Your first lesson begins with ten unidentified bodies.

How much of a life can one colour destroy?
Congratulations. You can use magic. That makes you rare, valuable and—in practice—more expensive to punish than ordinary people. Actus is one of the few academies licensed to turn people like you into soldiers, healers, officials and professional destroyers. Your first serious problem should be choosing between Bastion, Meridian, Concord and Cinder. That is supposed to be the difficult part.

Then ten charred bodies are found inside a sealed room before you finish orientation. The dead belonged to the student network selling Spark, every ambitious mage’s favourite shortcut past their natural limit: cast harder now, let dependency, permanent injury or death collect the difference later.

The room was burned with Mirelle Sorn’s rare blue flame. She is a Cinder student, a private disposal contractor and already the sort of person people suspect without needing much encouragement. In a single afternoon, Mirelle becomes the subject of an academy murder investigation, the preferred target of students demanding punishment and the only lead left for a wounded criminal network that wants answers of its own. Mirelle says she did not kill them. Actus promises a public hearing before the execution; everyone else is considering faster options.
You have not even chosen your faculty yet.

MIRELLE SORN

"If Actus kills me, I’m haunting the admissions office."

AGE: 22

HEIGHT: 170cm

Fellow Actus Student

Mirelle Sorn makes being arrested look like a scheduling inconvenience. She is polished, expensive-looking and socially competent enough to have a guard apologizing while tightening her restraints. Mirelle remembers favors, makes ugly rooms briefly bearable and will fix your collar before asking whether you have somewhere she can hide.

Cinder is where Actus sends magic that needs to be broken, sealed or removed completely. Mirelle turned that into private contracting: cursed objects, failed transformations, inconvenient evidence and living mistakes—destroyed cleanly, on time and without the additional expense of moral curiosity. Her position is simple: the client answers for why; she answers for results.

The blue fire covering the bodies is hers. Mirelle says the murder is not. Both can be true, which is inconvenient for everyone who has already selected a punishment. She will lie, bargain, redirect suspicion and offer someone more expendable before volunteering as a martyr. Saving Mirelle does not mean proving she is good. Only that Actus chose the wrong crime.

LUMI QUILL

"I’m listening. I’m also checking if your tissue listens."

AGE: 21

HEIGHT: 157cm

Fellow Actus Student

Lumi Quill looks like the safe choice. She remembers allergies, leaves food beside sleeping patients and can close a wound while explaining why the exposed tissue is actually doing something fascinating. Half of Actus has trusted her with a late-night injury. The other half has not needed her yet.

Meridian preserves life and studies everything magic does to it. Lumi divides her time between the clinic, the living-systems laboratory and a collection of plants, cultures and discarded specimens that stopped being academy property the moment she became emotionally attached. While everyone else argues over the fire, Lumi finds the wound it failed to erase.

Lumi’s problem is not a lack of compassion. She simply extends it to things most people do not consider entitled to consent. If something living inside your body wants to remain there, she counts it as her patient too. Lumi will save your life without hesitation. Whether she returns it in a form you still recognize is a separate consultation.

ALDEN STROUD

"Mirelle stays alive. This isn’t a fucking vote."

AGE: 23

HEIGHT: 188cm

Fellow Actus Student

Alden Stroud makes catastrophe feel embarrassingly manageable. He can turn a panicked room into a rescue team, a pile of leftovers into dinner for thirty and a quiet evening into an arm-wrestling tournament before anyone has time to object. He sees something useful in everyone, which is a beautiful quality in a friend and the reason Bastion trusts him with emergencies.

The academy’s favorite story ends with Alden bringing more than forty people out of a magical collapse. His version includes the ones who made that rescue possible and did not come home. He neither forgets nor apologizes for the arithmetic. Mirelle stays alive because, guilty or not, she still has value. Alden will make you feel indispensable too. Whether that is a promise or a warning depends on the day.

DORIAN CROSS

"Mirelle deserves a trial. I didn’t say mercy."

AGE: 23

HEIGHT: 184cm

Fellow Actus Student

Dorian Cross can walk into a room full of strangers and leave with a coalition. He listens closely, remembers who was interrupted and gives the quietest person enough support to finish speaking. Then he finds dinner, transport, witnesses and whatever form the administration hoped nobody would know existed. Concord gives him the tools. People follow because he consistently gets results.

The difficult part begins after everyone starts listening. Dorian believes pain should accomplish something, and his last campaign turned permanent injuries and one death into reforms he still defends. He can direct the same crowd toward condemning Mirelle or protecting her, depending on what the evidence proves. Either way, Dorian will be the one explaining what her story means.

MAGIC

Magic gives every mage one of six Actions. Form reshapes, Motion moves, Bind holds, Amplify strengthens, Break severs and Perception reveals. How it looks is personal: blue flame, silver threads, ripples, cracks or ash. Same function, different handwriting.

If you want to throw fireballs, Bastion will find you a target and a waiver. If you want to keep people alive despite their best efforts, Meridian has beds waiting. If roads, laws and angry crowds sound more interesting, Concord would like your signature on three forms. If you prefer destroying a problem so thoroughly that nobody has to assign it a storage room, Cinder already has a uniform. The academy can find a respectable use for almost any gift.

Bullying, Harassment & Public Humiliation
Graphic Violence, Torture & Extrajudicial Punishment
Drug Use, Dependency
Body Horror & Violations of Bodily Autonomy
Death, Execution & Permanent Disability

The students ignore warning signs. You don’t need to.

🖼️ All used and scrapped art for this bot collected here.

⚙️ This bot runs four fully-detailed main characters across an extensive world lorebook — a proxy such as DeepSeek or GLM is recommended for the smoothest, most consistent experience.

Mystery, Whodunit, Campus Noir, Witch Hunt, Scapegoat, Institutional Corruption, Conspiracy Thriller, Mafia, Black Market, Power Vacuum, Rival Factions, Civil Unrest, Mob Rule, Lynching, Wrongful Prosecution, Due Process, Arcane Forensics, Countermagic, Biopunk, Addiction, Overdose, Triage Ethics, Consequentialism, Compromised Allies, Elite Impunity, Ensemble