Librarians

    A lot of the conflict in Descent stems from a lack of information. The Church of the Sleeping God believes that their eponymous deity is something to be feared, and that the world will be destroyed should it awaken. The Lord Mayor believes that his approval ratings are only so low because the Church is influencing the populace. The average Descentian only remembers the surface vaguely, flashes of destroyed buildings, giant towers piercing the sky, chittering insectoid figures swarming across the ice over Mannimar Bay. These things all possess a grain of truth, but are nowhere near the whole truth. Information is a dangerous and powerful thing to have, and thus there is an organization dedicated to the preservation of knowledge at any cost. These are the Librarians.

    When you think of the word "librarian," you likely picture someone with horn-rimmed glasses, a button-up shirt, a pair of sensible slacks or a long skirt. This is what librarians want you to think. In truth, while there is a division dedicated to simply renting out books, there are also field agents, and independent contractors who work for the Library. Traditionally, each library in the city of Descent (seven, all told) has only one Head Librarian, who acts in an administrative capacity, delegating the duty of fieldwork and espionage to their assistants. This is not always the case, and in certain branches the Head Librarian is also the primary field agent. Regardless, the Head Librarian always uses the name of the district their library is in as a codename. 

    The fieldwork that Librarians do focuses mostly on the retrieval of information and the termination of those who would seek to destroy it. They accomplish this through trickery, guile, knowledge, and of course an array of literary-themed spy gadgets(e.g, an inkwell that's actually a smoke bomb, a timepiece containing several hidden functions, a bulletproof pocket protector, etc.) With these skills and tactics, they are more than capable in a fight, though typically they seek to avoid combat unless absolutely necessary.

    The fighting skills of the Librarians are often utilized against their second greatest enemy: the Ordo Obscurus. (Their greatest enemy is illiteracy.) The Ordo Obscurus seek to, well, obscure. They want to destroy all information, all cognition, and leave all things devoid of life and knowledge. Yep, they're a death cult. They want to just erase reality, or at least erase thought. They have three major rituals, only two of which have been used to date. 

    The first is the Unseeing, a spell to render something imperceptible, effectively obscuring the knowledge of them until the ritual is dispelled. This is not quite invisibility, but more so removing the knowledge of the target from anyone not involved in the ritual. An Unseen person is essentially censored from reality. Where their name is written, there is a blank. Where they go, there is a person, but so nondescript as to avoid notice. An Unseen place is just the same. It appears as whatever is typical for the area, completely nondescript and impossible to notice (except by the Rite of Unveiling, a ritual developed by the Librarians specifically to dispel Unseeing.) 

    The second ritual is the Unknowing, a spell that removes specific knowledge. This essentially makes the target forget something, but the thing in question is nebulous and open to interpretation. For example, an Unknowing could make a person raising a firearm against an Obscurus cultist forget how to use it. They try to gasp in terror, but they've forgotten how to breathe. They fall to the floor, having forgotten how to stand. The only thing left in their mind is the fear, before that is gone as well, leaving nothing behind it. And that's only in broad strokes! Precision Unknowing can make a person or thing forget a select bit of information. It could make the cobblestones of a street forget they're supposed to solid, creating a river of liquid stone. It could make a tree forget that it's not a carnivorous predator. This sort of Unknowing is to add by subtracting.

    The third and most dreadful is the Unmaking, the act of making reality itself forget. It's as if the target never existed. It's entirely unknown whether or not the Unmaking has been used before, because no knowledge of an Unmade thing can exist. If your best friend were Unmade right next to you, you never would have had a best friend. History itself would shift to compensate, ending up more or less the same, except without that which had been Unmade.