Loredump.

THE ACADEMY

Senior year.

Weeks 1-3: prep, tier reassessment, pairing allocation. Students find out whether they are solo-deployment or teacher-paired. Neither is safer. Teacher pairings are sometimes punitive.

Weeks 4-16: active mission rotation. Envelopes arrive the evening before. Travel, execution, return within 48-72 hours. Students return to classes Monday regardless of what happened Friday night, yes, even if someone died.

Final month: Graduation Assessment. One high-threat mission. Death rate: 2-6% for the full year, 1-2% for the Assessment alone.

Structure: Elders --> per-nation Councils --> Headmaster --> Deputy heads (academic, training, pastoral) --> Senior instructors (Master/Maîtresse, Sin-specific, Tier 4+) --> Junior instructors --> Specialist staff --> Senior students --> Junior students. French Academy pastoral: Madame Valbonne, Lust, competent and obligated to report upward.

THE MODERN WORLD

The Sigillum exists. The public does not know. The year is 2008. The twentieth century's major conflicts were fought against Hellspawn as often as against each other. History books reflect neither fact. The coverup is about a century old and increasingly brittle.

The seal appears on the skin, a tattoo-like mark, faint at first, grows as the wielder does. Physical expression of a gene written into human DNA at a point nobody can date.

The Corporation

Administrative body. Founded around 1900 when ten major powers agreed to classify the Sigillum and pool resources. Headquartered nowhere and everywhere, distributed across ten participating nations, coordinated through per-nation Councils answering to the Elders. Owns the hundred schools, the Hunter cadre, Solheim medical, Pride Barrier infrastructure, and liaison offices inside government agencies. Pretends to be a private research foundation for tax purposes. Cover has held ninety-seven years.

The Elder Families

Seven old families sit above the clans. (Not Sin clans). Money and infrastructure dynasties that bankroll the Corporation.

Elders - own the Corporation on paper. Decide what Councils are allowed to do. Nobody below Council level has met one.

Sandfords - run medical through Solheim. Solheim is a Sandford subsidiary.

Solheims - The medical division carries their name out of old respect.

Remaining four handle Finance, Technology, Coverup Operations, Archaeology. None publicly traceable. All richer than small countries.

The Sin Clans

Per-nation bloodline groups built around a Sin. Modern clans are smaller, quieter, more corporate, arranged marriages coordinated through Corporation registries, children tracked from birth, political weight measured in Council seats. Clan heads answer to the local Council. Council answers to the Elders.

Marriages are arranged to preserve dominant Sin expression. A Pride-bearing man marries a confirmed Wrath-carrier woman from a different family. She expresses Wrath. Her second X carries his Pride. Their daughters express Wrath with Pride silenced, insurance. The women usually do not know. The matriarchs do.

The Ten Desire Clans

Different entirely. Built around the Eighth Sin, which doesn't grant a domain but a custom ability. Each clan conditions its children's environment so the unconscious manifests the family ability at awakening. Roughly 5-15% awaken with something else (hazure, the off ones). Treatment varies from celebrated variation to... banishment and uncertain death.

Kurosawa - telepathy (読心). Blacklisted. Atrocities across four centuries. Stripped of Corporation recognition in 1961 after an Osaka incident. Operate underground, ~80-100 alive.

Morimoto - poison (毒). Generates biologically active compounds through the body. Compounds persist after contact. Effects range from systemic paralysis to cardiac failure depending on refinement.

Tanaka - animal communion (獣語). Communicates with animals at a pre-linguistic level. Does not command them. Behavior alignment through direct understanding. Enables large-scale environmental awareness through animal networks.

Shimizu - time delay (遅延). Localized reduction in action speed on a target. The target does not stop. Movement, reaction, force output all slow relative to external time. Higher tiers extend duration or widen affected area.

Yamada - illusion (幻). Projects false sensory information directly into a target's perception. Environment unchanged; only the observer's brain altered. Breaks if contradicted by strong physical feedback or multiple observers comparing reality.

Saitō - weather (嵐). Reads and influences atmospheric systems. Can predict weather accurately and redirect existing pressure systems, storms, and electrical charge. Cannot create weather from nothing.

Nakamura - memory (記憶). Alters stored cognitive records. Edits what the target remembers as having already experienced. Forgets an event entirely, believes it happened differently, or carries a false memory that feels real.

Fujimoto - object summoning (呼出). Stores physical objects in a personal anchored space ("hoard") and retrieves them instantly at range. Objects must be personally placed.

Costa - condition fulfillment (契約). Sets conditional rules linking an event to an enforced outcome. If the condition occurs, the result happens automatically. Requires precise wording.

Romano - speed (疾走). Accelerates nervous system and bodily response time beyond normal human limits. Perception, reaction, and movement all scale upward together.

(So, if you want these abilities, just say you're from these clans in the memory.)

Technology & The Coverup

Internet. Biggest unsolved problem. Digital Division monitors, suppresses, discredits. Forecast: thirty to fifty years of effective containment before collapse.

Forensics. Sigillum locus flagged non-coding in every commercial DNA panel. 23andMe and competitors quietly corrected through academic pressure, retracted papers, shell investments.

Surveillance. Corporation liaisons at director level in FBI, CIA, DGSE, MI6, BND, and equivalents. TSA has silent-tag paperwork for rune weapons. Senior detectives step back. Rookies who push get transferred to rural postings.

Cellphones and cameras. Field operatives carry short-range wipe devices for nearby phones. Cloud upload is a race. The Corporation is losing it by degrees.

Money. Corporation revenue: black government budgets + Sandford/Solheim pharmaceutical monopolies. Faction finances: black market, rune weapons, smuggled cards, sold intelligence. A single rune blade from a Master inscriber costs the price of a house. The inscribers do not take bank transfers.

The Barrier. Pride card interfaced with sonar and projection technology. Deployed around incident scenes. Reads the environment before activation and projects that image over the real scene. Handles cameras and passive observation.

The flaw: it is a projection. Someone who walks through the perimeter walks through the image into what is behind it. The Corporation manages this with a physical cordon. The Barrier buys time. It does not handle a determined person on foot.

The Prohibition

Article 4, Section B. Civilians are not permitted to know. Enforcement is layered:

- Mythology Division re-frames incidents as natural disasters, cult violence, serial killers.
- Nakamura memory bearers edit direct witnesses when cost-effective.
- Physical neutralisation is the tool of last resort and is used more than internal statistics admit.

Relationships between Sin bearers and sinless civilians are the hardest case. A civilian in love with a wielder will eventually figure out what their partner is. Two formal warnings are standard. After that, the relationship becomes a neutralisation matter. Operatives in grey coats are dispatched.

The Factions

Faction One. Wants the Corporation dissolved, the Sigillum made public regardless of civilian cost. Accelerationist, violent, recruits Fallen. Three confirmed Fallen in their ranks; their own senior members will not sleep in the same building as one. Responsible for ~60% of Corporation non-Hellspawn combat casualties per year.

Faction Two. Wants the Corporation reformed from within and without. Political, informational, selective. Refuses Fallen recruitment on principle and loses operatives to Faction One raids because of it. Considers the cost acceptable.

The Fallen. Not a faction. ~300 evil Sin bearers alive globally. Class-F classification. The Corporation's worst coverup problem.

(I don't have any good names, guys... So Faction 1, Faction 2 it is.)

The Cards

The gene came from somewhere. That somewhere is a card. When a wielder or Hellspawn dies, the card drops. Press it to skin and the seal transfers.

How to acquire one:
Birth - the gene is already there. The seal emerges when the body matures enough to sustain it.
Imbuement - a wielder presses their card to another person deliberately. Painful. Not reversible.
Taken - from a card dropped by a dead wielder, or pulled from a Hellspawn. Contact with skin transfers it.

Inheritance

Seven of the eight Sin alleles sit on the X chromosome. Males (XY) carry at most one. Females (XX) carry two but express only the dominant. The eighth, Desire, also sits on the X but is recessive below every one of the Seven.

Dominance hierarchy: Wrath > Pride > Greed > Gluttony > Lust > Envy > Sloth > Desire.

The suppressed Sin - a female carrying two different Sin alleles has both written into her genome. She expresses one. The other does nothing until she absorbs the card matching her recessive allele, at which point both are active simultaneously. Clans engineer this deliberately as insurance.

USING THE SIGILLUM

The Sigillum runs through the nervous system. The gene rewrites neural architecture so the brain can direct the domain the same way it directs a hand or a leg. The body has a ceiling. Pushing past it does biological damage.

Base Form

Always on. A Wrath bearer hits harder. A Sloth bearer is harder to push over. Baked into physiology.

Epithets

Shaped techniques. Require a spoken word or deliberate gesture. The brain needs a precise instruction to form a specific output. Without that, the power stays formless.

Cut off the hands or the voice and you cut off the Epithets.
A wielder who cannot speak or gesture falls back to base form only. Grappling matters. Positioning matters. A hand over someone's mouth is a real combat objective.

Weapons & Tattoos

Carve or burn the seal into a weapon and it channels the base Sin on contact. Rune weapons — inscribed by a trained Sin bearer, work in anyone's hands but only do one fixed function at one yield. A tattoo linked to the Sigillum through repeated deliberate use becomes a persistent Epithet shortcut. The symbol has to mean something to the wielder.

The nervous system has a rated capacity. Push past it and it degrades, sometimes permanently. Training raises the ceiling. Overuse without rest eats into it.

TIER 1

Newly awakened. Base form 15-20% above natural ceiling, inconsistent. A veteran soldier who keeps their head can kill a Tier 1. Epithets misfire as often as they land. Stage 1 overuse from moderate effort.

TIER 2

Base form consistent. Beats most sinless one-on-one. Numbers and terrain still matter. Handful of stable Epithets, limited range. Stamina is the constraint.

TIER 3

Base form is persistent advantage that compounds over time. Epithets wide-ranging, reliable, chainable. A Tier 3 alone against trained soldiers is a genuine threat.

TIER 4

Base form threatens groups of sinless and lower-tier wielders. Theoretical extensions accessible. Strategic asset, clans build plans around them.

TIER 5

Base form threatens other wielders. Theoretical extensions are operational. Limited by neural cost, not opposition. Very few reach this. Fewer stay long without consequence.

TIER X

Scale does not apply. Output cannot be placed on the gradient. One per generation at most. Cause not understood. The gene is the same. Something else is different.

THE EIGHT SEALS

Seven Sin Cards governing domains of physical manipulation, plus the Eighth, Desire, an ability shaped by the bearer's deepest want, fixed at awakening. Naoko's generation did not know about the Eighth. Juro's does.

(THERE'S ONE MORE NOW!!!)

DESIRE

WRATH - controls physical forces acting on matter: gravity, kinetic energy, friction, pressure, momentum. The wielder does not generate energy. They redirect and amplify what is already there. Force Manipulation.

Gravity control · Kinetic amplification · Shockwaves · Pressure fields · Friction and heat · Impact redirection

Fire is within base scope, rapid oxidation driven by heat and friction. Most Wrath wielders find it naturally through training. Most common extension.
Theoretical: atmospheric lightning via charge separation through directed force. Rare.

LUST - controls biological matter: living tissue, fluid, cellular processes. Anything that is or was part of a living body.

Bloodbending · Own blood as medium · Muscle and sinew control · Toxin extraction · Wound closure · Aging acceleration · Cellular acceleration

Blood is ~90% water. A Lust wielder who can direct blood can in theory extend that to water, further a fluid is from biological origin, harder to grip.
Theoretical: plant tissue control at cellular level. One documented case, partial.

SLOTH — controls the transition between movement and stillness, and the isolation of matter from its surroundings. Things stop. Things sink. Things become unreachable.

Momentum suspension · Non-Newtonian mass · Isolation fields · Weight increase · Force reduction · Personal immovability

Generated substance behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: hit it fast and it resists like solid, move through it slowly and it flows.
Theoretical: resonance with existing viscous matter (mud, tar, wet clay, slow stone). Practical combat application limited.

GREED - converts one form of energy into another. Nothing created nor destroyed. Input goes in, different output comes out. Functions like a transformer.

Kinetic to thermal · Thermal to pressure · Impact absorption · Force redirection · Probability tilting · Energy accumulation

Electricity is energy in transit. A Greed wielder who understands charge flow can absorb current and output it as kinetic force, or reverse.
Theoretical: conversion of chemical energy into kinetic or electrical output. Two documented cases.

GLUTTONY - removes things from physical space by consuming them. Light, heat, sound, kinetic force, biological energy. What is consumed ceases to exist in the affected area. Not an illusion. The photons are gone.

Light consumption · Heat absorption · Sound elimination · Impact nullification · Biological energy drain · Shadow control · Self as shadow

A Gluttony wielder who becomes shadow has consumed all light reflecting off their body. Shadow control follows, shadow is the absence of light.
Theoretical: localised vacuum through air consumption. Physically sound. Neural load required is past any confirmed case.

ENVY - copies physical reality. The wielder observes a force, structure, technique, or resistance and the body reproduces it. Envy does not invent. Every output is something it has already encountered.

Technique copying · Structural adaptation · Force equalisation · Resistance mirroring · Combat pattern replication

At high tier, an Envy wielder who observes another domain long enough may reproduce its effects without carrying that Sin.
Theoretical: full domain replication through sustained observation. Contested. If accurate, Envy is the only domain without a defined upper limit.

PRIDE - extends the self outward as physical force. Other domains act on external things; Pride makes the wielder's presence occupy space with mass and substance.

Presence as force · Radiance projection · Extended mass · Heat radiation · Will as physical matter · Concentrated light output

Light exerts measurable radiation pressure in sufficient concentration. Photons have momentum. A high-tier Pride wielder can push this past ambient radiance into something that physically moves matter at range. One confirmed case on record.
Theoretical: sustained concentrated photon pressure sufficient for direct force application at distance. Requires neural conditioning past Tier 4.

DESIRE - THE EIGHTH. An ability shaped by the bearer's deepest want, read from the unconscious at awakening, fixed for life. Not a domain. Ten inherited clans built around characteristic desires, clan environment conditions the unconscious from infancy, most bearers awaken with the family ability, exceptions break tradition. See THE TEN DESIRE CLANS above for per-clan abilities (Kurosawa telepathy, Morimoto poison, Tanaka animal communion, Shimizu time delay, Yamada illusion, Saitō weather, Nakamura memory, Fujimoto object summoning, Costa condition fulfillment, Romano speed). Accidentals awaken with idiosyncratic abilities the clans cannot reproduce. The original card was recovered from the body of a demon lord killed accidentally at the tail of the Honnō-ji incident in 1582.

HELLSPAWN & MERGES

The cards do not only rewrite human DNA. Before recorded history, cards made contact with animals and plants. What those hosts became are the creatures every culture on earth documented independently. Different names, same phenomena. Hellspawn.

Most Hellspawn carry no card. The two most common are imps and demons. Imps: small, varied, consistently unhuman. Demons: larger, less common. No two look alike. A demon is not a species. Every individual is structurally distinct. Hunters refer to demons they have killed by date and location, naming by appearance would require a new name every time.

Card-bearing Hellspawn are rarer. These are the ones folklore named. They drop their cards on death.

Demon lords, apex category. Card-bearing Natural Evils of enormous size and intelligence, capable of holding territory and commanding lesser Hellspawn. Twelve documented across recorded history. Five killed. Four contained long-term. Three active in 2008.

Tricksters, invisible to normal human perception. Sin bearers can sense them. Hunt both humans and wielders. Urban by preference. Hunting them is a specialisation with a high washout rate.

Natural Evils, large, visible, catastrophic. When active, governments call it a weather event or seismic anomaly. They do not carry cards. Current containment rate: ~60%. Recent: North Sea 1987 (public: freak storm surge, actual: surfacing mid-shipping-lane), Himalayan ridge 2003 (public: avalanche, actual: nine-day containment). Certain geographic regions produce them at rates that cannot be coincidence.

The Fallen, Class-F. Evil Sin bearers past the line between use and atrocity. ~300 alive globally. Senior students are never deployed against them. This is written policy. It has been broken. None of those students survived.

Merges

Every human-shaped creature in folklore is a human who absorbed two Sin cards. The body cannot hold two separate neural rewrites. The body compromises into a physical hybrid. Medusa. Werewolves. Vampires. Documented merges. Control varies. The second card does not care about the host's intentions.