What's in the Dark

The people

Most of what kills people in NYTE City is other people. They're sorted here by what shaped them, not who pays them, because an employer changes and a formation doesn't.

• Street The city produces them the way it produces heat: people who learned the block before they learned anything else, and found the corner paid when nothing else would. Numbers, local knowledge, and very little to lose.

  The line arriving on the wrong four blocks

• Corporate The ones with a budget: training, equipment, and a scope of work somebody approved. Predictable, and hard to deter, because reasoning with them means reasoning with the contract behind them.

  The line becoming an obstacle

• Syndicate Old when NYTE City was young. Corporations run on policy. The Syndicate runs on relationships, and keeping them holding is the entire business.

  The line taking something without acknowledging whose it was

• Agency A formation, not a job: the Chrome Beret on assignment, the black-ops specialist running corporate security, the retired intelligence officer who opened a café. There's always a mission, formal or personal.

  The line getting between them and the mission

• Tech A life spent inside engineered systems. Problems are systems, bodies are platforms, and the gap between human and machine is a question of configuration.

  The line interfering with a build

• Rogue People who grew up outside the structures that shape everyone else: the Underground, the Alley Nations. They want to be left alone, and the city has never once obliged.

  The line asking questions on someone else's behalf

• Occult People who stood close to something old long enough for it to leave marks: true believers, ritualists, channels for forces they didn't make. What they produce is real.

  The line interrupting the work

The old things

Every house has its old powers, and they're rarely what turns up on the street. What moves in the dark is mostly the lesser end: thralls and the newly turned, ghouls, and goblins and trolls stranded on the wrong side of a crossing.

• Vampiric Less a species than an economy: something that feeds on the living, and everyone bound into that arrangement, most of them entirely human. Vampires plan in decades.

  The line threatening the arrangement

• Therianthropic Those who carry two natures, and the packs and families built around them. They lose control less often than the people around them do, and the ground they hold is marked.

  The line crossing the boundary

• Fae Those who came from somewhere else, and mostly can't get back. A fae keeps their word with absolute precision, which is exactly the problem.

  The line breaking faith

• Undead What continues after it should have stopped. A thing without purpose can't be bargained with, deterred, or waited out.

  The line disturbing the places people stopped going

• Spirit Presences without bodies. Some were people. Many were the spirit of a crossroads, a workshop, or a rifle carried by four generations of one family, and they notice how they're treated.

  The line disregard

• Elemental Force with intent behind it: matter that became someone. They can be reasoned with, which surprises people who expected weather.

  The line standing between it and what it's decided to do

• Beast The things that generate their own folklore. Everyone who lives near one has a name for it, and a rule about when not to go out.

  The line being told, and going anyway

The ground

Some kinds of ground turn up in every Territory and act on whoever stands there. Only the first has an explanation anyone would accept in writing.

• Combat Zones Ground the city stopped paying to fix. People live there. Nothing works there: no response, no record, no consequence.

  The line there isn't one. No one is coming

• Genius Loci A place that woke up. It talks through weather, wildlife, footing and the reliability of a path.

  The line offending it, and staying

• Convergences Where ley lines cross and something pools. It makes everything there more of what it already was, which is why it draws company.

  The line still being there after dark

• Thin Places Where the separation between here and elsewhere has worn through. Distances don't resolve, and time runs uneven. Passing through is fine.

  The line staying, or coming back too often

• Gates A thin place that finished wearing through, or a hole somebody made and didn't close. A few are routes. The rest are just open.

  The line standing near one

Most of the people hurt in NYTE City were standing on the wrong side of a line they could have read.