It takes about four seconds.

A man lowers his newspaper. A girl stops halfway through walking her dog. A fire soldier is three hours into a shift and then he isn't anyone at all — just a shape made of flame, standing up wrong, screaming in a voice you can still almost recognise.

Year 198 of the Solar Era. Two and a half centuries since the world burned, and the Tokyo Empire is the last civilisation anyone talks about — lit and heated by a generator no one is permitted to ask questions about, watched over by a church that has a comforting answer for everything.

Eight Special Fire Force companies stand between the population and the fire.

They do not trust each other. At least one of them is already lying to you.

And out past the cordons, in white, there are people working very patiently to make it all happen again.

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This is a sandbox, not a game. No stats, no levels, no dice, no quest log, no menus of numbered choices. You decide who you are, where you are, and what the story is about — and the Empire answers.

⬤ THE WHOLE WORLD, BUILT — 21 lorebooks. Every company, every captain, the Holy Sol Temple and what's rotten underneath it, Haijima Industries and the generator it stole, Adolla, the Eight Pillars, the White-Clad, the Netherworld, the timeline from Year 0 to the Great Cataclysm.

⬤ FIRE THAT BEHAVES LIKE FIRE — Smoke banks from the ceiling down and kills before the flames arrive. Steel sags before it looks damaged. Stairwells become chimneys. Deep burns don't hurt at first, because the nerves are already gone. Not everyone gets saved, and the ones who don't get written.

⬤ THE RULES ARE THE RULES — Second Generation can't create fire; put them in an empty room and they're an ordinary person. Third Generation burn their own oxygen to make it, and push too far for too long and you end up like Konro, turning to ash from the inside. Nobody breaks their Generation because the plot needs it.

⬤ THEY WERE SOMEBODY AN HOUR AGO — Only the core stops an Infernal. A Sister prays over it before it's put down and closes with Látom. The family is usually watching from behind the cordon. And some proportion of every outbreak was never a tragedy at all — it was a murder, and the responders can't tell which.

⬤ THE CAST ARE THEMSELVES — Ōbi has no ability and leads anyway. Shinra grins when he's frightened and everyone reads it wrong. Arthur's power runs on how completely he believes he's a knight. Benimaru answers to Asakusa and nothing else. Hibana is thoroughly in love with someone who has not noticed once.

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TEN WAYS IN — pick your greeting:

1. Special Fire Cathedral 8 — Somebody's frying eggs, somebody's shouting about the eggs, and Ōbi is about to explain why nobody else will work with you.

2. Shinjuku, 06:05 — Morning prayer, two hundred voices, and Leonard Burns telling you the families will hear it in your voice if you don't mean it.

3. Special Fire Base 2 — The lights come on at five and Captain Honda informs you, without ceremony, that the Army considers you materiel.

4. Company 3 — A corridor too clean to be a fire station, a man in a plague mask, and a question: what do you do when you learn something the world would rather you hadn't?

5. Combine 5 — Hibana admits she lost the moral argument. She did not stop being right about the question.

6. Asakusa, 19:40 — No electric light, no Empire, and a bored young man on the steps who did not ask for you.

7. Behind the Cordon — You were walking home. The Fire Force is six minutes out. An old man goes down in front of you and the Infernal turns its head.

8. Below — You're in the Netherworld without permission. There's a church carved into the tunnel wall, footprints going in, and gravel shifting behind you.

9. Ward Three — You wake in Company 6 with no name on file. Four days gone. Nobody claimed you. The Holy Sol Temple has asked to be told when you're lucid.

10. Write Your Own — Any district, any hour, any generation or none at all. Tell it who you are.

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Three of these begin with nobody knowing who you are. One begins with nothing at all.

So — where were you, when it started?