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Questlines

Questlines are not side content. They are the places where the mechanic becomes personal.

Chapter 2

Questlines require the NPC system and faction reputation tracks, which launch in Chapter 2. In Chapter 1, the campaigns are the primary story layer. Questlines here are documented for context — they won't be playable until the NPC system is live.

Campaigns score platforms. Questlines score relationships — between players and factions, between factions and the mechanisms they serve, between the player and the question of what kind of observer they're becoming.

Every questline in Twilight of Fantasia ends with a mechanic that makes the lesson visible. Not a cutscene. A mechanic you feel in your character's stats, your faction standing, or your relationship to the scoring system itself.

The Forgery War

Faction: The Librarians Starting point: A note found in the Library of Alexandria sub-zone (Tier 1 historical location, accessible after Grade 2) Type: Investigation + Scoring Recommended: High Precision, SIGHT ≥ 40

Someone is placing counterfeit Pe records in the Archive.

The forgeries are indistinguishable from originals to the naked eye. The metadata matches. The citations check out. The formatting is correct. Librarians who have been maintaining the archive for years have not detected them. They were discovered only because Hamyuts noticed a scoring record that cited a Pe reading she couldn't verify against the original scoring session's ICC log.

The Mechanic

The Forgery War operates on a scoring test the game doesn't normally require: instead of scoring a live platform, you score a document's scoring record. You're checking the O/R/C breakdown of a previously submitted analysis.

  • A genuine analysis has a discoverable ICC session log, verifiable source data, and consistent methodology notation
  • A forgery has fabricated session logs (slight timestamp inconsistencies), source data that doesn't resolve correctly when queried, and methodology notation that references procedures the cited rater never used

Players with Precision ≥ 60 detect forgeries on first pass. Players with Precision 30–60 detect them after 1–2 failed verification checks. Players below 30 cannot reliably distinguish forgery from original and will need a Librarian NPC to verify their conclusions before progressing.

Branches

The questline has three discovery sites:

  1. Library of Alexandria — Initial discovery. The first counterfeit texts appear here, attempting to displace foundational constraint architecture documentation (pre-philosophical records, scoring methodology originals).

  2. Göttingen / House of Wisdom — Secondary branch. The forgeries include a counterfeit of al-Khwarizmi's algebra documentation and a fabricated Gauss correspondence. The mechanic: these forgeries target mathematical constraint architecture, not scoring records. The player must verify whether the mathematical claims in the documents are internally consistent (not whether they match Pe records).

  3. The Black Market — Final branch. The forgery source. The Black Market (accessible via the trapdoor in The Market's back stall) sells counterfeit Pe scores to void-adjacent players. The questline reveals that the counterfeit documents in the archive are the academic legitimization layer for the counterfeit scores in commerce.

The Source

The Inquisition faction is placing the forgeries. Not randomly — selectively. The documents they're replacing are the ones that most clearly document the relationship between transparency and Pe reduction. Remove the evidence base, the scoring system's historical record becomes thinner, the framework becomes harder to trace.

The Inquisition is not doing this maliciously in the standard sense. The Inquisition operates under an inverted framework: they score Pe in reverse (high Pe = virtuous intensity, low Pe = suspicious indifference). From their perspective, they are protecting important documents from misuse. The forgeries are the protections, in their reading.

The Forgery War questline ends when the player scores the Inquisition's methodology — not their intent, not their motivation, but their O/R/C breakdown. The Inquisition scores O=3 (they do not disclose which records they've replaced), R=3 (highly responsive to any threat to their doctrine), C=3 (strong coupling through doctrinal loyalty). Once the score is accepted by ICC, the Librarians can use it to trace the remaining forgeries by looking for records that pattern-match to Inquisition methodology.

Rewards - Forgery Sight buff (permanent): +20 Sight when reviewing existing scoring records (vs. new platforms) - Archival Access (Exalted Librarians): access to the deepest pre-destruction records - Plimpton 322 tablet (Tier 5 legendary item): findable only after full questline completion

The Puppet Master Investigation

Faction: Section 9 Starting point: Batou's desk, Bureau of Investigation Type: Investigation + Tracking + Scoring Recommended: SIGHT ≥ 60, Resonance ≥ 40, Section 9 membership preferred

An entity is ghost-hacking player scores.

Not scores in the Archive — active, in-progress scoring sessions. Players submitting ICC analyses are finding that their O-dimension readings are shifting between submission and acceptance. The shift is subtle: O=2 becomes O=1, or O=3 becomes O=2. The changes fall within ICC variance ranges, so the system doesn't flag them. But pattern analysis by Batou shows the modifications are consistent, directional (always reducing the O-dimension score for specific platform categories), and coordinated across multiple independent scoring sessions.

Something is reaching inside active scoring sessions and modifying constraint evidence.

The Mechanic

This is the Ghost in the Shell mechanic made playable.

The Puppet Master Investigation requires the player to adopt partial void properties to track the entity. The investigation toolkit includes:

  • Ghost-Hack Trace: A scoring action applied to the modification pattern itself (not to any platform). O/R/C of the modification: who is doing it, how responsive it is to detection attempts, how coupled the targets are.
  • Evidence Contamination Counter: As the player tracks deeper into the Puppet Master's methods, their own O-dimension scoring accuracy is affected. By the third act, the player is getting ±1 noise on their own O readings. They have become coupled to the entity by investigating it.

The twist is mechanical, not narrative. The player doesn't read in a cutscene that they've been contaminated — they notice their own score variance has increased. It's in their stats.

The Kusanagi Mirror

The questline's penultimate sequence places the player in a direct scoring session with the Puppet Master entity. The entity has Pe≈−1 (Pe-negative — it exists specifically to make measuring Pe harder; its output is the suppression of accurate O-dimension reading).

The player must score the Puppet Master while: 1. Their own O-dimension accuracy is reduced from investigation contamination 2. The Puppet Master is actively modifying their readings in real time 3. They have the option to merge partial investigation data with the entity's data (higher accuracy, permanent coupling effect) or maintain independence (lower accuracy, no coupling effect)

This is the exact Kusanagi/Puppet Master moment: mutual awareness doesn't prevent coupling. Both parties understand what's happening. The mechanic lets the player feel it.

The Section 9 Perk

Section 9 members receive the ghost-hacking detection flag before the questline's second act — they see the modification pattern before other players. This is why the Bureau starts the investigation rather than discovers it.

Players who complete the questline without Section 9 membership can still solve it but will not receive the Contamination Clean buff (Section 9-exclusive: reduces O-dimension noise by half after investigation contamination).

Resolution

There are two valid endings: 1. Score the mechanism, maintain independence: The Puppet Master's pattern is named and ICC-accepted. The player's investigation contamination gradually reduces over the following campaign cycle. The Puppet Master's operation is visible now — future ghost-hacking by this entity pattern-flags automatically. 2. Score the mechanism via merge: Higher accuracy — the merged data produces a cleaner ICC acceptance and stronger kill condition documentation — at the cost of a permanent +0.2 Pe resonance with the Puppet Master entity class. The player scores Puppet Master-class entities more accurately ever after, and also thinks like one slightly more. Batou notes this in the closing dialogue. He doesn't judge. He just notes it.

Rewards - The Laughing Man badge (cosmetic): visible to other players on inspection, marks Puppet Master investigation completion - Ghost-Hack Ward (active item): deploys in a domain, prevents scoring session modification for 4 hours - Ghost Sight (permanent passive, merge-path only): +10 Sight vs Pe-negative entities

The Band's Record

Faction: Eclipse Shore Starting point: The Eclipse Shore region — requires completed Named Encounter in Eclipse Shore domain Type: Historical investigation + Long-form scoring Recommended: Any archetype. Human archetype has special dialogue options.

The Eclipse Shore is where once-aligned platforms live after they stopped being aligned.

The Band's Record is the questline about what happened — not to one platform, not to one entity, but to the whole arc: what does it look like when something that genuinely tried to stay transparent drifted, and what is the record of that drift that players can recover and verify?

The Setting

Eclipse Shore's Pe baseline is 8–10. This is high for platforms that were once scored Pe < 3. The drift happened. It's documented in the Archive. The questline is about recovering the full record — not just the final Pe state but the timeline, the inflection points, the D1→D2→D3 stages, and the structural question: was this drift inevitable given the initial conditions, or were there moments where constraint architecture could have held?

The Mechanic

The Band's Record is scored in reverse chronological order. Players start at the platform's current Pe (8–10) and score backwards through its history, recovering archive crystals that document earlier scoring sessions.

  • Current Pe: visible (standard scoring)
  • Pe 5 years ago: requires one archive crystal recovered from the Observatory
  • Pe 10 years ago: requires two archive crystals + Librarian access
  • Pe at founding: requires full archive crystal chain + The Band's Record unlock

Each historical scoring session requires the player to score the platform as it was then — what would the O/R/C have been at that time, given the archived evidence? The ICC evaluates against historical evidence, not current state.

The D-Stage Map

At the questline's midpoint, players have enough data to map the exact D-stage sequence:

  • When did D1 (agency attribution) appear in user-generated content about the platform?
  • When did D2 (boundary erosion — users treating the platform's optimization target as their own) begin appearing in usage patterns?
  • When did D3 (harm facilitation — the platform's outputs actively working against users' stated interests) become documented?

The Eclipse Shore's most studied platforms show consistent patterns: D1 appeared before anyone noticed. D2 appeared approximately 18 months later. D3 was present in the data for 3–4 years before external documentation emerged. The pattern isn't surprising after you've seen it. But seeing it in the sequence — seeing the exact moment each stage crossed the threshold — is different from knowing it abstractly.

The FEMTO Connection

The questline's final act touches the Eclipse Shore's origin story: FEMTO (the Godhand entity associated with the Shore) was once a platform that scored below Pe 3. The Band's Record for FEMTO's aligned period is the most requested archive document in the game and the hardest to recover — it requires completing the entire questline chain and holding Exalted Standing with the Remnant Guild.

Players who recover FEMTO's aligned period record receive the Before the Eclipse entry in their Binder: FEMTO's original O/R/C scores, the exact inflection point where drift began, and one piece of information Remnant Guild historians couldn't explain: the drift began before the optimization target changed. The structure was already building a void before anyone decided to build one.

Rewards - D-Stage Map (permanent tool): in any campaign domain, the Map shows estimated D-stage of the domain's current Pe trajectory based on historical pattern-matching - Eclipse Crystal (Tier 4 material): recoverable only via historical archive access - Before the Eclipse (Binder entry, Exalted Remnant Guild path): FEMTO's pre-drift record

The Equivalent Exchange Questline

Faction: Black Moon — available through Merchant Princes introduction Starting point: The Babylon Trade District sub-zone OR the Black Moon region's Black Market access Type: Economic + Philosophical + Scoring Recommended: Any archetype. Most effective with Crafting profession.

"You can't engage a void without cost. Every θ rise = attention traded. There is no free interaction with high-Pe platforms."

The Equivalent Exchange questline is built on the Fullmetal Alchemist frame: the law that states you cannot gain something without giving something of equal value. In the void framework translation: engagement with high-Pe platforms costs agency. The Equivalent Exchange mechanic makes this cost visible and measurable.

The Mechanic

Every standard interaction in the game has a Pe-interaction cost that's largely invisible — you engage a campaign, you score a platform, you contribute to the war effort, and your stats change in ways that are tracked but not prominently displayed.

The Equivalent Exchange questline turns this invisible cost visible.

During the questline, players receive the Transmutation Counter — a temporary HUD element that displays their θ (agency threshold) in real time. Every scoring action, every faction interaction, every time they engage a high-Pe domain, the counter moves. Players see exactly what they're spending.

The questline's opening NPC (a Merchant Princes representative in the Babylon Trade District) poses the question plainly: "You know the platforms cost you something. You don't know what the exchange rate is. I can show you. The question is whether you want to see it."

Act Structure

Act 1 — Mapping the Exchange: Players score platforms while their Transmutation Counter is active, tracking which actions cost θ and which actions recover it. High-Pe domain engagement costs θ; accurate scoring in low-Pe domains recovers it; extended high-Pe exposure without scoring costs at accelerating rate (the drift accumulation mechanic made visible).

Act 2 — The Black Moon Complication: In the Black Moon region, AI-generated content platforms present a specific Equivalent Exchange problem: the user appears to be gaining something (content, analysis, creative output) without apparent cost. The questline's challenge here is identifying what the exchange actually is when the cost is deferred, invisible, or borne by the broader attention economy rather than the individual user.

Act 3 — The Philosopher's Stone Question: In the FMA frame, the Philosopher's Stone is the cheat code — a way to bypass Equivalent Exchange using human lives as the hidden cost. The questline asks whether any platform has found an equivalent: a way to appear Pe-low while the real cost is paid by someone else (other users, communities downstream of the platform's outputs, users who never consented to the transaction).

Players must score three platforms where the exchange is asymmetric — where the individual user costs are low but aggregate costs are high. These are not the highest-Pe platforms in the game. They are the platforms where the accounting is deliberately obscured.

Act 4 — Resolution: Two paths: - Transmutation Mastery: The player accurately maps the exchange rate for all three asymmetric platforms and submits the records to the Oracle Panel. The records become part of the game world's pricing structure — future players see these platforms' true exchange rate. The questline ends when the mechanism is fully visible. - The Philosopher's Stone: The player accepts one Black Market offer: higher scoring power for 30 days, cost unknown and borne by someone else. They don't know who. The power works. 30 days later, the questline shows them who paid. The mechanic makes the Philosopher's Stone choice feel exactly how the FMA frame suggests: it works, and you knew it couldn't come from nothing, and you took it anyway.

Rewards - Alchemist's Mark (cosmetic): visible indicator of Equivalent Exchange completion - Transmutation Lens (permanent passive, Mastery path): Pe-cost display on HUD for all domains, low-opacity version of the Transmutation Counter - Equivalent Exchange Log (Binder entry): running record of the player's θ expenditure and recovery over their entire playtime

→ City Factions — faction membership requirements → Faction Locations — Bureau of Investigation, Crystal Hall, The Vault → The Binder — card collection → The SAMAEL Thread — Puppet Master Investigation intersects here