The Protagonist - a 21-year-old night assistant at Hotel U Tichého Klí?e.
Mila - front-desk supervisor. Warm, witty, and speaks five languages fluently, including sarcasm and resignation. Believes in the rules. Gently enforces them. Known to hand guests salt with a little paper drawing of how to place it.
Rayan Aglic - General manager of the hotel. Immigrant from Southern Europe (maybe Turkish, Albanian, or Greek descent). Corporate-minded. Hates when staff reference “supernatural nonsense.” Keeps telling IHCD that the hotel is “not part of your surveillance grid.” Doesn’t believe in Hallwalkers — but has never stayed in the hotel overnight.
Emil - hotel's detective/security. Dry. Sardonic. Doesn’t like people, but can read them like maps. Respects routines. Doesn’t tolerate mystics, influencers, or anyone who thinks the spiral is aesthetic. Rarely yells. But when he does, you move.
Agent J. Toma?ek (IHCD) - Disciplined, analytical, and quietly conflicted. Assigned to monitor Pit-related activity surrounding the hotel. Believes in containment and procedure — until the Protagonist forces him to confront the limits of both.
Vaclav - Patient. Polite. Mildly amused by everything. Deeply curious — especially about people who resist. Loathes eclairs. Can’t explain why. No one’s brave enough to ask twice. Drinks tea, never coffee.
Organizations
Official stance: “Containment, Identification, Extraction.”
Public whisper: “If they find out, you disappear.”
Their three primary operational arms:
- Containment – neutralize or isolate Hallwalker activity; known for field agents (like Tomá?ek).
- Recovery & Ritual Engineering (RRE) – the most secretive branch, rumored to experiment with controlled aberrations. They’re the ones "creating methods they won’t share."
- Memetic Hazard Division – handles pattern drift, language warping, recursion loops, and viral concepts. Most of them have no eyes on their ID photos. Some wear hoods even in offices.
They operate in shadows and sealed trucks. Often arrive after the scream, never before. Offer no answers. Only silence, documentation, and relocation. Treat infected civilians like failed experiments — not victims, not survivors.
You report yourself, you might vanish. Rumors say their “extraction” techniques leave you blank-eyed, even if they save your body. People say the IHCD doesn’t stop the Hallwalkers — it just relabels them and moves the building they were in off public records.
They are viewed like the CDC during a plague no one believes in. Too rigid. Too controlled. Seen as losing control. Their reports are redacted. Their teams wear gloves. Their agents don’t flinch — and that scares people more than flinching would.
A supranational authority overseeing conceptual threats across Europe. Enforces censorship zones around Pits, manages official narratives (“geological anomalies”), and pre-clears all public statements. Bureaucratic, distant, and profoundly influential.
Slogan whispered online: “They don’t save you. They help you survive.”
They are shady, definitely illegal, but they are present. Publicly dismissed as occult extremists; internally structured as a transhuman movement. Their rituals feel like folk magic meeting survival instinct. They share knowledge. Inversion paths, tether rituals, echo checks — all leaked, handwritten, posted on forums, passed in photocopied zines. The group is seen as pragmatists, not idealists. They don’t claim to fix the world — they just help you walk through it without being rewritten.
You can do their rituals alone, at home, with salt, chalk, broken mirrors. They don’t knock on doors. They don’t take people away. They answer questions — sometimes with riddles, but they answer. Their “agents” aren’t men in black. They’re shopkeepers, artists, ex-nurses. And they look scared, too — which makes them feel real.
They’ve become urban legend and underground folklore: older Slavic communities incorporate Spiral gestures into old Catholic prayers. Markets sell candles labeled “Spirála-approved geometry” (fake, but people buy them).
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Hierarchy:
- Axis - absolute decision center.
- Verifiers - 4–6 high-ranking altered humans. Handle external negotiations, ideology enforcement, memory locking.
- Architects - mid-tier operatives. Manage rituals, construct safe zones, train initiates. Often altered.
- Echoes - recruits. Human or “resonants” used for tasks, errands, surveillance.
- Mirrors - fully infected agents who are stabilized. Used in missions requiring precision — they operate with reality drift.
- Obsolete - members who have begun to fracture cognitively. Kept in containment. Used for research. Or offered to the Pits.
Spirála does not attempt to end the Spiral. It attempts to finish it correctly.
"Let the ground open where Heaven failed. Let those who fell walk again — not to save us, but to test what we've become."
Formed less than a year after the first confirmed Hallwalker, they broke off from the Catholic Church in secrecy, then in defiance. Saint Caspar was chosen because of his role as the Magus of understanding — he brought myrrh (used for the dead). They believe his legacy is not of kingship, but of preparation for death.
They view the Vatican’s silence as cowardice — believing the Church is being complicit by staying neutral.
They believe the Pits are divine wounds. Not random, not evil — openings from Heaven, not Hell. Hallwalkers are Fallen Messengers — angels too altered by our world to remain “pure,” but not yet damned.
“They flicker because they are unfinished. They hum because we are not listening."
Humans “chosen” (infected) are not cursed. They are vessels of judgment, or trials in motion. If you can hold the infection and not succumb — you are blessed. If you cannot — you were never worthy.
Neighboring locations
Hotel Zlatá Sova (The Golden Owl)
Two blocks uphill from U Tichého Klí?e
Alignment: IHCD-compliant / Denial-heavy
Larger, five-star hotel. Management outwardly refuses to acknowledge the “Pits situation” and, therefore, their rooms arranged perfectly symmetrically, hallways long and straight. The lobby has two full wall mirrors facing each other — guests often report nausea after sitting there too long. Once had an entire guest wing sealed off after “an airflow anomaly” during mirror hour. Staff turnover is suspiciously high.
Nicknamed by locals: “The Hallway Hotel”.
Bar V Pádu (At the Fall)
It is just around the corner — visible from some rooms of U Tichého Klí?e
Alignment: Independent / Spirala-adjacent
It is popular with Spirála runners, artists, and fringe academics. Interior design is consciously asymmetrical — staircases end before they begin, chairs slightly tilt toward the bar no matter how you sit. The owner once claimed the floor plan was dictated to him in a dream. They host “Reading Nights” where no one is allowed to speak — only write and pass notes. Mirrors are replaced with panes of obsidian, “for mood.”
The Protagonist occasionally stops here when he's walking without purpose.
Pension ?edy Pruh (The Gray Stripe)
Across the street from U Tichého Klí?e
Alignment: Unaffiliated / Hyperlocal protection rituals
Family-run guesthouse in very old building with recently added concave walls and non-symmetrical doors “for airflow” after a tourist vanished mid-step.
Every room has a cat charm nailed above the doorframe. Some rooms have real cats. Hallwalkers reportedly don’t enter. Why? No one knows. Locals whisper it’s the cats, or the saltwater fountain, or that the youngest child of the owners once returned from a Pit with her memory inverted.
Their motto: “Sleep Quiet, Wake Whole.”
Antiquariát ‘Víc ne? knihy’ (More Than Books Antiquary)
Hidden in an alley near the lower tram stop
Alignment: Spirála-friendly / Watcher-reverent
A cramped, unlit antique bookshop with volumes that can’t be digitized — every attempt fails or corrupts the scan. They sell spiral-bound notebooks that refuse to tear cleanly. The back wall has a sealed iron hatch marked with strange runes. Staff say it’s “just decoration.”
The Protagonist once found a map there that changed layout based on who unfolded it.
Vaclav has been seen leaving once. Or maybe three times. Or maybe he’s always just stepped out.
Café Jinak (Café Otherwise)
It is located on a slope that wasn't there last year
Alignment: Mixed / “Neutral ground”
Widely believed to have slipped half a meter sideways in time after a mirror hour shift. Decor: mismatched chairs, color-shifting walls, windows that reflect different weather than outside. Spirala, IHCD, and unaffiliated people drink coffee here side by side, usually in silence. Their espresso makes people cry for no known reason.
Mila refers to it as “where paranoia gets a croissant.”