Animus

A decommissioned deep-sea research station, 400 metres below the North Atlantic surface. The player regains consciousness in a flooded lower corridor with no memory of the preceding hours. Emergency lighting casts amber bands along the walls. The station has been dark for an unknown period — equipment is cold, displays are dead, and the air recyclers have dropped to emergency output. The player's AI companion device, MARE, is active but running on baseline capability: no maps, no station history, no threat assessment. Something deeper in the station is still drawing power — a low rhythmic vibration travels through the hull plating. The surface airlock is somewhere above. An emergency beacon exists. Finding both is the only way out.

A remote mountaintop radio relay station, three days after an electromagnetic pulse knocked out every system below 2,000 metres. The player is a maintenance technician who hiked up through dead forest to reach the relay — the only transmitter that might still work. The station is cold, dark, and showing signs of hasty evacuation. Someone was here before you. The storm window is closing: six hours until the next weather front makes the antenna useless. One chance to send a signal. One frequency. No second attempts.