SCHRECKNET VLA-7 // RECOVERED FILE
classification: nodes-only
provenance: "SOMMER" lecture cache (unverified) — transcribed, not confirmed
topic: NECROMANTIC LINES — WHO TALKS TO THE DEAD

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There are five lines that treat death as infrastructure. The network is
built by rats, but the rats do not own the basement. Learn to tell the
five apart before you answer anything that knocks from below.

1. GIOVANNI / HECATA (the Family)
   Merchants of souls since 1444. They do not summon — they invoice.
   Their necromancy is contract law with candles. If a deal arrives
   worded like a lease, you are talking to them.
   COUNTERMEASURE: read the interest rate. Decline politely.

2. CAPPADOCIAN REMNANT (Harbingers of Skulls)
   The scholars who studied dying before the Family ate their founder.
   They surfaced in 1999 with the Week of Nightmares and have been
   settling accounts since. They write in bone-script. They correct
   our files, and the corrections have been right eleven times.
   COUNTERMEASURE: accept corrections. Never offer thanks.

3. SAMEDI
   The Caribbean line. Death worn openly — flesh in visible rot, kept
   at a chosen pace. Their elders read the hour of a death from the
   body of the dying. They sell that reading as assassination timing.
   COUNTERMEASURE: if a corpse looks worse than yesterday, log the
   delta. Do not attend second burials.

4. NAGARAJA
   Flesh-eaters from the far side of the Shroud. They must eat meat as
   well as drink blood, and the meat is the tell: morgue freezers emptied
   with the door seals intact. They came here as refugees from a
   catastrophe you are not cleared to read about.
   COUNTERMEASURE: inventory every cold room twice. The logs lie.

5. LAMIA (the Death-Priestesses)
   The old priesthood of the Cappadocians, nearly extinct, recently
   reopened by the Family Reunion. Their rites are real. Their funerals
   are correct. This is not reassurance; it is the entry fee.
   COUNTERMEASURE: file their appearances as RITE, not THREAT.
   Transcribing the words of a rite is forbidden by node protocol.

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NODE DIRECTIVE (standing):
Packets arriving from addresses that do not resolve — cold packets,
sent from the wrong side of the Shroud — are logged and NOT REPLIED TO.
The one time we replied, the reply cost a node. Which node is not
written here.

// end of recovered file