Writer's Guide

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Section One: What does the ICIO Union Universe look like?

Let's start with the basics. The ICIO Union is an organisation (within the fictional environment of the wiki) that focuses on the containment, investigation, destruction and concealment of entities, phenomena and other types of anomalous entities. It is an out-of-jurisdiction body formed long before there were even the basic laws we all know, with a rich history of centuries of doing its job and being in conflict with the rest of the world.

Why are we telling you this? To give you the basic concept on which the universe of the ICIO Union revolves. The world of this organisation is divided in two, separated by a metaphorical "curtain". That translates into the governments of the world hiding things and an organisation, the ICIO Union, taking care of manipulating the media by infiltrating false information, liquidating suspects that could give away the work of the organisation, among other actions you could imagine, such as having an infiltrated police force and so on. That metaphorical curtain separates two realities in one world.

As you can see, the way in which these two are separated is by means of cooperative actions, not only by a government, but also by the government allowing and ceding means for the organisation to act and maintain its anonymous status. At the same time we can intuit that they have higher contacts, be it in politics, the international market, additional or "front" corporations to have secret meeting places, their own private headquarters, a network of informants, access to internet security, the ability to disrupt the media, etc. With all this said, people on the civilised side away from danger live in disbelief, a status quo, within their own sphere of scientific knowledge that has been perfect for advancing humanity without it getting stuck while in the background there is a group of people keeping the real danger at bay.

And why? Well, imagine that tomorrow it comes out in the news that aliens do exist, and even the government itself shows evidence of it all on national TV channels and even international ones like CNN. And they themselves confess that they have been hiding this secret for some years. Wouldn't there be a shock? Wouldn't they receive criticism? Wouldn't people start to question more things about life? Most likely it would be a half-hearted reaction, but still, there would be the likelihood that the shock would be much greater. Think about it, we are not alone in the universe at the end of it all, that means the bible is all a lie and we are not the only intelligent, conscious animal created by God in the universe.

Wouldn't it be shocking if it really came out that they have been hiding all that? It would have an impact on the media, on people's belief, on the reputation of a country and most likely on science as well. And that could bring tragic consequences like, an increase of people turning against the authorities, people attacking religion or people really wanting to bring more things to light and cause even more chaos and uncertainty. Wouldn't this be a threat to take into account? Clearly, yes, and it would not be governments to blame, but information itself, because information can be a double-edged sword and is extremely powerful, either to ratify a scientific fact or to defraud a person.

For that very reason, it is more than obvious that an organization having such a great burden as to hide entities beyond the ordinary understanding of people, would receive so much help and means to fulfill its purpose. For to know of them would not only be dangerous, but to know and to know the way in which such an organization (in this case the ICIO Union) acts, would be even worse and catastrophic to the maintenance of order. Now, remembering this, let's look at another question: How is the more esoteric side of this double reality?

I will tell you about it right now. You have seen that there are entities beyond the human conscious, but exactly and what kind? To begin with, this other side also has its own coexistence. It is a world of danger and fantasy, why? Because there is magic.

Magic could be a definition to encompass a lot of arcane and esoteric arts, such as alchemy, spiritualism, shamanism, gleaning, exorcism, demonology, and a long etcetera. All this is real, and it could even be said that there would be many more types of magics, unique to the universe itself. Now let's turn the tables and see that all these things are real. Things that seem so absurd and middle age, are very true things with real power.

It is the very antithesis of the science that we humans have developed and sought for centuries. Don't think of it as a force that contradicts the laws of physics or anything else, but as a kind of force that can break them, use the elements and manipulate them to generate things that are extraordinary and unexplained, but that have some kind of logic within this own totally unique and unthinkable energy of the universe.

Knowing this, we could see fantastical things like lost or underground cities, hidden cults in sparsely populated regions or where there is little civilization, places that generate unique phenomena, forces beyond the planet that generate phenomena in space or some even guide them to earth, ancient and lost artifacts, even the most bizarre and dangerous.

Like a government project (not necessarily one born in our contemporary eras) that has gotten out of control, a group of humans who learned to manipulate these things, a gap in reality that expelled something from another dimension, creatures that can contact astral planes, ghosts of the dead bringing doom and disease to a place out of pure revenge, a very dangerous weapon of war coveted by an army, angels coming down from heaven, among many other things you could imagine that could appear.

As wonderful as it may sound to have such things in our reality, it would be very obvious that in the short or long run they would be of extreme danger. Humanity would be locked into a fantasy world of real danger, where they become dependent on these unexplained forces in the universe. And if we think about it, we could very well be stuck in a kind of middle age that never ended, because we have not sought reason and we have sunk in a reality of fear, nonsense, rumors and real fantasy, without having the slightest progress in science or reasoning about the universe, because we have locked ourselves with purely the unexplainable and now we are totally dependent on it. With this dystopian future in mind it would not be very out of mind to try to hide those things.

But not only that, but also to be able to look for an explanation or at least investigate if behavior in order to contain them better, even to use that knowledge to do things such as contain other magical anomalies. The church, governments and the judiciary would have no problem in maintaining and helping the Union, since they have a mission that is to protect not only humanity from magic, but also from civilization destroying itself by learning that this kind of thing has existed since the beginning of time.

But even then the organization would still have its problems. Let's say that not only having a lot of support on your side means that your task will be easier or not, because unforeseen events, historical setbacks, people who think differently and lust for power have characterized our history as humans. So let's look at the next section.

Second Section: The Problems of the Organization.

No matter how perfect a human organism working in anonymity may seem, there will always be operations that go wrong, people within our own ranks that we will not know what they think, and even the danger itself may become uncontrollable and out of hand. That is why we can imagine the problems that may occur or those that already exist just by thinking about them.

Starting with global risk. In a situation where the world looks bad economically, it means that when entering in crisis the own huge money aids sent to the Union could be reduced or cut, and with less economic power it has less money to spend on paying its employees, its own front industries could suffer from bankruptcy, lack of manpower for production or cannot cover the demands of a product, cannot afford the purchase of armament to governments, etc.

We could say that the organization receives support from the IMF, the United States, the European Union, the National Reserve, among others, but how much are they willing to spend and lose in the Union at the cost of continuing to have more crises? Here the economic scenario could become unfavorable if a government or entity that manages large amounts of monetary resources, decides to cut investment to the organization. And although it may have companies to obtain more funds, one could easily intuit that they would not be able to live purely by fighting in the international market and selling products. So, a worldwide economic crisis could be quite a big problem scenario.

Another scenario we could encounter is the breakdown of containment. Even though the organization has been around for centuries, it does not possess all the methods to immediately contain anything. The very magic that exists in their world is even with a pattern of how it may come to function, it remains impossible to guess what it may generate or what it will do.

Initial containment on an object can be by isolating the area, observing what the entity is doing and trying to act on what can be known at the time. Then you can expand the protocols and send the object to a secure base, but if that is not possible you can apply containment in the field. But even with all this, they still need to do testing, research, analysis or other things to find out more about the thing they are containing. Interim measures may work, yes, but there is a possibility that the danger and capabilities of that anomaly will far outweigh the precautions taken.

Asia that, a scenario where the containment breaks down either due to non-compliance, lack of information about the anomaly, some failure in the measures, some experiment that goes wrong, among others. So this would be an issue that the ICIO Union would face consistently throughout its existence, but one that we would think would have varying degrees of severity and would not reach the point of apocalypse. But if you have major problems, it can lead to a terrible scenario that may not resemble the end of the world, but may result in something very unfortunate to varying degrees.

One last example (but not the last problem) that can put the Union in adversity. In the of personnel types we can find that human employees are not the only ones, but there are also non-human personnel. We can think of beings just as conscious and intelligent as a human, moreover, they have a kind of their own culture already formed, where they have employees who live fully integrated within the Union but also have people who work for them with their own homes and families.

In such cases, politics itself, the differences between internal organizations, as well as the way in which anomalies can be dealt with can lead to internal problems and even clashes. So these kinds of things are not ruled out at all. However, the Union would look for a way to solve them sooner or later even though they may end up in civil war, in the middle of an economic crisis or trying to stop the apocalypse. Like humans, it is not a perfect entity, it can have failures and successes, but always looking for a solution to these.

With this clarified about the universe, how the organization works and the problems it can face, this section on the "Universe" is finished.

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