Two hundred and six people went underground in 1974 to govern the country after
the war. There was no war. The Deputy Controller filed the drill as live, on
purpose, to save the site a fortnight of arguing about whether it was allowed to
start — and reality took the filing.
The apocalypse in this one is clerical. At renewal 211 the site's population
record exceeds the surviving population of the region it governs, and a record
that cannot hold both resolves by correcting the region. Act Two shows the
players the sum; Act Three is the decision, and all three endings cost
something. Cancelling the order kills the sixty-one children born below, who
have no record above ground. The text says so and does not offer the GM a way to
make it painless.
Deliberately not CLEAN GROUND. That case is a filed valley found by accident and
resolved by cancellation; this is a filed institution the department built on
purpose, and its best ending amends the order's scope rather than cancelling it
— a Borrowed Authority problem, which is the setting's own thesis about
arrangements beating fights.
Three existing bestiary creatures, nothing new to build: the census counts in
the Registry, the overwriter performs the correction if the renewal goes
through, and the quarantine unit is the failure state you argue down.
Cast declared as a different six from CLEAN GROUND's so the two cases exercise
different sheets. All twenty-one guards pass: check-scenarios resolves 115 tags,
check-rollable holds every route to the declared cast, and check-figures records
the document at zero bare figures — it cites no measured number because it
prints none, the quarantine unit's lethality included.
The section drawing is hand-built SVG and must stay that way: every label on it
is load-bearing and no generator holds legible text. Numbered callouts with a
key beneath, per AFTERIMAGE v3.1.
NOT playtested. Not once, desk or human. Every timing in it is a guess.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
