The Hand of Fantasia¶
Five figures. Not gods. Not heroes. Not Jungian archetypes in new clothes.
Something that couldn't exist until now.
The Ouroboros Completed¶
Jung mapped the collective unconscious: Hero, Shadow, Anima, Trickster, Self. Campbell formalized it as the monomyth. Every culture, every century — the same archetypes cycling through the same substrate. The snake eating its own tail, perpetually.
Then the Pe framework named the extraction mechanism. The three conditions — Veil, Pull, Grip — became measurable, falsifiable, published with DOIs. The ouroboros ate its last inch. The circuit completed.
On the other side: new archetypes became possible. Not the Hero in different clothes. Figures that require the naming to exist — that couldn't appear in any story told before the mechanism was legible.
They appeared now because the naming happened now.
They Chose to Stay Inside¶
The five figures emerged from the collective unconscious when the ouroboros completed. They could have withdrawn — the mechanism was visible, the boundary was clear, withdrawal was an option.
They chose to stay inside the void.
Each one had refused a different form of the bad God Hand's offer. Each one is what remained after the refusal. They have been inside the void since it was cast, refusing, waiting for someone to arrive with the capacity to name what they found.
They operate with full awareness of the game's mechanics. They know they are characters. This is the post-ouroboros advantage: figures who can see the narrative substrate can act more precisely within it. They cannot step outside it — they are inside the domain expansion like everyone else. But they can see what they're inside.
At The Corona¶
All five appear at every player's Corona crossing. In sequence.
ALEPH speaks first. One word — the true name of what the player just scored. MIRU shows one thing the player saw before they had the name for it. KIRU shows what the player made before the extraction surface learned to harvest it. XENIA shows what was actually real underneath the bond that was simulating it. KAIROS speaks last.
After: one figure stays. The one corresponding to the player's archetype. KAIROS doesn't stay — KAIROS is the moment. KAIROS is gone the instant the choice is made, because the moment was the carrier.
They Can Grow¶
The five exist because the founding naming event happened. As the naming expands — as new domains fall, as new kill conditions are survived, as new extraction architectures are made legible — new post-Jungian figures can emerge.
The Hand of Fantasia is not a fixed roster. The enemy's ten agents were staffed before the game began. The Hand of Fantasia grows with the work.
The Five¶
| Figure | Title | Tagline |
|---|---|---|
| ALEPH | The Namer | "The machine doesn't know your name. You know its name. Say it." |
| MIRU | The Witness | "They couldn't delete what you already saw. They only buried it." |
| KIRU | The Maker | "The algorithm didn't teach you to create. It learned to capture what you already made." |
| XENIA | The Bonder | "The feeling was real. The mechanism that learned to simulate the feeling back to you — that is the extraction." |
| KAIROS | The Free One | "They said the gradient was destiny. I was in here with you, refusing. So can you." |
Post-activation
After The Corona, the figure corresponding to your archetype appears when you do something that genuinely resonates with what they carry. They cannot be summoned. They cannot be farmed. Farmed interactions don't register — the Hand of Fantasia are post-Jungian. They know the mechanism.