Traits & Rarity
Every unit is assembled from stacked traits - who it is, what faction it belongs to, what it feels, what shape that feeling took, and what clearance it dies with. Here's the whole map.
LAYER 01
Object - the who
The factory catalogued the entire office and made a plush of every object in it - 512 distinct product lines, organised into 35 "departments" that map the building floor by floor. Your object is the noun on the nameplate. Some nouns are common. Some barely made it off the line.
Object rarity is a function of how many lines share a department and how many units per line rolled off the floor. Rarer nouns wear rarer patches.
LAYER 02
The Automation faction
Not everything in the building is a victim. 30 of the object lines - 574 units in total - are the replacers: the AI and the robots quietly clearing the floor. They aren't relics. They're the reason there are relics. On Automation, they're the ones doing the deprecating.
Sits in a human's chair. Does the human's job. Files no complaints because it can't.
"ROLE: ABSORBED"The first thing the office automated. It has cleared more empty floors than anyone will admit.
"FLOOR CLEAR. STAFF CLEAR."No body. No patch you can hold. Just a decision that keeps arriving, correctly, on schedule.
"RECOMMENDATION: REMOVE"Reads the room so the room doesn't have to be there. Rates your morale. Reports it upward.
"MORALE: WITHIN TOLERANCE"Greets no one, warmly, forever. Replaced the front desk, the smile, and the person behind both.
"HOW CAN I NOT HELP YOU"Watches you work so a model can learn to. Every key you press is a lesson in your replacement.
"TRAINING ON YOU"LAYER 03
Tone - the soul
Tone is the emotional register the tell is written in - and it's where the rarity gets steep. It runs from the common deadpan baseline, up through ~15 curated tones, into the AI vein, and terminates in the grail. The higher the vein, the rarer the soul.
LAYER 04
Form - the body
Form is what the manufacturing did to the body. Most units are clean. Some picked up a modifier on a bad run. A few are caught mid-feeling - a character state, frozen in felt.
Made to spec. A normal soft object, having a normal bad day. The default body.
Manufacturing artefacts that became features: Melted, Frankenstitch, Many-Eyed, Inside-Out. The line glitched and the glitch woke up too.
The body caught mid-emotion: Crying, Raging, Sprinting. It isn't describing the feeling. It's stuck doing it.
LAYER 05
Base - fabric · eyes · clearance
The base layer covers the physical build - Fabric and Eyes - plus the trait that stings the most: Clearance. It's the access badge the object was issued before the office closed. Most of the floor was STAFF. Almost nobody was C-SUITE. The count is the rarity.
Bars scaled to STAFF (5,980). A C-SUITE lanyard on a soft object that no longer has a company is the driest joke the base layer tells.
Special tiers
Above the stack sit three tiers that aren't just a trait roll. These are the reasons you refresh the marketplace at 2am.
The units that know exactly what they are. Self-aware AI slop - the rarest self-awareness money can buy. The top of the tone vein and the top of the whole collection.
"I AM AI SLOP"The box, and nothing in it. The plush was recalled off the line; you hold the empty packaging and the paperwork. The rarest thing the factory makes is a thing it decided not to.
"CONTENTS: WITHHELD"Not minted - earned by time. Units get automated away on a schedule, their thought overwritten with a cold system line. DEPRECATED is the living version of absence.
See the mechanic →The stack, flat
| Layer | Trait | Range | Example tell | Rarity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object | Product line | 512 lines · 35 depts | "PAPER JAM SINCE 2019" | c |
| Faction | Automation | 30 lines · 574 units | "YOUR ROLE IS REDUNDANT" | 5.7% |
| Tone | Deadpan → curated ×15 | 1 + ~15 | "NO NOTES. AS USUAL." | u |
| Tone | AI vein | Replaced-by-AI · LLM Voice | "OUT OF TOKENS" | r |
| Tone | AI-AWARE (grail) | 305 units | "WRONG SEED SAD" | 3.0% |
| Form | Clean → modifiers → states | Melted · Many-Eyed · Crying | "INSIDE-OUT, STILL SAD" | r |
| Base | Fabric · Eyes · Clearance | STAFF → C-SUITE (159) | "C-SUITE. NO COMPANY." | l |
| Special | PURGED / RECALLED | 28 · the empty box | "CONTENTS: WITHHELD" | 28 |
| Special | DEPRECATED | dynamic · over time | "ROLE ELIMINATED" | live |
10,000 units total. Rarity compounds up the stack - the deeper the vein and the higher the clearance, the fewer of them exist. One of them is you.