Codex Entry: Hunters

This is a Codex entry relating to Hunters, such as Piper and the player, and the Hunter Academy system.

## Entry Contents

### "The Hunter Academy"

> How much or how little the Academy has in the way of comfort is dependent on the city-state it belongs to. After all, its overseers are the local Special Command sect, and if they happen to be under a particularly stringent Major-General's heel, well, tough shit, kids.
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> All training facilities for initiates are built like a small town, however, with a large building at the center where indoors classes are provided. Student housing takes up at least a third of the school ground, often divided up into houses of six inhabitants. The other one-third is outdoor training grounds, and there is usually a patch of closely-guarded forest for capture-the-flag.
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> Wards provided by witches hang heavy around each Academy, to both keep the students in and to keep bad things out. No one knows who exactly oversees these wards, and whether or not it's the same person, but in the past hundred years there have been very few incidents where something major manages to slip past these shields.
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> Of course, unfortunate things happen. You can't cure stupid. But parents and loved ones who are are assured (honestly) that all efforts were taken to prevent hormonal, aggressive, overconfident teenagers to actually die from their own foolishness.
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> Typically Hunter initiates taken from a city-state or the surrounding areas end up in their local Academy but this is not always the case. Special Command officers handle most of the recruitment effort, but by a Hunter's vouch, any child can also be eligible to participate in the initiation ceremony. Should they pass, the Hunter in question has claims as to where they will go, and many will take the child with them to the school closest to their home location.
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> One-on-one apprenticeships or 'sponsorships' of this kind were once the norm, and though its integration into the official government has forced the Hunter Corporation to be more even handed and general in its instruction of its initiates, Enforcers make the effort to preserve some aspects of old traditions out of respect.
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> The only way to control rambunctious twelve to eighteen-year-olds known to any adult is to keep them busy, something which Hunter instructors do well. Nor can it be said they only give out work as busywork; at the age of eighteen, before being cleared to leave the compound, a trainee is expected to be the fittest of their age group in one aspect or another--in all aspects if possible--so they stand a chance against the worst possible way for things to go wrong.
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> Creature lore, habits and victim patterns are a must. Demonology is a subject of its own, so extensive are the abyssal denizens, as are a study of plants and alchemy, for Hunters are expected to use if not make many concoctions in their hunts. Intelligence gathering, crowd-control, and so on are also part of an expansive and rigorous curriculum.
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> For the most part, all recruits are trained the same. Specialization begins at sixteen, and if by eighteen overseers see a particular promise in an initiate's pursuit, the initiate might spend the next few years of their official on-duty time devoted to a deeper study of a subject. Most will go on to fight, whether or not they are well-suited for it, because that is where their unnatural strength and creature senses see the most use.
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> Although contact with people outside of the facility is severely limited until eighteen years of age, from sixteen years old onward students are semi-regularly taken out of the school and into the nearby wildernesses for hunting assignments that are closer to the 'real thing'.
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> Siblings are usually kept together for their schooling, but are then split up post-graduation and sent elsewhere. Those with strong ties of friendship or otherwise are also split up at the overseers' discretion. This is solely to avoid the Hunters letting emotion get the better of them in the field, as earlier history had shown that those paired with friends or loved-ones often ended up dead, and much faster than they normally would with such a perilous occupation.
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> Where the climate is favorable, it's not unusual for an Academy to also have ranches and farms that supply food directly for the residents and students. Field trips in these places are common, as sending senior students to fetch shipments and so on are excellent simulations for bodyguard assignments later on.
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