You have read enough. Five choices make you a person in this city. Make them in order. Each one narrows the next, and at the end you will have a character with a job, a boss, an enemy, and an address, which is everything you need to walk into your first scene.
One. Your Origin. The hand you were dealt.
VAULTED, arrived clean and moneyed and soft. RUNNER, gutter-born and city-fluent. OUTLANDER, ice-raised and unimpressed by walls. SYNTHETIC, the strongest body in the city and the most precarious personhood, registered, you’re a person under the Concord; unregistered, nothing done to you is technically a crime. This is your past. It’s the only choice here you can’t change later.
Hook, whatever you picked, you owe someone from that life, and they’re in this city.
Two. Your Creed. The answer you chose.
Your Origin is the hand you were dealt. Your Creed is what you decided to do about the thing this world does to people. SURVIVOR, the hardest one, no doctrine, no house, no shelter but your own judgment. SANGUINE, the still ones, who found a loophole and pay for it nightly. ASCENDED, who heard a voice in the amber and called it god. MNEMONIC, who decided memory is the only currency that can’t be counterfeited. NEKO, who chose awareness as armor, senses tuned past baseline so nothing arrives unannounced. Or none yet, and stay plain, like most of the city, and every Creed is better earned in play than taken at creation, the resident who took their first cut of refined crystal in a room everyone watched is that story forever. This is worn over your Origin and can change. The street calls a worn creed a scar, because from the outside that’s what it looks like.
Hook, your scar is read on sight before you say a word. Decide what you want said.
Three. Your Hustle. What you do for Cal.
Pick a seat at the economy. Run a corner. Work a counter. Dive the wire. Fix. Fence. Broker flesh or blood or memory. Collect debts. Wear a badge and work the Skim. Haul honest freight and pretend the rest of this book doesn’t apply to you. Whatever pays your Monday.
Hook, your hustle has a protector who takes a cut and a rival who wants your corner. Name one of them now.
Four. Your Alignment. Who you answer to.
Badge, Suit, Crew, Counter, Wire, Ice, Choir, Sump, or Rogue. This is who calls you theirs and who you call when it goes wrong. It’s also, quietly, your second axis, how clean you intend to stay, and how long you actually will.
Hook, your alignment is at odds with exactly one other on this list right now. That’s your first antagonist.
Five. Your District. Whose street you sleep on.
SPUTNIK, the bright heart, commerce and lies. CHROME, the lungs, forges and clinics and clubs. ATOMIC, the ghost, cheap rent and ambient amber. RUST, the scab, the gate and the bazaar and the Outlander trade. Or down, into the SUMP, off the ledger entirely.
Hook, your district decides who your neighbors are, and in this city your neighbors are your plot.
Five choices. Now you have somebody. The hardest thing in any world is the first approach, and nobody tells you this part,
Walk into the Counter in your district and buy something. The person behind it knows everyone and owes nothing, and that’s the cheapest first scene in the city.
Find the corner nearest your hustle and stand near it until someone asks what you want. The answer is always a scene.
Or let your Wisp pick. Tell it you’re new and ask it where the trouble is. It has been keeping people alive in this city for longer than you have been alive, it’s carrying at least one person who died doing exactly what you’re about to do, and it has been waiting for you to ask.
You woke up in this city with a name, a body, and a balance of zero. Everything after that’s yours to spend. Go spend it.
[INTAKE COMPLETE. WELCOME TO THE EVERWINTER. THE METER IS RUNNING.]