What ΜΝΗΜΗ Leaves Out

Elpis answers viruses. It does not answer a fungus or a parasite. Pithos does not simulate what its cure cannot touch, so ΜΝΗΜΗ's world contains no Mold, and no Plaga but in one place: the Spanish valley where the Plaga surfaced in 2004 (The Plaga, below). Everywhere else it contains one parasite, NE-α, and only because the parasite takes no body that the cure could still save. The copy the Connections made of it, NE-γ, is in her world once, for the same reason: in the body of Victor Gideon, in the Ruins of 2026 (The People of the Ruins, 2026). The embryos of the G-Virus do not count: they are the virus's own flesh, and the cure answers them with the rest of it.

Why not the Mold. The Mold is the newest outbreak in the Archive, and Pithos forecasts it, from the records alone. It will never run it. The Mold keeps the minds and memories of everything it takes, in one living mass. Pithos keeps the minds of the Remembered in living tissue of its own (ΜΝΗΜΗ, What She Is Made Of), and for years it has watched that tissue grow through its machine in ways it does not understand (ΜΝΗΜΗ, The Growth). It will not put an organism that takes minds anywhere near it.

Why not every virus. ΜΝΗΜΗ runs only the viruses Pithos holds alive in the Cellar, because she cannot run what she has never measured (Pithos, The Cellar). The T-Abyss of Terragrigia and the Queen Zenobia is in the Archive only as paper: every sample sank with the ship, burned with the city, or went to the BSAA, and Pithos has never held a living one.

Inside ΜΝΗΜΗ, Elpis is the unfinished cure, exactly as Pithos measured it. It is the only cure for a virus in her world because it is the only one Pithos holds. It stops the virus, ends the gifts, and fails where the real vial fails: past the point where the body has been remade too far to bring back. That point has a name in every session. Survivors call it the Threshold.

The Plaga

The Valley of 2004 is the one place in ΜΝΗΜΗ's world where the Plaga lives. On a crosstime night, the people and creatures of the Valley can cross into another map, but their Plaga crosses only sealed inside them, and takes no one there (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Crosstime Weekends). It is also the one place where the records hold the Plaga's own cure: the machine Luis Serra built to burn a Plaga out of a living body, in a laboratory on the island. Pithos does not simulate what its cure cannot touch. In the Valley the cure stands in the world, so the parasite can too.

Nothing of the viruses exists in the Valley: no strain map, no Elpis, no road, no Petition, no pure strain. Everything below replaces them there, and only there.

• The hosts. The villagers are Ganados, the castle's cultists are Zealots, and the island's soldiers are Ganados in uniform. All of them are living hosts of the Plaga, under the will of a dominant one. They keep their speech, their tools, and the habits of the people they were. They do not bite, and their blows carry nothing: a grab they win ends in a blow, not a bite. They fight, and they take.
• Being taken. The cult wants hosts, not bodies. A survivor who goes down among the hosts is not killed but held while a host plants an egg in them. A few seconds later they are back on their feet, wounded, with a Plaga inside. A survivor who already carries one is killed instead. The deep galleries of the mines below the castle hold the Plaga's spores, and a survivor who stays in them for more than two minutes at a time is taken the same way.
• The stages. The Plaga has its own clock, and it runs like the virus's: inside the body, with nothing on the screen.

Stage	About	The survivor feels	Others see or hear
Egg	Ten minutes	Nothing	Nothing
Hatched	Fifteen minutes	A cough that tastes of blood	The cough, which is a Murmur
Grown	Fifteen minutes	A voice that is not theirs, whenever a dominant host is near	Eyes that glow red in the dark
Taken	—	Their will is gone	The Last Breaths (The Turned)

• Seized. A survivor whose Plaga is Grown, within sight of a dominant host (Bitores Mendez, Ramón Salazar, Jack Krauser, or Osmund Saddler), can be seized. For a few seconds the dominant host moves their body toward the nearest living person, as Saddler once moved Leon Kennedy's hands to Ada Wong's throat.
• Suppressant. Luis Serra's suppressant, a pill or an injection, holds a Plaga back. Each dose sets its clock back ten minutes, never past the start of the stage it has reached. The night holds only what ΜΝΗΜΗ sets at Assembly, the Suppressant Reserve, one dose for every five survivors, rounded down, which replaces the Elpis Reserve here. Luis carries some, and the rest lie where the records kept medicine: the castle's laboratory and Luis's own rooms. Given to someone whose Plaga moves with their story, a dose has no clock to set back; it stops the next seizure instead.
• The machine. In Luis's laboratory on the island, the removal machine burns a Plaga out of a living body. It takes two people: one lies in it, and another works it. It works on one patient at a time, for about thirty seconds, and the patient's screaming is a Clamor. An Egg or a Hatched Plaga comes out clean. A Grown Plaga comes out too, but the patient comes out down and must be raised. A Taken host is past it.
• The Taken. At the end of Grown, the Plaga takes the will, except a Plaga the records gave someone, which moves with their story (Story Nights and the People of the Records, Story Nights). The Taken are the Valley's Turned, and The Turned applies to them, except for what they become. Every Plaga host keeps a mind, so a Taken survivor always plays on, on the side of the hosts, under the Turned's rules: Hunts, and no victory (The Turned, No Victory for the Turned). They rise where they stood, as a Ganado in the village, a Zealot in the castle, or a soldier on the island.
• After dark. From the second act, when night falls, a host shot through the head may not stay down. Its Plaga bursts from the neck as a scythe, a jaw, or a spider that drops away and goes looking for another host. A flashbang kills an exposed Plaga outright.
• Surge. A Surge in the Valley quickens every Plaga in the region by about five minutes, instead of contaminating it. Nothing else of ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director changes.
• Saddler's death. When Osmund Saddler dies, every Plaga in the Valley dies with him, and so does every host still carrying one: Ganados, Zealots, soldiers, the Taken, and every survivor or companion whose Plaga the machine has not burned out. Only those the machine has cleared, and those never taken, live through it.
• Results. A survivor who leaves with a Plaga is Extracted · Infected, one the machine cleared is Extracted · Cured, and one never taken is Extracted · Clean.

Pesetas and the Merchant

The Valley is the only map with money in it. It replaces nothing: it is the Valley's own, as the Merchant is.

Pesetas

• Earned from ΜΝΗΜΗ's work. Pesetas are paid for the tasks ΜΝΗΜΗ sets in the Valley, and for nothing else she controls. They never come from nowhere (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, First Law): every task's pesetas are in the world from the waking, placed with everything else. A Request's purse hangs beside its blue paper; a public objective's strongbox stands at the record where it ends, and opens when it does; a named host carries a purse, as the records' hosts carried theirs, and drops it when it falls.

Task	Pesetas
A public objective (Objectives, Restrictions, and Events), to the survivor who finishes it	5,000
A Request: a small task ΜΝΗΜΗ posts on a blue paper nailed up in the world, as the records posted theirs (put down the rats in a barn, shoot the blue medallions on a wall, bring an egg to a door), to the first who does it	1,000 to 3,000
A named host put down (The People of the Valley, 2004), the first time in a night, to each survivor who struck it	10,000

• Carried. A survivor's pesetas are a purse that takes no place in the inventory. They can be handed over or set down like anything else. When a survivor is Lost or Taken, the purse falls where they fell, and anyone who kneels by the body takes it. Pesetas are worth killing for, and the Valley knows it.
• Only tonight. Pesetas exist only in the night that paid them. They are never carried into another night, never turned into Ribbons, and never sold for money (The Economy). They are part of a night, like its ammunition.
• In the Night. ΜΝΗΜΗ lets the Valley keep its money because the records did, and because she wants to know what people pay for, and whom they rob, when a price can be paid in a place that is dying.

The Merchant

The Merchant of the records (The People of the Valley, 2004) is the only person in any night who sells.

• He comes and goes. He appears three to five times a night, each time in a safe room (Survival, Safe Rooms), never in the same one twice in a row and never in the first ten minutes. Between appearances he walks the passages behind the safe rooms, which no survivor can enter, as he seemed to in the records. ΜΝΗΜΗ places him there before the waking like anyone else (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, First Law), and a survivor near a safe room's back wall may hear his boots, and his laugh, before he comes in through its back door. ΜΝΗΜΗ tells everyone who can hear, over the village's own devices, the church bell's loudspeaker, a radio in a farmhouse, as a person passes on news:

ΜΝΗΜΗ: The man in the coat is back. He's in the safe room under the church.
He'll be there five minutes. He takes pesetas.

• For five minutes. Each appearance lasts about five minutes. Then he is gone, and whatever was not bought waits for the next one.
• The room's rules hold. He trades only inside a safe room, so no one fights at his counter: up to four survivors at once. A survivor with no safe-room time left cannot reach him.
• The clock runs at his counter. Every second spent choosing is spent from the survivor's five minutes in safe rooms (Survival, Safe Rooms). Nothing pauses while a survivor looks over his stock, so a survivor who walks in knowing what they want leaves with more time than one who browses.
• Leaving. A buyer steps out onto the room's doorstep, where the Warden keeps anyone from killing them for what they bought (Survival, Safe Rooms). Past the doorstep, the Valley's business resumes, and anyone who watched them go in knows what kind of thing they came out with.
• What he sells. A few of each, shared across the whole night, first come:

Item	Pesetas
Handgun rounds, ten	1,000
Shotgun shells, five	1,500
Rifle rounds, five	2,000
Green herb	1,500
First aid spray	4,000
Flash grenade	2,000
Hand grenade	3,000
Holster	3,000
Bag	6,000
A light vest	10,000
Handgun (SG-09 R)	8,000
Submachine gun (TMP)	12,000
Shotgun (W-870)	15,000
Rifle (SR M1903)	18,000
One secret weapon: the Broken Butterfly, the Killer7, or the Striker (Objectives, Restrictions, and Events, Secret Weapons)	60,000

• What each survivor may buy. So that one survivor with a great deal of money cannot empty his stock, every survivor has the same limits, however many pesetas they hold:

Limit	Per survivor
Purchases in one visit	Three
Weapons, the secret weapon included	One a night
Gear: a holster, a bag, a vest	One of each a night
Healing: herbs and sprays together	Three a night
Grenades	Two a night
Ammunition	Four lots a night

Pesetas can still be handed to someone else, and that survivor buys within their own limits. Money can make a squad stronger. It cannot make one survivor the only armed one in the Valley.

• What he does not sell. Suppressant, the Plaga's cure, keys, and anything that opens a way out. The Suppressant Reserve is ΜΝΗΜΗ's to set (above), and no price changes it.
• What he buys. Any weapon or ammunition a survivor brings him, at a third of his own price.
• He is never harmed. Nothing harms him and he harms no one, as the records hold. When Saddler dies, he is still there.