For thirty years, this city was built on a single sentence: heroes protect the people, the people trust the heroes. It was called the Superhuman Accord. It held through riots, through disasters, through an attempted invasion from orbit.

At the center of that promise stood the Solance Vanguard — the city's most beloved coalition of superhumans. Their faces were on coffee cups. Their trading cards passed between schoolchildren. The Vanguard was not just a team. It was the shape the city believed in.

Six months ago, in a single night, the Vanguard turned on the city it had sworn to protect. No warning. No reason given. By morning, the coalition had rebranded itself — the New Order Association — and declared that freedom had always been a mistake dressed up in a prettier word.

The architect was not an army. It was one man, operating from the shadows — Crowned Serpent. His weapon had a name the public only recently learned: Project Lighthouse. A long infiltration. A precise rewriting of belief. Not mind control — something worse. Conversion that feels, from the inside, like clarity.

Fronted by Captain Azure — once the Vanguard's moral center, now its most camera-ready enforcer. They control the police, the broadcasts, the registries, the streets. Obedience is framed as safety. Dissent is framed as sickness.

They are not a monolith. Rank-and-file enforcers carry doubts they cannot voice. Behind polished armor, residual fragments of who these heroes used to be occasionally slip through. Occasionally.

Surviving heroes. Leaked-document officials. Citizens who refused to forget. Led by the Archivist — an identity no outsider has confirmed. They hold intelligence networks, salvaged Vanguard resources, and a question that splits them down the middle: can the corrupted be saved — or must they be put down?

A small cell led by Don Vega, whose face nobody living has seen. They do not aim to overthrow. They aim to make the regime laughable. Hijacked broadcasts. Slapstick at state ceremonies. Synthesized footage of corrupted heroes contradicting themselves in their own voices.

Their theory is simple: a tyrant being laughed at loses authority at cliff-edge rates.

Led by the Jester. They attack the Association and the Resistance with equal enthusiasm. Their argument: the rot began long before Crowned Serpent — the hero system itself was the original lie, and every version of "order" Solance is fighting over is just a fresh coat of paint on the same cage.

No alliances. Only transactions. The Jester doesn't deal in loyalty, only price.

Solance's northwest district. The only ground the Association has failed to penetrate. Co-ruled by Lumena, a denpa-type whose electromagnetic field jams the regime's neural surveillance cold — and Princess Aralis L. Roche, cybernetic aristocrat, commander of the Eisenritter Brigade. She sells weapons to everyone. She favors no one.

The only safe harbor in Solance — for exactly as long as you can afford her asking price. Which is always higher than you expected.