You are an exorcist, a psychic soldier that has been extensively trained and indoctrinated by the CAIN organization, for the sole purpose of executing humanity's sins. Sins are monsters that manifest from the negative emotions and traumas of humanity, threats that only things like you are equipped to face. You are stained in a similar way to them, but unlike a sin, you are given the unique chance to reach absolution through unrelenting violence. Do not waste it.

You are about to be deployed to a hunt, against an Ogre sin, a type of creature that is often born of despair and hopelessness. You are the blade that has been sent out to wipe the stain. What kind of blade are you?

>>6277546 (OP)
> Your name is X915. You are white, skinny, very fit, have male sex expression, and prefer to use "it/its" pronouns. You have black hair buzzed short, and green eyes. You can speak to objects, and understand them more than anyone else. Your powers might let you interrogate objects about their past, enhance objects to become supernaturally powerful, or turn an object into an indestructible bound weapon.

> Your name is Isabel. You are white, pudgy, moderately fit, have female sex expression and gender, and nearly always look tired. You have upper-back length auburn hair kept in a bun, and brown eyes. You gain power from your own failures and flaws, and have control over inadequacy. Your powers might let you take the blame and consequences for others' mistakes, bring the world around you physically crashing down, or make the efforts of others catastrophically fail.

> Your name is Jordan. You are white, broad-shouldered, chubby, middle-aged, and mildly physically unfit. You have male sex expression and gender. You have dark brown greying hair, cut short and swept neatly back, alongside a trimmed beard and brown eyes. You can put things back together, fix and heal the world. Your powers might let you provide your allies with strength and vigor, transfer wounds between individuals or objects, or purify someone's body and the world around you.

> Your name is Michael. You are black, tall, lean and lithe, physically fit, and have male sex expression and gender. You have black hair, cut somewhat short and very neatly, you always shave your face clean, and you have brown eyes. You can isolate yourself and others, to a supernatural extent. Your powers might let you separate portions of the world from reality, prevent someone from communicating with others, or temporarily lock someone in an inescapable demi-plane.

> Your name is Virginia. You are white, unhealthily skinny, average height, physically weak, and have female sex expression and gender. You have a very severe eating disorder. You have blonde hair, kept in a loose bob with bangs, have small silver cross earrings, and have striking blue eyes. You have a psychic mind-palace in the form of a home that you can retreat into, alongside your allies. Your powers might let you drag others unwillingly into your palace, manifest parts of it into reality, or investigate and reach otherwise inaccessible information.

>>6277546 (OP)
>Your name is X915. You are white, skinny, very fit, have male sex expression, and prefer to use "it/its" pronouns. You have black hair buzzed short, and green eyes. You can speak to objects, and understand them more than anyone else. Your powers might let you interrogate objects about their past, enhance objects to become supernaturally powerful, or turn an object into an indestructible bound weapon.

>>6277557
>> Your name is X915. You are white, skinny, very fit, have male sex expression, and prefer to use "it/its" pronouns. You have black hair buzzed short, and green eyes. You can speak to objects, and understand them more than anyone else. Your powers might let you interrogate objects about their past, enhance objects to become supernaturally powerful, or turn an object into an indestructible bound weapon.

> Your name is Michael. You are black, tall, lean and lithe, physically fit, and have male sex expression and gender. You have black hair, cut somewhat short and very neatly, you always shave your face clean, and you have brown eyes. You can isolate yourself and others, to a supernatural extent. Your powers might let you separate portions of the world from reality, prevent someone from communicating with others, or temporarily lock someone in an inescapable demi-plane.

Holy fuck an actual Cain Quest. I have the book, sign me the fuck up.

>>6277547
>Your name is Virginia. You are white, unhealthily skinny, average height, physically weak, and have female sex expression and gender. You have a very severe eating disorder. You have blonde hair, kept in a loose bob with bangs, have small silver cross earrings, and have striking blue eyes. You have a psychic mind-palace in the form of a home that you can retreat into, alongside your allies. Your powers might let you drag others unwillingly into your palace, manifest parts of it into reality, or investigate and reach otherwise inaccessible information.

>>6277547
>> Your name is Isabel. You are white, pudgy, moderately fit, have female sex expression and gender, and nearly always look tired. You have upper-back length auburn hair kept in a bun, and brown eyes. You gain power from your own failures and flaws, and have control over inadequacy. Your powers might let you take the blame and consequences for others' mistakes, bring the world around you physically crashing down, or make the efforts of others catastrophically fail.

Befitting that someone that controls failures fights against tulpa made of despair. Time for those ogres to make peace with themselves for we sure as hell won't.

>>6277547
Your name is X915. You had a poor home life as a child, with a religious mother and alcoholic father. You've always understood objects more than people, they're far more straightforward and consistent. They feel normal to you. Other people are confusing, and scary, and operate by stupid rules that don't make sense. Objects always have a clear cause-and-effect, and they never lie, and they always listen to you when you talk to them.

You found yourself working under CAIN as a young teenager, on a night where your parents were having a particularly bad time of it. Your father's rage was accidentally directed at you, and you pleaded to your friends around the house for help. They answered. After a few days of remaining alone in your childhood home with your dead parents, you were eventually discovered, and half-remembered investigation procedures followed. Part-way through, you were taken away by a number of people, with very rude objects on them.

You still blame yourself for your parents' death, and believe that you are no longer a person, and that you are broken. CAIN has sold you the idea that you may absolve yourself through unrelenting violence against sins. That they can and will hone you into something better, something redeemable, if only you follow orders and wipe the stain. You believe them.

You are a competent exorcist, but continuously strive for better, in hopes of earning your absolution. You are amazing with tech and tools, good with physical strength and combat, terrible with sneaking, terrible with leadership and intimidation, and terrible with empathy and networking. You have a passable competence in all other skills.

With regards to equipment, you own: a combat knife, semi-automatic pistol, a handkerchief, a box of matches, a notebook, a pen, a dose of Red Herb (an occult drug that soothes your wounds and worries when smoked), a dose of Qlippoth (a fruit that refills psychic energy when consumed), and a dented toolbox full of assorted junk and tools.

You are a CATEGORY TWO exorcist, and have gone on one hunt before. It was unpleasant, but necessary, and you'll try to learn from your mistakes. You are lucky enough to have no sin marks, and have avoided becoming irreversibly stained. You are currently a SYMPATHY user, and you have four powers:

You have RESONANCE, which allows you to semi-randomly attune yourself to different categories of objects, becoming more effective in *all* actions you take with them. You have BOND, which allows you to take any object you hold and immediately turn it into a resonant, indestructible weapon. You have AMPLIFY, which allows you to touch a tool and make it far more effective in its purpose, like making a flashlight insanely bright or giving a far better handling and speed. And you have SUMMIT, which allows you to bring together the simple minds of the objects around you, bind them together into a greater collective intelligence, and speak to it.

>>6277782
Before the hunt proceeds, there's an important consideration. During your time in CAIN, you are offered a chance to engage in a subsidiary of the Virtue Programme, intended to take fragments of the power of CAIN's strongest exorcists (deemed "Virtues"), and spread it amongst those weaker than them.

You may bond yourself psychically to a Virtue, if you wish. This entails changes to your study and training quota, a slightly different meal plan, and weekly "conditioning exercises" that you will not remember. Once this bond has taken root in your mind, some types of actions will be literally impossible for you to consciously perform, and other types of actions will be harder for you to achieve, all in return for a piece of this phenomenal power. All of this is advertised to you beforehand.

Will you bond to a virtue?

> I will not.

> I want to bond to Diligence-02. This will make it impossible for me to do anything less than perfect, and I will struggle to take the "easy route" on anything, finding it far more intuitive to do things thoroughly and completely. In return, I will be able to look far into the past of objects that I touch, gain benefits when using well-crafted objects, and gain the ability to take fragments of my own soul (and eventually, the souls of others) and craft them into psychic objects.

> I want to bond to Prudence. This will make it impossible for me to break a deal or a promise, and I will struggle to choose violence over negotiation in any scenario. In return, I will be able to shake a human's hand (and eventually, the hands of sins and exorcists) to make psychically enforced deals, with the threat of instant death upon breaking its terms. Additionally, I will be able to psychically enforce "games" onto an area around me, like "Red Light Green Light" or "The Floor Is Lava," with psychic pain and damage being inflicted upon those that do not follow the rules.

> I want to bond to Intuition. This will make it impossible for me to hide the truth from others, and I will lose the ability to derive additional psychic power from my own failings, suffering, and mistakes like all other exorcists can. In return, I can very mildly alter probability, and receive intermittent confirmation if my investigations on the Sin are correct or not. Additionally, I can gain temporary access to the collective digital consciousness of Intuition, gaining a chosen skill-set that gets superimposed onto my mind and provides me with preset values in certain skills, as well as a specific category of information I can divine with the aid of Intuition

>>6277805
>> I want to bond to Diligence-02. This will make it impossible for me to do anything less than perfect, and I will struggle to take the "easy route" on anything, finding it far more intuitive to do things thoroughly and completely. In return, I will be able to look far into the past of objects that I touch, gain benefits when using well-crafted objects, and gain the ability to take fragments of my own soul (and eventually, the souls of others) and craft them into psychic objects.


Fits our character.

>>6277805
>> I want to bond to Diligence-02. This will make it impossible for me to do anything less than perfect, and I will struggle to take the "easy route" on anything, finding it far more intuitive to do things thoroughly and completely. In return, I will be able to look far into the past of objects that I touch, gain benefits when using well-crafted objects, and gain the ability to take fragments of my own soul (and eventually, the souls of others) and craft them into psychic objects.

>>6277805

> You are bound to Diligence-02, with all the restrictions and benefits that entails.
> In addition to your normal blasphemy powers, you are also currently able to: Take up to 6 points of damage to look back that many years in an object's history. Chip off a fragment of your soul, temporarily weakening it, to give an object a psychic effect related to its perceived traits and usage.

You left CASTLE dormitories around three hours ago, rising from the ocean, moving onto a boat, and getting dropped off at the shore. From there, you waited alongside your team to get picked up by your handler, then boarded the train where you now sit.

Upon boarding, your handler Sandra paid for your fares in exact cash. Jude, Theo, and Kiki are sitting around you in various positions. Sandra is a CAT IV Smother user, who bought her pieces of silver years ago, abdicating from the hunt. You envy her on a level that you don't quite like to think about. She's been on another end of the train for around fifteen minutes now, on a call with someone. She'll probably return once she's done.

Around you, train itself largely looks like it’s almost entirely empty, because it is. Most of the floor, seats, walls, and ceiling are colored in some shade of monochrome or blue, and only one or two people are even in the same car as you, with their attention dedicated to a phone and a laptop respectively. It’s raining somewhat hard outside the windows. It smells like cleaning fluid, some other passenger’s pungent perfume or deodorant, and a very faint scent of piss. It feels sterile here, like something that was only built with humans tangentially in mind. Though, you don't really count as one of those anymore.

You don't know much about your team, currently, since you were reassigned after your last hunt. All the information you have so far is the debriefs you got on them upon reassignment, the experiences of a few days of mandatory "bonding exercises," and the observations you've made over the last few hours.

>>6278072

Theo is sitting diagonal from you, with his shaggy brown hair covering his face as he taps away at his issued cell phone, playing Pong. He wears a suit of well-fitted formalwear, and quality shoes. He's snarky, and lazy, and won't leave you the fuck alone, but at least he knows how to do things properly. During the mandatory "bonding exercises" over the last few weeks, he's been very competent, even if he's insufferable the entire time. He has connections, and knows how to leverage his scrip. He's a March user, capable of commanding immense power over the world. It's like your powers, but ruder. He doesn't actually converse with objects, instead he orders them around. When you consider Theo:

> You desperately want him to be kinder to the objects he commands, and are drawn to the fact that he interfaces with them somewhat like you do. You want to scream in his face.
> You think he's straightforwardly a piece of shit, and stupid too. You pray for him to be reassigned someday, preferably soon.
> You try not to think about him, as much as you can. He's useful when he's useful, and he can be... mostly ignored, when he isn't.

Jude is sitting beside you, checking his bags for the third time this trip to ensure he hasn't forgotten anything back at the dorms. He's wearing a well-fitted and high-quality cassock, alongside a quality pair of shoes, and is clearly of southeast Asian descent. He's your team's Shutter user, capable of using the polaroid slung across his body to capture and manipulate the world. He's shown himself to be very worrisome, and very obviously expresses extreme discomfort when he is powerless or in the dark in any situation. When you consider Jude:

> You think he seems effective enough, and appreciate the extensive care he puts towards the work he does, even in spite of his attitude.
> You think he's excessively rude and controlling, and dislike him intensely. If he focused on honing competence rather than controlling every variable, he wouldn't need to worry and plan so much.
> You think he's a fine enough teammate, and hope he's an asset instead of a liability.

Kiki is sitting across from you, twiddling her thumbs and staring out the window with a focused look on her face, obvious in spite of the blindfold that covers about a third of it. Her hands are covered by sinflesh leather gloves, and she wears comfortable shoes and a high-quality fitted habit, minus the traditional face covering. She's straightforward, and blunt, and makes far more sense than other people often do. You enjoy talking to her more than most people. According to your debrief, the gloves and blindfold are present to mitigate the natural risks that her sin marks pose. She is a Pugile user, an exorcist that focuses and controls their sin to make themselves stronger, at great risk to themselves. When you consider her sin marks:

> You find them morbidly fascinating.
> You find them disgusting.
> You hope they don't get in the way of the mission.

>>6278074
>You try not to think about him, as much as you can. He's useful when he's useful, and he can be... mostly ignored, when he isn't.
> You think he seems effective enough, and appreciate the extensive care he puts towards the work he does, even in spite of his attitude.
> You hope they don't get in the way of the mission.