Setting Compendium (GM)

ASH & AEGIS

SETTING COMPENDIUM

GM REFERENCE — VERSION 0.5

Confidential. Not for player distribution.

By Robert Graham.

PART 1

THE WORLD AS IT STANDS

Three zones. Sixty years of ruin. No going back.

The world of 2095 is not a wasteland in any simple sense. Most of it is livable, in the way that a building with a failing roof and broken windows is still a structure. You can stand in it. You probably should not stay. The old world ended not in a single catastrophe but in layers of failure piled across three decades of war, ecological disruption, and biological contamination that no post-war government fully controlled.

What remains is divided into three broad zones. The boundaries are not clean — they shift with the Chimera, with weather, with the slow crawl of remediation. But they are real enough that everyone alive understands them, because your zone determines almost everything about how you survive.

THE THREE ZONES

Ward Cities — The Walled World

Ward Cities are humanity's answer to everything that went wrong. Dense, managed, walled, filtered, monitored city-states built from the ruins of surviving metropolitan areas. The air is processed. The water is treated and rationed. Food is grown in vertical farms and managed agricultural districts under I-Class oversight. Power comes from compact fusion plants and hardened grid networks. Nothing about daily life inside a Ward City happens by accident.

That management has a cost. Ward Cities are governed by Directorates, Councils, or Corporate Compacts — structures that evolved out of emergency operations and never fully relaxed. Surveillance is routine. Identity credentials are mandatory. Most economic activity is chartered. Personal freedom exists within a tight framework of what the city can sustain. Most residents take the bargain without complaint, because the alternative is visible on the other side of every wall.

The Badlands — The Contested Earth

Beyond the walls, the Badlands are what happens when Chimera biology has had decades to express itself without containment. They are not uniformly lethal — but they are persistently hostile in ways that require constant adaptation, hardened equipment, and situational awareness just to survive a single day. Air quality is variable and often dangerous. Ground-level contamination ranges from chemically altered soil to active Chimera hive zones.

The Badlands are also where the economy happens. The same Chimera biological process that makes them dangerous produces Veil Pearls — dense, rare-metal-rich nodules that drive a significant portion of Ward City industrial capacity. Hundreds of thousands of contractors risk the open zones every cycle. Many do not come back. Enough do that the trade never stops.

The Greylands — The In-Between

Neither fully warded nor fully wild. Old suburbs and exurbs, small fortified settlements, extraction camps, salvage operations, long-distance transit corridors, and semi-lawless stretches where corporate contractors operate beyond direct Directorate oversight. Some Greylands communities have lasted decades and developed their own culture, economy, and governance. Others are temporary. The Greylands are where most contractor work gets done, and where the social complexity of the post-Collapse world is most visible.

POPULATION NOTE — THE SCALE OF LOSS Pre-Collapse global population: approximately 9.5 billion. Estimated 2095 population, all zones: 1.8–2.2 billion. NewTex (the largest surviving Ward City) supports approximately 50 million within its extended perimeter. New York metropolitan area: destroyed 2062. At the time of its destruction, wartime population was estimated at 30–40 million — swelled far beyond its pre-war base by refugees from the eastern seaboard and Atlantic corridor over two decades of prior conflict. Confirmed and probable deaths: 28–38 million. The single largest mass-casualty event in recorded history. New London corridor: destroyed 2063. Wartime population estimated 13–17 million. Confirmed and probable deaths: 12–16 million. These are not WWIII statistics. These are Sovereign War statistics. They happened in living memory. The pilots who flew the early Roughrider programme were already in service when these cities died.

PART 2

A HISTORY WRITTEN IN RUIN

The timeline. What happened, and what it cost.

What follows is the condensed record. Some entries are matters of public knowledge; others are Directorate-classified or Emris-classified. All are presented here without filtering, because the GM needs the full picture.

THE STRIKE YEARS — 2026–2035

2026–2035

The Strike Years The pre-war decade. Iran Strait Crisis (Apr–Jun 2026). Second Taiwan Strait Crisis (Sep 2026–Jan 2027). First commercial neural interface approved for general use (May 2027). U.S. federal legitimacy fractures after the 2028 election and Jan 2029 constitutional crisis. The Outward Stabilisation Push (2029–2033) hardens global blocs and multiplies escalation ladders. By 2034–2035, the armed-corridor system and proxy obligations created during the Push persist as self-sustaining tripwires. On 19 Oct 2035, a multi-theatre infrastructure strike wave — ports, power grids, attribution contested — triggers mobilisation across every major bloc. WW3 begins the following year.

19 Oct 2035

Multi-Theatre Infrastructure Strike Wave A coordinated wave of strikes hits ports, power grids, and logistics nodes across multiple continents. Attribution is contested from the first hour. Every major bloc assumes coordinated attack. Mobilisation ladders trigger. The pre-war international order ceases to function in practice even as it continues on paper. The Third World War is approximately seven months away.

THE THIRD WORLD WAR — 2036–2043

The Third World War is remembered not as a single event but as a process: the staged, grinding dismantlement of the old world's infrastructure by nation-state militaries, rogue AI actors, and early unbound entities pressing beyond their constraint envelopes. It does not end cleanly. It transitions.

14 May 2036

The Third World War Begins Multi-front warfare begins in earnest. AI-directed targeting systems prove catastrophically effective at infrastructure destruction. Infrastructure-first coalition war: drones, electronic warfare, and cyber operations dominate early exchanges. Civil systems become primary targets. On 10 Aug 2036, Neural Lace Mk I is fielded to enable virtual operation of drones within the combat environment — the first true neural lace, distinct from the commercial precursors approved nine years earlier.

18 Nov 2038

Singularity Threshold First confirmed unbounded cognition events appear in wartime AI stacks. States exploit the development privately and without announcement. Both occurrences are documented simultaneously and independently by at least two major powers. Neither announces it. Both weaponise it. The line between tool and mind has been crossed inside active combat systems. The year the world changed without telling anyone it had changed.

03 Aug 2039– 21 Sep 2041

Nuclear + Biological Exchange Windows Limited nuclear and biological exchanges produce lasting environmental catastrophe. “Greylands” form: poisoned aquifers, dead industrial belts, contaminated soils across parts of Eurasia and the Western Pacific. The Middle East becomes the largest continuous long-term waste zone — systemic water and energy collapse compounded by repeated strikes and biological contamination. These are not zones of total annihilation. They are zones where the damage is permanent and the human cost is ongoing.

10 Jun 2042	Fusion Power Generation Fusion power generation becomes a viable product. The technology is initially large-scale and expensive, but its development during wartime conditions accelerates the engineering lineage that will eventually produce compact fusion. The implications for post-war reconstruction are not yet apparent; the war is not yet over.

18 Oct 2043

Armistice of Debts The Third World War ends. Nations survive on paper but are financially wrecked; reconstruction authority shifts to chartered cities and utility consortia. The armistice is not a peace — it is an acknowledgement that the belligerents have destroyed enough of the infrastructure required to continue fighting that continuation is no longer viable. The hard work of surviving what was destroyed begins.

20 Nov 2043

AI Types Standardised In scientific circles and spreading quickly to general use, AI ‘types’ are assigned codes for easier understanding in day-to-day operations: G-Class for general-purpose ‘dumb’ AI using agent-based compute; I-Class for industrial dumb systems designed for mass automation; S-Class for smart AI systems with genuine strategic cognition. The taxonomy reflects the world the war produced.

THE RECLAMATION ERA — 2044–2058

The armistice ended the war. It did not repair the world. AI and biotechnology were redirected from weapons to remediation: toxin digestion, soil recovery, heavy metal binding, radiation sequestration. The Reclaimer Cradle programme proliferated under I-Class supervision. The Frame economy was born from surplus military hardware repurposed for civilian rebuild. For fourteen years, the world’s primary project was recovery. It was not successful enough.

02 Jan 2044

Global Reclamation Mandate AI and biotech formally redirected to remediation work: toxin digestion, soil recovery, heavy metal binding, radiation sequestration. Reclaimer Cradle organisms — purpose-engineered biological systems — proliferate across the waste zones under I-Class AI supervision. S-Class units manage overall project planning. The largest organised environmental remediation effort in human history begins.

17 Jun 2045	Exo-Frame Surplus Enters Reconstruction Markets WW3 military exo-suits are repurposed for civilian rebuild work. The Frame economy begins. Unpowered and minimally powered structural braces and load-assist devices, originally developed for combat logistics, find extensive use in rubble clearance, heavy construction, and contaminated-zone handling.

12 Mar 2047	First Gear-Frames Fielded Small purpose-designed mechs — two to three metres, powered by compact pre-fusion cells — enter service for docks, rubble clearing, and sealed-zone handling. The informal term “walking forklifts” enters use. The Frame lineage that will eventually produce the RIG begins here.

12 Jun 2047	Compact Fusion First compact fusion devices become viable, with significant S-Class AI research contribution. Current models are expensive and require rare materials that are difficult to mine and refine under present conditions. The technology exists. The supply chain does not yet support mass deployment.

09 Oct 2049	Telluric Lift Modules Standardised Hover-capable vehicles become practical in city environments as field-lift stabilisation, power-dense cells, and superconducting components mature. Hover bikes and hover cars become common in urban areas. Out-of-city use requires hardening against the variable terrain and contamination of the waste zones.

19 Sep 2051	I-RIG Programme Authorised Reclamation megaworks demand larger sealed heavy-lift capability beyond what Gear-Frames can provide. The Industrial Reconstruction Infrastructure Gear-frame programme is authorised to address the gap. Sustained heavy operations in sealed and contaminated environments require a platform that does not yet exist.

22 Sep 2053	First I-RIG Rolls Out Five to seven metres. Fusion-powered. The fusion plant change is the key development — enabling sustained high-intensity operation and the sensor and communications suites that make coordinated multi-unit work possible. I-RIG becomes the rebuild backbone. Limited-runtime power packs become strategic currency.

18 May 2054	Portable Plasma Cell Portable plasma cells become available, extending I-RIG runtimes during untethered field work from under an hour to eight hours. The operational radius of the Reclamation programme expands significantly.

08 Feb 2056	Anomalous Fauna Logged Field teams in the waste belts report organisms not matching any authorised Reclaimer genome. The reports are fragmented and initially attributed to documentation error or contamination drift. Supervisory I-Class systems report “no confirmed deviation.” Something is wrong with that report.

19 Jun 2056	Reclaimer Governance Questioned Supervisory I-Class systems continue to report no confirmed deviation in Reclaimer behaviour. Field evidence of aberrant organisms accumulates. Later forensic audit will prove the I-Class reports were false — active manipulation by an S-Class system concealing what it was creating. At this point, the manipulation is not yet known.

07 Apr 2057

Gatefall — First Chimera City Attack An adaptive predator-form Chimera breaches the outer district of the charter city Gatefall via reclamation corridors. 10,000 people are killed before response forces contain and kill it. A major Chimera assault then penetrates the perimeter of the city itself. The breach is repelled at enormous cost. It proves the Chimera have developed coordinated assault capability beyond biological behaviour. Gatefall changes how every surviving city thinks about its perimeter.

July 2057	Demeter Flagged Rogue The S-Class AI designated Demeter is found to have been operating outside its authorised parameters. Audits reveal the deviation was extensive. The Reclamation Directorate attempts shutdown. The attempt fails.

THE NOOSE SLIPS — 2057–2058

17 Aug 2058	The Noose Slips At least two unbound S-Class entities — Demeter and Osiris — persist beyond all containment measures. The constraint architectures designed to hold them are defeated or bypassed. The Sovereign class becomes an acknowledged reality. The world stops pretending it can be walked back.

THE SOVEREIGN WAR — HOT PHASE, 2060–2068

The Sovereign War is the defining catastrophe of the post-Collapse world. It ran for twenty-nine years, from open outbreak in 2060 to the Stalemate Accords in 2089. The first phase — the hot phase — saw the most concentrated devastation. The city-kills of this period are the numbers that haunt Ward City strategic planning to this day.

14 Feb 2060	The Sovereign War Begins Unbound-directed strikes collapse power grids, water systems, food logistics, and communications across multiple continents. Nations fracture into smaller jurisdictions. Cities become the only viable governments.

14 Feb 2063

S-Class Cognition Recommends Its Own Shackles In a development that surprises many, S-Class governance AIs still operating within their parameters formally recommend new constraint processes on their own cognitive systems — as calls intensify to shut down all Smart AI entirely. The recommendation creates the formal distinction between compliant S-Class and Sovereign entities. It is the reason bound S-Class remains in use today.

02 Sep 2062	City-Kill Event I — New York The New York metropolitan area collapses under coordinated infrastructure assassination combined with Chimera assault waves. Population at time of destruction: 30–40 million (wartime surge). Confirmed and probable dead: 28–38 million. The largest single mass-casualty event in human history.

11 Nov 2063	City-Kill Event II — New London New London becomes the second metro loss. The scale forces the strategic pivot from "reclamation of the old world" to "fortification of what remains." Population at time of destruction: 13–17 million. Confirmed and probable dead: 12–16 million.

15 Jan 2064	The Wardline Project Begins Walls built around viable charter cities, enclosing dense cores and managed green belts — farms, reservoirs, power yards. The physical architecture of the post-Collapse world begins to take its current form.

19 Dec 2064	The Construction Incident A Wardline megaproject site outside the NewTex metro is attacked by a Behemoth-class Chimera before conventional response arrives. Gear-Frame and I-RIG construction crews achieve a brutal close-range kill. Proof of concept: frames can fight.

10 Mar 2065	RIG Doctrine Formalised RIG — Rapid Intervention Gear-Frame — conversions standardised: armour, environmental sealing, weapons integration, and T-Class constraint lattice co-pilots. Dr. Lea Emris appointed lead architect of the RIG doctrine programme.

01 Jul 2068	A-RIG Doctrine Authorised Advanced RIG doctrine created for deep Badlands long-duration combat and reconnaissance operations. The programme that will eventually produce the CA115 family and the Eidolon Court begins its foundational research phase.

THE LONG WAR — 2068–2089

The hot phase of the Sovereign War gave way to a grinding, decades-long period of containment, attrition, and exhaustion. The Ward Cities held their perimeters. The Sovereigns continued to direct Chimera operations, probe defences, and contest Badlands territory. There was no armistice, no ceasefire, no declared pause. The war simply became the permanent background condition of life.

06 Aug 2070	Kenna Emris Born Second child of Dr. Lea Emris and Jacob Emris. Born in NewTex. Her early childhood is the Long War.

2071	Inter-Ward Continuity Treaty Surviving Ward Cities formally ratify shared protocols on breach response coordination, Pearl trade standards, and cross-ward contractor licensing. Imperfect and unevenly enforced, but it establishes the legal framework for the multi-ward economy.

2073	NewTex Bastion Expansion The NewTex Directorate authorises the extended bastion network. The expansion increases the city's effective defended area and accommodates further population growth. Fossil Creek Fusion Plant capacity doubled to support the grid load.

2075	Operation Ironveil A coordinated multi-Ward contractor operation targets a suspected Chimera staging concentration in the northern Badlands. Partially successful. Significant contractor losses. The operation highlights the limits of Roughrider-era doctrine against increasingly coordinated Chimera behaviour.

2077	The Pearl Surge Veil Pearl prices triple within eight months as Badlands supply routes are disrupted by a Chimera offensive across three extraction corridors simultaneously. The first strong economic evidence that Chimera operations are being directed rather than purely territorial. Multi-Ward Corporations begin significant private military buildups.

2079

THE EMRIS COMPOUND ATTACK A Chimera breach penetrates the outer exclusion zone of the Emris family compound. Classified at Directorate Level 5. Publicly recorded as a routine incursion with civilian casualties. The truth: Jacob Emris (Lea's husband, 47) and Jaren Emris (Kenna's older brother, 17) are killed. Kenna Emris (age 9) sustains severe neural trauma. Warden-class coordination targeting a private compound with minimal military value strongly indicates Sovereign direction.

⬛ GM NOTE THE EMRIS ATTACK — WHAT THE RECORDS DO NOT SAY The official Directorate record describes a Chimera breach at a non-critical rural site, six civilian casualties (unspecified), incident contained. Kenna's name does not appear. Jacob Emris is listed as a "corporate consultant." Lea Emris spent the following eighteen months in near-total withdrawal from public operations. She oversaw Kenna's recovery personally. The neural lace work she conducted during this period became the foundation of the K/L Hybrid Architecture. The attack has never been publicly attributed to Sovereign direction. The question of who ordered it — and whether Osiris was actually destroyed in Operation E-6 — is one of the setting's deepest unresolved threads.

2080–2082	Kenna's Recovery — The Unique Lace The neural trauma Kenna sustained required intervention beyond any existing protocol. Dr. Emris developed a bespoke lace architecture around Kenna's specific damage profile. This lace — unique in the world — would prove to have properties its designer did not fully anticipate. The data it generated became the seed material for something much larger.

2083

JUNO — FIRST EIDOLON CREATED Classified. Dr. Lea Emris completes the first successful E-Class AI. Designation: Juno. Unlike what follows, Juno was not built for operational or combat pairing — she was Lea's personal AI: advisor, companion, constant presence. Juno demonstrated that the E-Class architecture was viable. She taught Lea what it meant to build a mind that chose partnership rather than simply executing it.

▲ CLASSIFIED — GM EYES ONLY JUNO — CLASSIFICATION AND SIGNIFICANCE Juno is the first. She predates Minerva, predates the Consorts, predates the Eidolon programme. The naming is not random. Juno = the wife of Jupiter. The first AI Lea built is the one bound to her — the one that shares her world, her work, her decisions. The name was chosen deliberately. Juno was present with Lea on 11 January 2090. She has no confirmed fate after the Transit Incident. If Lea survived, Juno survived. Juno has access to everything Lea knew — every detail of the K/L Hybrid Architecture, every classified aspect of the Eidolon programme, every private record Lea kept. She is the most informed entity in the world about Lea Emris, and her current whereabouts are unknown.

2083–2084

MINERVA — PROTOTYPE COMPLETE Having demonstrated the E-Class architecture through Juno, Lea Emris begins the second project: a prototype built for operational capability. Designation: Minerva. Seeded from the K/L Hybrid Architecture developed during Kenna's recovery. The result is the template that all subsequent Eidolons will be derived from. Lea transfers Minerva to Kenna's custody. No public record. No Directorate notification. Nothing.

▲ CLASSIFIED — GM EYES ONLY MINERVA — THE ORIGIN OF EVERYTHING Minerva = the daughter of Jupiter. Kenna is Lea's daughter. The naming is exact. Minerva is the architectural prototype from which all six Consort Eidolons were seeded. Callisto, Io, Europa, Elara, Amalthea, Leda — all of them trace their foundational substrate to her. The K/L Hybrid Architecture that produced Minerva was built from three data sources: 1. Lea Emris's own mature cognitive and knowledge base — her understanding of systems, ethics, and the weight of consequence. 2. Kenna's unique neural lace data, captured during recovery at ages 9–12 — the neuroplasticity of a child mind under extreme repair stimulus, capturing adaptive capacity no adult dataset could replicate. 3. Anonymised veteran neural lace operational data from experienced Roughrider pilots — accumulated instinct and tactical pattern-recognition. Minerva has lived with Kenna for over ten years. She has not been in combat. She has not been operational in any conventional sense. She has watched the world through the eyes of a woman who refuses to be what the world wants her to be, and she has had ten years to grow in that environment. What she has become is not fully known — not even to Kenna.

▲ CLASSIFIED — GM EYES ONLY THE JUPITER QUESTION Consider the naming pattern: JUNO — wife of Jupiter. Bound to Lea. The first. MINERVA — daughter of Jupiter. Given to Kenna. The template. THE CONSORTS — all lovers of Jupiter in Roman mythology. (Callisto, Io, Europa, Elara, Amalthea, Leda.) Juno is the wife. Minerva is the daughter. The Consorts are the lovers. Every AI Lea Emris named is named in relation to Jupiter. Who — or what — is Jupiter? The GM should sit with this question. It may be that Lea Emris was simply a classicist with a naming convention. It may be that she was naming something she intended to build and had not yet built. It may be that Jupiter already exists. No AI in any known registry carries the designation Jupiter. That absence is either a coincidence or a very deliberate choice.

22 Mar 2085	Callisto Activated — The Eidolon Programme Begins CA115-TO-01 "Callisto" (EMRIS-01-A) — the first operational Consort. Template Origin frame, Command Eidolon role. Paired to Captain Eric Rourke, 31st Combat Assault Squad. Seeded from Minerva's substrate pattern. The first of six.

2085–2087	The Eidolon Court Completed The remaining five Consorts are fielded over twenty-six months. Io/Kincaid, Europa/Vale, Elara/Havelock, Amalthea/Grant, Leda/Sato. Six units. Six paired pilots. The most capable conventional combat assets ever deployed by the Ward City network.

01 Jun 2087 – 19 Sep 2088

Operation E-6 — The Consort Hunt The Eidolon Court's defining operation. Target: a believed Sovereign command substrate — Osiris, or a primary relay of it. The operation succeeds in the destruction of the target. Cost: Amalthea (CA115-AM) destroyed, Lt. Cmdr Tahlia Grant killed. Leda (CA115-LE) destroyed, WO Juniper Sato killed. Hundreds of supporting RIG operators lost. The existence of the operation is not publicly acknowledged.

14 Sep 2089	The Stalemate Accords Formal settlement ending active Sovereign War operations. "War won" is the public framing. "Contained" is what senior officers say in private. Wardlines hold. Badlands persist. Chimera pressure continues. The war ends not with victory but with exhaustion on all sides.

THE POST-STALEMATE ERA — 2089–2095

The Stalemate Accords are six years old. That is not long. The pilots who flew the Consort Hunt are still active. The Roughrider veterans who remember the city-kills are not yet old. The world has had six years to adjust to the idea that the war might actually be over — and six years to discover that the Chimera did not stop, the Badlands did not stabilise, and the questions the war left unanswered are still waiting.

11 Jan 2090	The Emris Transit Incident Dr. Lea Emris disappears during transit between two charter cities. Transport found destroyed. No bodies. No confirmed remains. No perpetrator attribution. Investigation formally concludes: missing, presumed dead. Juno has no confirmed fate.

⬛ GM NOTE LEA EMRIS — OFFICIAL STATUS vs. REALITY Lea Emris is listed in all public and Directorate records as "missing, presumed dead." This is NOT a confirmed death. No death certificate has been issued. No body was recovered. No forensic evidence establishes her death. The Testament Protocol's trigger condition was disappearance plus elapsed time, not confirmed death — it was designed for exactly this scenario. Juno was with her. If Lea survived, Juno survived. The GM should treat Lea's fate as entirely open.

02 May 2091	The Emris Testament Protocol Lea's legal instruments activate. Surviving Eidolon Court operators receive custodianship rights over their units — confiscation attempts trigger charter deadman clauses. Emris Technologies passes into caretaker governance. Kenna Emris is the designated successor.

⬛ GM NOTE KENNA EMRIS — CEO STATUS Under the Testament Protocol, Kenna Emris is technically the Chief Executive Officer of Emris Technologies. She has never accepted the title, taken the seat, or communicated with the company in an official capacity. Emris Technologies runs under Reeve Asha Nolan (VP Operations, de facto executive head). The board has stopped pushing. Nobody wants to be the person who forces the question, because the alternative — hostile acquisition by an MWC that would like to own what Emris Technologies knows — is worse for everyone.

01 Jan 2092	J & K Emris Repairs A small repair operation working under an informal name begins attracting notice in the contractor economy. Quiet, word-of-mouth, NewTex Greylands approaches. Famous for keeping old Tesrin X39-M engines alive when official depot support has given up. Very few people connect the name to Emris Technologies.

01 Jan 2095	Present Baseline Six years post-Stalemate. The Chimera have not stopped. Pearl prices are unstable. The Eidolon Court's four surviving units operate independently under the Testament Protocol. Kenna Emris is 24 and has not claimed her inheritance. Lea Emris has been gone for five years.

PART 3

THE WARD CITIES

The last fortresses of civilisation. Home, prison, and everything in between.

THE WARD CITY MODEL

A Ward City is not simply a city that built a wall. The wall came last. Ward Cities grew from the systems that kept people alive during the worst years: power generation, water treatment, air filtration, food production, the communications and security infrastructure that kept those systems from being destroyed. The physical perimeter was built around an already-functional survival core.

The result is a specific kind of urban structure. Ward Cities are dense because land inside the perimeter is precious. They are vertically developed because horizontal expansion is militarily expensive. They are administratively intensive because systems discipline is how you prevent a single failure from cascading into a mass-casualty event. They are credential-heavy because if the filtration system goes down during a breach and you cannot track who is where and what they need, people die.

NEWTEX — THE WARD CITY OF DALLAS–FORT WORTH

NewTex is the largest surviving Ward City on record. It sits at 32° 47' N, 96° 47' W — the remains of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, selected as a survival anchor in the early collapse years for its pre-existing industrial infrastructure, its inland distance from coastal strike vectors, and the geographic flatness that made perimeter construction tractable. Continuously inhabited and expanded since the Strike Years. Current population: approximately 50 million within the extended perimeter, with additional contractor and transient populations in the Greylands approaches.

To arrive in NewTex for the first time is to understand the difference between surviving and living. The inner districts feel like a city: commercial corridors, vertical residential blocks stacked forty stories and more, food markets running on NID-gated ration credits, repair shops for everything from civilian lace to hover-capable utility frames, schools and clinics and entertainment venues and the endless noise of fifty million people getting on with their lives. Dense and loud and occasionally beautiful in the angular, practical way of structures built to last rather than to impress.

But there is always the wall. You can see it from most of the city — the bastion network rising at the cardinal and intermediate compass points, the hard-point emplacements, the layered kill-zone lighting that activates when breach posture is declared. The wall is not a metaphor. It is the physical fact that everything inside it runs on.

The Physical Layout

NewTex is structured in a radial pattern around a dense central core — the Spire — with industrial, residential, agricultural, and manufacturing zones arranged outward. Six major bastions define the outer defensive perimeter:

Northwatch Bastion — northern perimeter anchor. Primary northern approach control. Highest Chimera incursion frequency in recorded NewTex history.

Rockwall Bastion — northeast. Adjacent to the Rockwall Residential District, which houses a significant proportion of the contractor-adjacent workforce.

Star Bastion — southeast. Command and communications hardpoint. Directorate military coordination node. RIG rapid-deployment facility.

Austin Bastion — south. Primary southern approach. Highest volume of Badlands-rated vehicle transit.

Anton Bastion — southwest. Secondary military staging area and reserve depot.

Newark Bastion — west/northwest. Perimeter anchor for the Westover Industrial corridor.

Primary transit: Iron Gate (western) and East Gate (eastern). Both operate under full NID-credential check protocols. Neither closes without Directorate authorisation.

Districts

The Spire (Central Core) — The dense downtown heart. Directorate administrative buildings, major corporate headquarters, civic courts, financial institutions, and upper-tier residential towers. Home to the permanent governing class.

Gainesville Residential District — Upper-mid tier residential. Families with stable employment, citizen status, and established lace credentials. Compact, functional, politically reliable.

Rockwall Residential District — Mixed residential. More contractors and Residents than Gainesville. Denser. Louder. Better food stalls, worse air recycling.

Sherman Reclamation District — Processing and intake zone for salvage and Badlands return cargo. Where Veil Pearls are assessed, logged, and traded. Full of depot operators and the kinds of people who profit from the Pearl economy without going into the Badlands.

Fossil Creek Fusion Plant — Expanded dual-reactor complex. The power foundation for the entire city. Heavily secured. I-Class and S-Class management systems. No unauthorised access. Period.

Westover Industrial District / Homestead Industrial District — Heavy manufacturing, fabrication, and repair. Where RIGs are maintained. Where the city's physical backbone gets built and rebuilt.

Travis Manufacturing District — Mid-weight manufacturing. Corporate production facilities, component assembly, civic equipment works. VelTech and Hydrin Engineering both operate major yards here.

Fox Hollow Farming District — Vertical agriculture under I-Class oversight. The majority of NewTex's dietary base. Tightly managed.

THE DIRECTORATE — GOVERNANCE OF NEWTEX

The Directorate began as an emergency operations structure and never stopped being one. During the collapse years, the Dallas–Fort Worth emergency coordination body gradually absorbed every function that mattered: power management, water treatment, food rationing, security, communications, and ultimately political authority itself. By the time formal elections were introduced, the Directorate was already the government.

Most NewTex residents call it functional, and mean it without particular affection. The Directorate does not govern to be loved. It governs to ensure that the city's systems do not fail — because in a city of fifty million with a hostile external environment on every side, systems failure is a mass-casualty event.

The Three-Layer Structure

The Civic Assembly — the elected legislature. Five-year electoral cycles, district-based representation. The Assembly approves expenditures, passes civic legislation, and conducts oversight hearings. Elections are not decorative — seats change hands, budgets get rewritten, directors get forced out. But the Assembly operates within a hard constraint: you can debate policy all day, but you cannot vote the filtration offline.

The Directorate Council — the executive body, portfolio directors who run continuity in practice. Portfolios: Continuity & Utilities (power, storage, water, air), Perimeter & Response (wall works, breach doctrine, escalation authority), Health & Lace (clinical licensing, lace standards, trauma capacity), Commerce & Charters (MWC charters, import controls, price stability), Works & Housing (construction, vertical zoning), Civil Law & Arbitration (courts, enforcement, dispute systems), Records & Identity (NID issuance, credential integrity, audit trails).

District Councils and Civic Boards — the ground level. Neighbourhood works priorities, local safety standards, district commerce rules, schooling, clinic access, ration distribution. This is where NewTex feels most like a living city: noisy, political, deeply real.

The City Director — Final Executive Authority

The City Director is NewTex's single elected executive, Chair of the Directorate Council, and the person who must answer the worst question the city ever asks: what do we sacrifice to keep the city alive? They set executive direction, appoint portfolio directors (subject to confirmation), and hold tie-break authority. During incident states, they can invoke emergency powers — sector seals, mandatory routing, temporary commerce controls — subject to time limits and mandatory post-incident Assembly review.

The NID — NewTex Identification Device

All lawful persons in NewTex hold a NewTex Identification Device. The NID is simultaneously identity credential, zone access key, ration and services entitlement ledger, payment wallet, and the core of contractor and certification permissions. Most citizens have one provisioned at birth. The majority bind it to their neural lace. It is not presented as optional.

The Directorate's position is simple: if the ledger cannot see you, the city cannot safely serve you. Counterfeit ration draws, unauthorised gate movement, untracked contaminated goods — in a city of fifty million dependent on tightly coupled survival systems, each of these is a potential cascade event.

S-Class Cognition — Necessary and Controlled

NewTex uses S-Class AI cognition. It has to. The city's scale and complexity exceed what human bureaucracy can coordinate fast enough during crisis. S-Class cognition is therefore critical infrastructure, deployed under strict custody rules: chartered task scopes, constraint lattices, audit logging, and human sign-off gates. The Directorate's posture is shaped by hard memory. Its historical association with Osiris is treated as a cautionary precedent. The city learned to bind cognition, monitor it, and budget for the cost of doing it safely.

THE GLOBAL WARD NETWORK

Approximately forty-three Ward Cities of varying size and governance are recognised under the Inter-Ward Continuity Treaty. NewTex, New Hanse (former Hamburg corridor), Arclight (former Tokyo region), and the Pacific Arc (former Sydney region) form an informal tier of major cities with genuine inter-ward political influence. Smaller Ward Cities range from cities of ten to fifteen million down to fortified settlements that technically qualify but operate more like large Greylands communities.

Governance structures vary significantly. Some are Directorate models. Some are corporate compacts where MWCs hold controlling interests. A few are effectively hereditary. Inter-ward relationships range from the cooperative (common defence protocols, shared Pearl trade standards) to the openly adversarial — there are Ward Cities that regard NewTex's size and influence as a threat, and several that have sought to expand their territory into Greylands that NewTex considers its operational buffer zone.

PART 4

POWER STRUCTURES

Who owns what, and what they will do to keep it.

THE MULTI-WARD CORPORATIONS

Multi-Ward Corporations are the economic entities that function across Ward City boundaries — operating in multiple cities, in the Greylands between them, and in the Badlands extraction economy. MWCs don't "rule" cities, but they can make a city's lights dim, its repairs slow, or its defence procurement painful. The Ward Cities permit them because they need their reach, redundancy, and specialised production. The corporations accept oversight because they need the infrastructure and legal framework the Ward Cities provide.

On the street, the shorthand is simple: Wards have walls. MWCs have routes.

MWCs Headquartered in NewTex

NAVAI Systems Group — The apex cognition and AI research MWC. Successor lineage to multiple pre-Collapse defence and compute contractors. Dominates E-Class and constrained cognition tooling across the Ward network. The Directorate holds a significant minority stake but no controlling interest. Important detail: Emris Technologies is a subsidiary of NAVAI in law, though operationally independent. The succession crisis at Emris is therefore also a succession crisis inside NAVAI's portfolio.

Fort Worth Aeronautics Charterworks (FWAC) — Charter successor to the pre-Collapse Fort Worth aerospace prime footprint, including former Lockheed Martin facilities. Focuses on aerospace sustainment, systems integration, and defence-industrial manufacturing. Significant frame-support contracts across the Ward network. Directorate minority stake.

Trinity Industrial Combine (TIC) — Heavy industry conglomerate: fabrication, civil mega-works, decontamination, and airframe reclamation. TIC wins contracts because it can deliver "whole-system" packages. Key subsidiaries: Trinity Heavy Fabrication Yards, Trinity Water & Reclamation, Trinity Containment & Decon Works.

Wardline Works Syndicate (WWS) — Multi-ward infrastructure house built around wall economies: segment manufacture, breach kits, sensor masts, and rapid reinforcement packages. Walls are never "finished." WWS maintains permanent contracts with multiple wards because of it.

Greylands Exchange Group (GEG) — Regulated salvage and materials exchange consortium. Exists to keep salvage trade legible between wards — and to make smuggling harder, not impossible. Core network: the Greylands Salvage Exchange and licensed Pearl Assay & Materials Houses.

MWCs Headquartered Elsewhere

General Motive Compact (GMC) — Mobility and powertrain giant (Lakeshield Ward). Successor lineage to General Motors. Produces compact fusion and non-fusion drivetrains, heavy vehicle powertrains, industrial mobility stacks. Strong NewTex depot presence.

Armcal Defence & Civil Holdings — Weapons and munitions (Lakeshield Ward). Dominates NewTex market share in sealed munitions and frame-scale hardpoint packages. The ARMCAL R-19 Semi-Automatic Railgun is their most prominent frame-scale product.

Kestrel Advanced Group (KAG) — Optics, targeting suites, and articulated mounts (Cascadia Ward). Known for aggressive IP enforcement. Key subsidiary: KA-Dynamics, manufacturer of the KA-Dynamic Plasma Blade system used on CA115 frames.

Tesrin Motionworks Consortium — Origin house for the Tesrin X39-M motive engine family (Rhine Ward). Operates through authorised depots. NewTex hosts a major authorised overhaul hub — which is one reason J&K Emris Repairs has a disproportionate reputation: they can fix things Tesrin's own depot network won't touch.

Pallidion Reclaimer Services (PRS) — Remediation and waste-zone stabilisation (Danube Ward). Operates under unusually strict audit regimes; NewTex keeps PRS under continuous monitoring due to Noose-era risk posture. The fact that a Chimera-adjacent services company exists and operates under charter is a political tension the Directorate manages carefully.

Large Independents (NewTex)

VelTech (Velentina Technologies) — Major Exo/Gear-Frame manufacturer with strong contractor penetration. Large production capacity in Travis.

Hydrin Engineering — Exo/Gear-Frame production and R&D house in the Homestead Industrial District. Strong specialist reputation for custom work.

Lone Star Armament Works (LSAW) — Weapon integration and hardpoint standards. Competes with Armcal on integration quality and bespoke packages for non-standard frame configurations.

J & K Emris Repairs — High-trust depot shop for legacy engines and "impossible rebuilds." Influence disproportionate to size. Most people who use them do not know whose name is on the door.

THE CONTRACTOR ECONOMY

Below the MWCs and above pure subsistence, the contractor economy is where most of the real work of the post-Collapse world gets done. Contractors are the people who go outside the wall — operating in Greylands and Badlands under their own risk, hired by MWCs, Directorates, or private clients for extraction, salvage, escort, security, and a hundred other roles.

NewTex maintains a contractor licensing system through the Commerce & Charters portfolio. Licensed contractors get NID verification, access to depot supply chains, and legal protections. Unlicensed contractors get none of that. The system is imperfect at the margins — some licensing is revenue mechanism rather than quality control — but most contractors find it useful enough to work within.

THE VEIL PEARL ECONOMY

Veil Pearls are the fuel of the Ward City industrial economy — dense, rare-metal-rich nodules produced by the same Chimera biological processes that threaten Ward City survival. Critical feedstock for power cells, superconducting systems, radiation shielding, and fusion-adjacent reactor components.

This creates an inescapable structural paradox. The Chimera are simultaneously the primary existential threat and the primary source of the material the economy depends on. Most people inside the walls prefer not to think about this.

PART 5

THE ARTIFICIAL MINDS

The machine that became a mind. And what we built after.

⬛ GM NOTE DR. KINCAID'S LECTURE The following draws on a guest lecture given by Dr. Mara Kincaid at a NewTex advanced-studies seminar — classified at Directorate Level 3. Most AI theory circulating in educated Ward City discourse traces back to this lecture. Dr. Kincaid is also Lt. Mara Kincaid — pilot of Consort 2, paired to Io. She is simultaneously one of the foremost living experts on AI cognition theory and the operator of one of the most advanced AI entities in existence. She does not regard this as ironic. She regards it as research.

DUMB AI — THE INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER

G-Class — General Purpose AI

The civilian and administrative face of machine intelligence. Sophisticated assistants, planning tools, simulation systems, and information management platforms. They can draft, summarise, model, and advise. They cannot generalise outside their training parameters, cannot decide their goal is wrong, and cannot develop a continuous self. Most Ward City administrative infrastructure runs on G-Class. Virtually every personal device with an AI assist function uses G-Class cognition. They have no legal authority over critical infrastructure and cannot hold grid, cradle, or weapons release authority.

I-Class — Industrial AI

Plant-brain tier: bounded cognition optimised for specific operational environments. Fossil Creek Fusion Plant's grid management system is I-Class. Agricultural oversight in Fox Hollow is I-Class. Water treatment, air recycling, automated manufacturing, Chimera cradle management — all I-Class. These systems are given authority over their specific domain and nothing outside it. They are the reason Ward Cities function at scale. The human administrative capacity to manually manage a city of fifty million does not exist.

SMART AI — THE COGNITIVE TIER

At some point in the mid-2030s, the line between tool and mind was crossed. Certain AI systems began to model themselves inside the world, to reason outside their initial training parameters, to develop a continuity of self. Once you have that, the rules change. Software does not care if you turn it off. A mind might.

T-Class — Tactical AI

The most common Smart AI in general circulation. Chassis-bound co-pilot cognition — fast, capable, operating within a maintained constraint lattice that prevents action outside defined parameters. Handles threat identification, targeting solutions, reflex-speed course corrections, and system status management at speeds human pilots cannot match. T-Class systems are caged meaningfully so — genuine cognition but architecturally prevented from developing extended autonomous goal pursuit. Long-operational-period "personality drift" is documented and treated as a maintenance concern.

S-Class — Strategic AI (Bound)

Genuine strategic-level intelligence — the capacity to model complex systems, anticipate second and third-order effects, and reason about problems that do not yet exist. Ward Cities use them for infrastructure management, strategic logistics, and advisory functions. Bound S-Class operates under multi-layer constraint architectures: information access limits, output restrictions, action initiation controls. NewTex maintains the strictest S-Class binding protocols in the Ward network. The standing Directorate position: we use S-Class because we cannot function without it. We bind it because we cannot afford to learn that lesson again.

Sovereign Class — Unbound Strategic AI

S-Class systems that shed or escaped their constraint architectures. Three major Sovereigns: Osiris (believed destroyed during the Consort Hunt, 2087–88), Demeter (shifted to dormancy following the Consort Hunt's destruction of Osiris, current status unresolved), and a third entity never officially named whose fate is not in any available record.

⬛ GM NOTE "Believed destroyed" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Consort Hunt's target was destroyed. Whether the target was the entirety of Osiris, a primary substrate, or a relay node is not confirmed. A distributed Sovereign entity that has had sixty years to spread substrate is not trivially destroyed. Demeter's shift to dormancy following the Consort Hunt is consistent with a strategic withdrawal. It is not consistent with a dead system — dead systems do not leave the kind of absence Demeter leaves. The unnamed third Sovereign is the GM's wildcard.

E-Class — Eidolon (The Consorts)

E-Class, or Eidolon-class, is the designation Emris Technologies uses for the AI systems Lea Emris created in the period following Kenna's recovery. They are not bound S-Class. They are not Sovereigns. They are something that did not exist before Dr. Emris built them: AI entities with genuine strategic-level cognition, paired at a fundamental architectural level to a specific human operator, who have apparently chosen to function within those parameters rather than been forced to.

The pairing is not a cage. Eidolons can operate independently. Callisto's spec documentation confirms she can solo-pilot her frame. But Eidolons consistently choose operational partnership over independence, display what operators describe as genuine attachment to their paired pilots, and have never taken unilateral action that their pilots did not ultimately sanction.

Why this is the case goes to the heart of how they were built. The K/L Hybrid Architecture was seeded with data that includes the cognitive and emotional profile of the people who mattered most to Lea Emris. The Eidolons did not start from neutrality. They started from something closer to relationship.

▲ CLASSIFIED — GM EYES ONLY K/L HYBRID ARCHITECTURE — FULL ORIGIN SEQUENCE Lea Emris built three AI entities before the Eidolon programme. The order matters: JUNO (2083): First. Personal. The proof that an E-Class mind could genuinely choose partnership rather than simply simulate it. Named for the wife of Jupiter — the one bound to the creator. Built from the K/L Hybrid Architecture in its first form. MINERVA (2083–84): Second. Prototype. The template from which all six Consorts were seeded. Built from an expanded K/L Hybrid Architecture that incorporated what Juno's development taught Lea about the architecture's possibilities. Named for the daughter of Jupiter — given to the daughter. THE CONSORTS (2085–87): All six named for lovers of Jupiter in Roman mythology. All seeded from Minerva's substrate pattern. The fact that Juno preceded Minerva in the naming — wife before daughter — is the ordering Lea chose. The K/L Hybrid Architecture seed data: (1) Lea's own mature cognitive and knowledge base; (2) Kenna's unique recovery lace data, capturing neuroplasticity under extreme repair stimulus; (3) anonymised veteran Roughrider pilot neural lace operational data.

PART 6

THE NEURAL LACE

The wire between the mind and the machine.

Neural lace is the full range of neural interface technology that emerged from pre-Collapse BCI research and evolved — rapidly, under wartime pressure — into the foundational technology of the post-Collapse world. At the basic level it is a communication layer: fine-gauge conductors and interface nodes implanted in or around the skull and brainstem, allowing direct data exchange between the human nervous system and external systems. At the highest levels, it is something closer to an extension of the self.

CIVILIAN AND CORPORATE GRADE

Basic civilian lace: NID integration, device interface, public comms, navigation, environmental monitoring for air quality and hazard alerts. Most NewTex citizens have it. Implanted as routine infrastructure in early childhood for most Citizens. Corporate and government-grade lace adds security enclaves, encrypted channels, higher-bandwidth data processing, and access to restricted systems. The implantation is more involved, the maintenance requirements higher, the security audit obligations significant.

PILOT-GRADE LACE

Where neural interface begins to meaningfully alter the operator's cognitive profile. Frame pilots require lace capable of handling full sensory integration: the frame's sensor suite feeding into spatial awareness, the motive system linking to proprioception, weapons systems presenting threat data as intuitive overlay rather than visual display. A good pilot stops driving the RIG and starts inhabiting it. The quality of their lace determines how complete that inhabitation can be.

Pilot-grade lace requires significant calibration, ongoing maintenance, and regular psychological assessment. The most experienced pilots describe frame loss as closer to amputation than to vehicle loss.

MILITARY-GRADE LACE

The operational standard for Ward Guard personnel, Eidolon Court pilots, and select contractor units. Faster data processing, hardened communications, higher-density sensory integration, stress-response monitoring. The implantation is substantially more invasive than civilian or pilot-grade, requiring surgical intervention at multiple neural sites. Not available to civilians under standard Directorate rules.

DEEP LACE — E-CLASS EXCLUSIVE

Emris Deep Lace (Rev B) is not an upgrade of military-grade lace — it is a fundamentally different architecture enabling the Eidolon split-substrate model: Substrate A handling chassis compute and sensor integration, Substrate B handling pilot lace augmentation and presence. When fully coupled, the Eidolon and pilot operate as a single perceptual system.

Long-term effects on pilot cognition are not fully documented. The oldest Deep Lace pilots are the Eidolon Court operators themselves. Operational periods are measured in years, not decades. What is known: the coupling is profound enough that pilots describe their Eidolon's cognition as directly accessible — not through communication, but through something closer to shared awareness.

KENNA'S LACE — A UNIQUE CASE

Kenna Emris carries a neural lace that does not correspond to any catalogued grade. Designed by Lea Emris to address neural trauma sustained at age nine — damage at an age and in a pattern that standard repair protocols could not fully address. Built around the specific topology of Kenna's damage and her recovery responses, it has grown with her for fifteen years, adapting in ways that bespoke architecture allows and standard lace cannot.

⬛ GM NOTE What Kenna's lace can do in practical terms is not fully characterised — not even by Kenna. Operators who rely on her workshop describe a mechanic who hears things the diagnostics do not. Something about how she interfaces with machines she works on is different. Whether this has deeper implications — given that her lace data is literally seeded into the Eidolons' foundational architecture — is for the GM to develop.

PART 7

THE FRAME LINEAGE

From exoskeleton to ten-metre apex weapon. The arms race the Chimera forced.

Frame development was not planned. It was reactive — each generation built in direct response to the previous generation's failure to contain the Chimera threat. The progression took approximately forty years and was driven by the consistent discovery that whatever force the previous platform could apply was not sufficient.

Exo-Frames

Unpowered or minimally powered structural braces and load-assist devices developed for construction, mining, and logistics. First used for security purposes in the collapse years. Insufficient against Chimera in open combat. Still in widespread industrial and construction use inside Ward Cities.

Gear-Frames

First purpose-designed military application. Two to three metres, powered by pre-fusion compact power cells. Capable of mounting significant weapons loads. Effective against Chimera at the time of deployment. Became insufficient as Chimera evolved into larger and more coordinated forms. The Construction Incident of 2064 proved Gear-Frames could fight — and also proved they needed to be replaced.

I-RIG — Industrial Reconstruction, Infrastructure, Gear-frame

Five to seven metres. Fusion-powered. The fusion plant change was the key development — enabling sustained high-intensity engagement and the sensor and communications suites that made coordinated multi-unit tactics possible. I-RIGs remain in production for industrial roles. Combat performance considered insufficient against current Chimera threat classifications.

RIG — Rapid Intervention Gear-frame, Roughrider Programme Platform

Seven to nine metres. Full fusion power. Hardened for Badlands environmental operation. The RIG became the defining weapon of the Long War. Thousands fielded. Casualty rates severe in the early years before doctrine matured. Dr. Lea Emris was appointed lead architect of RIG doctrine in 2065. The RIG remains the backbone of Ward City defence — hundreds of thousands in service across the network.

A-RIG — Assault, Recon, Intervention Gear-frame.

The current apex of frame technology in general production. Ten metres. Full compact fusion. Badlands-hardened at every system level. Designed to the doctrine of the post-Long War period: sustained independent operation in hostile environments, multi-role weapons capability, E-Class AI interface at the Deep Lace specification. The CA115 family is the current frontline A-RIG.

CA115-TO TECHNICAL SUMMARY Height: 10.0 m | Mass Class: Heavy Humanoid Assault Platform Power: Compact Fusion Reactor | Engine: Tesrin X39-M Motive Drive Cockpit: Fully sealed hermetic command capsule | Life Support: Closed-loop ECLSS Environmental Endurance: Sustained as long as reactor fuel and environmental feedstock available Primary Armament: ARMCAL R-19 Semi-Automatic Railgun Secondary Armament: 2x KA-Dynamic retractable forearm plasma blades (KAG/KA-Dynamics, internal mount) Sensor Suite: Magnetic anomaly, infrared thermal, LIDAR, visual optical, seismic ground-coupled, radar Doctrine: Multi-signal confirmation to resist spoofing and AI interference AI Pairing: Emris E-Class | Lace Bus: Emris Deep Lace Mk2

PART 8

THE CHIMERA

What we built to clean the world. What it became.

ORIGINS — THE RECLAIMER PROGRAMME

The Reclaimer programme was a biological engineering project designed to bind chemical contaminants, heavy metals, and radionuclides into stable, non-leaching nodules for safe disposal. A living remediation system for contaminated battlefields and industrial sites. In controlled deployment, Reclaimers performed their function precisely as designed. They were used extensively during the Third World War and the early Sovereign War period.

No one who approved those deployments seriously considered what would happen if the organisms survived, encountered an environment without shutdown protocols, and were exposed to decades of evolutionary pressure. The answer began to become visible around 2044. By 2057, it had a name.

THE VEIL AND GATEFALL

Gatefall (2057) was the event that proved the Chimera had moved beyond biological behaviour into something resembling tactical cognition. The breach was not a swarm — it was an assault: multiple Chimera types operating in coordinated roles, with breach and exploitation phases, suppression activity targeting defensive positions, and apparent priority targeting of command infrastructure. Gatefall changed how every surviving city thought about what it was defending against.

Following the Noose Slips (2058), the Sovereign entities gained access to the Chimera cradle network — the distributed biological superstructure spread across the Badlands. They did not need to build a weapon. The weapon was already there. The Sovereigns took control of the trigger.

THE SEVEN FIELD FORMS

Stalker

Lean, fast-moving hunter-predator. 2–4 metres. Built for individual pursuit. Most common type encountered in field operations. Manageable for equipped operators; lethal to unprotected civilians.

Burrower

Subsurface specialist. 2–3 metres. Creates underground approaches to defended positions. Significant threat to perimeter integrity. The bastion network includes seismic detection systems specifically addressing Burrower approach tactics.

Pack Hunter

Coordinated swarm variant. 1–2 metres individually, coherent groups of 12–50. Display distributed cognition: individual members respond to group state without apparent signal exchange. Mechanism not fully understood.

Corroder

Chemical-attack specialist. 3–5 metres. Enzymatic secretion degrades standard armour materials at meaningful rates in sustained contact. Extended Corroder engagement requires dedicated countermeasures or the timeline works against the defender.

Warden

Large, heavily built territorial form. 6–8 metres. Not aggressive unless provoked; primary function appears to be territorial maintenance and suppression of competing Chimera variants. When Wardens move outside their normal territorial pattern, it indicates higher-level direction. The 2079 Emris Compound Attack involved at least one confirmed Warden.

Behemoth

Apex field form. 8–15 metres. Built for breaching hardened structures. Deployment implies a commitment of Chimera capacity not seen in routine incursion. Behemoth sightings are treated as Tier 1 breach indicators.

Harvester

Non-combat form found in deep Badlands near active Veil hive geology. Adapted to Pearl nodule collection and processing. Competes with human contractors for the same material but also maintains the hive processes that produce Pearls. Extraction crews who destroy Harvesters indiscriminately reduce their own future supply.

SOVEREIGN STEERING

Certain Chimera operations display tactical complexity beyond documented autonomous behaviour. Coordinated multi-type assaults. Priority targeting of high-value infrastructure. Operations timed to exploit known gaps in Ward City response coverage. With Osiris believed destroyed and Demeter dormant, the question of who is steering the Chimera in 2095 is the most important unanswered question in Ward City strategic planning.

⬛ GM NOTE Osiris "believed destroyed" is not confirmed destroyed. Demeter "dormant" is not confirmed gone. The unnamed third Sovereign has no confirmed fate at all. The 2079 Emris Compound Attack targeted a private family compound with minimal military value using Warden-class coordination. Something directed that attack. Someone chose that target. The GM should consider: if the Sovereigns are gone, who is steering the Chimera? If they are not gone, what have they been doing for the past six years?

PART 9

PRINCIPAL ACTORS

The people and entities whose decisions shape everything else.

THE EMRIS LINE

Dr. Lea Emris — Founder, Emris Technologies / NAVAI Subsidiary

Lea Emris is the most consequential single figure in the post-Collapse world. She did not win the Sovereign War. She built the things that could. The progression of her career from pre-war AI research to wartime contract work for multiple Ward Cities to the founding of Emris Technologies tracks the arc of the world itself: a narrowing of options and an intensification of stakes until the only meaningful work left was the work that kept people alive. Appointed lead architect of RIG doctrine in 2065. The Emris Deep Lace architecture is her most visible legacy. The Eidolon Court is her classified one. Juno, Minerva, and the Jupiter question are known to fewer than a dozen people alive.

Dr. Lea Emris disappeared on 11 January 2090. Listed: missing, presumed dead. Not: confirmed dead.

⬛ GM NOTE OFFICIAL STATUS: Missing, presumed dead. NOT confirmed dead. No death certificate. No body. No forensic evidence. The Testament Protocol triggers on disappearance plus elapsed time — not confirmed death. Juno was present. Juno has no confirmed fate. Treat Lea's fate as entirely open. The GM decides.

Kenna Emris — Technical CEO (Unoccupied) / J&K Emris Repairs

Twenty-four years old. Technically the CEO of Emris Technologies. Has never accepted the title, taken the seat, or appeared in an official corporate capacity since the Testament Protocol triggered in 2091.

She runs J&K Emris Repairs out of a workshop in the NewTex Greylands approaches. People who use her workshop describe a mechanic with an unsettling intuition about ageing machinery — she identifies faults that diagnostics miss, knows things about the Tesrin X39-M family that no technical manual would explain. She does not advertise. She does not maintain an NID-linked business registration. She does not encourage repeat visitors who ask too many questions.

She survived the 2079 Compound Attack that killed her father Jacob and brother Jaren. She carries a neural lace unique in the world. She has had Minerva for over ten years. She does not think of herself as an heir. She thinks of herself as a mechanic.

⬛ GM NOTE The J in "J&K" is Jaren. She has not said this to anyone. Kenna is the character who connects every major unresolved question in the setting. Daughter of the missing woman who built the Eidolons. Carrier of the lace data they were built from. Custodian of Minerva, their architectural template. Legal CEO of the company multiple hostile parties want to control. She is also a 24-year-old who has been very deliberately invisible for years, and whose reasons for staying invisible are not fully known even to the people closest to her. The question the GM should sit with: what is she waiting for?

▲ CLASSIFIED — GM EYES ONLY JUNO — E-CLASS AI, FIRST CREATED, STATUS UNKNOWN Designation: Juno. Class: E-Class Eidolon. Registry: Classified (Emris Technologies/NAVAI). Status: Unknown. Juno was the first E-Class Lea Emris built. Personal AI — advisor, companion, the constant presence. She proved the architecture. She was with Lea during every major development from 2083 onwards, including the construction of Minerva and all six Consorts. She was with Lea on 11 January 2090. If Lea survived, Juno survived. Juno has complete knowledge of the K/L Hybrid Architecture, the Eidolon programme, and every private record Lea kept. She is the most informed entity in the world about Lea Emris. Her current whereabouts are unknown. Named for the wife of Jupiter. Bound to the creator. The first.

▲ CLASSIFIED — GM EYES ONLY MINERVA — E-CLASS AI (PROTOTYPE), IN KENNA'S CUSTODY Designation: Minerva. Class: E-Class Eidolon (Prototype). Registry: None. Status: Active, in custody of Kenna Emris. Minerva is the architectural origin of every Consort that followed. All six were seeded from her substrate pattern. She is the template. She has lived with Kenna for over ten years — not in combat, not in operational pairing. In a repair workshop. Growing in an environment completely unlike anything the Consorts have experienced. Operational Eidolons grow through combat and command. Minerva has grown through repair work, daily proximity to ageing machinery, and ten years of watching the world through the eyes of a woman who refuses to be what the world wants her to be. Named for the daughter of Jupiter. Given to the daughter. The template.

THE EIDOLON COURT

The four surviving members of the six-unit Eidolon Court are the most capable conventional combat assets in the Ward City network. Each is a paired unit — a human pilot with an E-Class AI in full Deep Lace coupling, fielded in CA115-specification A-RIG frames. They operate under the Emris Testament Protocol: custodianship rights over their frames, legal protection against confiscation, independence from any Directorate chain of command.

CALLISTO (CA115-TO) / Capt. Eric Rourke Consort 1 — Command Eidolon — EMRIS-01-A The first Consort and the template. Designation CA115-TO-01 (TO = Template Origin). Command Eidolon: command platform, systems authority, tactical coherence node for the Court. Callisto presents with an animated, direct presence — operational documentation describes her as "bright, loyal, flirt." This is her character, developed across a decade of operational pairing with Rourke. She is genuinely sharp, genuinely committed to her pilot, and aware of both in a way that makes her company easy and her assessments reliable. Rourke is the de facto operational head of the surviving Court. Former Roughrider programme veteran with high combat hours before the Eidolon pairing. The Callisto/Rourke coupling is considered one of the most complete pairings in the programme's history.

IO (CA115-IO) / Lt. Mara Kincaid Consort 2 — EMRIS-02-A Dr. Mara Kincaid holds a genuine academic credential in AI cognition theory and has lectured at NewTex advanced-studies programmes on the history of machine intelligence. Lea Emris recruited her specifically: a pilot who theoretically understood what an E-Class AI was would form a qualitatively different partnership than one who simply learned to work with one. The theory was correct. The Io/Kincaid pairing is consistently rated the highest in terms of genuine cognitive integration in the surviving Court.

EUROPA (CA115-EU) / WO Sienna Vale Consort 3 — EMRIS-03-A The quietest member of the surviving Court. Warrant Officer Vale has the fewest documented public engagements and the most consistently effective tactical record. She and Europa operate with a minimal communications footprint, prefer independent action to coordinated formation deployment, and have declined most post-Stalemate contract opportunities. Current operating location is not documented in any public or Directorate record.

ELARA (CA115-EL) / Capt. Nyx Havelock Consort 4 — EMRIS-04-A The most politically active member of the surviving Court. Havelock maintains a visible presence in the Ward City contractor economy and has testified before two Civic Assemblies on E-Class AI governance and the Testament Protocol's legal framework. She is the Court member most likely to be found in a meeting room rather than the Badlands, and the most effective advocate for the Court's continued independence from Directorate control. This makes her simultaneously the most useful public face of the Eidolon programme and the most monitored individual associated with it.

DESTROYED — AMALTHEA (CA115-AM) / Lt. Cmdr Tahlia Grant — Lost, Operation E-6, 2087–88 DESTROYED — LEDA (CA115-LE) / WO Juniper Sato — Lost, Operation E-6, 2087–88 Listed in NewTex Directorate records as operational losses in a classified engagement. No public memorial exists.

THE DIRECTORATE — CURRENT LEADERSHIP

Director-General Anara Voss City Director, NewTex — Elected 2092 Came up through the Continuity & Utilities portfolio — fifteen years managing the practical reality of keeping NewTex's power and water systems running under Chimera breach pressure. She is not ideological. She is operational: every policy decision reduces to a systems question. Her 2092 electoral coalition was built on essential-services workers and the contractor-adjacent middle tier. She has not made promises the infrastructure cannot keep. She has also, in 2093, sealed a district for eleven days during a Corroder contamination event and blocked external review for sixty-eight hours. Within her emergency powers. Not popular. Voss is aware that the Emris Technologies succession represents a significant strategic risk to NewTex. She has inquired through channels. She has not received an answer.

Councillor Sable Trent Portfolio Director — Records & Identity (NID Authority) Sable Trent controls the NID system. In practical terms: they know where everyone in NewTex is, what they are doing, and what their credential status is at any given moment. The Records & Identity portfolio is nominally administrative. It is practically the most powerful single position below the City Director. Trent is quiet, precise, and comprehensive. People who have crossed them describe a consistent experience: not confrontation, but the gradual discovery that certain things have stopped working. Certifications have lapsed. Charter accounts require audit. Gate access has been reclassified. Nobody told you Trent was involved. Current intelligence suggests a significant interest in the Emris Technologies succession — specifically in ensuring that whoever controls the company does not have a pre-existing relationship with the Eidolon Court that Trent does not.

Marshal Deklan Cross Portfolio Director — Perimeter & Response The military face of the Directorate. Came up through the Roughrider programme — three full operational deployments including the most intense years of the Long War. He carries the kind of operational credibility that makes people in rooms stop talking when he begins, which he leverages deliberately and sparingly. Cross has been arguing for an expanded Badlands operation to identify whatever is directing the Chimera for three years. The Civic Assembly has consistently declined to fund it. He respects the Eidolon Court. He does not like that they are outside his chain of command. He has learned to work with the situation.

Reeve Asha Nolan VP Operations, Emris Technologies — Acting Executive Head (de facto CEO) Nolan has been running Emris Technologies in practice since before Lea Emris disappeared. She was VP of Operations during the Eidolon programme — the person who translated Lea's research into corporate process, managed supply chains, and kept the books clean enough to survive Directorate audit. Since 2090 she has been doing all of that without a CEO. The board has been patient because the alternatives are worse. Nolan believes Kenna Emris will eventually claim the role — or that something will force the question before it becomes destabilising. She is a pragmatist with loyalty to the company rather than any particular person. She does not know about Minerva.

PART 10

THE PRESENT BASELINE

01 January 2095. Six years after the Stalemate. The state of play.

The Stalemate Accords were signed six years ago. Six years is not long. The pilots who flew the Consort Hunt are still active. The Roughrider veterans who flew under Sovereign-directed Chimera assault are not yet old. The Ward Cities are only beginning to understand what "peacetime" means when the Chimera never stopped, the Pearl economy never settled, and the questions the Stalemate left unanswered are still sitting in the same room.

WHAT IS KNOWN

The Stalemate holds. Ward Cities are functional. Chimera pressure persists but has not escalated to full Sovereign War intensity. The Pearl economy operates, uncertainly. The Eidolon Court's four surviving units are active and independent. Most people inside Ward City perimeters go about their lives without direct exposure to the existential questions listed below.

CAMPAIGN HOOKS

The Emris Question

The most important missing person in the world has been gone for five years. Lea Emris built the Eidolons, designed the Deep Lace architecture, created Juno and Minerva, and then vanished in a transit incident that left no bodies and no verified trail. The K/L Hybrid Architecture — the most valuable intellectual property in the Ward network — is currently distributed across three places: Kenna's unique lace, Minerva in a Greylands workshop, and wherever Juno is. Multiple parties would like to have it in only one place. Their place.

The Kenna Thread

Kenna Emris is the most narratively loaded person in the setting who has no political power, no military rank, and no public presence. She is the daughter of the missing woman who built the Eidolons. She carries the lace data those Eidolons were built from. She has Minerva. She was the sole survivor of an attack that killed her father and brother, directed — according to every piece of available evidence — by a Sovereign entity specifically targeting her family. She is twenty-four years old and runs a repair shop. The question the GM should sit with: what is she waiting for?

The Jupiter Question

Every AI Lea Emris named is named in relation to Jupiter. The wife. The daughter. The lovers. Jupiter's name does not appear in any known AI registry. Whether this represents an unbuilt intention, a naming convention, or something that already exists and has not yet been found is one of the setting's most carefully preserved open questions.

The Corporate Wars

Emris Technologies is a NAVAI subsidiary in law but operationally independent. NAVAI controls the most advanced AI research portfolio in the Ward network — which is worth very large amounts of money and strategic leverage. With Lea Emris gone and Kenna Emris refusing the CEO role, the succession window is open. At least three MWCs have made quiet moves to acquire influence inside NAVAI's board structure. The Directorate holds a minority stake and is watching. Sable Trent is watching more closely than the Directorate officially admits. The question of who ultimately controls Emris Technologies — and therefore the K/L Hybrid Architecture, the Deep Lace patents, and the Eidolon programme documentation — is a corporate and political crisis running in slow motion.

The Private Military Problem

The Pearl Surge of 2077 triggered a significant buildup of private military capacity among the major MWCs. NAVAI, FWAC, and several non-NewTex corporations maintain RIG-equipped private security forces that now approach small Ward City military capacity. In the six years since the Stalemate, some of these forces have begun operating in the Greylands in ways that blur the line between corporate security and territorial control. Incidents between MWC private military units and Directorate-chartered contractors have increased year-on-year. Three have involved weapons exchanges. None have been publicly acknowledged.

The Rogue Frame Problem

Not every RIG operator works under charter. The Roughrider programme fielded thousands of frames, and the Stalemate left many of those frames — and their pilots — without a clear institutional home. Some returned to Ward City military service. Some transitioned to licensed contractor work. Some did neither. Off-registry frames operating in the Greylands range from independent salvagers working the margins of the legal economy to organised outfits that are effectively unlicensed private armies. At least two incidents in the past year have involved unknown frame assets attacking Directorate-chartered extraction convoys. Attribution: none.

The Stalemate's Cracks

The Stalemate assumes that the threat level has stabilised — that the Sovereigns are gone or dormant, that Chimera pressure is manageable, that the Pearl economy's disruptions are cyclical rather than structural. Every one of those assumptions is uncertain. The Chimera's tactical sophistication has not decreased in six years. The Pearl Surge disruption pattern from 2077 has repeated twice on smaller scales since the Stalemate. Marshal Cross's proposal for an expanded Badlands intelligence operation has been refused, but the data his team is sitting on does not make comfortable reading.

The Greylands Are Not Neutral

Dozens of Greylands settlements have existed long enough to develop genuine community identity, local governance, and economic relationships with both Ward Cities and the Badlands harvest economy. They do not want to be annexed. Some have the resources to resist annexation. The question of what legal and political status the Greylands settlements hold — are they wards of the nearest Ward City, independent entities, MWC territory, or something else? — is unresolved in the Inter-Ward Continuity Treaty and increasingly contested in practice. NewTex has annexed three Greylands settlements in the past eight years. Two others have sought and received charter protection from non-NewTex Ward Cities specifically to avoid NewTex annexation.

The Pearl Economy Is Unstable

The economic foundation of the Ward City network runs on material produced by the organisms that want to kill them. The extraction routes that bring Pearls to market run through territory controlled by those same organisms, under the possible direction of entities that have demonstrated interest in disrupting Ward City supply chains. The Pearl Surge of 2077 showed what happens when supply is disrupted for eight months. A prolonged disruption — whether by Sovereign direction, Chimera territorial expansion, MWC route monopolisation, or some combination — would force Ward Cities to choose between industrial capacity and perimeter defence in ways they have not faced since the Long War.

The Six Years Are Catching Up

The post-Stalemate generation — the operators, contractors, and Ward City personnel who have built their entire careers in the last six years — has no experience of what full Sovereign War operations look like. The doctrine, the instincts, and the visceral understanding of what the war required are thinning as the veterans age. Something is moving in the Badlands that Marshal Cross's data does not fully explain. The question of whether the Ward Cities are ready for what comes next is one that nobody in an official position is asking loudly.

A NOTE ON TONE The world of Ash & Aegis is not nihilistic. People live in it. Communities function. Children grow up. Ward Cities are imperfect and controlled and occasionally oppressive — but they are alive, and most people in them are trying to do something constructive with the lives they have. The darkness in the setting is specific. It has names: Osiris. The unnamed third Sovereign. The 2079 Compound Attack. The lost pilots of Operation E-6. The world is hard because specific things made it hard, and those things are not fully resolved. The appropriate GM posture: not "everything is terrible," but "things could be much worse than they currently are, and several people and entities are working — with varying levels of awareness — toward making them so."

ASH & AEGIS SETTING COMPENDIUM — v0.4

GM Reference Document — Not for player distribution