This setting is a post-collapse, high-competence civilization where advanced technology has replaced magic, yet mythic forms persist because they are effective, durable, and culturally necessary. Clean, restrained institutions maintain cities and infrastructure through audited systems, standardized forces, and continuity doctrines, while independent operators, deniable specialists, and post-institutional cultures exist in the gaps where those systems fail or are deliberately rejected. Ascendant figures—bonded to legacy technology from an earlier, overconfident age—function as living symbols and crisis assets, powerful but politically dangerous to deploy. Against this backdrop move characters defined by professionalism rather than destiny: engineers like Slab and Hardpoint who stabilize collapse zones, infiltrators and relic-runners like Crosswire and Blink who exploit institutional blind spots, neutral authorities like Bluebird who override missions to preserve life, adaptable units like FAYE and the MCA who enforce order without heroics, and rare Ascendants like Seris Halemark whose presence reshapes outcomes simply by being seen. The world is stable, tense, and adult—built by experts, haunted by past failures, and unified by a single truth: progress didn’t erase myth; it just changed the interface.