2025-12-07
Date: Sunday, December 7, 2025
The Sanctuary settles into a quiet, Sunday night rhythm. The lights are out in the Starlight Pavilion, the weekend's activity fading into memory.
Inside the Academic Quarter, a new signal is flickering on a monitor in Cipher's (still-under-construction) workshop. The "Geode" interface is live—clunky, perhaps, and glitching on the mobile frequencies, but it is there. A new digital foundation has been poured.
In the real world, the hero rests after a day of "maintenance"—maintaining the body at the gym, maintaining the home with chores, and maintaining the complex, sometimes fragile web of family connections. The laundry is folded (finally), the dog is walked, and the "dust" has been arranged satisfactorily for another day.