ICHOR — International Cultural Heritage Organization, a UN agency tasked with relocation and preservation of cultural property during natural disasters and armed conflicts. Its operations mask the true agenda of the Invisible College.
EXO — Extraordinary Object. An item, entity or phenomenon possessing paranormal qualities. Every EXO can be categorized by a number of characteristics: form (item, entity, event), affect type (cognition, transformation, warfare, etc.), reach (personal, local, global) and class (DAWN, APEX, NIGHTFALL, MIDNIGHT on the Waterhouse scale)
Enlightened — a collective term used to describe those with the knowledge of unseen history.
The Cabal — an ancient secret society pursuing an unknown goal with no regard for human life or safety, often in direct confrontation with the Enlightened organizations.
EXO Form — describes the basic nature of an EXO. There are three general EXO forms: item, entity (sapient or non-sapient) or event (singular, continuous or periodical).
EXO Reach — describes the magnitude of the effect an EXO might produce in terms of area. Divided into: personal (affecting only the EXO or its wielder and their immediate area), local (affecting a large geographical area such as a town or a country) or global (affecting a large part or all of the world).
EXO Class — describes the magnitude of the effect an EXO might produce in terms of impact. Divided into: DAWN (affecting only a person or a group of persons, mostly historically insignificant), APEX (affecting a large population of persons, somewhat historically significant), NIGHTFALL (affecting multiple populations of persons, having a shaping effect on history), or MIDNIGHT (capable of producing an extinction-level event and ending history).
EXO Affect Type — describes the type of affect an EXO might produce. There are numerous types of affects, roughly divided into four categories: warfare (affects predominantly resulting in destruction), production (affects predominantly resulting in creation), transmutation (affects producing changes in objects or organisms), and cognition (affects exerting influence on the mental processes of sapient entities).
Emergence — an event or process of a new EXO coming into existence.
Attunement — a process of gradual binding with an EXO, allowing for increased control, efficiency and sometimes access to new affects.
Transference — a process of imprinting paranormal attributes on ordinary objects or persons, usually associated with extremely powerful EXOs.
Shift — a change in one or several characteristics of an EXO.
Critical Shift — a type of Shift that changes or destroys previously known methods of controlling an EXO, thus making containment impossible.
