By the third month after C's contact—now widely called The Change—human civilization was no longer debating whether the event was real. That part was over. It had become a geopolitical certainty, a scientific crisis, a cultural fracture, and something bordering on theological collapse. It had a name now: The Narrative Emergence, or more simply The Emergence. And the beings shaped by it—people who had undergone real transformation into myth, character, or aesthetic identity—were no longer urban legends or fringe rumors. They were The Transformed. Or, in more clinical or intelligence-oriented language, Narrative-Merged Beings (NMBs). What began as a flash of light had become an entire new axis of reality. And with that came structure. Response. Control. Suppression. Exploitation. Because this was still Earth. And Earth responds to threat by building institutions.
The United States was one of the first to build a response system—operational, layered, and partially classified. Internally, they called it N.I.R.O.—Narrative Integration and Reality Observation. It's a formal task force under the DHS and DARPA umbrellas, with direct input from the NSA and partially affiliated with the Department of Energy. N.I.R.O. isn't military, but its language is paramilitary: containment thresholds, integration vectors, probability collapse risk levels. Their primary objective is not elimination, but containment and understanding. But they're already using tiered threat scores to rank Transformed individuals by "meta-impact potential." People like Peter Capaldi, now flagged as an "Intellect-Class Tier 5 Transformed Entity," are under constant surveillance. They're watching. Quietly. Ready to move if belief becomes action.
China's response is more direct, brutal, and less concerned with optics. They've created a full-scale black operations unit under their internal security forces and the Central Military Commission. The program, rumored under internal leaks to be called Zhìrán (智能染色体计划, or "Cognitive Genetics Initiative"), does not operate under public oversight. Transformed individuals are quietly disappeared, interrogated, and in many cases, experimented on. The Communist Party sees narrative emergence not as an anomaly, but as an opportunity—an evolutionary resource to harness before the West can. They do not publicly acknowledge the phenomenon. But they are building what leaks suggest is a "containment citadel" in Xinjiang province, where merging individuals are dissected for bio-data and forced into classification. It's horrific. And it's accelerating.
Russia's approach is more subdued, yet deeply manipulative. The FSB has quietly folded narrative emergence into existing psychological warfare divisions. They aren't publicly kidnapping anyone. Instead, they are recruiting. Offering sanctuary, medical treatment, or influence to those Transformed willing to cooperate with the state. Their new sub-branch, unofficially referred to as Mythos Operations, is crafting media campaigns to discredit uncontrolled Transformed while quietly platforming those who might destabilize foreign systems. Russia doesn't fear the Emergence. It sees it as a new Cold War—one of identity and belief, where control of myth becomes control of minds.
The European Union, fractured in its response, has nonetheless created a provisional coordinating body known as CENI—the Central European Narrative Integration panel. CENI is part think tank, part inter-agency coordination hub, involving CERN, ESA, Interpol, and academic representatives from major universities. Unlike N.I.R.O. or China's model, CENI isn't trying to suppress the Transformed. It's trying to understand them. Their working assumption is that the Emergence is not a threat but a paradigm shift. They're tracking cases, running deep sociological models, and quietly funding shelters and education systems for affected individuals. Of all the global bodies, CENI is one of the better ones.
The Vatican, and religious communities globally, have had a harder time. Some sects have called the Emergence a divine punishment. Others call it a test. But the Vatican itself has issued an official position labeling the Transformed as "spiritually ambiguous." Not demonic, not divine—simply part of the New Creation. This has not stopped grassroots religious violence. Fringe Christian and Islamic groups have carried out harassment and even attempted lynchings of visible Transformed individuals, especially those with overt non-human traits. As transformation becomes more visible, more regional churches have begun splitting—some accepting the Transformed as signs of the End Times, others seeing them as the next phase of spiritual evolution.
Meanwhile, a dozen unofficial networks are forming. Whispers. Forums. Discords. Underground meeting spaces. Small groups of the Transformed are banding together—sharing experiences, techniques, emotional coping structures. One of the earliest and most respected is AnchorNet, a quiet Discord-based organization started by anonymous early transformed, aimed at helping people not lose themselves. Others are less benign—collectives forming around power, rage, fantasy fulfillment. Some are already beginning to radicalize. No one knows which will become the next great myth. But all of them—every one—are growing. YouTubers ran theory channels on how emergence worked, its limits, and what it did to people, and why with the same focus FNAF theorists have when a new FNAF game comes out. Streamers documented their transformations on multi-day live streams. Memes surged. But beneath the jokes was the real, slow terror of a society watching its rules liquefy.
While others... were traumatized by the events. By those who saw them as brainwashed, controlled, demonic or otherwise. While dealing with fiction becoming reality, such discrimination compounds trama. As mental health instablity in transformed in regions like texus, religious areas, and more. Grew larger. As incidents occured, went viral, and local populations grew more bias. A pressure cooker of discrimination formed slowly. But surely in many areas. While areas of higher acceptance formed in others. With a reverse-presure cooker effect given by local cultures being accelerated into greater acceptance by such transformed being around. Many describing it like "The transformed are forcing cultures to adapt, and the only method to adapt, is to grow more extreme in whatever you currently are."