The Houses of the Anunnaki

The Anunnaki are the secret power within or behind the secret power that is controlling the rudder for the fate of the Earth in the Cosmic Era. The first secret power is the Glassenheim Foundation, a five-century-old non-partisan technology research, development, and archiving organization laid down by the long since defunct G7 conference. This organization inherited the legacy of alien technology found on the Moon, the remnants and ruins of Imbria. One of the distinct delineations that can be observed comes from which New Earth Goverments have thrived and reached successfully into space, and those that haven't. The Foundation has picked its favorites and the rest have either been manipulated into falling behind, had their ambitions sabotaged, or otherwise found expanding outward never an option for them.

The Glassenheim Foundation is a little-known organization in the Cosmic Era, and the people who do know about it tend to accept it's facade as an archival group, librarians, and museum curators who on rare occasions offer funding to secondary and minor projects. Those who don't believe the front, which is factually accurate, they are librarians and curators, tend to associate them quite incorrectly with more traditional conspiracy theories of worshiping Mesopotamian deities, human trafficking and sex cults, and associations with astrology, UFOs, Bigfoot, and whatever other urban legends/fringe science thing is trending.

Its truth is a good deal less fantastic, and more mundane despite the horrors they have and secrets they control. The Glassenheim Foundation is a living legacy of the Petroleum Era and has roots going to the CIA, the FSB RF (successor to the KGB), MI6, NASA, and more esoteric and questionable groups like the WEF and the Council on Foreign Relations. Glassenheim is a secret, inside of a secret, inside of a secret, a Matryoshka doll of deception and misdirection. Within the Foundation, there are a number of Houses. This is an informal grouping, and its membership changes over time, with the Anunnaki masters and grandmasters occasionally changing houses, shifting the balances of power, and the portfolios of each house. For the most part, these do remain stable and have their own common areas of interest.

Leadership

The Glassenheim Foundation has a Council of Advisors who answer to the Director. The council is composed of two members from each of the Foundation's Houses, save for the House of Extinction, which sends no members. The Director is chosen by the Council, with most having served as members of the council before, or as the leaders of a House itself.

The House of the Forsaken

Keystones - Charisma, Oratory, Humanities, Social Causes, Politics, the color Blue

The current House of leadership, the House of the Forsaken is the most interested in political power and control over the terrestrial nations of Earth and the Solar System. Also known as the House of Causes, or the Glassenheim Humanities Committee, the Forsaken have the goal of creating a single world government, folding the other nations and superstates under a single figurehead, and then bringing all of the colonies, stations, and planets in the Solar System under this aegis. The fewer people in positions of power the less complicated social engineering needs to be to manipulate them. Two hundred nations with leaders, councils, parliaments, congresses, presidents, dictators and shahs are a nightmare to control. If every nation became a state, and each state subject to a single capitol, a single body of legislators, and the cherry on the sundae, a single president, king, or space emperor, then everything shines like gold and falls into the Foundation's hands.

The House of the Forsaken is the stuff of trope spy novels. Clandestine old boy's clubs, the outcome of wars determined on the golf course, and favors traded over fifty-year-old scotch and contraband cigars. They indulge in brushfire wars, nation-building, regime changes, and generally act as the American CIA in the late 1900s. They have enormous wealth and influence but at the cost of having some truly impressive enemies. The Andromeda Council, the cognocratic core of the Atlantic Federation resists the actions of the House, as do the M12, who keep the House from taking control of the CogNet. The largest opponent of the House of the Forsaken is the Federation's Council of Finance and it's steward, the AISC Mammon.

The House of Resurrection

Keystones - Perception, Medicine, Science, Healthcare, Doctors, the color yellow or gold

The House of Resurrection also called the Hospice, or the Hospital is a smaller House that has never been in contention for leadership of the Foundation. Their interest is in the human body and the great crusade to find the secret of immortality. To this end, the Hospice has worked to unravel Imbrian technology to push advances like med-pods into mainstream technology, as well as more cutting edge tech like Imbrian alcazars and Phoenix Engines. To gain the advances they have, the House routinely engages in crimes against nature and crimes against humanity as human experimentation is all but their deliberate purpose. The House runs highly illegal medical operations in places with no oversight, no governing bodies, testing drugs and devices on populations unknowing of their purpose.

The Hospice and the Hospitalers are the stuff of body horror and medical malfeasance. While their ultimate goal is the eradication of age as a cause of death and making immortality real even for someone whose body is completely destroyed, this is a limited goal. The Hospitalers are working for immortality for the elite only. The masses will still exist at the mercy of death. While their work has been put to good ends, eradicating many diseases that were rampant in the Petroleum Era, this was not from a sense of altruism or humanitarianism. Wiping out diabetes, most cancers, and all but wiping out petro-obesity made a more healthy population, which was needed. When the global population crashed during the Second Dark Age, falling close to 90%, every willing and able body was needed. There weren't resources enough to sustain a population crippled by health and dietary problems any more than there were resources to pursue planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption. The modern gene mods, cyberpunk expressionism, and bio-hedonism of the Cosmic Era are the strange fruits of the Hospice. 

The House of Desecration

Keystones - Wits, Charisma, Diplomacy, Organized Religion, Prayer, Clergy, the color white or silver

Through the centuries the Foundation has existed, and the House of Desecration has served in a leadership role many times. The House claims organized religion and faith as its portfolio and has its interests and influence among the world's religions. This is superficially the religious version of the House of the Forsaken, but there is a fundamental difference. The Forsaken chase temporal power, while the Desecrators search for spiritual power. This might seem odd, considering the advanced tech of the Cosmic Era, but in the CE, parapsychic powers exist, and these powers are grounded in human suffering and the lens that is used to focus that suffering into a conduit of power and praxis. The House of Desecration follows religion so that it becomes the Foundation House with the ability to create, recruit, train, and deploy parapsychic capable men and women.

The House of Desecration has taken a step back. Their projects are starting to bear fruit, especially those in the second world and Wastelands. The House cultivates places like the Holy City of Enoch and its Brotherhood. The conditions that create parapsychics require suffering but require resistance. A broken people do not produce parapsychics, nor do the comfortable. There must be a balance of agony and hope so that the spark of power is ignited. The other houses pursue this goal to their own ends, thinking to find it in genetic engineering, or psychotronic training. The power comes from the soul, and the Desecrators know that there is no fire without a spark.

The House of Knives

Keystones - Dexterity, Wits, Stealth, Discretion, Knives, Assassination, the color red

Any organization with grandiose ambitions requires a silent knife. The House of Knives serve as the assassins of the Foundations and are accordingly the smallest house, and have never held a leadership position. On the front end, the House exists to carry out the needs of the Foundation. Enemies who need to be dealt with are dealt with. The House is rarely so bold as to actually step up and stab someone who opposes a Foundation interest. Rather, they find themselves facing problems that draw them away from opposing the Foundation. This could be as minor as their means of travel being interrupted so that they miss important meetings, to their finances being disrupted. It could also be as serious as poisoning disguised to look like a natural death. It could also literally be a bullet in the head assassination, garrote wire, or a prostitute delivering a lethal technique in the midst of scandalous coitus.

The other side of the House of Knives is that they are the oversight for the rest of the Foundation. If a member goes astray and becomes a liability to the Foundation, they might get a visit from a knife. They are masters of nuance and persuasion, so the visit certainly could be brute force murder in their home or workspace. This is reserved for those who become consumed by their research and are contaminated by arcanotech byproducts, or those whose tastes and interests in impolite things have gotten out of hand. A more discrete visit might be an Anunnakus who has been out of line, or engaged in activities counter to the interests of the Foundation being served their steak dinner with a red jade-handled steak knife, honed to an edge so sharp that it could cut the plate. Other incidents have included being gifted swords and knives with red decoration, artwork depicting a red knife, or most infamously, a business card with a calligraphic red arc. 

The House of Armageddon

Keystones - Endurance, Perception, situational awareness, military hardware, the color green.

One of the legacies of the Glassenheim Foundation is arcanotechnology, and that legacy has a lot of problems. There have been accidents and incidents. There have been some kaiju wars, and those were exciting. The House of Armageddon was born from the Foundation's SCP efforts, and as its main means of maintaining its influence over the world's militaries, and more importantly, the pan-solar military-industrial complex. The House of Armageddon is traditionally seen as the kingmaker for the Foundation, no house has ever gained the director's seat without the support of Armageddon. The House has held the directorship the fewest times, not counting the houses that have never held the seat, but in the years that the Director has been the Director-Marshall the Solar system has had some of the most impressive wars historically speaking. The last Director-Marshall had their appointment when the Red Planet war broke out, and lost their seat when the Atlantic Federation abstained from the conflict.

The House of Armageddon is in a weird place, inside the Foundation and the Anunnaki. They are very specifically not a military force, there is no House Armageddon fleet, no Armageddon battalions or armor divisions. They certainly have ships, power armor, and soldiers, but the House maintains contracts with mercenaries, radicals, zealots, paramilitary forces, militias, and the like. When something is needed, Armageddon is more likely to arrange for a subsidiary force to handle the problem. This can be redirecting a Federation aerospace squadron to intercept a problem or scheduling a Eurasian frigate to be in the wrong place at the right time. It can also be deploying an Armageddon ghost ship to handle the problem and vanish, leaving behind Bermuda Triangle debris, or ships with missing crews.

The House of Algernon

Keystones - Intelligence, Charisma, Education, Science, Math, Psychology, Arcanotech, Art, Museum, archive, and the color brown or bronze.

If there is a heart to the Anunnaki and the Glassenheim Foundation, it is the House of Algernon. This cabal focuses on education, science, arcanotech, research and development, archiving, and curating the vast collection of the Foundation's Imbrian artifacts, such as the Neam Octillio, the Eschaton Treatise, and the Emigre Codex. As keepers of the chronicles, and the curators of horrors like the Magnatheans, Chimera, and alien plasmids. Beyond their zoo of horrors, the House of Algernon is very much involved in education and in more honest terms, indoctrination. They perfected psychotronic training, anthropotronics, cloning technology, media manipulation, and pretty much all major technological advances not covered by the medical sector, or the military-industrial complex. They were subsidiary to most of those as well, for what it is worth.

The House of Algernon is the largest House and is the most publicly visible. They are not just the curators of the Glassenheim Foundation's facade and its museums and charity trusts. They also have the most open interaction with the rest of the world, providing the advisors, experts, and 'mercenary research scientists' as well as pumping funding into think tanks, research projects, public works, and the rest. They work to normalize arcanotechnology, mainstream new advances, and encourage the widespread adoption of Foundation covert guidance.

The House of Extinction

Keystones - Sanity, Intelligence, Arcanotech, cosmic horror, Insanity, the color black

The House of Extinction is the secret house within the secret house. The others certainly know about them, and the house attends, but has no seats on the council and officially there have been no Extinction Directors. The house is so deeply involved in conspiracies, clandestine operations, black ops, and black budget work that no one really actually knows. They maintain the Iapetus base, mecha-teratomorphs, and when one of the other Houses uncovers or creates a new horror, the House of Extinction is the first to show up with 'That's awful, give it to me' on their lips.

The House of Extinction are the biggest problem within the Glassenheim Foundation. The other houses are following different tracks to get to the same destination, a single world government where the Foundation stands behind the throne and pulls the strings. The House of Extinction has a completely different plan and a different goal. The Sephirot support the Utopia Initiative, restoring the Earth to a green and pristine state. They also support incessant brushfire wars, militarism, and social upheaval on the planet. The more the nations fight each other, the less prepared they will be when the Sephirot's plan comes to fruition. Their plan is to take Earth and annihilate pretty much the entire global population. Earth would be rendered as an Edenic garden where only they would remain. The rest of surviving humanity would be hunted down by their genetically engineered super soldiers, Homo Sapiens Xenus and their arsenal of orb craft, teratomorphs, seraphs, parapsychics, youma, and Desolate Ones. When this grand invasion happens, the House of Desolation will divide the Glassenheim foundation into those who kneel to their ambition, and those who will stand with humanity and the status quo and die.

Welcome to the New Earth, Green and Pure