♠Asylum Ink
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Ellium Leisure · 49th printing · FM-52

The Corrupting Deck

A party game played with a normal deck of cards and whatever junk the room contains. It is also the only safety measure you will be issued, and nobody is going to tell you that.

Take the booklet ♠ Play a hand

Free · any deck · any room · any number of players, including none

Threats conform. Environments blend in. The room you are in right now may already be one, and if it is, no alarm sounded and nobody is coming, because from the outside nothing is wrong.

A safety measure that has to be requested is a safety measure that arrives late. So it has to already be inside, everywhere, disguised as the kind of trash nobody bans, nobody burns, and nobody thinks to take away from you.

The deck divines the hell you are in. The suit is the direction the failure comes from. The number is how far along it is. Fifty-two pages account for the most common. That is not a fraction of what is out there. It is what fits in a booklet you would find funny.

It looks like a joke because a joke gets carried home, left in gloveboxes, read on toilets, and remembered drunk. A warning gets filed.

The four suits

Where the failure comes from

♣
Clubs
failures arriving through the body

The flesh volunteers for structural work. It produces more of itself than requested. It is being finished as something else, and the finishing is the problem.

♦
Diamonds
failures arriving through the room

The space is longer at the end than it was at the start. The level is coming up, patiently. The structure has learned to keep its occupants, and it calls this care.

♠
Spades
failures arriving through the record

A wrong past, gaining signatures. It happened, and nothing will agree with you that it did. Something is being removed from the record while you watch. Possibly this.

♥
Hearts
failures arriving as help

A better body, honestly offered. Growth, offered as salvation. It does not want you dead, it wants you kept. Everything it offers is real. All of it is bait.

The classes

What can be ended, and what cannot

Environment

There is nothing to seal. Survive it or take the hit; either way it is discarded. These do not get removed from the world. They get outlasted.

Hunter

It can be ended permanently, by one of three routes. A hunter you survive but do not seal is shuffled back into the pile. It will return. They are noted for that.

Convergence

The four Aces. Pay a toll or take it as a hit. Either way it fires. Whatever you are braced against will shield you from its own house's ending. Once. While it is facing you.

The Unsuited

Two jokers. One is a lever. One is a bill. The manual is unusually quiet about the second one, and says so.

Sealing a hunter

Three answers, each costs you something different

By object

Spend the named objects, in the count listed. Silent, cheap, and entirely dependent on what the room happened to give you. The counts come from reports, not from science.

By act

Perform the listed act, exactly, aloud. Feeling ridiculous is part of the mechanism, or at least it was part of every report where the agent survived.

By price

Pay the number, silently, or discard a life. Always available. This is the only route the Continuum stands behind without reservation, because it is the only one that runs on a printed number instead of testimony.

There is no free way to end a thing. The files are unanimous on that, and the files disagree about everything.

Past the line

The standing verified count is eleven.

Reaching the seal target is a win. You may stop, and stopping banks it. This section exists because some of you will not stop there, and the files would rather you did it correctly than creatively.

The agent's file does not say she stopped. It says she kept reading. Nobody has verified twelve.

Take the booklet ♠ Play a hand first

It is free because a price is a place to stop, and you do not get a place to stop.