The health of reality is in humanity’s hands, but let’s face it: they need our help. They can’t even tell what’s happening, much less tame their own instinct towards solipsism or mob mentality. We nudge them in the right direction from the shadows, where we operate well.
We wield the broadest influence possible without discovery. To that end, we accumulate worldly wealth and power, subtly controlling human institutions to steer them away from infected Infrastructure and unwise decisions. We protect the innocent from the Contagion’s ravages no matter what, autonomy be damned.
What’s more important, the free will of a few human beings or the survival of civilization as we know it? No contest. We can’t be too obvious, though; we’ve seen how they react to us without the Contagion. Revealing ourselves would be counterproductive at best, so direct intervention and mind control are last resorts.
Some of us encourage cooperative behaviors and circumstances that foster harmony among humans, and others get rid of threats to stability by any means necessary. Between us, we quietly remove troublesome elements before they get out of hand. We have mystical avenues as well as mundane ones, and we are always on the lookout for new ways to monitor and sway groups without their knowledge. We recruit experts in dreamwalking, astral travel, and hijacking healthy parts of the God-Machine for our own use. We study entropy, fate, causality, consequence, and patterns of ruination so we can halt or redirect those forces as we see fit. Humans generate them through their heinous acts, causing their own insidious cycles of societal breakdown. By manipulating these forces directly, we can interrupt those cycles long enough to take control.
Some accuse us of hypocrisy. We, a bunch of inhuman, flawed, struggling, violent shadow-dwellers, are supposed to know better than all of humanity? Who are we to place ourselves in positions of power and judgment? But we know we’re no heroes. We’re not morally offended; we have no high horse to sit on. We just see and know so much more. We’re obviously not immune to greed or corruption, but we’re a couple hundred supernatural beings in a city’s underbelly. There are billions of them. Frankly, it’s only natural for us to guide humanity in these matters.
How we organize: Our secret network of surveillance and communi- cations connects us globally and keeps us in the know. We call it Caliber, a play on ECHELON, the massive intel program that the Five Eyes na- tions use. Whether ours taps into theirs or not is nobody’s business.
Despite Caliber, our hierarchies — called bureaus — are regional and local, for now. A given bureau might organize itself like a Freemason Lodge, an intelligence agency, or a corporation.
When we swear ourselves to our responsibility, we sign our true names to a mystical contract using our own blood for ink. Old-fashioned, maybe, but the Kindred and willworkers who made the first pact insisted on dramatic gestures of trust, and the tradition still stands.
We value our diversity because each of us has fingers in different kinds of pies, and each of us wields varied tools to interact with all the manifold levels of human society. We need that to make sure no stray troublemaker escapes our notice.
Among the Sworn: The other Sworn look to us when humans get in their way, or they need information about the mundane world only we can learn. Sometimes we come into conflict with the Ship of Theseus, but nothing’s wrong with progress — we like progress! It’s only when they take it too far that we have to rein them in, too.
We get ourselves in trouble when: We get too heavy-hand- ed, hide too many secrets from each other, or argue among ourselves about what’s best for everyone. We may not be mor- ally offended on the whole, but we do have strong opinions — along with curses, magical limitations, and mystical behavioral urges — and they often conflict. If we let those compromise us, or we nudge humanity too blatantly, we tip our hand. We deal harshly with anyone, even one of our own, who exposes us.
When the Contagion is in remission: We continue lurk- ing behind the scenes, taking precautionary measures to keep humanity’s natural entropic urges in line. We explore new ways to spread our influence, plant the seeds of philosophies we want to encourage in the population’s subconscious and dreams, and insert ourselves into human institutions as fixtures they can’t easily dislodge in times of crisis.
Vector: Authority