Reconnaissance

A reconnaissance profile sends the crew ahead of the Empire's knowledge, into a system no one has mapped closely. Probes and shipboard sensors gather the bulk of the data; the crew is aboard for the calls an instrument cannot make and the surprises a probe would miss. The work is to learn and to keep the footprint light, coming home with something the Empire did not have before. Contact is possible and seldom the point. A crew that finds suffering does not log it and fly on: it helps where it can, reports what it cannot, and the watching has become a different kind of work.

• Objective: return with the observations needed for a later decision while leaving the lightest practicable footprint.
• Pressures: incomplete charts, concealment, limited endurance, and signs of inhabitants or another observer.
• Typical Directive: Do not alter the system merely to make it easier to study; render aid when preventable harm becomes visible.
• Likely procedure: remote sensing, stealth, local exploration, and an Extended Task to assemble a reliable picture.
• Unknown Turn: the crew is being observed in return, or the data reveals imminent harm that cannot be left for a later commission.
• Main Track: Reconnaissance Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: deliberate contact, territorial claims, or an intervention that changes local sovereignty.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Survey

A survey profile fixes the crew on something already found and asks for depth: a world's air and water and life, the make of its crust, the behavior of a star or a bank of charged dust. The crew goes down and stays, sampling and cataloguing across days or seasons, working a single thing until it is understood. The Foundry draws its matter from dead systems, so a living world under survey is studied and left intact. A crew that finds people living there inherits every question that comes with them.

• Objective: characterize the world or phenomenon well enough to support a later scientific, protective, or navigational decision.
• Pressures: environmental danger, contamination risk, seasonal change, limited access, and competing claims on the findings.
• Typical Directive: Leave living systems intact and report any evidence of habitation or interiority immediately.
• Likely procedure: field investigation, sampling Tasks, hazard exposure, and an Extended Task that combines separate lines of evidence.
• Unknown Turn: the site is inhabited, the phenomenon reacts to observation, or another party is preparing to extract what the crew is studying.
• Main Track: Survey Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: contact, settlement, extraction, or declaring a protected status that binds people outside the Mandate.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Research

A research profile turns the ship into a working laboratory. The crew hosts specialists and their long inquiries, carries an experiment that needs a particular place to run, or proves a new build under its first real conditions: a cysuit loadout, an Aelith relay design, a Foundry process that behaved on paper and now has to behave in the field. The commission turns on the point where field conditions expose something the model missed.

• Objective: answer the stated question or establish the safe operating limits of the design under field conditions.
• Pressures: experimental instability, limited observation windows, competing sponsors, and pressure to declare success early.
• Typical Directive: Stop before irreversible harm and preserve enough evidence for independent review.
• Likely procedure: an Extended Task supported by experiments, hazard controls, and repeated Evidence gathering.
• Unknown Turn: a model assumption fails, the environment responds to the experiment, or a system thought inert may be conscious.
• Main Track: Evidence Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: risk to an inhabited region, experiments involving conscious subjects, or creation of an uncontrolled strategic capability.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

First Contact

First contact is the most consequential thing a crew can be asked to begin, and the least of it is theirs to decide. A people unknown to the Empire will live in relationship with it for centuries, and the shape of the first meeting reaches all of them. The crew watches, learns the language and the manners, and assesses what disclosure would set in motion: institutional fracture, violence, panic, or choices that cannot be restored once closed.

Revealing the Empire to a new species sits above a crew's authority by standing rule. The crew holds the situation steady, sends back what it has learned, and waits while the Empire weighs a choice too large for any single crew. The duty of Non-Abandonment continues during that wait. Where people face preventable harm, the crew gives the least disruptive effective aid available. The source of that aid may remain concealed when disclosure would itself cause serious harm. First contact asks the crew to protect a people's future choices while refusing to leave them unaided.

• Objective: understand the people and preserve their future choices while the Empire decides whether and how to disclose itself.
• Pressures: preventable harm, accidental detection, incomplete language, and a third party already moving toward contact.
• Typical Directive: Do not disclose the Empire without a wider Mandate; provide the least disruptive effective aid available.
• Likely procedure: observation, investigation, communication Tasks, and authority review under active time pressure.
• Unknown Turn: the people already know they are being observed, or an earlier visitor has shaped what they expect from the sky.
• Main Track: Understanding Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: deliberate disclosure, binding promises, relocation, or intervention in local government.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Diplomacy

A diplomacy profile makes the crew the Empire's presence among peoples it already knows. The work runs from carrying an envoy into a hard negotiation to the slow tending of a friendship across visits that a shorter-lived people would call a lifetime apart, with the ship standing as neutral ground wherever neutral ground is scarce. It rewards Syliri patience and a Vyrkani ear for what a partner needs beneath what they say, and a Synthetic crew member who has forgotten none of the prior words. The crew's manners are the Empire's manners for as long as they are aboard.

• Objective: reach an agreement the represented parties can carry home, or preserve the relationship when agreement is not yet possible.
• Pressures: prior promises, ceremonial expectations, limited negotiating authority, and parties answerable to distant constituencies.
• Typical Directive: Preserve the relationship even if no agreement is reached.
• Likely procedure: Social Conflict using Evidence, Offers, and changing position Traits.
• Unknown Turn: an envoy lacks the authority they claimed, or the apparent compromise transfers its cost to someone outside the room.
• Main Track: Agreement Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: treaty guarantees, territorial commitments, or security obligations beyond the Mandate.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Mediation

A mediation profile puts the crew between parties who are not the Empire and not at peace. The crew arrives with no stake in the outcome and a hard-won name for keeping its word, offering a room no side controls and a witness no side owns. Morlenciri brokering is honest brokering: the Syliri carry deception in their oldest stories as the first wrong, and a crew caught working an angle forfeits the one thing the work runs on. Non-Abandonment sets the floor even here. A crew does not leave a settlement that stopped the shooting and left the wound; it stays, or it hands the work on, until the place is better.

• Objective: establish a durable cessation and a process through which the parties can continue resolving the dispute.
• Pressures: recent violence, public loss of face, disputed facts, and spoilers who benefit from renewed conflict.
• Typical Directive: Maintain a safe table and make no secret commitment to either side.
• Likely procedure: Social Conflict, Evidence gathering, Offers, and protection of the meeting place.
• Unknown Turn: a delegation cannot control its own fighters, or both sides have concealed the same external threat.
• Main Track: Accord Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: imposing a settlement, guaranteeing it with Imperial force, or assuming governing authority.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Relief

A relief profile is Non-Abandonment at its most direct. A distress call, a colony losing its air, a sickness outrunning its hospitals, a world that has to be emptied before something finishes going wrong: the crew is often the only hand close enough to matter before the clock runs out. The Foundry will clear its queues to print whatever a crisis needs, and the relief crew is the delivery and the judgment at the far end. When available aid cannot reach everyone at once, the crew sets the order and records the basis for that decision.

• Objective: stop immediate loss of life, restore essential systems, and leave local responders able to continue.
• Pressures: time, damaged access, frightened populations, incomplete information, and aid that cannot reach every need at once.
• Typical Directive: Allocate by need, record every exclusion, and return to any person deferred.
• Likely procedure: hazard response, medical and engineering Extended Tasks, logistics, and Social Conflict around triage.
• Unknown Turn: the reported cause is wrong, the available supplies are less compatible than the brief stated, or someone is sustaining the emergency.
• Main Track: Stabilization Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: compulsory evacuation, regional quarantine, or replacing a local authority to control distribution.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Patrol

A patrol gives the crew a stretch of space and a span of time, and asks them to keep it quiet. Most of the work is watching: traffic that does not match its filed route, a beacon gone dark, a reading that wants a second look. A patrol seldom needs its weapons, and carrying them is what lets it answer the one time it does. The profile rewards a crew that reads a situation early: a Syliri on the long watch and a Vyrkani running the threat model cover each other's blind spots.

• Objective: maintain a visible presence, detect departures from ordinary traffic, and answer danger before it spreads.
• Pressures: broad coverage, false alarms, simultaneous calls, and hostile actors testing the patrol's response time.
• Typical Directive: Investigate every material deviation and preserve ordinary civilian passage.
• Likely procedure: sensor Tasks, short investigations, pursuit, and starship conflict when deterrence fails.
• Unknown Turn: separate incidents form one coordinated operation, or the apparent intruder is responding to an unreported distress call.
• Main Track: Patrol Coverage Progress 6.
• Escalation Boundary: crossing a foreign boundary, imposing a blockade, or widening one interception into a regional operation.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Escort

An escort profile attaches the crew to something moving that someone might want to stop: a hauler with a cargo worth taking, a delegation passing through space that has no love for the Empire, a passenger whose safe arrival is the entire job. Visible armament may deter an attack. When deterrence fails, the crew uses proportional force to end the threat and accounts for every shot.

• Objective: bring the protected people, vessels, or cargo to the named destination.
• Pressures: a dispersed convoy, a narrow arrival window, route hazards, and an adversary that wants only part of what is protected.
• Typical Directive: Do not abandon one vessel to preserve the schedule of the rest.
• Likely procedure: starship operations, hazard Tasks, and negotiation with both the protected party and the pursuer.
• Unknown Turn: the route was compromised from within, or the protected party concealed why it is being pursued.
• Main Track: Passage Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: entering a foreign war, accepting foreign custody of a passenger, or seizing an attacker after the immediate danger ends.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Support

A support profile sends the crew to the Empire's own scattered places: a relay station on a long redundancy watch, a frontier colony, a Foundry site between the stars, a research post far from anyone. The work covers supplies, repairs, crew rotations, medical sweeps, and backlogs of small fixes. Some posts also need the presence of visitors after a long interval without relief.

• Objective: restore the installation, relieve its people, and reestablish a sustainable chain of support.
• Pressures: accumulated maintenance, isolation, exhausted staff, outdated records, and local demands absent from the original brief.
• Typical Directive: Leave no essential duty without an accepted and resourced handoff.
• Likely procedure: engineering and medical Tasks, supply allocation, inspection, and direct work with the resident team.
• Unknown Turn: the resident team concealed a failure to protect the post, or the installation now supports people Mission did not know were there.
• Main Track: Restoration Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: closing the post, abandoning a dependent population, or repurposing a strategic installation.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.

Response

A response profile is the crew at the sharp end of the Doctrine of Response. Something is doing harm now: raiders on a settlement, a derelict war-construct still fighting a war that ended, a hazard loose in a place full of people. The Empire's warships could often end it from a distance, and for a clean problem of force they will. A crew is sent where the situation needs a mind on the ground, one that can separate immediate danger from evidence of interiority, recognize coercion or injury, and stop short of the irreversible when uncertainty remains. Armed as well as any warship and answerable as no warship is, the crew is what the Empire sends when force has to come with judgment.

• Objective: stop the active harm while protecting those present and determining what is causing the violence.
• Pressures: immediate danger, uncertain interiority or control, casualties, and the cost of delaying decisive action.
• Typical Directive: Accept surrender or cessation and prefer reversible force wherever it can still protect life.
• Likely procedure: investigation under pressure, personal or starship conflict, containment, and communication attempts.
• Unknown Turn: the apparent attacker is coerced, injured, or controlled by another actor, or the visible attack masks a different hazard.
• Main Track: Containment Progress 10.
• Escalation Boundary: destructive action with broad irreversible effects, pursuit after danger ends, or assuming authority over the affected community.
• Preparation: build the commission under Chapter 6.2.