Beneath the Green
Factions
Working notes. Names are placeholders until better ones arrive.
Local Resistance
The Porchlight People
A loose network of ordinary people who know enough to help: nurses, dispatchers, funeral directors, teachers, mechanics, librarians, preachers, aunties, gas station clerks, and the occasional person who has died once and come back wrong but kind.
They do not have a logo. They have phone trees, casseroles, keys to old buildings, and rules written in the backs of hymnals.
Root Families
Families with inherited protections, curses, obligations, and old knowledge. Some are generous. Some hoard what they know. Some are bound to land that no longer feeds them.
Green-Watched Communities
Places protected by the green world: trees, roots, fungi, rivers, hills, old growth, and the local dead woven into the land.
Protection here may mean the woods hide you. It may also mean the woods never let you leave.
Compromised Power
The Department of Natural Continuity / Federal Weird-Weather Offices / Whatever Name Survives Drafting
A possible government response to impossible patterns: disaster anomalies, ecological ruptures, public health irregularities, infrastructure failures, missing towns, weather that behaves like attention.
Important: this must not become an SCP-style normalcy-preserving authority. It is not an all-powerful hidden agency. It is not the default solution. Most people should not know its name, and even local officials should usually be calling ordinary authorities first: sheriff, fire, EMS, state police, FBI, public health, emergency management, insurance, clergy, whoever seems like the nearest handle.
If a specialized agency exists, it is human, partial, underfunded, frightened, compromised, overconfident, bureaucratic, or late. Its people may have studied the weird and may recognize patterns faster than civilians, but they are still little people standing in front of vast things. Better prepared does not mean in control.
The useful model is closer to The X-Files than SCP: someone in authority suspects something strange, or has a file they cannot explain, and sends investigators because humans call authority when they run out of ideas. Maybe those investigators know more than they say. Maybe they are guessing. Maybe they have a protocol. Maybe the protocol is just hope with a badge.
Some employees may be demons. Some may be protected without knowing by something stranger. Some may be decent humans doing harm reduction inside a system that cannot save the world. Nobody has the full map.
Corporate Bargain Houses
Corporations whose leadership has made contact with deeper beings. They may not understand who they serve. They may frame it as market insight, predictive analytics, longevity science, resource optimization, or divine mandate.
Industries that fit naturally:
- mining
- logging
- prisons
- insurance
- pharmaceuticals
- private security
- disaster recovery
- real estate development
- data centers
- funeral services
- addiction treatment
Churches of the Wrong Name
Congregations worshiping something they call God. Sometimes they are partly right. Sometimes they are tragically wrong. Sometimes the thing answering them enjoys the confusion.
Human Occult Power
Hedge Workers
Practical magic users. Rootwork, charms, signs, saints, family recipes, storm rituals, graveyard etiquette, warded vehicles, hidden names.
They survive by being careful, not flashy.
Borrowed Men and Hollow Women
People who traded pieces of themselves for influence, health, money, beauty, revenge, or survival.
They may still look human. They may still love people. But something else is using the space inside them.
Disaster Saints
People who became protective figures after dying in an event where the world broke open. Not necessarily holy. Not necessarily safe. But capable of answering.
Inhuman Near-Surface
The Flesh-Hungry
Crude or sophisticated beings that crave embodiment, pain, sensation, meat, sex, disease, music, heat, or being remembered.
Grief-Eaters
Entities that feed on mourning, especially unresolved mourning. They may cultivate tragedy like a crop.
The Choirs of Rot
Group entities that speak through decay, mold, infection, spoiled food, corrupted blood, and collapsing houses.
Door Things
Beings that do not live in places so much as thresholds: closets, motel rooms, stairwells, culverts, storm drains, hospital elevators, church basements.
Protective Inhuman Powers
The Green Below the Green
A vast living network of land, root, fungus, animal, and dead memory. It is not Mother Nature in a sentimental sense. It is old, practical, and not always gentle.
Sometimes it protects human settlements because they are part of its body.
The Kindly Watchers
A dangerous phrase. Some deeper powers do show care. Human beings often misunderstand that care. A watcher may save a child from a demon and then mark that child forever.
Open Questions
- Which factions recur across many stories?
- Which should remain local and mysterious?
- Are there named immortal beings in public life?
- How much does the federal government know?
- Is there one central wound/event, or many regional wounds?