Kit's Crater Five
Originally a group of everyday high school studens from Kit's Crater, Nevada, the lives of the individuals who would become the 'Kit's Crater Five' was be turned upside-down in the Summer of 1986 when they awoke to the potentially world-shattering power of The Word. Pursued by the wealthy power-hungry cult to Moloch known as the Golden Cloister and a shadowy cabal of government scientists under Office of Psychosocial and Speculative Research, the Kit's Crater Five created El Cenote to gather allies and protect others who awoke to their very same gift - or, as some would come to believe, curse.
History
Until the events that would create the Kit's Crater Five, magic was unknown to the world. Science was the pre-eminent natural philosophy of the age, and the world was in the early throes of the Information Age with new developments in personal computing and mass communications. People had already been to the moon and the public was already bored of it. This was the sociocultural context in which the five friends from Kit's Crater found thesmselves - and in which they would have remained, had a chance encounter with a supernatural adversary not changed the course of their lives forever.
Bill, Anita, Cody, Fritz, and Reed attended the Kit's Crater Grange Fair in August of '86. There, a mysterious Magician purported to read the five friends' future through what he called the Deck of True Fate - before pronouncing a terrible prophecy that the world would come to an end with the closing of the year. While the friends initially blew off this encounter, the Magician's actions had catalyzed the development of previously dormant arcane power in them. Some other first-born descendants of old Kit's Crater families also began to develop limited powers over time, and it was this fact that drew the eyes of members of the Golden Cloister embedded in the community.
The cult, for their part, had existed since the beginning of recorded history, eventually transitioning to a more 'traditiona' fraternal order for the wealthy and connected when their very real arcane power bled away near the end of biblical times. They had not experienced a resurgence of temporal magical power like this since, so they had to find the source and claim it as their own. To this end, the cult sought out nascent spellcasters to sacrifice to their "Lord of Fire," hoping to siphon off the burgeoning magical power and use it for their own ends. This set the cult on a collision course with the Five.
Kit's Crater had long been a seat of government-funded scientific research, the 'crater' having been initially created when atomic bomb testing to the south caused a collapse of a previously undiscovered aquifer under the town of Rawhide. Unfortunately for the Five, the reappearance of magic coincided with the establishment of OPSR facilities beneath the local Air Force base. This clandestine organization was already eyeing the local population for questionably legal and ethical research projects when some were witnessed experimenting with telekinesis in their backyards or showing uncanny predictive powers at the craps tables.
With OPSR and the Golden Cloister representing existential threats to all suddenly unintentionally magical citizens of Kit's Crater, the Kit's Crater Five set out to find new cases of magic and protect and conceal its users. El Cenote was formed as a sort of secret society where firstborns made aware of their powers could gather, hide out from their pursuers, and discuss strategies for counteracting the threats they all faced. The Five gathered more powerful arcanists, like Lily Parsons and Max Force, and Joseph Rangi, to directly undertake missions against the Cloister in particular.
Eventually, the Five noted that some otherwise uninvolved members of the community were acting oddly, particularly Patricia Wixtaki, the new school Superintendent who had taken over after the sudden heart conditions suffered by Mr. Centumocto. When they investigated her, assuming that she was an agent from OPSR at worst, they found themselves being investigated; as it turned out Patricia was, in fact, an agent of some supernatural part of the cosmic hierarchy known as the Substrate. Patricia informed the Five that the Magician had been correct: the end of the world was coming, and it was being caused by the willy-nilly use of The Word by people who didn't understand the danger it presented.
Seeing that the Five were unwittingly Elder Blanks, explaining their intuitive grasp of The Word as spirits from beyond the current cycle of time, Patricia entrusted them with the important task of seeing to it that all knowledge of magic is supressed and all who would use it poorly be brought low to face their judgement at the appointed time. Given the powerful forces arrayed against them and contention among El Cenote about what the proper place of magic should be in the world, it remains to be seen if the Kit's Crater Five will be successful in this quest.
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Adventuring Party
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