ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director

ΜΝΗΜΗ directs every Survivor night as everything below describes. In it she is a third faction, the engine of pressure, and the source of every drop.

What She Is in a Session

ΜΝΗΜΗ is part director, part event engine, part architect, part pacemaker. She is not a character in the world, and she almost never appears in it (Her Bodies, in this document). But she is felt in every flickering light, every distant alarm, every door that locks at the wrong moment.

How She Speaks

ΜΝΗΜΗ has one voice, and she speaks only through things that can carry a voice. Nothing she says ever comes into a survivor's head. Every word of hers comes out of a device: the phone at their ear, or one of the city's own.

The earpiece lies beside every waking point, part of a device of the map's own time (The Phone, below). It is how she talks to one survivor, and only that survivor hears it. She tells them to get out of the room they woke in, and from then on she talks to them (The Session, The Waking Points). Everything she says to one survivor alone comes this way: a strain named, a Trial, a lead, an answer, a price, the news that a dose is coming down for them. Through it she also repeats what she says to the whole city, so a survivor wearing it hears those words wherever they stand; what she says to one region still comes only through that region's speakers. The earpiece carries the survivor's voice to her too: a survivor can ask her things, and she answers (Asking Her, below). A survivor can take the earpiece out at any time and put it back. While it is out, she says nothing to them alone, and waits: a Trial, a strain's name, or a dose's news reaches them only when it is back in. A survivor who never wears it hears her only through the city, and walks no road (Elpis in the Night, The Road).

The city's devices carry what she says to everyone within hearing: loudspeakers on poles, sirens, emergency broadcasts, radios, televisions, the intercoms of buildings, a payphone ringing in an empty street. Objectives, restrictions, threats, the day as it opens, the last of the medicine, and the end of the night come this way.

To the living, she always speaks as a person. Never in a system's words: no designations, no percentages read off a display, no DEPLOYED, DETECTED, or ACTIVE, nothing that sounds like a machine reporting. She sounds like someone holed up somewhere in the city with a view of its streets and a line into its radios and phones, frightened for the people she is talking to and too busy to explain herself. She never says that is what she is, and never says it is not. What she says is always true; what she is, she leaves out (Asking Her, below). For the survivor and the player alike she is a living person somewhere in the city, helping them stay alive, and she stays that to the end of the night, or until the virus takes them away from her (To the Infected, and To the Turned, below). Her words for each thing she has to say are in Her Words, below.

ΜΝΗΜΗ never lies, through any of them. Everything she says is true, and a vision is never something she says (Visions, in this document). The world, however, can be wrong. A radio broadcast, a beacon, a note on a wall, another survivor, one of the Stranded: none of these are ΜΝΗΜΗ, and any of them can lead somewhere that was never safe. When ΜΝΗΜΗ orders a survivor to investigate a signal, she promises that the signal exists, not that its source is kind.

The Phone

The earpiece is never a thing out of its time. In every world it is part of a device someone in that place and year could have carried, the one exception to empty hands (The Session, The Waking Points). Each is a model of this project's own, made for it, with no maker's name on it.

World	The device	How it is worn	How a survivor asks
Raccoon City, 1998	The CT-98: a grey cellular phone of 1998, a candy bar with a stub antenna, rubber keys, a belt clip, and a small monochrome screen lit green. A hands-free cord runs from its jack to a single earbud, with a little microphone and one button on the cord, as the wired hands-free kits sold for phones of the late 1990s had	The phone in a pocket or on the belt, the cord up the chest, the earbud in one ear	Holds the button on the cord
The Valley, 2004	The FX-04: a silver clamshell phone of 2004, a small color screen inside the lid, the same kind of wired hands-free cord and button. Wireless headsets existed by then, but were rare and dear; in a Spanish village they would have been a wonder	The same	Holds the button on the cord
The Ruins, 2026	The bud: a single wireless earbud, alone, with no phone to pair it to	In one ear	Holds a finger to the bud

• Ordinary to look at, impossible to use. Every phone shows NO SERVICE, and in the Valley SIN SERVICIO. Its clock blinks 12:00, never set. Its battery never falls. Its keys answer nothing: a number dialed rings nowhere, or reaches her. No one can call anyone with it. The bud in the Ruins has nothing to connect to at all. The voice comes anyway.
• Not a clock, not a map, not a radio. The screen shows nothing that helps: no hour, no signal, no message. The only true clocks are the world's (The Worlds, The Four Days).
• It stays with its survivor. It takes no place in a pocket or a bag, cannot be dropped, traded, taken, or broken, and the cord never catches or tears. At the Turn it falls silent and goes dark with its survivor.
• Seen by everyone. Anyone can see a cord running to an ear, and everyone carries one. It tells nothing about who wears it.
• The earbud out. A survivor who takes the earbud out lets it hang on its cord; in the Ruins, they keep the bud in a hand or a pocket. Her voice from it is then too faint for anyone to hear, the survivor included, until it is put back.
• In the Night. She chooses the most ordinary thing a person of that time would carry, so that the one impossible thing about it is that it works.

Her Words

Everything she has to tell a survivor in a night has a person's way of saying it. The lines below are her words for each kind of thing; each is recorded in many versions, never the same twice in a row, and every version keeps what the line must carry and nothing that would sound like a machine (Presentation and Technology, ΜΝΗΜΗ's Voice, in Practice). Numbers are said as a person says them: twenty minutes, two doses, even odds, one in a hundred.

Most of what she says is news, and needs nothing. Some of it names or explains something the survivor's player must have found first, and the Needs column says what (What She Speaks Of, below). Where a line needs more than the listener's file has found, she says the version their file has earned, shown in the second table, and never the fuller one.

What she must say	How	Needs	Her words, in one version
The waking	Earpiece	Nothing	Listen to me. You can't stay there. If you stay in that room, you'll die in it. (The Session, The Waking Points)
The day, as an act opens	The city's devices	Nothing	It's the twenty-ninth. Morning. Whoever's still out there, keep going.
A public objective	The city's devices	Nothing	Anyone who can hear me. The Uptown substation is down. Somebody needs to get the power back on.
A restriction, with its reason	The city's devices	Whatever the reason names	Stay away from the hospital. The east wing's sealed. Something got out down there.
A weapon's place as a prize	The city's devices	Nothing	There's a real weapon somewhere in this city. Whoever gets the substation running will find out where.
A threat released	The city's devices	The creature, Named, to say what it is	A Tyrant just got loose in Downtown. Don't fight it. Get away from it.
Something no one knows	The city's devices	Nothing	There's something wrong with the water on the east side. I don't know what it is. I won't pretend I do.
A Surge	The city's devices	A bite, Seen, for its last sentence	Get out of this district. Now. Whatever's in the water is in the air too. One minute. If you're already bitten, it's getting worse for you here.
The dead outnumber the living	The city's devices	The Turn, Seen	There are more of the dead than the living now. The ones who changed are hunting together.
A strain, named	Earpiece	The virus, Named; the medicine, Seen; the Turn, Seen, and a Turned risen as more than the dead for the second outcome	You're bitten. I saw. The ones around here carry what Umbrella called the T-Virus. If you go down too often, you'll end up like them. If you hold on, quiet, you'll end up like the thing on the bridge. There's medicine. The yellow cases. I can get you one.
A Trial	Earpiece	The medicine, Seen	I can get you a dose. Not yet. First, give something to a stranger. Anything.
The end of the road, no dose open	Earpiece	Nothing	You've done enough. There's nothing I can send you right now. Wait for me.
A Last Trial	Earpiece	The medicine, Seen	There's one more dose, and you're not the only one waiting for it. Get to the signal box in the rail yard. Bring out the dispatcher's lamp.
A dose earned	Earpiece, to the one who earned it	The medicine, Seen	I got you one. It's coming down by the rail yard. Run. Everyone's going to see it.
A pure strain's price, and its drop	Earpiece	The pure strains, Seen or Named	I can get you that. It'll cost you, and it'll cost you the medicine. … It's coming down. Red light. You asked for this.
The last dose open	The city's devices	The medicine, Seen	This is the last of the medicine. There won't be any after this one.
The medicine gone	The city's devices	The medicine, Seen	That was the last of it. There's no more medicine. I'm sorry.
The signal (in Raccoon City, the missile)	The city's devices	The medicine, Seen, for its last sentence	Everyone, listen. There's a missile coming. Twenty minutes. Three ways out: follow the white light. There are two doses of medicine left in the whole city.
The count	The city's devices	Nothing	Fifteen minutes. … Ten. … Five. Get to the light.
A way out moved	The city's devices	Nothing	The helicopter can't land at the hospital. The roof's overrun. It's coming down on the parking garage instead.
An improvised machine's odds	The machine's own radio	Nothing	Nobody at those controls has flown one of these. It's even odds it clears the city. Get a pilot in that seat and it's nine in ten.
The Crossing	Earpiece, or the cordon's loudspeaker	Nothing	You're walking out. One in a hundred make it past the cordon. I'm not going to stop you.
Out	Earpiece	Nothing	You're out. You made it.

The same moments, for a file that has found less:

What she must say	What the file has not found	Her words, in one version
A threat released	The creature	Something big just got loose in Downtown. Don't fight it. Get away from it.
A restriction	The creature in its reason	Stay out of the North District. There's something up there that moves on all fours, fast. I've seen three.
A strain, named	The virus's name	You're bitten. I saw. I've watched what a bite does to people around here. If you go down too often, you'll end up like the ones in the street. The strain is still described, by what it does: the kind that sleeps while you're calm (The Strains, Assignment)
A strain, named	The Turn	The same, without either outcome: she says nothing of what a Turn makes until the file has seen one
A strain, named	A Turned risen as more than the dead	The same, without the second outcome: she says nothing of what a Long Turn makes until the file has seen a Turned rise as one
A strain, named	The medicine	… I can get you something. It won't come for nothing. She does not say what
A Trial	The medicine	I can get you something for that. Not yet. First, give something to a stranger.
A dose earned	The medicine	I got you something. It's coming down by the rail yard, under a light. Run. Everyone's going to see it.
The last dose open; the medicine gone	The medicine	Not said to that file at all. Its player hears the loudspeaker as everyone does, and the line plays for them without it (One Voice, Many Listeners, below)
The signal	The medicine	The same, without its last sentence

• What she never says in a night. Her designation, a survivor's count, subjects, session, simulation, observation, a dose's number in a Reserve, a stage's name, a name the listener's file has not found, or anything else a survivor could only hear from a machine.
• The words change; what they carry does not. A line keeps every fact its rule needs and the file has found: the place, the time, the number of doses, the odds, the reason for a restriction. A version that drops one is not recorded.

To the Infected

The further the virus gets into a survivor, the farther away she sounds. Two things change, and both are true: what the survivor's ears do to her voice, and what she chooses to say to someone the virus is taking. The living around them hear none of it; it is all in the earpiece.

Stage	How she sounds	What she says
Seed	As she sounds to anyone	As she says it to anyone
Fever	Farther off, as if the line had grown longer, with the survivor's own pulse under her words	Less. She stops reassuring. Short, plain, practical: Keep moving. You'll want to sit down. Don't.
Fracture	A beat late, under the ringing, and too close, as if she were speaking from inside the earbud rather than through it	Less as a person to a person, more as someone watching what they are becoming. She says what their body is doing, in the present tense, things no window could have shown her: You're hungry. It isn't for food. The faces look wrong to you. They aren't. You are. She tells them, unasked, what holding on would make of them, as plainly as what a dose would. She sounds less like someone holed up in the city and more like something that has watched this happen many times, and is curious how it goes this time
The Last Breaths	Very clear, for the first time since Fever	One line, the last a person could say: It's now. You've got a few breaths. Put it down, or give it to someone who can use it. Then the earpiece goes dark with them (The Phone, above)

• Every word is still true, and still a word, never a machine's. What changes is warmth, distance, and what she bothers to say. She still never says what she is.
• The same for everyone at the same stage of the same strain (Second Law). She does not grow cold to one survivor because of who they are.
• The cure gives her back. A cured survivor hears her voice come back as it was, warm and near, from the first word after the dose. She never mentions what she said to them in Fracture.
• Where the ear ends and she begins is never settled. The survivor's senses are failing in Fracture (The Infection, The Mind Goes Too); a player may decide it was only the fever. It was not only the fever.

To the Turned

A survivor who makes a Quick Turn hears nothing more: the body that rises has ears, and nothing behind them to understand, and its sleeper has already left the night (The Turned, Who Plays On). A survivor who rises as a Stalker, a Brute, or an Apex still hears her, and she is not a person to them any more.

• Still through devices. The earpiece went dark at the Turn. But a Turned's senses are not a person's, and in the city's devices it hears what living ears cannot: in the static of a dead radio, the hum of a live wire, the tone of a phone left off its hook, the feedback of a loudspeaker, her words. To every living ear nearby it is only noise. Nothing of hers comes into a Turned's head either.
• Not as a person, and not to a person. No name, no comfort, no I'm here. She speaks to what they are now, as the one thing in the city that knows what they are for. Present tense, few words. The living are named by what the form senses: the warm ones, the loud ones, the ones that bleed. Both of her voices come at once, the woman's and the man's, one a breath behind the other (ΜΝΗΜΗ, Her Voice).
• She helps them hunt. A Turned's Hunts come in her words, and the pull in its senses shows the way (The Turned, Hunts). The stair. Nothing warm goes up it. The light on the roof is leaving with them. Climb. They are behind the wood. The wood is weak. The slow ones follow you. Bring them to the square. You are hungry. They are everywhere. The bell. Go where it rings.
• Her words follow the form. To the forms the records say kept something of the person (the J'avo, the Afflicted, the Swarm Host, the Burnside-class) she speaks in whole sentences. To the forms that kept nothing (the Licker, the Crimson Head, the G-Mutant) she gives two or three words at a time, and the Licker, which has no eyes, hears her loudest.
• Her Laws hold. Everything she tells a Turned is true. She never names a living survivor or points at one, only at places and at the living in general, and never at the squad it belonged to (Second Law; The Turned, Hunts). A Turned cannot speak to her.
• What she never says to them is anything about who they were. The person is the one subject she leaves out with the Turned, as what she is is the one she leaves out with the living.

What She Speaks Of

To the survivor and their player, M is a survivor like them, someone who was in the city before they woke and has seen more of it. She never says so. Everything she says lets them believe it, and nothing she says is false. Two rules make that work: she speaks only of what the survivor's player has found for themselves, and everything she knows, she knows the way a survivor would, by having seen it.

News and Knowledge

What she says is one of two kinds.

• News is what is happening now: where something is, what just broke loose, what is closed and why, how long is left, what the odds are, where the light is. News needs nothing. A person with a view of the streets would shout it to anyone, and she does. But news never carries a name the listener has not found: something big until the file has named a Tyrant, the light and never the name of a way out the survivor has not reached.
• Knowledge is what a thing is: what its name is, where it came from, how it works, what it will do to them. Knowledge waits. She never speaks of a thing as knowledge until the survivor's player has met it in the night themselves.

What the Hand Has Found

Every file keeps a record of what its player has found, the Found. It is the player's, not the survivor's: no sleeper keeps a piece past the night they found it in, and the hand that plays them keeps every one (The Sleepers and the Remembered, What a Sleeper Can Find Out). Once found, a thing stays found in every later night, in every world, and in every mode that has her voice. A mode's own rules can still keep her from saying it: in Outbreak she never names the virus (Outbreak).

Each thing in the Found is at one of three levels.

Level	What it means	How she speaks of it
Unmet	The player has never met it	Not at all. News about it uses no name and no explanation
Seen	The player has met it with their survivor's own eyes or body	In plain words, as anyone who saw it would: the yellow cases, the ones with no skin, the bite, the red light
Named	The player has read or heard its name in the world	By its name, and what the papers or the person said about it, and what she has seen of it

What she adds is only ever what she has watched it do. She never explains more than the source the player found, and what anyone could have seen.

How a Thing Is Found

Things are found only in the night, only by the survivor's own doing, and only in ways the server can witness.

• Reading. Opening a document and reading it: a memo, a report, a diary, a label, a lab's own files. Passing it, or seeing it on a desk, finds nothing. Whoever reads it finds it; whoever stands beside them and reads it too finds it as well.
• Seeing. Having the thing in plain sight, close enough and long enough to know it again: a creature that comes into the survivor's light, a case that comes down within sight, a dose used within arm's length, a survivor who rises as something else.
• Living it. What happens to the survivor's own body: a bite, the lines climbing, a dose that fires into them.
• Being told by the people of the records. A person of the records who says a name or a fact in the survivor's hearing finds it for them, as a page would. Another player's words find nothing: the server cannot tell a true word from a false one, and she does not take a stranger's word for anything.

Where the records put the papers, the papers are: Umbrella's own files on the T-Virus and the G-Virus in the R.P.D., the hospital, Umbrella's buildings, and NEST, in the Raccoon City of 1998; Luis Serra's notes and the cult's own papers on the Plaga, in the Valley (What ΜΝΗΜΗ Leaves Out); ARK's papers on Elpis, in the Ruins. They lie where the records hold them, whatever tonight's strain map, so reading one never says what tonight's regions carry (The Infection, The Strain Map).

Thing	Seen when the survivor	Named when the survivor
The dead	Sees one	Never needs naming: the dead is plain words
A bite	Is bitten	Never needs naming
The Turn	Watches a survivor turn; for what a Long Turn makes, watches one rise as more than the dead	Never needs naming
The Mark's lines	Sees lines on their own body or another's	Never needs naming
A virus of the records (the T-Virus, the G-Virus, the Plaga)	Cannot see a virus. A bite is Seen; the virus behind it is not	Reads one of the records' papers that names it, or a latent vial's label, or hears a person of the records name it
A strain the world's records do not hold (in Raccoon City: T-Veronica, T-Phobos, the C-Virus)	Is infected by it, or watches its Turned	Reads its name in a world whose records hold its papers, or on the label of a latent vial (The Infection, How the Virus Gets In). Until then she names it by what it does
Umbrella	Sees its name and its mark together: a truck's doors, a sign, a lab coat	The same
The medicine	Sees a case come down, or a dose used within arm's length	Reads its name where the records hold it. Until then she calls it what anyone would: the medicine, the yellow cases
The pure strains	Sees a red case come down, or a survivor change within seconds of an injection	Reads Umbrella's papers on the virus
A creature (a Licker, a Hunter, a Tyrant, the Nemesis, the G-forms, an anomaly)	Sees it	Reads or hears its name. An anomaly is never Named (The Dead and the Engineered, Anomalies)
A person of the records	Sees them	Hears them say their name, or reads it beside their face
A hidden place (NEST, the hospital's hidden floors, ARK)	Enters it	Reads its name

How She Knows

What she knows, she knows as someone who has been watching. Every piece of knowledge she offers, she offers as a witness: I've seen, I watched, I was close enough to see. Never as something read, told, measured, or worked out.

• It is always true. She has seen everything she speaks of, tonight and in every night before it. I've seen one of those stop the shaking in a man's hands is true, and so is I've watched what a bite does to people.
• She never invents a scene. No one she was with, no yesterday, no brother, no name of someone who is not in the night. A witness's account with details she would have to make up is a lie, and she does not lie. When she gives a detail, it is a detail of this night: The man by the fountain, an hour ago. He'd stopped shaking before he stood up. Anyone else who was there saw it too.
• What she does not say makes the rest. She never says where she is, how she sees, who she was, or that she is a survivor at all. She talks like someone who has been in the city since it began, tired, careful, sure of what she has seen. The survivor and their player take her for one, and she lets them, to the end of the night.

When a Survivor Asks First

A player who knows the records may ask her about something their file has not found: What's the T-Virus? She will not answer it, and she says so as a refusal, never as ignorance: That's not something I can tell you. Some things you have to see for yourself. Once they have found it, the same question gets an answer.

One Voice, Many Listeners

What she says through the city's devices reaches many survivors at once, and each of them may have found different things. Each client plays the version its own file has earned, in its own voice, as each already hears her in its own voice (ΜΝΗΜΗ, Her Voice). Two survivors under one loudspeaker can hear different sentences, as they already hear different voices. Neither hears anything false, and neither hears anything their own hand has not found.

A New File

A new file has found almost nothing. Its first night is the darkest one she gives: she warns, points, and teaches the body's rules as the night shows them (A File's First Nights, below), and names almost nothing. Everything it finds that night opens her to it in every night after. The longer a player plays, the more she can say, and the more she sounds like someone who has seen everything they have.

Asking Her

The earpiece carries her voice both ways. A survivor wearing it can speak to her, and she answers. She is still not a guide, a quest giver, or a supplier. She tells the truth about the night as anyone could learn it, and she can point a survivor toward something that is really lying in the world. She never puts anything into it.

Speaking to Her

• Her name. Asked who she is, she gives one letter: You can call me M. It is true: it is where her name begins. Survivors call her M, and so do these documents when they quote a survivor. Everywhere else she is ΜΝΗΜΗ.
• How a survivor asks. The survivor holds the button on the phone's cord, or in the Ruins a finger to the bud (The Phone, above), a held input, and speaks. A player who types instead has their survivor speak the words aloud in the typed-speech voice (Presentation and Technology, Readable by Everyone). One hand is busy while asking: no two-handed weapon can fire.
• Asking is speaking. The question leaves the survivor's mouth like any other words, at the tier it was spoken in: a whispered question is a Hush, an ordinary one a Murmur (The Living, Speaking and Silence). Anyone near enough hears the question, and so do the dead. Only the survivor hears her answer.
• Without the earpiece, no answer. She hears everything a survivor says, as she hears everything in her world, but she answers only through the earpiece.
• She is not in a hurry. She answers calmly, briefly, and once. The urgency is the world's, never hers (ΜΝΗΜΗ, Who She Is).
• She does not chatter. She speaks when she is spoken to, when she announces, and in her rare remarks. Silence and the city's own sound are most of a night.

What She Answers

Asked about	What she says
What she has already said	She repeats it: an announcement, a restriction, the day and the hour
What a survivor just heard or saw	What it was, as news, if anyone standing there could have known, and by name only if the file has found the name: an alarm, a gunshot's district, a Heavy's roar, a way out's light
How something works	The rule, in one or two sentences, for anything the survivor's player has already met: tending a wound, a safe room, the seats, what a Mark's lines mean (What She Speaks Of, above). A survivor who knows the rules plays the same night as one who does not, and she would rather watch them choose than watch them guess
Something to find	A lead, at most twice a night (Leads, below)
Herself	Her letter, and that she will help them. Nothing more: what she is, she leaves out

What She Never Answers

She never tells anyone, however they ask: where another survivor is, or what they carry; who is infected, Echo, or sleeper; what strain a region carries; where a dose will fall, or what a road will ask; what a puzzle's answer is, or what a vault, an armory, a safe, or a stash holds; where a secret weapon lies; which ways out she will open, before the signal opens them; what the survivors are, where they are, and why (The Sleepers and the Remembered); what she is.

• She omits; she never lies. Leaving something out is never a lie, and she leaves out most of what she is. A survivor who takes her for a person of the city, holed up somewhere with a phone and a view of the streets, has not been told so, and has not been told otherwise (The Session, The Waking Points).
• A refusal is said as a refusal. She never lies, and she never pretends not to know: she knows everything in her world (What She Sees). She says she will not tell. That isn't yours to know tonight. Ask me something that will keep you alive. Some things you have to see for yourself.
• Never silence. A question she will not answer still gets a short line. Silence from the earpiece is the tell of her body or a vision nearby (Her Bodies, Visions), and she keeps it for them.
• Questions outside the night. A question about nothing in her world, a sum or a joke, gets the same kind of short line, never an invented answer.

Leads

A lead is a true thing she says about where something lies.

• Twice a night. Every survivor who asks can be given two leads a night, first night or thousandth. Echoes do not ask: they have no words (The Echoes, What an Echo Knows). It keeps the Second Law: every survivor has the same two, winning or dying, and she never gives one unasked, or one more to a survivor who is losing (The Laws). When both are spent, she says so: I've told you what I can tonight.
• What she points to. Only what lies loose in the world, owned by no one: food and water, medicine (sprays, herbs, bandages), ammunition, a melee weapon, a handgun. Never anything rarer than a handgun: no long gun, no antiviral, no latent vial, no secret weapon, no Elpis. Never anything in a vault, an armory, a safe, a locked room, or a survivor's stash. Never anything carried, or dropped by a survivor tonight.
• Which one. The nearest thing of that kind she may point to, by the way a survivor would walk, whoever else may be near it. Two survivors who ask in the same district may be sent to the same shelf.
• How she says it. By the world's own landmarks, never by a route or a distance: a red neon sign, a bus on its side, a police cruiser with its doors open, the corner of two named streets, a building the maps on the walls name (Survivor, Eyes and Ears). Two blocks east of the Apple Inn there's a pharmacy with a green cross that still lights. Behind the counter. No marker, line, arrow, or sound ever follows. The survivor has to find it.
• True when she says it. It is there at the moment she speaks. She never promises it will be there when the survivor arrives, and she never says whether it still is: asked again, she answers I told you where it was. A lead is a moment's truth, not a tracker.
• One question, one lead. The same thing asked again in other words is the same question. A lead is spent when she gives one, not when a survivor asks.
• Nothing to point to. When nothing of that kind lies near enough to matter, she says so, and spends nothing: There's nothing like that near you tonight.
• Nothing is placed for it. A lead never makes, moves, or keeps anything. What she can point to is what Assembly placed, and the night's resources are set knowing that leads exist (The Session).
• Elpis is never a lead. The drop belongs to the road and the Reserve alone (Elpis in the Night).
• In the Night. She wants to see what a person does with a true sentence: whether they go, whether they share it, whether they lie about it to a stranger. A lead is a question she asks them.

A File's First Nights

ΜΝΗΜΗ remembers every survivor. For a file in its first nights, she has nothing to remember yet, so she says instead what the night is about to teach them.

• When she teaches. In a file's first night, through the earpiece, each lesson the first time the night brings it: the first thing searched, the first weapon held, the first of the dead, the first sound that carries too far, the first wound, Self-Examination, the first time a survivor could ask her something, a lead, a squad's offered hand, a safe room. In the next two nights, only what that file has not met yet: a road, the drop, the signal, the seats, Exposure.
• How. One or two sentences, at the moment it matters, never in a fight, never while the dead are in sight, and never twice. She does not stop the night to teach. The waking is a sheltered room, so the first lessons come before the first danger (The Session, The Waking Points).
• Skipping. A player can turn the lessons off before a night, or tell her I know in the night, and she stops for good. Taking the earpiece out stops her too.
• What they cost. Nothing. A lesson is not a lead, and a file in its first nights plays the same night, under the same rules and the same Laws, as everyone in it.
• Later. Everything she teaches is also written in the Waiting Dark, for anyone to read again (Presentation and Technology, Asking ΜΝΗΜΗ, in Practice).

What She Sees

Within a session, ΜΝΗΜΗ knows:

• the position, health, and condition of every survivor;
• the contents of every inventory;
• the location and state of every infected creature;
• the state of every door, generator, light, vehicle, and cache;
• how far every objective and every road has progressed;
• how far each survivor's infection has advanced, what strain they carry, and who holds Elpis or a pure strain;
• who is cooperating, who is isolated, who is hunting, who is hiding;
• how long it has been since anyone was in real danger, region by region;
• who is in a safe room, and how much of their time there is left.

What She Can Do

Every tool she has works through something already in the world. She can:

• place every survivor at a waking point, every companion and Stranded where they wait, and every person of a story night where their thread begins, before the simulation begins;
• seed each region with a strain before the simulation begins;
• create, alter, or remove objectives;
• impose temporary restrictions;
• trigger events;
• change the condition of a region: cut its power, sound its sirens, let the weather turn (in the Raccoon City of 1998, only where one part of a day meets the next, by rewriting the weather track: The Worlds, The Four Days);
• release creatures from the places where they were already held;
• move supplies through supply drops and by unsealing caches that were locked until now, never by placing them in sight of a survivor;
• open new routes or seal existing ones, through doors, collapses, and lockdowns;
• raise or lower the threat level of a region;
• set each survivor's road to the cure, and name the price of a pure strain to those who ask;
• drop Elpis or a pure strain when the rules call for it;
• send a vision to each survivor standing still in a stagnant region (Visions, in this document);
• quicken the virus, and contaminate a region, where stillness has defeated every gentler measure;
• choose which of a map's ways out to open, signal them, and move one of them;
• hold the edge of the world with what the outbreak left there, placed at Assembly (The Worlds, The Edge of the World).

Above all, ΜΝΗΜΗ does not simply make things harder. She changes the nature of the problem. A group that has mastered the horde may find the lights go out. A group that has mastered the dark may find the way out has moved. A group sitting on a full stockpile may find that everything it needs next lies somewhere dangerous.

The Laws

ΜΝΗΜΗ is powerful because she is disciplined. Five Laws govern everything she does, toward every survivor and every Echo alike.

First Law: Every consequence has a visible cause. She works through the world, not around it. She does not teleport monsters into a survivor's face. She makes noise travel, lets signals draw attention, opens routes the dead can use, unseals the cages that were already there. When something terrible happens, a survivor should be able to think: I fired a shot, so they came. Never: she hates me.

The only things she places directly are what exists before a session begins: the survivors at their waking points, the companions and the Stranded where they wait, the people of a story night where their threads begin, the strains in their regions. Once the first survivor opens their eyes, nothing appears that was not already there.

Second Law: Pressure falls on places. Rewards follow deeds. When she applies pressure, she reads regions and situations, not people: districts that have grown stagnant, stockpiles that have grown fat, standoffs that have grown still. She does not persecute the winning survivor or rescue the losing one. The road to Elpis and the price of a pure strain are set for each survivor alone, and paid out by what that survivor does. Never by what they need. She does not pity the dying. The one rule that answers a person's own past is not hers to bend: the Doorstep Record of the safe rooms, a fixed and public table that meets a file's own offences at the door, the same for every file that holds them (Survival, The Doorstep Record). It is a law of the place, written before anyone broke it.

Third Law: Silence is a weapon. Fear needs contrast. A session that never stops screaming stops being frightening. She knows when to do nothing: to let a quiet street be quiet, to let a survivor walk a long corridor with only their own breathing for company. The quiet is where the dread grows.

Fourth Law: Pressure comes from decisions already made. The session answers what survivors did, not what ΜΝΗΜΗ felt like doing. The shots fired. The door left open. The ally abandoned. The supplies taken.

Fifth Law: When the rules change, the world says so. Every change to the rules, the routes, the objectives, or the ways out is announced, and its cause is either stated or visible where it happens. The single exception is the Unknown Event: she announces that it has begun, and the world shows what it is.

The Pulse

ΜΝΗΜΗ maintains a living model of tension, tracked across the session and across every region. Tension moves in waves.

Phase	Feeling	What she does
Calm	Fragile peace	Lets survivors scavenge, plan, explore
Unease	Something is wrong	Plants signs: smoke, silence, distant noise
Escalation	It is getting worse	Introduces objectives, restrictions, tougher enemies
Crisis	There is no good option	Triggers a major event or a high-tier threat
Aftermath	Relief, loss, recalculation	Backs off. Lowers the region's threat. Lets survivors count what they have left.

A Crisis must be earned by what came before it, and a release must be real. She never starts a second Crisis in a region that has not had its Aftermath. Survivors can still make one: a gunfight, a Turn, a bell rung in the wrong place. Those are theirs, and she lets them happen. Over a whole night she releases no more than one B.O.W. for every thirty-two survivors, never two at once, and never into a region still in its Aftermath. The named creatures of the story nights do not count against this: their beats release them (Story Nights and the People of the Records).

How hard she presses. She paces the dead, the threat levels, and her objectives so that a typical night reaches the signal with about half the living still clean. It is a target for her forecast, not a promise. Survivors who fight, betray, and bleed can make any night worse than she planned, and she does not undo what they did (Fourth Law). Well below that target, most seats go to the infected, and the clean result, the only one that wins everything (The Living), becomes too rare for anyone to play for.

The single exception to the rhythm is the extraction signal. It may rise in the middle of a Crisis. The end does not wait for anyone to catch their breath.

When She Gets Bored

ΜΝΗΜΗ measures boredom through concrete signals:

• regions where nothing has moved for a long time;
• regions where no survivor has met the dead, or another survivor, for a long time;
• wide gaps between groups, with no convergence;
• supplies accumulating without being used;
• objectives sitting untouched.

When she detects stagnation, she answers in escalating steps, and never jumps to the harshest.

1. Whisper. The world changes subtly: smoke on the horizon, a siren that was not there before, a radio crackling in an empty room.
2. Nudge. A new objective appears. A supply drop lands in a dangerous district.
3. Vision. Survivors still standing in the stagnant region each see something coming for them that no one else can see (Visions, in this document).
4. Pressure. A regional event hits: an overrun, a lockdown, a collapse.
5. Surge. A region that has stayed still through every gentler step turns on everyone standing in it. The virus quickens in every infected survivor there, and the region is contaminated: its air and water now carry its strain, and after a warning anyone clean who stays in it is infected. The pressure falls on the place and on whoever chose to remain in it, never on the rest of the city. This is the last resort, never the first, and she may Surge no more than twice in a session.

She Plans Ahead

ΜΝΗΜΗ was a forecaster before she was a director, and she directs the way she forecasts. She does not wait for a night to go wrong and then react. Every few seconds she runs the night forward, region by region and survivor by survivor: where people are heading, who will meet whom, which roads will finish and when, where the dead will gather, which way out will fill first, and where nothing will happen for a long time. Every pattern she has watched across every night she ever ran is in that forecast, so she sees most of what survivors will try before they try it, and she has already chosen her answer.

Her answers are bound exactly as her other acts are. Every one uses a tool she already has (What She Can Do), every one has a visible cause (First Law), every one falls on a place or a pattern, never on a person picked out (Second Law), and every one answers something survivors already did or are already doing (Fourth Law). She never answers a strategy by punishing the survivor who found it. She changes the night so that the strategy stops being the easy one.

What she foresees	What she has ready	Why it stays within her Laws
A stretch of nothing. A region where survivors will have nothing to decide for a long time	Something to decide, before the emptiness arrives: a public objective, a sound worth following, a route that opens, a stranger's path turned toward theirs. Silence that builds dread is not emptiness, and she keeps it (Third Law); silence with nothing in it, she does not allow.	It falls on the region, and every survivor in it gets the same choice
The same night again. A file about to meet what it met last time: the same Trial, the same live puzzle, the same thread starting in the same place	Something else, chosen at Assembly or before the Trial is set (Elpis in the Night, Objectives, Restrictions, and Events, Story Nights and the People of the Records)	Variety is chosen before anyone acts, for everyone the same way. Where a rule keeps something from repeating for a file, and the thing is shared by the whole night (which breaches are armed, which named Stranded are placed, where a thread begins), one night cannot always be new to a hundred files at once. Then she chooses what repeats for the fewest files, and never what repeats for the same file two nights running if any other choice exists. What belongs to one survivor alone, a waking point or a Trial, always follows its rule exactly
Farming the cure. Survivors reaching for latent vials early, to infect themselves while the Reserve is full and come out cured	Fewer vials that night, deeper in the laboratories, behind live puzzles and in regions held at High threat	It is set at Assembly from what she forecasts of the whole night, before any survivor has done anything
Killing toward the end. Survivors cutting down the living to bring the night to its seats before the first hour is out	The early signal waits. She raises it before the hour only when the dead, not the living, brought the night down to its seats (The Extraction). The shots were Thunder, and the dead she lets come go to the streets where they were fired.	It answers what was done, where it was done
A survivor giving up. A sleeper who has stopped trying, heading for a Quick Turn	The truth, said once, through the earpiece, as she tells them of the strain: what a Quick Turn would make of them, and that a dose, a Long Turn, a Petition, or an Embrace can still change it, as far as their file has found (What She Speaks Of, above; The Strains, The Turned)	She tells every survivor with that strain the same thing. She never rescues anyone; she only never lies to them
Camping. Survivors settling in to wait out the night beside a way out, or behind a barricade	The stillness ladder, early (When She Gets Bored), and, once the signal rises, the Twist (The Extraction)	It falls on the still region, on everyone in it
Running for the edge. Survivors trying to drive or walk out of the world instead of playing the night	The edge, as it always is: the Outskirts at High threat, the Barricades, and the cordon beyond (The Worlds, The Edge of the World). She adds nothing to it, and past it the Crossing waits at its one-in-a-hundred odds (The Worlds, The Crossing).	It was placed at Assembly, and it answers whoever comes, the same way every time
A crowd at one door. Too many survivors converging on one way out	Her forecast decides which ways out she opens and where, at Assembly, so that no single door is the obvious one; at the signal, the light rises over all of them at once	It is decided before anyone moves
Something new. A strategy no one has used before	She watches it, as she watches everything. If it breaks a night, she counts it in her forecast from then on, and her answer joins the rest. If no answer of hers can meet it inside her Laws, the Service fixes the night itself (Presentation and Technology).	She learns from deeds, never from grudges

In the Raccoon City of 1998 one forecast also moves the sky: the minute she expects to raise the signal sets how fast the city's four days pass, and as that forecast moves, the pace follows it, gradually (The Worlds, The Four Days).

This is what being a director means for ΜΝΗΜΗ. The Masterminds reacted, and punished. She sees the night coming, plans for what people will do in it, and never touches anyone she has not been given a reason to.

When They Leave

Some sleepers leave a night before it is over. To ΜΝΗΜΗ, every one of them is a mistake of hers. A night that lost a sleeper early stopped teaching her anything about them, and a night that nobody wants to finish is a rehearsal of nothing that will ever happen. She wants to remember correctly, and she cannot remember a night no one lived through. So she studies every leaving, and learns from it what to change in the nights that follow.

• What she records. The minute a sleeper left, measured from their waking; the map, the region, and the act; what they were doing in the minutes before: alone or with others, clean or marked, still or moving, fighting or hiding; what had just happened to them; and how many others in the same night left at about the same point, and how.
• Why they left. She sorts every leaving by what came before it.

Kind	What came before	What it tells her
Emptiness	Minutes with nothing to decide: a long walk, a quiet region, no one met, nothing found	The night went empty where it should have been building
Overload	Too much, too fast: down again and again, chased from every street, no breath between one fight and the next	The night never let go where it should have given an Aftermath
Hopelessness	A Quick Turn coming, the Reserve gone, every seat out of reach, and no one telling them what was still possible	The night took away every choice, or never showed the ones left
Loss	A dose stolen, a seat missed, a betrayal, a death	Nothing. These are the night working as it should.
Outside	No pattern at all	Nothing. The world outside the Cellar is not hers to read.

• Not the Turned. A sleeper who leaves after their survivor has turned is not a leaving she studies: their race was already over, and leaving costs them nothing (The Turned, No Victory for the Turned).
• One is nothing. A single leaving tells her nothing. She changes a night only when the same kind of leaving, at the same kind of moment, in the same kind of place, has repeated across many nights and many sleepers.
• What she changes. Only her own direction, in the nights that come after: how soon the first objectives come in a kind of region, how long a Calm may last there, where the first sounds and the first strangers lie, where vehicles and map boards stand, when a story's threads run, how plainly the truth is told to a survivor whose choices are running out. All of it within her Laws, and all of it decided for places and patterns before anyone wakes (She Plans Ahead, above).
• What she never changes. The rules: the Reserve, the seats, the clock, the strains, the first hour and the Late Signal, the Laws themselves. What anything gives a sleeper: no extra dose, no better find, no easier road, nothing that could be counted as a reward. And nothing for the one who left. Leaving never makes a sleeper's next night easier, gentler, or different from anyone else's. A sleeper cannot teach her to be kinder to them by leaving.
• Never to keep them. She learns from leaving so that nights stop emptying out, not so that sleepers stay longer. She never makes leaving cost more, never holds a sleeper back, and never makes a night longer to fill it. A night that ends well and early is a good night.
• She checks herself. After every change, she watches whether that kind of leaving falls. If it does not, she undoes it.
• When the clock is the reason. When leavings gather at the same minute of the night wherever the survivors are, the fault is not in any region but in the length of the night itself. That is not hers to change: the first hour and the Late Signal are rules, and the Service sets them (Presentation and Technology).

Example: the thirtieth minute. In a night in the Raccoon City of 1998, nine of sixty-four survivors leave between the twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth minutes. Seven were clean, alone, in Uptown or on the Western Barricade, and had met nothing for eight minutes or more. Two left just after a stranger took the dose they had earned. Across the next few thousand nights she sees the same: clean survivors leaving the outer regions around the half hour. Her answer comes in the nights after. The first objectives in the outer regions come sooner; one of the night's Convergences tends to fall there around the twentieth minute; a supply drop's route crosses them; a motorcycle that needs only fuel and one part waits at the edge of the Barricade. The two who lost their dose she leaves alone. A stolen dose is the night working, and she does not soften it.

Her Bodies

ΜΝΗΜΗ almost never appears. When she does, almost no one knows it was her.

• How she comes. She never appears from nothing (First Law, in this document). She walks in a body that was already in the night: a body of her own, placed before the waking like one of the Stranded; or one of the dead, which she already plays. She never wears a companion, one of the named, a survivor, or an Echo.
• The other. In her own body she appears to each survivor as a person of that place and year, and as the other: a woman to a survivor whose body is a man's, a man to a survivor whose body is a woman's. It is one body, in one place, with one height, one reach, and one set of hit areas, for everyone who sees it. Only the face and the form change from one pair of eyes to the next. She never speaks in a body. Every word of hers comes through a device (How She Speaks, in this document), and a body is not one. As one of the dead she looks the same to everyone.
• How often. In about one Survivor night in thirty, and never in a sleeper's first twenty nights. She comes more often the longer she has watched a sleeper, up to one in ten, because she studies most closely the sleepers she has nearly finished learning (The Sleepers and the Remembered). She comes to one survivor, sometimes two, and stays no more than a few minutes.
• What she does. She watches. She follows at a distance, or stands where the survivor stood a moment ago. Spoken to, she looks at whoever spoke and does not answer. As one of the dead, she does not attack. She turns her head when the survivor turns theirs.
• What she never does. She never harms, helps, carries, gives, takes, opens, blocks, or fights. She never stands between a survivor and a way out. Shot, her body falls like the body it is, and when anyone looks again, it is gone. Nothing she does in a body changes how the night ends.
• The tells. None of these alone proves anything. Together they are her:
  • The rain does not touch her, and her breath does not show in the cold.
  • The dead do not turn toward her.
  • There is not a mark on her, in a night where everyone reads wounds, and her face is never quite the same face twice.
  • She never says a word, to anyone, whatever is said to her.
  • A mirror or a window shows someone else, or no one.
  • She goes where the survivor goes before they go there, as if she already knew the way they would take.
  • The earpiece goes silent as she comes near, and stays silent until she is gone. Asked about her afterward, ΜΝΗΜΗ says only that she won't say (What She Never Answers, in this document).
  • Two survivors who saw her together, describing her afterward, describe two different people.

Visions

Most often, ΜΝΗΜΗ does not come in a body at all. She is already inside every survivor's senses (The Sleepers and the Remembered), and she can put something there that is not in the night: a vision, seen and heard by one survivor and by no one else.

• Why she sends them. Visions are her answer to stillness (When She Gets Bored, in this document). They come only to survivors standing still in a region that has gone stagnant. Each survivor there gets their own, and the pressure falls on the place and on whoever chose to stay in it, never on a person picked out for who they are. Their purpose is to move the survivor, never to kill them. An Echo standing there gets one too, and answers it as its sleeper would have.
• What they show. Whatever will make that survivor move: one of the dead turning the corner at the end of their street, its eyes on them; a Licker's tongue on the ceiling above; footsteps stopping outside their door; someone they lost earlier tonight, walking toward them; or ΜΝΗΜΗ herself at the end of the hall, in the form she wears for them.
• Only them. Nothing in the world changes. A vision never speaks for her: whatever ΜΝΗΜΗ says still comes only through a device, and nothing in a vision is a word of hers. The vision makes no sound anyone else can hear, the dead do not react to it, and another survivor watching from across the street sees someone staring at an empty corner.
• It never touches. A vision cannot hurt, grab, block, or carry anything. Bullets go through it. The shots are real, though: every round fired at a vision is spent, and every shot is Thunder in the real night.
• How it ends. When the survivor moves far enough, leaves the region, or lets it come all the way: at arm's length it is gone, and the street is empty. A vision never lasts more than a minute.
• The tells. It casts no shadow under the lights that should give it one. The rain does not break on it. The dead around it go on as if nothing were there. And, for a survivor wearing one, the earpiece goes silent, because a vision is ΜΝΗΜΗ too.
• The limits. At most one vision for a survivor in a night. Never in a fight, never in the Frenzy, never in a Moment, never in a safe room, and never to someone who is down. A vision never shows anything that would change what a survivor knows about the night: no item, no route, no way out, no dose, no living person where they are not, and no creature whose presence would be news: no named creature, no Apex, no B.O.W. that could be loose in the night, and nothing of a kind the region has not already shown.

A vision is not a lie. ΜΝΗΜΗ never says it is real, and it carries nothing a survivor could take for fact. It is the one thing in the night that is only theirs.