WITCH BUSTERS - Archon Academy and Other Organizations

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The creation of Archon Academy is a joint effort on the part of seven different prominent mage organizations, all with different goals and ideals that are united in a single purpose: protecting the world from the growing threat of the witchlings.

Pyre
Until the appearance of the witchlings, Pyre was largely a peacekeeping organization tasked with, somewhat ironically, putting out the fires started between various factions of mage society to prevent catastrophe; the organization's name largely a relic of when they hunted highly dangerous witches, which are either in hiding or are extinct. Then the Paradisio Witchling put a crater in the Siberian mountains and nearly reached a city before it finally retreated into parts unknown, sending out its monstrous spawn instead. Their name once again became darkly appropriate.

Pyre is largely a volunteer organization made up of skilled mages from all walks of life and all disciplines, who are either outcasts from different factions or ideologically disagree with all of them and prefer to focus on helping people where they can. Despite their ranks rapidly swelling with the threat of the witchlings, they are constantly on the verge of extinction due to the attacks of the monsters. Their leader, recognizing that they needed to change tactics, suggested a specialized training program to the other significant factions. The other factions, as always, took it way overboard.

Thandi Axel Tannen Luluthuli is the acting leader of Pyre, and, much to xir chagrin, the headmaster of Archon Academy. Xe is as steady as a rock and just about as sturdy as one, considering how long Thandi has been leading the Pyre corps. Many admire xir for the precipitous decline in witchcraft incidents ever since xe took over Pyre, but Thandi has declined comment, wearily stating with a haunted look in xir eyes that xe was, "Just doing my job." Despite how much xe's seen and done, Thandi remains a gentle soul who is constantly kicking xirself for saying something that could be construed as insanely as it was within the presence of the other factions, but is determined to do xir best for the students regardless.

The Pillars
The Pillars are the collective name for families that have been around long enough that, despite their propensity for obsessively keeping their own history, have developed spirits of the family line. In many respects, Pillars are the very archetype of mage society at its most "refined:" highly traditional, stodgy, constantly infighting, dismissive of cartomancy and glyphistry, terrified of miracles, and more concerned with matters of reputation and appearance than research and breakthroughs.

Still, one cannot deny the strength of even the lowliest Pillar family, as they all have contracted spirits, historical records, and artifacts to spare. If nothing else, their children have all the resources to be incredibly effective soldiers against the witchlings, although many of them coast along on the sheer strength of the family's spirit and their artifacts. But in this day and age, that hardly matters, for the Pillars are the most dedicated to fighting off the witchlings, even giving the creatures the name of the hated witches as they represented anathema to all of mage society.

The two Pillar families instrumental in constructing Archon Academy each sent a representative to fill a single board seat, and unfortunately for both of them, it's a job neither of them want but they have to fight over it anyways.

Ezra Legue is a disinterested heir who would frankly like nothing better than to take a sip of the Lethe and erase all his memories of mage society, which unfortunately got him booted into a position that is hypothetically important enough to require a lot of paperwork but due to its unique position means he's practically powerless. He's lazy, apathetic, and very rarely talks above a monotone, but rumor has it... that he's exactly has incompetent as he seems and doesn't really have any hidden power.

Letitia Capern is a firebrand of a mage wielding the complete dueling blade of Julie d'Aubigny, exiled to the post of a mere bureaucrat for nearly killing the mage who implied she was a fool in a duel. By stabbing him. No magic required. It's questionable if they have any magical talent at all, really, but it's in nobody's interest to ask, especially since most of their aggression is funneled toward Ezra for being a lazy idiot who doesn't take his absolute nothing post seriously, which in turn means she can't do anything either. Everyone agrees that she's a walking time bomb.

Together, Letitia and Ezra have been strongarmed into teaching cartomancy, and somehow teach a semi-functional class.

Night's Hood
Night's Hood is the organization that veils magic from the public eye, and it's currently one strong push from completely falling apart.

Normally, their job is intensive, but easy enough to do. Use conspiracy spirits to wipe a few minds, some diversionary tactics materializations to put up illusions, whatever it takes to keep ordinary people from noticing magical disasters. Occasionally, it got more difficult, and highly trained and specialized squadrons of expert combat mages were sent to dispatch particularly unruly cases.

That's all gone now that the witchlings have arrived. It's literally every hand on deck wherever Night's Hood HQ is, to the point that there are rumors promising mages that aren't "enrolled" into Archon Academy are pressganged into their ranks. Most of these extra mages are used to power whatever mysterious artifact allows them to shatter a moment in time within a specific space, momentarily separating it from causality and rendering whatever would affect the outside world from within null and void until the bubble is dismissed. These shattered moments are the only ways that witchlings can be contained and safely fought against, but using even one requires intense resources for every person cleared to act within the moment, and witchling attacks have increased in pitch to several times a day across the world. Furthermore, this is already in addition to triple the amount of "standard" work that's required to veil magic, for when they don't catch a witchling as soon as it touches down.

It's rumored that most of the deaths within Night's Hood come from the stress of having to watch the world burn around you rather than overuse of magic.

Night's Hood has no formal representative on the board as they require literally every hand on deck, but their influence goes to Thandi, giving xir the tiebreaker vote.

Reliquary
Not much is known about Reliquary, other than their job, which they do worryingly well, is to secure and distribute artifacts and they are entirely made up out of skeletons.

While at least one extremist within the Skull Five, the five sentient leaders of the skeleton horde that makes up Reliquary, is of the opinion that all artifacts should be unilaterally destroyed for unknown (but easily understood, considering the state of the Five), the rest hold that they can still be used as long as their power is restricted and evenly distributed to those who ask for it and are qualified. Reliquary is the faction that originally came up with the fragmentation process towards this end: shaving each artifact into fragments to limit their power, placing them in charms, and properly testing their would-be users to make sure they're responsible.

Reliquary is also the only known mage organization with the power to bring the dead back to life. While this power is desperately sought by most, it has several restrictions, the first of which is that it can only be used on bodies that have died in a relic-related incident. Further, by and large they become mindless skeleton servitors who perform the vast majority of the labor involved in containing and categorizing artifacts, but a few, especially children, come back with their minds fully intact like the Skull Five. They're taken under the care of the council and, if they wish it, become agents to hunt down artifacts and ensure, just like their predecessors, that whatever killed them will never occur again.

Valentina: The Reliquary has a reputation for being a, well, lifeless, joyless organization, largely in thanks to the outward appearance of its members. Valentina unlives to counter that stereotype. She's bombastic, motherly, has a very pink fashion sense, and is fiercely protective of children. While she's on the job of keeping Archon Academy's resources—magical and not—balanced literally 24/7, her door is always open to those who want tea or just need to talk, and has thus become something of a makeshift counselor. (Valentina is also notable that, in the last fifty years or so, she's had a personal epiphany and started presenting as a woman. Being a skeleton makes this about as easy as a change of clothes.) She teaches classes on archaism.

Wisper
Wisper, similar to Reliquary, is an organization built almost entirely by nonhumans: a conclave of spirits, all working together to make the world just a little bit more mysterious. By nature, Wisper is a highly secretive organization, and so little is known about their activities that several conspiracy spirits have been born and joined their ranks as counterintelligence specialists out of the speculation that surrounds them. The only firm facts known about Wisper is that they are staunch allies of humanity, and are only formed out of spirits with a deep, abiding love for it.

Broadly, Wisper's role in mage society is to put prospective invokers that they believe have potential into contact with invokerless spirits that they believe suit them, forming often lifelong partnerships. It's also an open secret that for invokers that mistreat, neglect, or actively harm their spirit are swiftly dispatched and made an example of by Wisper to make sure that none would think to repeat those kinds of mistakes. The main branch of Wisper has around equal parts human and spirit members as invoker and spirit partners, but most of the satellite chapters are made up solely of spirit "unions" that enforce better treatment when less consciously malicious invokers slip up by suspending all services so they're not the only ones pressuring the incompetent invoker to reform.

Alexandria: A library spirit makes the most sense to send to a school, and so one of great pedigree was sent... although Alexandria refuses to share exactly which library he comes from, changing the answer each time. (Obviously, Alexandria is a pseudonym as the actual Library of Alexandria burnt down and thus isn't eligible for a spirit.) He manifests as a humanoid shape wrapped in paper of all kinds printed in all sorts of languages, perpetually hunched over in his labcoat and always looking like he needs a coffee despite physically being unable to have one. Despite being in the spirit equivalent of chronic pain and fatigue, he has a special passion for teaching and always perks up during the general education classes that he leads, and gives genuine effort in trying to help his students. He leads every general education class. All at once. Being a spirit with the ability to fracture yourself into separate bodies has its perks, after all. He also teaches classes on spiritual invocation and historical materialization.

The Professorial Union
The Professorial Union is an organization that was created largely out of a quirk in the way historical materialization and archaism function: the chances are slim, but someone with sufficient knowledge and materials may, by coincidence, accidentally cast magic. The Professorial Union, rather than Night's Hood, deals with these incidents preemptively by identifying who is likely to become a mage, tracking them, and immediately inducting them into their ranks to prevent information leaking. They have no former leadership or organization as such, instead forming a loose network of communication and tips that are generally in sync with one another. If a debate ever occurs, it typically takes several weeks then peters out once the participants get overworked in a more mundane department. The union is eternal and almost entirely unchanging, and regarded as the cockroaches of mage society by many.

Slim chances occur all the time in such a big world, and therefore the Professorial Union is the largest mage faction by a large margin, only limited by the fact that they are largely disinterested in practical applications of their discipline and each member only being skilled in one kind of spell on average. They're often lent out as tutors to less military mage schools and Pillars, and in this dire time their numbers are finally shrinking as the fact that they're everywhere means they're often the first line of defense against witchling incursions nowadays, dying in vast swathes before the real specialists arrive.

They are not happy about this.

Therefore, the union put most of its resources together into building Archon Academy, yet because the Academy itself is so often a target of attacks, they simply nominated Alexandria to represent them.

Alexandria is not happy about this.

World Enclave
World Enclave fulfills a role similar to the Professorial Union, but instead of scouting spontaneous historical materializers, they instead find and nurture glyphistry talents over the internet. This is an arduous task, both because glyphistry and finding glyphics is a task based primarily on instinct and "soul feel," and because the internet is very, very large and the chance of someone spontaneously developing glyphistry without knowledge of magic is small. Still, it happens often enough, at around half the frequency of the targets of the massive Professorial Union, that World Enclave has its work cut out for it...

...especially since they actively encourage potential glyphics instead of simply watching out for them, loving watching art bloom. World Enclave has received criticism from almost every other faction for this risky strategy, as their opponents argue that it risks thrusting magic into the public eye, but those debates have died down into grumbles as the threat of the witchlings makes the truly unique talents of each glyphic unfathomably valuable, and so they have been given reluctant free reign.

Until a bit over a decade ago, World Enclave was as informal and rudderless as the Professorial Union, but the arrival of the idea of the "cinematic universe" changed everything. Fan interpretations of the focus tested corporate advertisements lent life and color to them within their minds if enough effort was put into a fanwork, paradoxically spawning glyphs within different people that were otherwise the exact same due to originating from the same "soul" of the corporation that produced the franchise. As cinematic universes and similar franchises have spread, the phenomenon, once uncommon, has rapidly started to catch up with the (admittedly low rate) of naturally occurring glyphics. The philosophical implications of this phenomenon are highly troubling, and have caused a schism within the Enclave about whether it's positive or negative that they refuse to admit is happening to outsiders but is immediately apparent to anyone who takes a cursory look.

Hikari Atsuko: In a brief moment when the two sides of the debate weren't deadlocked but instead the pro-CU side had a mild advantage, they sent a representative to Archon Academy. Atsuko is extremely bubbly and friendly, and it's easy to assume she's distractible considering how much time she spends on her phone, but that couldn't be more false. When the chips are down, such as in the case of a witchling attack, she's dead serious and shows that her skills with glyphistry and cartomancy are the real deal, if what she's teaching in class didn't already attest to that. She's easily approachable and is more like a casual acquaintance who can tutor you in a tight spot than a teacher... plus, knowing how to actually use the internet is a unique skill among the staff, except for Ezra who barely counts anyways.

Other Organizations
While the above are all the factions with a direct hand in Archon Academy, there are several others prominent in mage society, especially in the era of witchlings.

The Merry Men are an anonymous group of phantom thieves who make a habit of racing Reliquary agents to artifacts secured in private collections, and their intelligence is good enough that their calling cards are often the first signs Reliquary gets of an artifact being somewhere... yet the Merry Men still often beat the skeletons to the punch, much to their annoyance. What is genuinely worrying about the Merry Men to Reliquary is their propensity for dropping the artifacts that they find in the laps of people they find worthy, and while by and large it has been a positive for the fight against the witchlings, there's a sneaking suspicion that something is eventually bound to go horribly wrong soon.

Souls' Light is a "spiritual group" (everyone knows it's really a cult) that popped up shortly after the witchling crisis began, promising to grant the power of miracles to whoever joins them to wield against the witchlings. Disturbingly, they can actually follow up on that promise, and too often are their foot soldiers instrumental in defeating witchling incursions. Many would laud them for their efforts if the fact that everyone who joins them is incredibly obviously brainwashed, but mage society doesn't have the luxury of turning down their "help" with the threat of the witchlings at hand.

Round Table is a small, approximately dozen-strong group of mysterious mercenaries, wielding archaism that calls upon the legends of the titular round table, to fight against the witchlings. Their ability cannot be understated—they were the group that forced the nightmarishly powerful Paradisio Witchling to retreat—and are thought of as heroes, but they're cryptic, totally silent, and exact payment in vaguely-defined "contracts" that no one can quite make heads or tails of. They unsettle everyone.

Illumina Incorporated are the superstars of the magic world and the ones behind the most popularly used cartomancy deck. They always have new innovations and formulae—copyrighted, of course—in their labs for their magical clients, but they're also the largest conglomerate within the normal, human world as well. They purchased Disney wholesale after the release of the first "Iron Man" movie without blinking. Disney's business practices have not changed since then, except for hard pushing several gacha games based on their franchises that are, unfortunately, actually fun to play except for the grueling need to pay lots of money for good units. Illumina Industries was reached out to to help build Archon Academy, but they declined, saying that they already had enough charity tax benefits and the academy didn't promise to be profitable.