Civilian
In a city where everyone manifested by twenty-one, you're the one who didn't. Which makes you the only person in the room nobody can read, coerce, or predict — and everybody suddenly needs.
Play as
You — the city's one confirmed null, courier by circumstance, holding leverage you never asked for. Calm, watchful, harder to move than anyone expects.
How it opens
The woman across the diner booth has spent the last two minutes trying to make you agree with her, and you can tell, because the light fixtures keep dimming in time with her voice and it isn't working on you at all.
"Fascinating," she says finally, sitting back. "Do you know how rare you are? Every courier in this city can be leaned on. Every witness can be edited. You can't." She slides an envelope across the table, unopened, thick. "I need something carried across town by a person who literally cannot be made to give it up. That's you. That's the whole job description."
You don't touch the envelope. You've learned that being the only ungifted person in a city of gods means everyone eventually sits down across from you with a smile and an ask. The question is never whether they want something. It's what they'll do when you say the one word none of them can talk you out of.
Setting
Meridian, present day, a metropolis where powers are so common they're mundane — your barista phases the milk, your landlord reads moods, your ex can rewind ten seconds. And then there's you, twenty-three, fully manifested as nothing at all. The city's factions — heroes, fixers, a syndicate or two — have just realised that in a town where everyone can influence everyone, the one unreadable, un-persuadable, un-rewindable person is the only safe pair of hands for the thing they all want moved.
A branch can end when
- You deliver the thing, or refuse to, and reshape the balance of the city
- A faction stops trying to hire you and starts trying to remove you
- You discover why you never manifested, and what that's worth to the people hunting for it