How to Play · The Carney Extraction
The job. Rescue Jessica Carney from the Illuminati through three encounters — the Auditor, the Committee, and the Grey Clockwork. Don't let your Verve reach zero before you reach her.
Verve is your artistic capability — the red bar beneath the dice. The beige exists to drain it. Empty, and it takes you.
Rolling. You throw five bone dice and your class die. Every die showing 4 or higher is a success. Successes strike the enemy.
Push. After a roll you may reroll your failures — but pushing costs Verve, and the price doubles each time in a fight (1, then 2, 4, 8…). Or take the roll as it stands and strike.
Your class die is the one you chose at Intake. Each class carries its own die with its own faces — the Demolitionist's Charge, the Tailor's Bolt of Cloth, the Wheelman's Idling Engine, the Accountant's Second Ledger, the Oneiromancer's Sleeping Key.
The beige rolls back. Enemies roll too, and mutter as they do. The chips above the dice show what's in effect: grey chips are rules the beige has imposed on your next roll (fewer dice, a higher bar, no Push); gold and red chips are in your favor.
Thermos of Zeal. One use per run. Restores Verve. The coffee is old and possibly load-bearing.
The hallways. Between fights, the building opens a corridor. Roll or choose — what happens there follows you into the next fight.
The drop. Beat an enemy and you get one throw to loot a checkpoint. Land it and you can resume there if you fall. Miss it and there's no net beneath you.
Red Correction. Jessica's red pen, earned in the hallways. Hold one and it strikes your first failure into a success — her hand reaching back through the walls.
The Illuminati have her. Fours and higher count. The beige rolls back.
—
Your Verve
Notice of Continued Relationship:
Our records indicate that at some point you were processed. Our records indicate several other things about you, but our attorneys have advised us to keep those in a locked drawer.
As we begin — do you remember choosing a class?
Each specialist carries their own die into the beige. The die is the character.
I was never processed · Report to Intake ↗Field Briefing · Eyes Only · Then Not Even Those
Finding your way in is easy. Always is. It's what you do.
There are other crews. J has them positioned just so. At 9:14 there will be a fire on the third floor — small, but ambitious. At 9:17, every security camera in the building will suffer a simultaneous crisis of confidence.
And one man's entire ██████ is going to ████. You don't know what that man did. You don't know how J arranged it. But J was insistent, and J's insistences have a way of becoming weather.
Your part is simple. Somewhere in this bureaucracy, they keep Jessica Carney. It's an insurance building — only so many places a soul can be filed. A handful of specialized talents have been deployed to narrow the ledger.
You drew the Auditor's department. Department 175, Floor 13.
The building directory insists there is no Floor 13. The building directory has been spoken to. The elevator does not ask which floor. It already knows.
—
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The Drop
—
"Just... stop."
The gears neither hurry nor hesitate. They simply continue. They remember empires — libraries burned, cathedrals raised, revolutions bloomed and hardened into paperwork. They know the weight of centuries.
They know that despair rarely wins with a scream.
It wins with a sigh.
The Correction
The Grey Clockwork shudders around her, wounded but still turning. Its gears chew sparks. Its pistons drag one last breath through the chamber. Across the walls, brass mouths whisper with the voices they have used against her for years.
Fraud.
Burden.
Too late.
No one will ever care.
Jessica stands inside the heart of it, streaked with oil, ash, and somebody else's blood. Her red pen waits uncapped in her hand.
The machine gathers itself. Every gear in the chamber clenches. Far beyond these walls, its greater body strains through offices, banks, ministries, churches, hospitals, and every beige room where a human spirit has ever learned to apologize for existing. The Clockwork speaks through all of them at once.
“Without me, you are nothing.”
Jessica looks up. “No,” she says. “That sentence doesn't work.”
She plants the point of the pen against the machine's central housing and draws one hard red line through the Grey Clockwork.
The correction travels.
Red ink races across the iron like lightning through a corpse. It strikes through gears, pistons, belts, ledgers, seals, signatures, and the ancient grammatical machinery that kept the whole abomination pretending it had always possessed the right to exist. Great wheels stammer. Chains convulse. Brass mouths open, but every whisper vanishes beneath the spreading stroke.
For one impossible second, the Clockwork hangs before you as a rejected passage in the manuscript of the world.
Then Jessica writes one word beneath it.
REDACTED
The machine does not explode. It loses permission.
Iron fades into red dust. Gears collapse into blank space. The vast astral body stretching across the world tears loose from this room and recoils into distances you cannot see. Beige walls shed their color. The floor forgets what once stood upon it.
Around you, the Illuminati cultists stagger through the silence. They have spent so long feeding the machine that its absence hollows them out. Some clutch their lanyards like rosaries. Others paw through empty air, searching for levers that no longer exist.
One of them recovers enough courage to step between Jessica and the window. He raises a ceremonial clipboard.
Jessica hits him in the mouth. He folds across a desk and remains there, gently reconsidering his affiliations.
The charges blow. Glass erupts into the night. Cold air floods the chamber, alive with rain, traffic, sirens, and all the unruly noise the Clockwork could never quite file into obedience. You throw the rappel line around the nearest surviving support. Jessica catches it beside you, red pen still clenched between her teeth.
Behind you, the Committee begins shouting for a quorum. They do not have one.
You and Jessica step backward through the broken window and descend together into the dark, boots hammering the side of the building, ropes singing through your hands. Far above, red pages whirl out into the city like startled birds.
Something has escaped the building with you. Something it placed inside you, or uncovered, or failed to confiscate.
Jessica laughs on the way down. Not because everything has been fixed. Not because the greater machine has died everywhere.
Because tonight, when it whispered that she would never escape, she corrected it.
Incident Report — Ref. Pending
The beige has you. A lanyard settles around your neck like a verdict.
Do not panic. Panic attracts auditors. And Eyeless Lamentors.
The Cabal denies this operation ever occurred.
Field Operation 0013