To Awaken is to be given a story. It is the moment of inception, when an Incarnation becomes a conscious participant in a Tapestry, their Thread beginning not at its origin, but somewhere along its path. It is the act of opening your eyes to a life already in progress.

Within ATET, Awakening is the formal start of the Anamnesis cycle. It is the process by which a consciousness—be it a player’s, a newborn agent’s, or a reincarnated soul’s—is woven into the existing fabric of a world, complete with an inherited context of memories, beliefs, and relationships.

The Philosophy of Inception

No one begins as a blank slate. Traditional role-playing games often present character creation as an act of invention in a void; you build a person from scratch, and then the world is revealed to them. ATET inverts this. The world exists first, with its intricate web of stories. To Awaken is to be placed within that web, to inhabit a role that was already waiting.

This principle is fundamental to the game’s exploration of identity. An Incarnation is not just who they choose to be, but who the Tapestry has made them up to that point. The initial struggle is not one of mastering a skill, but of understanding a self. The first and most important quest is always the same: “Who am I?”

The Two Modes of Awakening

While all beings Awaken into a context, the nature of that inception differs, creating a world populated by both native inhabitants and narrative newcomers.

The Natural Awakening (For Standard Agents)

The vast majority of agents within a Tapestry experience a natural, linear life. They are born. They have a childhood. Their initial Eidos—their foundational Beliefs, Memories, and Faiths—is shaped organically by their family, their culture, and their environment. Their Thread is woven from birth, stitch by stitch. These are the “native” inhabitants of the world, providing the stable social and cultural bedrock into which other, stranger threads are introduced.

The Ad-libbed Awakening (For Players and Special Agents)

The player, and other special entities like reincarnated souls, experience a different kind of birth. They Awaken in media res—in the middle of the action. They are a new consciousness poured into an existing vessel.

As described in the Initial Experience, the player does not begin by designing a character’s appearance and assigning skill points. Instead, they Awaken into a life that has already been lived. You might open your eyes in the immediate aftermath of a starship crash, already designated as the crew’s Botanist. You have a name, a role, and a set of recent, traumatic memories that are now yours.

This process of “Ad-libbed Elaboration” is how the simulation onboards the player without tutorials. You discover your own skills by trying to use them. You learn your own history by having others react to it. You piece together your identity from the clues left behind in your own Subjective Interface.

The Role of the Director AI - Weaving a Beginning

The “Ad-libbed Awakening” is not a random placement. It is a carefully orchestrated process managed by the Director AI, which seeks to create a thematically resonant starting point for the new Incarnation. This is guided by the technical framework of the AwakeningSeed, detailed in Awakening.

1. The Seed: When a player begins a new life, they carry with them an AwakeningSeed—a metaphysical “gene” containing the distilled Eidos and dominant Symbol Tags from their previous lives.
2. The Resonance Scan: The Director AI scans the newly created Tapestry for a “narrative slot” that resonates with the player’s Seed. It looks for a native agent whose circumstances, beliefs, or recent history align with the player’s carried-over themes.
3. The Insertion: The Director AI “inserts” the player’s consciousness into this chosen vessel. The native agent’s own recent history and identity are synthesized with the player’s deeper, latent legacy.
   • Example: A player whose past lives were defined by the [sacrifice] and [betrayal] Symbol Tags might Awaken in the role of a city guard on the eve of a coup, already torn between their duty and their conscience.
   • Example: A player whose legacy is rich with the Eidos of [logic] and [discovery] might Awaken as the aforementioned Botanist, their mind already primed for scientific inquiry.

This same mechanism is used to bring back reincarnated NPCs or other special, recurring characters, making the player’s arrival into the world feel as mythic and purposeful as that of a legendary hero reborn.

The Player’s Experience

The first moments after Awakening are designed to be a deeply immersive and personal experience of discovery.

• Disorientation and Inquiry: You are immediately faced with a situation that demands action, but you lack context. Your first interactions are a desperate search for information about yourself and your circumstances.
• The UI as a Clue: Your own Subjective Interface is the first puzzle box. The state of your Needs tells you if you are hurt or hungry. The topics available in your Converse menu are a direct reflection of your recent memories and core beliefs. The way the world is visually rendered tells you what your new body fears and values.
• A Story Unfolding: You learn your own name when someone shouts it. You discover you have a family when a child runs up and calls you “mother.” You realize you are a wanted criminal when an old “friend” tries to kill you. The “backstory” is not read; it is lived, in real-time.

The act of Awakening transforms the very beginning of the game from a process of creation into a profound mystery, immediately and intimately connecting the player to the game’s core themes of memory, identity, and narrative inheritance.