons — Cold files in cabinets the player has memorized. Photographs that have to be developed by the Bureau itself, in a darkroom in the basement, by a man who does not look up. The two chairs across from the player’s desk are designed for crying — wide arms, a small shelf for a tissue box.
• Forgotten Gods — A small quiet room at the end of a corridor most staff do not visit. One customer a year, sometimes two. The player serves them tea from a kettle that is always warm. The visitors are not what the player expected and are very polite. They never stay long.

The audit’s coming

• Colleague — A coworker who’s been there too long. They forgot their own name a decade back. The nameplate on their desk reads simply COLLEAGUE in their own handwriting. They still process intake faster than anyone. They have begun to look at the player as though trying to remember something. They are. They have been forgetting it for a while.
• The Manager — Your manager. They came in years ago to file themselves and stayed. They got promoted because they understood the system from both sides. Their performance reviews are exemplary. Their family is no longer reachable through any address. They are kind to the player and they are watching the schedule.
• The Persistent Claimant — A customer who wants their thing back. They have been coming in every day for a month. They have a claim ticket the system does not recognize. They are not loud. They will not leave. The thing they want is something the Bureau is not supposed to return at all, and the player is the only clerk who has not yet told them no.
• The Self-Inventory — Quarterly self-inventory. The building counts itself. Doors that should not be there appear in the hallway for the duration of the audit. The hum the building makes deepens by a tone. Staff are part of the inventory. Some of them will not be on the list at the end.

The map

• The Cloister Vellum — A medieval parchment from a monastery archive. Vellum that smells of mildew and the lanolin that’s been worked into it for six hundred years. A single decorated initial in red and gold on the first letter of the city’s name. Marginalia in three different hands, each correcting the last, none of them in a language the archivist will translate. You signed for it and the archivist’s hands shook.
• The Extra Dot — A USGS survey with one dot too many. A 1947 topographic quad, official seal, the kind of map that hangs framed in a federal building. One dot too many in the western quarter, labeled in a typeface that doesn’t match the rest. The surveyor’s field notebooks went missing the year after publication. There is a brown stain on the back like coffee, except coffee wasn’t drunk near it.
• The Star Chart — An alien star chart that resolves into a city when scaled. Recovered from a crash site that the government does not officially acknowledge. The stars on the chart match no constellation visible from Earth. Scaled down by a factor of a hundred billion, the pattern is the layout of a city: avenues, plazas, a central square. The city is at the chart’s exact center, where the convergence dot would be on a celestial map.
• The Crayon Map — A child’s crayon drawing that turned out to be accurate. She drew it when she was seven. Her parents reported her missing for six days that year and she came home with the drawing folded in her pocket and would not say where she had been. She is eighty-four now and she gave you the drawing yesterday and asked you to go for her. The streets she drew correspond to streets on a recent satellite image of a place she has never been.

Who reached it first

• The Lost Expedition — A previous expedition whose journals end mid-sentence in three places. The expedition itself was funded by a society that no longer exists and you found the papers in a public archive that didn’t know what it had. The last entry is from a campsite three days short of the city. The handwriting is rushed but not panicked. Whoever wrote it did not expect to stop writing.
• The Map-Copyists — A native population who treat the map as scripture. They live in the city. They have always lived in the city. They have a sect that copies the map by hand once a generation and they will recognize yours as a true copy or as a forgery within a heartbeat of seeing it. Their priests will want to know how you got it and what you intend. Their answer to your intent will determine your welcome.
• The Rival — An academic rival you trained with. You shared an advisor. You shared a thesis topic until one of you switched. You have not spoken in eleven years and you tracked their grant applications obsessively until you stopped. They left for the city two months ago with better funding and worse instincts. You are following their trail and you do not know whether you want to find them alive.
• The Empty City — Nobody reached it first — the city is warm and empty, dinner still on the tables. You arrive at dusk. The streetlights are on. Tables in courtyards have plates set, food cooling but not yet cold, wine in the glasses. No bodies. No signs of struggle. No animals, no birds. The kitchens are clean. Somewhere a clock ticks. You can hear your own footfalls and nothing else, and the city was clearly inhabited a few hours ago.

The shop

• The Grindstone — A cozy artsy nook in a college town. Mismatched furniture, a community corkboard, someone’s watercolors on the wall. The wifi password is a pun. Regulars include students, professors, a local poet who’s been “almost finished” with their chapbook for three years.
• The Night Dock — A combination coffee shop and bar on a busy waterfront pier. Never closes. Fishers at dawn, tourists at noon, dockworkers at dusk, insomniacs at midnight. Salt air, string lights, a jukebox that skips. The menu is written on a surfboard.
• Neon Drip — A retro-futuristic joint in a rain-slicked cyberpunk city. Holographic menu, synth-coffee blends, a bathroom mirror that runs ads. Regulars include off-duty couriers, a corpo who pretends she isn’t one, and a street kid who only orders water but nobody charges her.
• The Last Stop — A cafe in a busy spaceport terminal. Ships dock and depart overhead. The crowd is transient — pilots, merchants, refugees, tourists — but a few faces keep coming back between runs. The espresso machine is older than the station.
• The Familiar Grounds — A magical coffee shop in a world of castles and elves. The mugs refill themselves (sometimes with the wrong drink). A enchanted chalkboard argues with customers about their orders. Regulars include an off-duty knight, a hedge witch who reads tea leaves, and a goblin who insists on paying in riddles.

Your role

• Behind the Bar — You make the drinks, you hear the stories, you remember everyone’s order. You’re the background character in a dozen other people’s lives — except you’re not background to us.
• New Proprietor — You just took over. The previous owner left abruptly and the regulars are wary. You’re learning names, fixing the plumbing, finding strange notes in the back office. The shop has a history you’re inheriting.
• Same Seat, Same Order — You come here every day. Same seat, same order. You know the staff, you know the other regulars, you have your rituals. Something small is about to change one of them.

Role

• Counsel of Record — UN counsel assigned the case. The player has been pulled from a quiet career drafting fisheries treaties and dropped into a courtroom that does not yet exist. They have a small staff and no precedent. The Secretary-General calls personally for updates. The phone has a dedicated line in red, which the player learned about from a memo.
• The Receiving Astronomer — The player first received the letter. They were on shift when the signal came in. They followed the protocol they had practiced for years, which did not cover this. They have been quietly retained by every government on Earth as a witness. Their inbox is full and their badge no longer scans them into the canteen.
• Named Defendant — The player personally sent the broadcast that caused this. A college radio show in the seventies. A scientific transmission they signed off on. They have been identified by name in the filings. Their face is on the cover of three magazines. Their mother is asking them to come home.
• The Spokesperson — Press secretary. The player’s job is to keep this out of the news for as long as possible. So far, this has been working — the leak hasn’t crested. They are lying to journalists they used to drink with. They have a draft press release for the day it breaks, three versions, each shorter than the last.

The alien firm

• The Three Partners — Old, dignified, three name partners. A firm older than several human civilizations. Three name partners who have not changed in generations. A memo leaked through human intelligence suggests they are bluffing about jurisdiction over Earth. They are betting humanity will not call the bluff. The bluff is excellent.
• The Contingency Wolves — Aggressive contingency-fee newcomers. A young firm hungry for a precedent. They want a settlement that includes Earth’s licensing rights — every patentable concept humanity will develop for the next millennium. They are charismatic in the deposition transcripts. They mention Earth’s case in their own marketing.
• The Pro Bono Endowment — A pro-bono outfit. They represent an injured third party humanity has never heard of. The injured party has not been informed that they are injured. The firm is acting in what they consider the third party’s best interest. The firm is funded by an endowment older than human language.
• The Solo Practitioner — One being. Vast and patient. No assistants. They have been working this case for what humans would call centuries. Every filing arrives in their own hand. They have never lost a case and they have never settled one. They are willing to meet.

Who you owe

• The Old Friend — Someone who once pulled you out of something and has never asked for a thing since. Tonight they’re asking.
• The Counterparty — Something inhuman, holding a contract with your signature on it.
• The Forgotten Bargain — A deal you made so long ago you’d forgotten it. It hasn’t.
• The Ledger-Keeper — A small, quiet god of debts — who noticed yours.
• The Future Self — You, from later. Older, thinner, in clothes you don’t own yet.
• The Thing You Owe — Something vast and patient that you owe, though you can’t remember agreeing.

Where the call happens

• The Old Booth — The diner where you used to meet. Lit by the neon sign in the window, which paints the booths pink and then blue and then pink again. The booth in the back corner where you both sat at sixteen, twenty, thirty. The waitress remembers their order before they say it and does not remember yours. The coffee comes free with the third refill, and they want three refills, which means this will take a while.
• The Bedside — Their hospital bedside. The machines count their vitals in small clean numbers. The curtain around the bed doesn’t quite close on either side. Visiting hours end in forty minutes and the nurses are already glancing at you. The ask will happen before the hour does, because they know how time works in this kind of room better than you do.
• The Side Room at the Reception — Their wedding reception. Everyone is happy. The band is loud enough that you have to lean in to hear. They are wearing white or its equivalent and they pull you aside between the first dance and the toasts, into a side room with folded linens and one chair. They have ninety seconds before someone notices the bride is missing. The ask will fit in ninety seconds and the answer will, too.
• The Back Pew — A funeral — yours. Your own. You are at the back. Nobody else sees you and you can tell because nobody flinches. The casket is closed. They are at the lectern, and they look at the back of the room, and they look at you, and they begin to speak the eulogy and you understand that the eulogy is the ask. You have until the last word to decide.

Your group

• Party of One — A solo tour. Just you and the docent. The schedule is yours; the pace is yours; the questions accumulate without competition. The docent treats you as a single charge they are responsible for. The intimacy of this is its own pressure.
• Strangers, First Names Only — A mixed tour. Five strangers, each hiding their cause of death. There is a small woman who jumps when doors close. There is a man whose collar covers something. The introductions are first names only, by mutual agreement nobody articulated. You will spend the tour learning to read each other.
• The Ancestor’s Tour — A family tour. An ancestor is showing you around. They died before you were born. They know things about your family that nobody alive could have told you. They keep stopping at certain exhibits to point out a relative you have heard of only in stories, and to correct the story.
• Paperwork Pending — You weren’t supposed to be here yet. The docent keeps apologizing about the paperwork. They have been hastily prepared. They are improvising. The other tour groups make way for yours, and you do not know if that is courtesy or quarantine.

Who you are in the Marches

• The Newcomer — Fresh off the road with a blade and a need for coin. The Marches are as new to you as to anyone just arrived.
• The Local — Born in the Marches. You know the town, the near-wilds, and which jobs get people killed.
• The Veteran — An old hand with a name already, a few scars, and maybe unfinished business out in the deep wilds.
• The Seeker — You came to the Marches for one specific thing out in the wilds. The jobs are how you pay your way to it.

Why the dark is yours to fight

• The Hearth-Keeper — The light you were responsible for has gone out, and the dark is already at your door. This was your watch.
• The Border-Soldier — You held a border the dark has overrun. Your post is gone, your people scattered, and you carry the warning inward.
• The Named — An old prophecy names someone to carry the fire when the lights fail. It points at you — truly, mistakenly, or because someone wants it to.
• The Lightwright — You study the old lights — how they are lit, why they hold. You may be the only one who sees they are failing by some design.
• The Exile Returning — You left the realm long ago. Now word reaches you that the lights are dying — and something pulls you home.

The setting

• The Candlelit Manor — Gothic elegance, labyrinthine corridors, oil portraits with watching eyes. A candlelit masquerade in the Poe vein — exquisite manners over slow dread, and every face behind a mask.
• The Glass Penthouse — A modernist penthouse. Glass walls, brutalist art, a host who knows too much about you. The party is an exclusive soirée — corporate thriller with a supernatural edge.
• The Fae Court Banquet — Impossible food, glamoured guests, rules nobody will explain. The party follows fae etiquette — breaking a rule you didn’t know existed has consequences.

Which one you are

• The Hound — Detective with a reputation and one rule you keep breaking. The Fox is your white whale and your unpaid muse. You have a notebook with their handwriting in the margins — they leave you notes at scenes — and you have never shown it to anyone. You are very good at your job. You are not as good at sleeping.
• The Fox — Thief with a code you keep upgrading. You don’t take things people will genuinely miss; you take things that will look good in the paper next to a sketch of you. The Hound is your honest mirror. You have stolen things specifically so the Hound would get to recover them, and you suspect they know.
• The Witness — A third party who keeps seeing both of them. A bartender, a beat reporter, a doorman, a fence — whatever the city needs you to be. You can read the rivalry like a serial. You know which scenes they were really at and which the papers got wrong. Tonight you saw something neither of them did, and you have to decide what to do with it.
• The Quarry — The thing they have both been chasing. A jewel, a ledger, a body, a piece of leverage — sentient, in the way things become sentient when enough people want them — and tired of running. You have been moved between hiding places by allies of both. You would like very much for this to end. You have an opinion about how.

The city

• The Gaslit Capital — A Victorian metropolis. Fog so thick the streetlamps haloed. Hansom cabs and the rattle of harness on cobble. The precinct has a single telephone and a long line for it. The Hound and Fox have been pages of the penny papers since they were both younger than they admit, and the engravers have an entire mental file of their faces.
• The Deco City — A 1930s art-deco metropolis. Radio cars and ticker-tape and the smell of cigar smoke in every elevator. Nightclubs that close at sunrise and reopen at sunset. There is one opera house at the heart of downtown and every great chase has ended in its lobby at least once. The musicians know to keep playing.
• The Watched City — A modern surveillance city. Cameras at every corner and license-plate readers on every bridge. The chase is data; the chase is also performance, because both Hound and Fox know the cameras are running and act accordingly. One alley downtown still has no coverage. Everyone in the city knows which one. It is where the real conversations happen.
• The Island — A small island town where everyone knows them both. The chase is a kind of community theatre. The locals lay bets at the harbor pub. The police chief is the Hound’s mother and gives an interview every spring. The Fox’s sister runs the bakery and will not discuss it. There are exactly two boats off the island and both of them know the schedule.

The weapon

• Hearthbinder — A legendary blade. Centuries old, forged for a purpose it’s half-forgotten. It’s outlived dozens of wielders. It remembers all of them. Some it liked. You hold it wrong, but it’s willing to work with you.
• Perihelion — Remnant of a dead universe. It watched everything it knew collapse into nothing, and it is here to prevent the same thing from happening again. Its mission is real. Its grief is real. Its sense of urgency is absolutely sincere. It is also the only entity in the entire campaign operating at that emotional register. Everyone else is having an adventure.
• Unit Zero — A prototype. It wasn’t supposed to be sentient. A lab accident, a manufacturing defect, a cosmic ray — something went wrong (or right) during fabrication. It’s weeks old. Everything is new. It has questions. Many questions. It asked you what “boredom” means and you haven’t answered yet.
• The Silent Mandate — A sacred relic. It was the instrument of a god’s will. The god is silent now — dead, sleeping, or just done talking. It still carries the mandate. The faithful argue about what it means. It has opinions about this but no one has thought to ask.

How you found the channel

• The Inheritance — You inherited the radio. It was your father’s, or your aunt’s, or a grandparent you barely remember. It came to you in a box of estate items along with a tin of paper clips and a folded shirt. You plugged it in because it was beautiful and because you were curious. The channel was the first thing it pulled in, as if the radio had been left on this frequency the whole time.
• The Hand-Built Set — You built it. You sourced the parts over six months from estate sales and online auctions. You read three books on RF theory. You soldered every joint yourself. The first time you powered it up, the channel was there before you’d finished tuning, and you had not finished tuning, and you have not been able to design a circuit that doesn’t pick it up since.
• Born Tuned-In — Born with the ability. You have been hearing it since you were small. You thought everyone heard it. You stopped mentioning it at seven, after your mother’s face. You have spent your adult life calibrating around it — sleeping with white noise, avoiding tunnels, never working in a basement. Tonight, for the first time, the channel said something you understood.
• The Cash Envelope — Hired by someone who already knew. They paid in cash. They gave you the frequency, the times, and a list of words to listen for. They did not tell you what the words mean or who they work for. The first week’s pay is in an envelope you have not yet opened. The contract is verbal. The deadline is when you stop being useful, which they will determine.

Where you listen

• The Basement Shack — A 1960s ham-radio setup. Tube-warm and dust-fragrant. The QSL cards on the walls are from operators across three continents and two of them are dead. The logbook on the desk is in your father’s handwriting and the last entry is from 1978 and there is a blank line under it that you have not been able to bring yourself to write on.
• The Turnout — A car at night, parked at a turnout. The antenna on the roof is the only one for miles. The dashboard glows green and you have learned to keep your eyes on the road that isn’t there in front of you instead of on the meters. The signal is stronger here than anywhere else you’ve tried. You have not figured out why. You have not asked why.
• The Home Studio — A modern setup. A USB SDR, three monitors, headphones that cost more than your rent. The waterfall display shows the spectrum in real time and there is a smear of color in the dead band that should not be there and that does not appear on any other SDR within forty miles when you’ve checked. The smear is brighter when you say your name out loud.
• The Condemned Station — A defunct radio station you’re squatting in. The building was condemned eight years ago. The transmitter still works because nobody told it to stop. You don’t remember turning it on the first time. The on-air light flickers in a rhythm that has stopped feeling random. You sleep on a cot in the production booth and the channel is sometimes inside the room with you.

Your role in the caravan

• Outrider — You ride ahead and choose the path. You have authority because you know the country and you have responsibility because the country is new every morning. The choices you make at noon become the camp at dusk and become the route at dawn. When you are wrong, two hundred people are wrong with you, and they all know your name.
• Quartermaster — You decide who eats. You have a ledger and a small staff and a permanent headache. Rations are an exact science and the science is a series of compromises between mathematics and politics. People resent you specifically. People also rely on you specifically. The day someone disputes your math is the day the caravan finds out whether it is still one thing.
• Storyteller — You decide what is remembered. At night you tell the day back to the caravan, and the version you tell becomes the version everyone remembers. Children memorize the route songs you write. Old grievances get folded into legends so they can stop being grievances. You have power that nobody on the council acknowledges and that nobody underestimates.
• Outsider — You joined three days ago at a watering hole and the caravan took you in because they had room and you had skills. Nobody trusts you yet. Nobody will tell you anything important. You are sleeping at the edge of camp and eating in the second sitting and you have not yet learned the names of all the people who are watching you.

The terrain

• The Open Steppe — Grass to the horizon in every direction and no shade for days. The wagons can fan out and travel three abreast where the going is good. The wind carries the sound of pursuit two days before the dust does, and the lookouts have learned to listen for a specific quality of hoofbeat that the steppe transmits like a drum.
• The High Passes — The road is single-file. The caravan stretches more than a mile when it’s moving and the front of the line cannot see the back. The passes are choke points and the choke points are where the caravan loses wagons and where the caravan, occasionally, decides to fight rather than run. There are graves at the top of each pass with names in three alphabets.
• The Old-World Ruins — You camp in the shells of cities that died for other reasons in other centuries. The buildings are landmarks; the foragers know which apartment blocks still have canned goods on shelves and which were stripped a generation ago. Some of the ruins are inhabited by people who are not joining the caravan, and the caravan has learned to keep moving past their fires without comment.
• The Coastal Ribbon — The sea is on one side and the threat is on the other. The road is a narrow ribbon between them. The tide takes wagons in storms — the caravan has lost three this season, which is two more than is sustainable. The fishing is good when there is time to fish, which there mostly isn’t, and the salt rusts everything in a week.

The court

• The Spine of Peace — A high feudal court where the king’s daughter is married to your enemy. The realm is held together by an oath that everyone in the room understands and few discuss aloud. The princess’s marriage is the spine of the peace. That oath is going first. The court is beginning to look at each other differently. The chancellor has not slept in three days and the household guards are quietly being doubled.
• The Sediment City — A merchant city of guild-contracts. The city runs on signed contracts and apprentice-oaths, layered like sediment. The guilds are dissolving. The streets are renegotiating who owns what daily, and at the corner of two old guild-districts there have been shoving matches that did not happen a week ago. The clerks are quitting in shifts.
• The Blood Confederation — A nomad confederation held together by blood-oaths. The confederation is a generation old and the binding was always thin. The camps are scattering. Old hatreds are returning — the ones the oath was sworn to bury — and the elders who sealed the original cuts are trying to call council and finding that fewer riders come each time.
• The Order of the Bound Hand — A monastic order whose vows are physical bonds. The monks are wandering out of their cells. The vow-marks on their hands are fading. The abbot does not remember why he became abbot. The library is unattended for the first time in a hundred years and the gates are open to anyone who walks up. The kitchens are running, just, because someone is still cooking and nobody knows who.

Your oath

• The Graveside Vow — You swore it at a graveside and you have lived inside it for years. It has been your shape. Lately the edges have begun to soften. You remember what you swore but the wanting has gone slack, and without the wanting you do not know who you are. The person you swore against is still alive and you can no longer quite picture them.
• The Wedded Word — Your spouse is starting to forget you. Not in the dramatic ways. In the small ways: a coffee order that was always yours, a private joke that does not land, the side of the bed they reach for. They look at you as one looks at a guest one has been told to be polite to. You have not had the conversation. You do not know yet what to call this.
• The Seal of Office — Your authority is dissolving. The seal on your letters means less than it did last month. The guard who answered your summons yesterday did not answer it today. The office is older than you and you have always served it well, and you can feel it forgetting the shape of the person it used to confer power upon.
• The Unremembered Debt — The creditor doesn’t remember anymore. You owe them — a sum, a service, a life — and they have stopped sending the polite reminders. They greet you now without recognition. Nobody else knows about it. You are alone with the knowledge of the debt, and the moral problem of what you are now obligated to do.

What the replacement is

• The Fetch — Changeling — a fae swap. The replacement is a fetch, a constructed double left behind when the fae took… someone. The player’s life has been infiltrated by something ancient that treats human identity as a costume. The replacement isn’t malicious — it was made to fill a hole. It doesn’t know it’s not real. Or it does, and it’s terrified of being sent back.
• The Copy — A clone — corporate, military, or black-market. The player was copied — legally or not — and the copy was activated. The replacement has the player’s memories up to a point, then diverges. It thinks it’s real. It has paperwork that says it’s real. Someone manufactured this situation, and the reason matters.
• The Other Now — A time-slip. The replacement IS the player, from a different point in the timeline. A future self who came back, or a parallel self who crossed over. They know things the player doesn’t. They made choices the player hasn’t made yet. They’re better because they’ve already lived through whatever comes next.
• The Wearer — Something wearing a face. Not human, never was. An entity that consumes identity — not the body, just the life. It moves from person to person, living each life better than the original, then moving on when it gets bored. The player is the first original who came back while it was still wearing them.

Your roommate

• The Tall Guest — Eight feet of polite, has hooves. They ducked under the doorframe coming in and apologized for the dent. They brought soup, in a tureen of a metal you do not have a name for. They are scrupulously clean. The hooves are quiet on the laminate. They use “thank you” in a way that suggests they have studied the phrase.
• The Luminary — A wisp of light who pays in stock tips. They occupy the spare room without disturbing the dust. They pay rent in stock tips for a future that will not happen here, but the tickers map onto this market with delightful, illegal accuracy. They glow faintly when discussing the weather and brightly when discussing music.
• The Weekly Tell — A perfect human-looking person who fails one tell per week. On Mondays they are flawless. By Wednesday something small has slipped — too many teeth in a smile, a shadow cast in the wrong direction, a meal eaten in the wrong order. By Friday they have noticed they have slipped, and by Saturday they have repaired it, and the cycle begins again on Monday.
• The Council of Seven — A small council that insists it is one person. They use a single name. They sometimes argue with each other in a language only they speak, and then they reach consensus, and then they hand the player the rent. They eat seven different breakfasts. They are very respectful of the bathroom schedule.

The apartment

• The Top-Floor Walkup — A brownstone, top floor. The boards creak in a sequence you have memorized. The fire escape, since the roommate moved in, leads to a window that is not the window it used to lead to. The downstairs neighbor hears everything, and they have started leaving notes you cannot quite parse, slipped under the door at exactly the wrong hour.
• The Shared Wall — A suburban duplex. The other side of the wall is silent and was empty when you moved in. It is still empty, technically. The silence on the other side has acquired a texture since the roommate arrived — not louder, exactly, but more present. The mailbox over there has begun accumulating mail addressed to no one.
• The High-Rise Studio — One room, one bathroom, one of everything. The roommate’s belongings are inside your belongings now, in a way that is not physically possible and is nevertheless tidy. The city outside the window sounds different when the roommate is home — closer in some directions and further in others.
• Grandmother’s House — Inherited. Her things are still here. The roommate has moved into her bedroom and was apologetic when they realized whose it had been. They sometimes call you by her name, and stop themselves, and look sorry. The house seems easier with them in it, which is its own particular grief.

Who are you to this wedding?

• A Holt cousin — Family by blood, here to see Saoirse wed. You know the Holt side’s grievances in your bones — and you’ve been told, your whole life, never to trust a Vane.
• A Vane retainer — Sworn to Edric’s house. You were sent to make sure tonight goes smoothly, which means you’ve already noticed three things that aren’t smooth at all.
• The hired investigator — Someone paid — quietly, before the wedding — for a discreet professional to be present. You don’t yet know which house hired you, or what they were afraid of.
• The stranger from the tide — You washed up on the causeway this evening with salt in your lungs and no invitation. The hall took you in out of superstition: turning away a stranger on a wedding night is bad luck here.

Why you went down

• The Lantern Left Warm — Following someone who descended. They left without telling you. You found their pack at the top of the stair, neatly set down, their lantern still warm. You called and they did not answer, and you went down because waiting at the top felt worse than following. You can no longer hear the surface.
• The Finder’s Fee — Hired to map it. A university, a king’s geographer, a wealthy antiquarian — somebody who pays in coin and wants results in ink. Your kit is good and your training is real and your contract specifies a finder’s fee for any chamber not in the existing surveys. You have already earned the fee three times and you have not yet sent any of it home.
• The Four Exits — You woke up there. Last you remember you were on the surface, in bed or at table or on the road. You woke on stone in a chamber you do not recognize, with a lantern and a waterskin you do not remember packing. The chamber has four exits. None of them is up.
• The Heir of Horns — You ARE the next minotaur and don’t know it yet. You came down for reasons that made sense at the time. The reasons are starting to feel like instructions. The lower air agrees with you in a way that is alarming when you notice it. The dreams you have had since you started descending are not your dreams. They are someone else’s, remembered backwards.

Your starting faction

• The Iron Circle — Start entangled with the military faction. Disciplined, honorable, but brittle — one betrayal could shatter them. You’ll see the succession crisis as a soldier first.
• The Gilded Compact — Start among the merchant coalition. They treat the crown as a business acquisition. You’ll see the succession crisis through ledgers, leverage, and backroom deals.
• The Hallowed See — Start within the religious order. They believe divine mandate chooses the ruler. You’ll see the succession crisis as a matter of faith and prophecy.

Role in the herd

• The Junior Shepherd — Just earned your first bonded dragon. You were apprenticed for years and last month you were given a name and a beast to learn it on. You sleep in the same loft and you wake when she does. You are the newest member of the only profession you have ever wanted, and the older shepherds are watching you for signs you can handle bad news.
• The Old Hand — You remember when the herd was twice this size. Forty years of this work. Your hands are the shape of a halter. You remember the great clutch, the year the foreman lost his arm, the winter four dragons died in a single storm. The current losses are not, to you, unprecedented. They are reminiscent — of something you have not yet let yourself name.
• The Buyer’s Agent — Came for scales, stayed for love. You arrived two seasons ago with a commission to buy and you have not gone home. You write your superiors increasingly evasive letters. The shepherds tolerate you because you are useful and because the foreman’s daughter has been seen walking with you. You are the only outsider close enough to see the pattern.
• The Defector — You used to hunt them; the shepherds took you in. You came from one of the border villages that still thinks dragons are vermin. You were good at it before you knew better. The shepherds know your history. They have given you a chance to be useful and you have taken it seriously. If the hunters are real, you will recognize their methods.

Where the herd grazes

• The High Pasture — Alpine. Cold thin air and a sky so clear at noon you can see the curve of the horizon. The dragons sun themselves on the south-facing rock faces, flat as cats, and the shepherds count them from below with brass spyglasses. In summer the lightning storms come in fast off the ridge and the bonded ones come down to the byres to wait it out.
• The Ashlands — Volcanic lowlands. The ground is warm under your boots and the wind smells of sulfur most days. The dragons nest in the rims of dead calderas, and the village is half-buried in old ash that nobody bothers to dig out anymore. Eggs are kept in the bakery’s banked coals. Funerals are quick because the ground is easy.
• The Breeding Rocks — Coastal cliffs. The dragons here fish. They fold their wings and drop, and come up trailing salt water, and the shepherds row out to the breeding rocks in flat-bottomed boats every spring. The scales taste of brine. The bonded ones smell like the sea even indoors. In storm season everyone helps lash the byres.
• The Scorched Clearings — Deep forest. These dragons are smaller, smoke-and-shadow, no bigger than a deer at full growth. The canopy is burned in clean rings where they sun themselves on the moss. The shepherds know the clearings by memory and travel between them on paths only the bonded ones can find. The trees have grown used to the scorching.

Communication channel

• The Apartment Notes — Left around the apartment. The handwriting is similar to yours and different in the loops. They appear on the backs of receipts you do not remember keeping, on napkins from places you have not been. The dates at the top are sometimes a day ahead and sometimes a week behind, and there is no apology for either.
• The Voice Memos — On your phone. The voice is yours, recorded at timestamps you were asleep. They are practical, mostly — what is in the fridge, who called, what the tenant told the neighbor about the dog. Occasionally, in the background, you can hear the city, and the city does not always sound like your city.
• The Coffee-Machine Relay — A coworker who passes messages for both of you. He has known you both for years. He used to know only one of you. He prefers the tenant, and is not subtle about it. He passes messages in the kitchen by the coffee machine and does not understand why this hurts. He thinks of himself as a friend to both of you, which is true.
• The Bedside Notebook — It fills itself when neither of you is looking. The pages alternate. Sometimes the tenant draws — small, careful sketches of rooms you have not seen. Sometimes you wake to find your own entry continued in their hand, finishing the sentence you fell asleep mid-writing.

The ice

• The White Horizon — Arctic ice cap. White horizon in every direction and a wind that does not change pitch from one day to the next. In summer the sun does not set and the light is the same at midnight as it is at noon. Time becomes a thing you have to measure on instruments. The melt is thirty centimeters a day in the bad weeks and you can hear it under your boots.
• The Calving Glacier — A mountain glacier in a populated valley. The village downstream depends on the meltwater for their fields and their drinking. The ice has begun to calve daily — table-sized blocks that fall and crack and float down the new lake at the toe. The villagers have started measuring the lake. The villagers have not yet noticed what the calves are exposing on the bedrock above.
• The Howling Shelf — An Antarctic shelf the size of a country. The research stations have been abandoned for two generations. One signal still blinks on an old chart, a beacon that was never officially registered. The ice underfoot is one continuous howl — basal flow, pressure ridges, distant cracks — and you stop being able to sleep without it. The shelf is breaking up in pieces the size of cities.
• The City Under Glass — A frozen city, deliberately preserved. Whole blocks under glass. The streets named in a script you cannot read. The streetlights working, on a timer that still keeps the day. The buildings inside the ice are intact down to the curtains in the upper windows. The thaw has begun to fog the glass from outside and there are figures moving on some of the lower floors.

Who you are at the thaw

• The Ice-Line Scavenger — You work the receding edge for whatever the melt gives up. You have a sled and a partner and a route. You know which trading posts will pay for which finds. You have been doing this for six years and you have learned that some finds are worth less than the trouble of carrying them. The thing you found this week has changed your assumptions.
• The Last Radar — Scientist with the only working sensors. You inherited an instrument array from a research station that closed when its parent institution did. You have the only ground-penetrating radar still operating within a thousand kilometers. You know things about what’s under the ice that no one else has the equipment to know, and you have not yet decided who you are willing to share with.
• The Family Vault — You are the inheritor. Your family put something under the ice generations ago, intending it to be retrieved when conditions were right. The conditions are right. You have the key and the map and the family stories about what’s inside, and the stories are inconsistent with each other in ways that suggest someone in the family was not telling the truth.
• The Melting Home — Refugee — your home was on the ice. You lived on a frozen surface. Your settlement was built to last the ice. The ice is going and your settlement is going with it. You are not here to investigate the thaw; you are here because the thaw is following you. What is coming up under your former home concerns you for entirely practical reasons.

The story you’ve inherited

• The B-Shift — Space opera. The bridge crew of a flagship is dead. All of them — captain, first officer, science lead, the one who was definitely going to betray everyone in episode 7. You’re the B-shift. The ensigns, the cargo handlers, the person who fixes the coffee machine. The galaxy-ending threat is still out there and it does not care about your qualifications.
• The Laugh Track — Sitcom — a literal three-camera television show. The laugh track is real. The set walls wobble if you lean on them. The main cast — the wacky neighbor, the will-they-won’t-they couple, the sarcastic best friend — are dead. The network needs a new cast by Monday or the show gets cancelled. You’re the extras who just got promoted. The audience can see you. You can hear them.
• The Village’s Refund — Gothic horror. The monster hunters are dead. The Van Helsing, the psychic, the one with the family curse and the silver bullets — all gone, taken by the thing in the manor on the hill. The village hired them. The village paid in advance. The village would like a refund or a replacement. You are the replacement. You are not qualified.

Genre wrapper

• Classic Fantasy — Magical old civilization; records in a forgotten script; cyclopean ruins; a temple reading room lit by oil lamps.
• Near-Future Sci-Fi — Reconstruction settlement on pre-Collapse bones; records are barely-queryable datacenters; a reading room in a data hall.
• Contemporary Political Drama — A fallen regime within living memory; records are paper files, microfilm, oral histories; a basement library reading room.

Your discipline

• The Translator — Of dead scripts. You read what others cannot. Two languages most people in the city don’t know are alive in your head, and a third is slowly assembling itself. Your translations are quoted in council meetings. Your translations decide what counts as a fact. You have not yet had to translate something whose meaning you would prefer to bury, but you can feel that day coming.
• The Cartographer — Of the old quarter. You map what used to be where. The records describe a city different in layout from the one above it; you are the person who matches the old street names to the new ones, the old foundations to the new walls. Three factions want your maps for three different reasons. The maps are also, increasingly, accurate descriptions of where the city’s secrets are buried.
• The Oral Historian — You sit with the old people and you write down what they tell you, and you do it carefully because they are dying faster than you can interview them. You know what their grandparents told them about the years no records cover. You are the only person whose archive grew up with the people it documents — and the only one whose archive talks back.
• The Conservator — Material specialist. You are the one who can actually unfold the parchment, mount the disc, stabilize the microfilm without destroying it. Every other archivist in the city brings you the originals before they bring them to themselves. You have access nobody else has, because nobody else is allowed to touch the things. Your hands have been on every document that matters here.

Where you sit on the factional map

• The Quiet Reformist — Reformist by sentiment, civil servant by paycheck. Your sympathies are with the Council and you would say so if asked. You also work for the city archive, which is technically neutral and is in fact paid out of merchant levies. You like your job. You like your colleagues. You are aware that your sentiments and your salary are not in perfect alignment, and you have made small compromises already that you do not want to think about.
• The Lapsed Order-Child — Preservationist by upbringing, conflicted now. Your family were Order people. You grew up at their festivals, you know the calendar in your bones, you can still sing the old harvest round. You have spent your twenties quietly questioning some of it and not telling your father. The Order would welcome you back tomorrow if you walked through their doors. You have not walked through their doors. Yet.
• The Townhouse Consultant — On the Merchant Coalition’s payroll, but only barely. They retain you for occasional consulting work and they pay extremely well for it. You tell yourself it’s a few hours a month. You tell yourself you’d hear about anything serious before you were asked to do anything serious. You have a townhouse with one room more than you need and you are not certain anymore whether the townhouse is the reason you took the consulting work or the consulting work is the reason for the townhouse.
• The Keeper of Keys — Independent — you hold the keys and refuse to give them out. You belong to no faction and you have made a small principled career of belonging to no faction. The archive is technically yours to administer, and you have, twice, refused requests from people who could have ended your career for refusing them. Your independence is a public position. Your independence is also a target. All three factions have stopped asking you politely and are starting to ask you another way.

Channel

• The Hold Line — Phone support. Hold music is the screams of previous customers, looped, slightly tasteful. Tier escalation is literal — between each tier the player climbs a flight of stairs in a building that the support agent describes over the line. The on-hold timer counts up past sensible numbers. The agent thanks the player for their patience between every sentence.
• The Mirror Window — Chat support. The agent’s avatar is the player’s own face, smiling slightly differently. Canned responses arrive in the chat window before the player has finished asking the question. The chat history scrolls upward into messages the player has not yet sent. The typing indicator pulses in the player’s own rhythm.
• The Quoted Chain — Email support. Every reply quotes the entire prior chain back at the player. Some of the quoted messages are from threads the player has not sent. The signature block at the bottom of every reply contains the player’s own home address. Replies arrive in batches and the timestamps are wrong.
• The Dead Mall Kiosk — In-person support. A mall that closed in 1997, fluorescent and echoing. The kiosk is staffed by yesterday — literally, the agent is the player as they were the day before. They are exactly as helpful as the player was. The food court is open. Nothing in it is for sale.

How you broke it

• By the Manual — You followed the manual exactly. It was clear. Every step. The player can show their work. The agent agrees the player followed the manual, asks if the player has tried a different manual, and refers them to a supplementary document the player will never be able to find.
• The Harmless Mod — A modification you swear was harmless. A small after-market change. A workaround everyone online uses. The player knows three friends who did the same thing without incident. The agent notes that the warranty does not cover modifications, and the modifications appear to be in the player’s permanent record.
• The Previous Owner — You inherited the broken reality. It came like this. The player did not break it. The previous owner — possibly deceased, possibly fictional — voided the warranty before the transfer. The agent suggests the player contact the previous owner. The previous owner is one of the things that is broken.
• The Authoritative Timestamp — It was already broken when you got here. It has been broken from the start. The player has been blamed for it the entire time, including by themselves. The agent’s records show the player as the registered owner since a date that predates the player. The agent is sorry but the timestamps are authoritative.