Classification: Cura Supernorum Peculiar Evaluation and Certification Protocol
Full designation: Mental, Arcane, Physical Testing
The MAP Test is the primary mechanism through which the Cura Supernorum sorts, classifies, and controls Argona's Peculiar population. It stands for Mental, Arcane, and Physical - a three-part evaluation system used to determine whether a Peculiar has any legitimate access to employment, housing, and civil standing at all, and failure to meet the conditions may result in rehabilitation in Turris, depending on the severity of their evaluation.
Structure of the Test
The central problem is this: the Storm produced Peculiars, people with extraordinary and potentially dangerous supernatural abilities, within a population of Normies who fear and resent them. Peculiars cannot be eliminated — they exist, they have rights in principle, and their abilities are potentially useful. But they cannot simply be left free, because their freedom threatens the social order, the established hierarchy, and, crucially, the economic and political interests of those currently holding power. The system's task is therefore to manage Peculiars: to contain their threat, extract their utility, suppress their political consciousness, and do all of this in a way that appears legitimate, even benevolent, rather than simply oppressive.
The systemic coherence here is precise: the Praesidium feeds graduates into the MAP test system (they've been trained to be or present as stable), into the Paladin force (the most compliant become enforcers), into the Cura's Acolyte structure (the most devout become the ideology's distributors), and into the general Argonian labour market (the certified become economically useful). The institution does not produce a single type of subject. It produces a range of subjects, all of whom serve the system in different ways.
The tests' three categories are worth examining individually for what they reveal about the system's assumptions.
• Mental — evaluates psychological stability, emotional regulation, impulse control, stress responses, and susceptibility to Venerite exposure. This axis evaluates behaviour and temperament rather than raw ability. Mental evaluation presupposes that Peculiarity creates psychological instability requiring assessment. This is the Praesidium's teaching made into policy that if Peculiarity is a biological trauma, then the mind of a Peculiar is presumptively damaged and must be assessed for stability before society can trust them.
• Arcane — measurement and classification of a Peculiar's magical ability to control, suppress, and safely utilize their abilities. This includes assessing the strength, consistency, and potential violability of their Peculiarity through classifications: power type, threat level, combat profile. This axis produces the data used to determine what kind of registered work a Peculiar may be permitted to pursue. Arcane evaluation presupposes that the Peculiar's supernatural abilities are inherently dangerous until proven controllable. This is the Paladin's security logic made bureaucratic: every Peculiar is a potential threat until certified otherwise.
• Physical — evaluates physical control, endurance, coordination, bodily adaptations, and the potential for a Peculiar's physiology to become hazardous under stress, which includes their baseline physical capability and any physical manifestations of Peculiarity requiring accommodation, monitoring, or restriction (wing retraction capability, skin durability, superhuman strength, etc.). Physical evaluation presupposes that the Peculiar's body itself requires assessment.
The entire person — mind, magic, body — must submit to evaluation.
Function and Consequences
Passing MAP grants a Peculiar the Arcane Eye brand, formal registration in the Cura's system. It also grants access to a wider range of employment, housing, education, and other basic civic opportunities or protections that Normies possess by default.
Failing MAP, or becoming a Recusant like Ratelsi, results in exclusion from almost all legitimate economic and social participation. Unregistered, unbranded Peculiars are shut out of formal employment, forced into underground economies (Merc work, black-market running), and subjected to constant suspicion at every checkpoint, every transaction, every public interaction. Failing badly enough, or being deemed sufficiently "volatile, unstable, or inhumane," results in transfer to Turris.
Ideological Function
The Cura presents MAP Tests as a safeguard for everyone. But for many Peculiars, it's also a reminder that their rights are conditional. A Normie does not have to prove that they're mentally stable, physically safe, or socially compatible before getting a job. A Peculiar does, and that is exactly why Ratelsi stopped taking them.
MAP does not exist to protect society from genuinely dangerous individuals so much as it exists to convert Peculiar labour and compliance into a resource the Cura can extract, brand, track, and deploy, dressed in the language of safety and integration.
Relationship to Mawborns
Notably, the MAP system has no meaningful mechanism for evaluating or processing Mawborn individuals — not because Mawborns are exempt from scrutiny, but because their existence is deliberately kept outside the registration framework entirely. Ratelsi's massacre as a child was covered up rather than processed through any adjudicative or evaluative system; she was sent directly to the Praesidium and eventually isolated, bypassing MAP altogether because no version of the test was designed to accommodate or safely contain the knowledge of what she actually is.
TURRIS
Classification: Cura Supernorum Rehabilitation Facility.
Location: Yenegia, north of the Sector Belt, Argona.
Overview
Turris is a Cura-operated rehabilitation institution for Peculiars deemed psychologically, physically, or arcanely unstable. Its name (from the Latin for "tower") reflects both its architecture and its symbolic function: a vertical structure of ascending confinement, positioned at Argona's northern periphery, physically and psychologically removed from the city's center of ordinary life.
Officially, Turris exists to rehabilitate Peculiars who fail their MAP evaluations, providing treatment, supervision, and controlled environments intended to help them regain sufficient stability for reintegration into society.
In practice, admission to Turris can mean losing independence and becoming permanent residents in the rehabilitation facility. But that depends on the duration of rehabilitation, which varies according to the Cura's assessment of the individual. Peculiars who demonstrate sufficient improvement may eventually be released and permitted to undergo MAP testing again. Others remain indefinitely.
The gap between official rehabilitative purpose and actual outcome is total enough that the wider Peculiar population treats a Turris sentence as effectively equivalent to death or lifelong disappearance. The two are, as established, spoken of almost interchangeably. Ratelsi's own assessment during the tunnel approach to The Basin — that with the Venerites they were carrying, being caught would make "a cell in the tower… a mercy," since the Cura "wouldn't even bother with rehab. They'd gladly wipe us off the grid. Permanently", reflects the working assumption of those closest to the underground economy: that Turris is, functionally, a one-way institution regardless of its stated purpose, and that the Cura's actual response to sufficiently dangerous or inconvenient Peculiars may not even involve the pretense of institutionalization at all.