Resonance Keeper

Ecology

The Sage tradition in the Lethean Age spans a range of practices from academic philosophy to active field medicine to high-level substrate manipulation, but the most common face of the tradition at the settlement level is the Resonance Keeper: the community's healer, mediator, and substrate-sense practitioner, who maintains the local circuit-house and provides the services that keep a settlement's population functional enough to work.

The work is not glamorous. A Keeper's day consists of diagnosis -- mostly trauma, infection, and the low-grade substrate toxicity that comes from living near active Miasm zones -- combined with the administrative maintenance of whatever community infrastructure has been assigned to their care. Datacore access, if the settlement has one. The mechanical water filtration, which everyone treats as the Keeper's responsibility regardless of whether it was designed that way. The ongoing argument with the settlement council about supply allocation. The Keeper is an embedded professional in a community that has built its daily operations around their availability, and this means they are rarely available.

The Novice is the apprentice position: a person with substrate sense, some training, and not yet enough experience to practice independently. Most Novices work competently within a defined scope -- field dressing, basic diagnostics, minor psionic stabilization -- and flag everything outside that scope to the Keeper. They are not timid; they simply know what they do not know yet, and they have been trained to treat that knowledge as a tool rather than a limitation.

Neither Keepers nor Novices are fighters by training or by preference. When they do fight, the Keeper leads with psionic support -- stabilization, disorientation, positional control -- while the Novice provides direct strike capability as a last resort. They do not pursue; they do not escalate. They are defending something.