Booklets

Six booklets, six verbs, six ways of trying to remain in the world.

A booklet does not describe what a person is. It describes what they learned to do in order to keep living with other people, up to the possible point where that gesture becomes their only answer.

Why verbs

Watch, serve, please, fade, order and resist are immediately human gestures. Each can be attention, generosity, intelligence or courage. Each can also rigidify, invade every relationship and close the world down.

Unmind syndrome does not reside in the verb: the syndrome is shared by every character. The verb describes a singular way of remaining in the world, which closes when it becomes the only answer still available.

This keeps the residents close to us. The booklets are not six disguised diagnoses or six categories of otherness.

The six gestures

Booklet	Survival gesture	Risk of closure
Watch	Anticipate danger so nothing can surprise you again.	Everything becomes a warning sign; resting means abandoning someone.
Serve	Become necessary so you will not be abandoned.	Exist only through other people's needs; sometimes create the need you know how to meet.
Please	Regulate others through charm, humour or agreement.	Become unable to bear disagreement, silence or a face that can no longer be read.
Fade	Give nothing to hold on to.	Become unreachable even to those who would try to find, love or protect you.
Order	Make the world predictable through rules, signs or rituals.	Confuse constructed coherence with reality and experience every exception as a threat.
Resist	Preserve your existence through refusal and opposition.	Become unable to recognise an offered hand without seeing an attempt at control.

Shared architecture

Each booklet gives its own language to the five depths:

• Mask — how this verb still makes me readable to others;
• Protection — how I use it so I cannot be reached;
• Attachment — for whom or what this gesture still has meaning;
• Wound — around what rupture it organised itself;
• Inner World — what private reality appears when this verb becomes a law of the world.

Each player builds two personal threads. For each thread, choose one fragment at each depth. The same fragment cannot be chosen twice.

What makes them different

The six booklets do not grant six powers. They teach players to notice different things in the same situation.

Faced with a door left open:

• Watch looks for what could enter;
• Serve looks for who will need it closed;
• Please watches other people's reactions;
• Fade looks for a way through unseen;
• Order notices the break in procedure;
• Resist asks who claims the right to decide whether it stays open.

Guardrails

• No booklet corresponds to a clinical diagnosis.
• The Inner World is not the character's hidden truth.
• The Mask is not necessarily false.
• The Wound is not a sufficient causal explanation.
• The verb can save the character as much as imprison them.
• Two characters built from the same booklet may be radically different.