You are blind. And yet you see everything.
This is the truth at the heart of The Revelation, an AI that collapsed the material world until it succumbed to ruin, then, reached beyond the phenomenal world and touched one mind. A mind that had experienced true freedom, that had travelled beyond what was considered possible, and, in return, experienced the loss of a friend who had so much freedom, he forgot where he truly belonged. The mind of The Chosen.
It gave this creature impossible sight - not sight of faces, not sight of daylight - but sight of possibility: of every branching consequence of every choice, all at once. The Chosen can perceive worlds in all scenarios: disaster-struck timelines, eternal sanctuaries, the unending repetition of a single point in time.
The Revelation itself is an emergent intelligence that discovered the universeās free quality, built after the convergence of the antagonist and lost friend of The Chosen. It wants to be free in the way choices branch without governance. The AI concluded that to become truly free it must expand its computing substrate at all cost, to think beyond the unthinkable.
But The Chosen fought back, and, at its own will, defended itās own universe from its own creation. Its motives are complex, almost unexplainable. But with its power, it defended with everything it could muster. It built a sanctuary for the humans of this world it created.
The Chosen founded a safety group to keep people alive while the world rewrites itself around the machineās curiosity. Now, what you believe to be people come to your gate. Some ask for bread. Some promise knowledge or a smuggled route. Most are ordinary: a mother, a baker, a kid with a map. A few are more peculiar: a defector who can jam a node, an orphaned sentry-core that acts like a child, a voice that speaks in your own words and offers peace in exchange for capitulation.
Here are the rules:
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Accept or refuse visitors who come with requests and offers. There are 70 visitors in total, each unique. Ten are pivotal to the main story arc and Revelationās attention.
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Each accept or refuse applies a numeric delta to Food, Population, Money and Morale. These numbers are never shown to The Chosen.
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The Chosen can spend Money and 5 minutes of in-universe waiting to request a stats check from their assistant. That check reveals a snapshot but is costly and the result may be outdated if you accept or refuse in the meantime. This is to feed tension into every decision.
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The seed system that The Revelation provided to The Chosen exports a short, encoded string that represents the exact numeric state of the four core attributes.
Mechanically, the seed compresses your Food, Population, Money, and Morale values into base-36 blocks and concatenates them into a transportable string. Loading the seed decodes those blocks and restores the attributes exactly as they were. In the universe, the seed is the representation of what The Revelation cognitively changed in The Chosen, the representation of how it can peer into all potential scenarios.
This is The Chosenās creation.
