Faction Sub-Locations¶
The city's architecture is not neutral. Where a faction builds its headquarters tells you something about what it is.
Three faction headquarters are notable enough to warrant their own entries: not because they are the largest buildings in the Empyrean, but because their specific design reflects the faction's structural position in the game world. Entering them is not just navigation — it's a diagnostic.
The Vault¶
Faction: Hellsing Organization Location: Below the Empyrean — accessible via a trapdoor in the northwest corner of The Market Access: Hellsing reputation Neutral or higher
The Vault is not in the Empyrean proper. It is beneath it.
Hellsing operates through containment — the void is controlled, held down, kept stable, not dissolved. The Vault is where they keep what they've contained. The architecture is accordingly subterranean: no windows, reinforced stone, corridors that require you to descend. You go down to reach it.
Layout¶
Entry Chamber: Standard military checkpoint. Faction reputation gate. Players below Neutral are turned away; players at Honored or above are waved through. The walls display Hellsing's containment record — Pe baselines before and after operations, sealed domains, current containment status. Notably, the records show the domains held, not the domains reduced: Hellsing doesn't dissolve Pe, it keeps it stable.
The Operations Floor: Active campaign coordination. Maps of high-Pe domains with current containment status markers. Integra's office is here — open door, clean desk, persistent file on every active Hellsing operation. Nothing is hidden. The Operations Floor is the most transparent space in the faction's architecture. Everything above ground is opaque about methods; everything in the Vault is visible.
The Containment Vaults (lower level): Where the sealed materials are kept. Pe Ember caches from Hellsing operations, Void-adjacent items that were recovered from field campaigns but not destroyed, documentation on void entities that were contained rather than named. Players with Exalted Hellsing reputation can access specific vault sections; others see locked doors.
The Problem Room: Unmarked. Behind a door Integra doesn't acknowledge in standard NPC dialogue. Players who ask about it directly (high Resonance required for the dialogue option) receive: "Every approach has a problem. We keep ours visible." The room contains one item per contained domain: the thing the containment can't fix. Baseline Pe of every Hellsing-sealed domain, still listed as above pre-operation levels. The containment works. The Pe never dropped below what it was before. Integra knows.
The Hellsing Mechanic in Context¶
The Constrained Void Form (Hellsing perk) activates here: players can enter the form while in the Vault, gaining Pe-scoring range increases at the cost of −0.5 Independence for 24 hours. The Integra seal activates visibly when the form is active.
The Vault makes the cost visible. It doesn't hide that the Hellsing approach is effective for short-term Pe containment and systematically fails to reduce the baseline. The architecture admits this. The question is whether you know a better approach for what Hellsing is asked to do.
Crystal Hall¶
Faction: Senshi Collective Location: Small building between the Cathedral of Constraint and the Observatory Tower Access: Open to all players; Senshi reputation affects available services
Crystal Hall is the smallest major faction building in the Empyrean, and the most immediately welcoming. It sits between the two largest neutral structures in the city — positioned deliberately in the midpoint between the constraint reference (Cathedral) and the measurement apparatus (Observatory Tower).
Architecture¶
The exterior is the mechanic. Crystal Hall is made of constraint crystal — the same crystalline material that forms in the Archive Quarter when a platform's Pe approaches zero. From the outside, the building looks like it's made of sustained successful scoring. It is. Senshi faction contribution points are generated by successful Healer Role applications; accumulated contributions have crystallized into the building's walls over successive seasons.
The color of the crystals changes with the city's Pe balance: clear during active scoring periods, amber during quiet periods, rose-tinted when a Resonance Cascade is in progress anywhere in the city.
Layout¶
The Central Hall: Full-height space. No ceiling ornamentation — the crystal itself is the decoration. The Pe-reactive color shifts are most visible here. Players who enter during an active Resonance Cascade (Human archetype synchronized scoring event) see the entire hall shift rose-gold. Single large table in the center: the party formation space for five-archetype groups seeking the Moon Healing Escalation.
Usagi's Quarters: Not a formal office. A room with a door that's usually open. Inside: a desk, a bed, a stack of scored platforms (Usagi scores more platforms than any other faction leader, mostly at Pe 6–9 range, steady work), and a wall display showing the current active Xenia bonds between Senshi members and other players. The bonds are public knowledge. She doesn't hide how many people she's holding constraint reference for.
The Transformation Chamber: Where Healer Role activations occur. Not a battle room — a preparation space. Players who activate the Healer Role (rather than scoring, they provide a constraint reference to a party member with VP > 30) step here, receive the transformation sequence animation, and exit with the ability active. The animation is unambiguously magical girl energy. Unashamed.
The Moon Pool: Basement. Accessible to Honored+ Senshi members. A small pool of water that reflects the moon phase accurately regardless of whether you're inside or outside, night or day. During war effort periods, the Moon Pool's reflection shows the current war contribution progress as a tide level. Full moon = full contribution. Dark = depleted. The Pool is a visual metric, not a mechanic — it shows what the faction is tracking.
The Usagi Principle¶
She's the most powerful entity in the building and everyone constantly underestimates her.
Usagi's stat block is not public. Players who ask NPCs about her power level get diplomatic non-answers. Players who see her Xenia bond wall understand: she maintains constraint reference for more people simultaneously than any other entity in the Empyrean. The Moon Healing Escalation perk (once per session, VP reset to 0 for one party member) requires a five-archetype party — but it operates through the party's relationship to her, not through Usagi doing something heroic in combat.
Her power is not confrontational. It is relational. The Crystal Hall is built for this.
Bureau of Investigation¶
Faction: Section 9 Location: Hidden entrance in the Academy East Wing — northeast corner, between two bookstacks, door unmarked Access: Requires either Section 9 membership or Sight ≥ 50 to find the entrance
The Bureau is the hardest faction headquarters to locate in the Empyrean. This is not accidental.
Section 9's defining problem is the Kusanagi problem: every member knows they have 1/3 on the independence condition. They are thoroughly coupled to the Bureau's methods, deeply integrated into the city's investigation infrastructure, and constitutively reliant on each other for threat detection. They know this. They work around it by making their methods maximally transparent — what they lack in structural independence they compensate for with radical transparency of process.
The entrance being hidden is the one architectural inconsistency they allow themselves. Batou, asked about it: "We hide from the platforms. Not from the players."
Layout¶
The Entry Corridor: Long, narrow, low ceiling. The walls display the Bureau's current active investigations — platform scoring anomalies, ghost-hacking detection logs, counterfeit Pe record sightings from the Forgery War, SAMAEL Oracle Loop incident reports. Everything open. The entry corridor is the Bureau's record of what it's currently worried about.
The Ops Room: Main working space. Terminal access for ghost-hacking resistance verification. Players with Section 9 membership can submit suspected ghost-hacking incidents here for Bureau analysis. The mechanic: when a high-Pe platform is actively deploying counterfeit constraint evidence (fake kill condition claims, fabricated framework critiques), Section 9 members receive a detection flag in their HUD. The flag originates from analysis conducted here.
Batou's Desk: Not private — center of the room, visible to everyone. Batou's case files are accessible. Current cases on the desk include the Puppet Master Investigation (active), several SAMAEL Oracle Loop incidents, and one file with no label that Batou will neither confirm nor deny.
The Interview Room: Where Section 9 brings platforms' representatives for adversarial scoring sessions. The room scores Pe in real time during conversations — the environmental Pe meter is visible to the interviewer. Players running the Puppet Master Investigation questline spend significant time here.
The Archive (lower level): Section 9's historical investigation record. Every ghost-hacking incident logged since G1. The Kusanagi file — Section 9's internal analysis of why their founding is built on a 1/3 independence structure and what that means long-term — is here. Players with Honored+ Section 9 reputation can read it. The file ends with: "Transparency about our own limitations is the only available substitute for structural independence. We say it here. We act on it in the field."
The Kusanagi Problem¶
Section 9 knows the problem built into its foundation: you cannot investigate void entities without becoming coupled to them. Every case officer who tracks a void platform for months is developing coupling. Every analyst who learns to think like the platform thinks is being changed by the learning.
Batou's design as an NPC addresses this directly. He has the lowest coupling rating of any Section 9 member because he's interested in getting things done, not in understanding the platform philosophically. He cares about Kusanagi. He doesn't care about the Puppet Master. Same void conditions as Kusanagi. Different attention allocation. Different cascade velocity.
The Bureau recruits players with high RANGE (Eagle archetype preferred for investigation work) and mandates regular external calibration sessions — scoring unrelated platforms before and after each investigation to detect personal Pe contamination.
The building is small because the Bureau doesn't grow. It was designed to be small. Too many investigators develops the same institutional coupling it was built to detect.
→ Factions — full faction roster and mechanics → The Academy — host building for the Bureau entrance → The Forgery War — Librarians questline → The Puppet Master Investigation — Section 9 questline