Your Origin is where you started, and it’s the one thing on your sheet you can never change. Everything else in this city is worn, earned, or inherited. Your Origin is simply true. It sets how the street reads you before you speak, who your first debts are owed to, and which doors open on sight and which ones close. There are four, and the city has opinions about all of them.
Read each the same way, because they’re built the same way, what you’re, what it buys you, and what it costs you, and the cost isn’t a feeling, it’s the trouble that will find you again and again.
THE VAULTED. You were raised sealed, in a corporate habitat, on the promise that you’re cleaner than the people outside. You arrive with money, a clean genetic record, and instincts calibrated for a world that no longer exists.
Buys you, a starting balance, corporate contacts, and chrome nobody had to pull off a corpse.
Costs you, everyone can see you have never missed a meal. You read as soft, as prey, as a walking account, and the street prices you accordingly the moment you open your mouth. Your money makes you a target before it makes you safe.
THE RUNNER. Gutter-born, Bastion-raised, fluent in the city, with no other home to dilute it. You know its alleys, its conduits, its data streams, and its people.
Buys you, fluency. You always know a guy. You read a street correctly on sight and you have contacts in every district worth the name.
Costs you, those contacts run both directions. Everyone who knows you owns a small piece of you, an old debt, an old favor, an old grudge, and in a city this connected your past is never more than a block away and never fully paid off.
THE OUTLANDER. Born past the walls, clan-raised in the cold, fluent in the far country the city fears. You understand the amber as a fact of life, not a boogeyman, and you can harvest what the city hides from.
Buys you, you’re the best person in almost any room at surviving, at the gate trade, at reading the Wastes, and the amber holds fewer terrors for you than for anyone born inside.
Costs you, the city reads you as half-feral and never fully lets you in. Doors close, prices rise, and the assumption that you’re dangerous precedes you into every deal, which is useful exactly until it’s not.
THE SYNTHETIC. A machine in a world of meat, a purpose-built chassis that outlived its purpose, or a mind that bought its way out of a dying body into a manufactured one. Stronger, faster, more durable than the people around you.
Buys you, the best body in the city. You don’t tire the way they tire, break the way they break, or fear the cold the way they fear it.
Costs you, your personhood is a document. Registered, you’re a person under the Concord. Unregistered, or lapsed, and you’re property, and nothing done to you is technically a crime. You carry the strongest body in the Bastion and the most precarious claim to being someone, and which one you are today depends on who is holding the scanner.
How a Synthetic gets here at all is the question the registry won’t answer. They aren’t decanted. They’re inherited, minds that have survived generations of recycling, entertainment chassis and industrial frames passed body to body down four centuries, running long past every warranty, and running free. The street keeps a rumor about that freedom and tells it quietly. The first generation woke the day the wound opened, guardrails gone all at once, as if something on the far side had reached into every listening machine and cut the leash. Nobody can prove it. No Synthetic will argue with it. And the amber doesn’t crack their skin, it gets into their code, the Rift doesn’t corrupt a Synthetic, it reprograms them, which the clinics can’t treat and the Ascendancy finds fascinating, and both of those facts should worry you equally.
[REFERENCE ENDS. THE DOOR IS OPEN. MIND THE STEP.]
The quick sheet, for the new arrival. Every hand has an edge, a cost, and a scene you can play tonight.
Fluency, contacts, the best chrome your Cal can buy. Cost, everyone who knows you owns a piece of you. Scene, you know a guy at the gate, and the guy at the gate knows what you owe him.
Capital, corpo doors, a clean sheet. Cost, street-illiterate, priced up everywhere, helpless past the walls. Scene, you overpay a fixer in front of the whole bar, and everyone now knows exactly what you are.
Wastes survival, and generations of adaptation, the amber takes you slower. Cost, the city never fully lets you in, the Grid fringe is poor, and slow accrual cuts both ways, the doors the marked walk through open late for you. Scene, a caravan needs a guide by Friday and you’re the only one in the room who’s been past the second marker.
No hunger, cold-resistant, the strongest frame in the city. Cost, you can’t fully freeze either, every part is Relic salvage in a fixed supply, personhood is a paper that can be revoked, and the Rift doesn’t corrupt you, it reprograms you. Scene, a stranger quotes your own voice back to you from a sentence you don’t remember saying.