Records
Records is the Intellect-faculty skill for the totality of facts and memories CASCADE has on file. World history, geopolitics, Bureau procedure, the last five years of paperwork on Hershel Wilk specifically, and the personal memory of a 14-year operant career that ended badly. It's the skill that knows things. Buffed +1 by Ghost Recorder - Do Not Open Conditioning Thought, which is the Thought specifically about CASCADE's relationship with her own past.
Stats
| Faculty | Faculty of Intellect |
| Resource | Delirium (purple) |
Strengths
- +The skill that has the answer. World lore, Bureau procedure, personal history — Records knows it.
- +Buffed +1 by Ghost Recorder - Do Not Open Conditioning Thought (which also buffs Technoflex and unlocks 'memories with the old crew').
- +Anchors the historical reads that Grey Matter and Entanglement then synthesise into a hypothesis.
Costs
- −Burns Delirium. Long lore-dump scenes stack the Intellect stress meter.
- −High Records can dump information at the wrong tempo. Knowing all the relevant facts doesn't mean it's the right beat to share them.
Description
The totality of facts and memories about the world. Understand the present through the past.
Records is one of the five Intellect-faculty skills, alongside Entanglement, Grey Matter, Poetics, and Technoflex. It's the archive — catalogue and retrieval system both.
The scope is wide. Geopolitics: the Superbloc vs La Luz vs EMTERR balance, the Cultural Blockade, the berrion bombing of St. Ulwen. Bureau institutional history: Belkov's '47 Operant Toolkit design, the Opera's old enemies. Hershel's personal history: Mircea, the Kohila defection, '82 to '91 in Portofiro, the burn, the five years in Novessa. All one skill.
When the player needs to know what year something happened, who built it, who carried out the bombing, what the Bureau called the program — Records answers.
It's the librarian's voice in CASCADE's head. Cool, organised, occasionally pedantic. Has the date, the source, the alternative reading. Not emotional about most of the catalogue — except the part that's her own. Personal memories are filed differently. Records-heavy CASCADE sometimes has to choose between two voices: the one pulling the document and the one living through it.
For a 14-year veteran by '96, the catalogue is dense and well-worn. Records' job is to keep using it without letting any single page take over the scene.
Faculty
Faculty of Intellect
Mechanics
Records checks resolve recall — historical facts, geopolitical context, Bureau procedure, personal memory. The skill is the operant's archive and retrieval system both. Burns Delirium (purple). Buffed +1 by Ghost Recorder - Do Not Open Conditioning Thought (which also buffs Technoflex and unlocks old-crew memory discovery). If the Intellect stress meter caps at 20, an Intellect skill drops a level. Preset starts: Kinetic 3, Charismatic 2, Analytical 4.
Builds & playstyles
**Kinetic (Intellect 3):** workable. Knows the basics, misses the specialist reads.
**Charismatic (Intellect 2):** painful. Spends a lot of scenes asking other people for context.
**Analytical (Intellect 4):** anchor. Walks into a room knowing what every object in it used to mean.
**Ghost Recorder - Do Not Open Conditioning:** +1 Records, +1 Technoflex, plus the ability to discover memories with the old crew. The Thought about CASCADE confronting her past. Violation: repressing old-crew memories suspends the buffs and applies an Intellect Disadvantage.