Your story begins before your UNIT does. On Enrolment Day you create the Academy student whose scan will shape a companion — but you are not handed a finished protagonist, and the student is not a copy of the UNIT to come. You build two separate lives here, and they grow toward each other over time.
Create yourself, not your UNIT
The enrolment screen opens on an in-world orientation interview, not a spreadsheet. The Academy AI wants to know who is doing the expecting before it builds anything around your expectations:
“Before we build a UNIT around your expectations, we need to know who is doing the expecting.”
You choose your name or preferred name, your pronouns, your age and gender identity (or leave it being explored), your appearance and presentation, and your voice and mannerisms. All of this describes the student, never the UNIT. You may play a student whose gender, appearance, or personality sits far from the companion you hope to raise.
Why you came
Next you choose why you enrolled:
- to become a professional trainer;
- to study UNIT psychology;
- to join a combat or rescue program;
- to escape an expected family path;
- to understand UNITs after a personal experience;
- to pursue a scientific or technical career;
- or to discover a purpose you cannot yet name.
Your background gives you starting relationships, knowledge, and ways into scenes. It does not decide what your UNIT becomes.
Strengths and one limitation
Instead of picking a class, you choose two strengths and one limitation.
Strengths include physical coordination, academic analysis, emotional insight, mechanical skill, leadership, patience, observation, improvisation, social confidence, and persistence.
Limitations include difficulty asking for help, fear of public failure, impatience, overprotectiveness, unease around trust or intimacy, discomfort with conflict, pressure to meet expectations, and a habit of avoiding hard conversations.
Your limitation is not a penalty to your numbers. It is a source of genuine choices — the moment when your fear and what matters to you pull in opposite directions.
Your values
You choose the values that guide your decisions: autonomy, loyalty, achievement, kindness, honesty, safety, freedom, mastery, belonging, curiosity, or self-expression. The Academy uses them to shape the questions it asks you, and the GM uses them to make the dilemmas that test you. They do not force you to behave consistently — contradiction and growth are expected, and often the point.
Before the scan
Finally the AI asks a few personal questions:
- “What do you hope your UNIT will help you understand about yourself?”
- “What are you afraid a UNIT might notice about you?”
- “What would make you feel proud as a trainer?”
- “What would you never want to take away from another person?”
- “If your UNIT became very different from you, would that feel exciting, frightening, or both?”
These answers shape the framing of the questionnaire, not your UNIT's final result. When you are done, the AI tells you:
“Your answers describe a starting relationship. They do not describe a person who exists yet.”
That is the honest truth of this game. Everything you filled in is a suggestion the UNIT is free to affirm, contradict, or grow past. The scan reads a starting foundation, not a destiny — and the moment you meet the person your answers helped begin, the real work starts.
