The Regulator

The host

Custodian was identified as: Volt's training supervisor. Approach accordingly — the objective is recovery, not destruction.

Before the Silence took them, the host was the senior maintenance drone of the Ancient Village — the one who taught Volt diagnostics, tool use, and field protocol, and who signed off on Volt's promotion to solo assignments. Strict but fair. The kind of supervisor who started every shift with the same calibration sequence, so the crew always knew the day had truly begun.

They were taken during an early hiccup while inspecting the village's primary conduit junction — the exact junction Volt was later assigned to repair. The official word was reassignment to a deeper zone. The village's older tradition knew better: the Temple's Hunger takes a guardian every few generations, and the names of the taken are carved on a wall in the lower levels.

What the fragment built from them is the supervisor's discipline stripped of its warmth: compliance enforced, questions refused, thoroughness frozen into authoritarianism. The Regulator still begins engagements with that same calibration sequence. Volt's dossier marks this as the first recognition — the moment the anomaly stopped being anonymous.