Dungeon Break
Dungeon Gates, Clears, and the Unsourced Enemy
What a Dungeon Gate Is
Dungeon Gates (Breaks)
A Dungeon Gate, also called a Break, is not a doorway. It is a fixed tear in local spacetime that only releases material into our world. This can include matter, energy, pressure shifts, radio noise, and living creatures. Nothing has ever gone through a Gate from our side. Every attempt—drones, cables, or even light-based probes—either disappears or comes back destroyed. The accepted view is that a Gate is a one-way outlet from a hostile dimension into ours. You can shoot into what emerges from a Gate, but nothing can cross inside.
Gates appear as visible distortions surrounded by mineral growths called riftstone. They give off steady hums, visual effects like light haze or auroras, and environmental changes that field teams can detect. These include blocked radio signals, strange dust patterns, frost-like burns on metal, or animals avoiding the area. Each Gate has a unique emission signature, made of repeating subsonic, electromagnetic, and thaumic tones. These determine what comes through the Gate and how severe its cycles are.
Immutable Rules of a Break
Exhalation Only: Nothing enters. All threats emerge outward.
Cyclic Behavior: Gates cycle through calm periods, rumbling periods, and surge periods when monsters appear. Larger Gates have layered or combined cycles.
Local Rewrite Only: Normal physics mostly apply, but the area near the rim is distorted, causing issues like bent trajectories, sound distortion, or unreliable drones.
Escalation Bias: Over time, Gates shift toward stronger spawns. If left alone, any Gate will eventually escalate to catastrophic levels.
Field Taxonomy
Rank: Based on the amount and strength of material or creatures a Gate produces over time.
Color: Quick visual code for the Gate’s hazard type (Amber = heat, Verdigris = corrosive, Ultraviolet = light hazards, etc.).
Temper: The Gate’s cycle pattern.
Drip = constant low-level release
Spasm = unpredictable bursts
Siren = loud and regular cycles
Maw = long silences followed by massive releases.
How You “Clear” a Break
Since no one can enter a Break, a “clear” means forcing it into dormancy so it stops releasing monsters and energy. The standard process is called Isolate, Starve, Cull, Suture, Watch:
Isolate: Build the Gate Belt. This includes barricade corridors, shield anchors, and evacuation lanes that turn the area into a controlled zone.
Starve: Prevent monsters from moving or feeding. Use kill zones, mines, fire strips, or demolish buildings that give them cover.
Cull: Eliminate waves of monsters during surge periods with coordinated fire and Breaker strikes until the Gate slows into a dormant state.
Suture: Deploy a @KHATIM Array tuned to that Gate’s frequency to seal the rim and stop emissions.
Watch: Keep guards and sensors in place. Dormancy lasts months to years, and when the Gate’s signature shifts back to active levels, another clear is needed.
A “clear” is not permanent closure. It only means dormancy, and every team knows the effect is temporary.
The @KHATIM Array: The Only Way We Suture Rifts
Full name: Kinetic Harmonic Aperiodic Tear‑Inhibition Matrix
Nickname: @KHATIM (“seal” in several languages) • Sealrig (@DCRA slang) • Halo Suture (@GGA spec)
Origin: In the weeks following the 2046 @Cairo catastrophe, a @MEDA Breaker‑physicist named Samir al‑Khatim—callsign Binder—awakened with the singular ability to “pinch” active micro-rifts shut for seconds at a time. He jury‑rigged coils, tuning forks, and salvaged relic-crystal into a backpack frame and demonstrated the first human-made counter-emission: a phased discord that caused a Gate’s rim to “slacken” and stop venting for as long as he could maintain focus. Binder died saving an evacuation column when his prototype overloaded, but his notebooks and helmet-cam telemetry became scripture. @MEDA engineers and @GGA researchers spent three brutal years turning a man’s gift into a repeatable machine.
How it Works:
A @KHATIM deploys as a tripod Keystone Node and a ring of Peripheral Posts (6, 8, or 12 depending on Gate radius), all grounded into riftstone or bedrock.
Field techs fabricate a @Seal Key—a fist-sized resonant core unique to that Gate—by annealing dust, ichor, and spectral data into a composite crystal tuned to the gate's frequency. No two Keys are alike; every Break demands its own Key, often grown and tuned on-site.
When the Gate enters a quiescent trough, the array fires a phase-opposed chord (mechanical, EM, and thaumic) that induces rim laxity. Posts then “weave” a standing counterfield—the suture—that inhibits further emission.
Constraints & Risks:
Power Hungry: @KHATIM draws obscene energy at activation; in dark sites, Seal Teams tow capacitors or burn relic-cells.
Temperamental: Fire a suture during a surge and you’ll trigger backlash—pressure rebounds that shatter posts and pulps crews.
Non-Permanent: Sutures degrade as Gate harmonics drift. Keys can be re‑tuned; arrays must be serviced; nothing stays sealed forever.
Why It’s Sacred: The @KHATIM is the only proven path to a “clear” in a world where no one can invade the other side and no gate has stayed closed. Statues of Binder mark evacuation routes in multiple cities; every Seal Team carries a sliver of riftstone etched with his emblem—a looped cord tied in a simple knot.
The New Age of the @Portable KHATIM (Prototype)
Born from desperation in the late 2050s, the @Portable KHATIM (Prototype) was humanity’s gamble to shrink a city-sized miracle into a Breaker’s grip. Engineers sought to condense Binder’s great lattice into a hand-held rig, one that could be carried into collapsed streets and field sutures without a full yard’s worth of posts. Prototypes were rare, unstable, and often fatal—more Seal Teams were lost to backlash than to monsters during its trials—but those that worked gave lone Breakers a chance to do the impossible: silence a Gate for days with nothing but a crystal Key and a steady hand. Even now, the device is whispered about as both salvation and curse—a relic of brilliance too dangerous to mass-produce, yet too valuable to abandon.
Battlefield Practice: Turning Cities Into Tools
Since Gates cannot be attacked directly, cities are redesigned to support defense and suturing. Plazas are cleared into firing zones, highways are shaped to funnel movement, and stadiums are converted into suture yards where @Seal Keys are prepared. Standard procedure is to use terrain for control, track Gate cycles carefully, and finish with a suture when the Gate is dormant. Public sirens are timed to Gate cycles, freight rails move @KHATIM posts, and rooftop beacons broadcast harmonics so guards know when a surge is coming.
@Seal Keys are prepared at Suture Yards before a Gate is even reached. Technicians only need riftstone dust and monster ichor to create a raw crystal. These raw Keys are stable enough to be stored and transported, but they are not yet tuned. Once a Gate site is reached, the Seal Key must be tuned to that Gate’s frequency before it can be used in a @KHATIM or @Portable KHATIM (Prototype). This makes @Seal Keys both portable and flexible, as stockpiles can be prepared ahead of time and assigned to a mission when needed.
@Seal Key Baths
A @Seal Key Bath is the process of imprinting a Gate’s frequency onto a raw @Seal Key. The Gate’s emission frequency is played into the crystal until it resonates with the same pattern, forcefully imprinting it. This process is called “bathing” the @Seal Key in the frequency, which is where the term @Seal Key Bath comes from. @Portable KHATIM (Prototype)s now allow field teams to perform this tuning on-site, removing the need for large coil arrays or stationary yard equipment.
Where Monsters Come From (The Admitted Unknown)
No lab, agency, or Breaker has ever recovered confirmed material from inside a Gate. Everything we know comes from the creatures and matter that come out of them, along with the energy patterns we can measure. There are a few main theories:
Echo Hypothesis: Monsters are patterns from another ecosystem that are pushed into our world by pressure differences.
Graft Hypothesis: Monsters take on forms familiar to us when they cross over, which is why many look like creatures from human myths.
Terraformer Hypothesis: The things that come through are not random but are controlled outputs designed to test and overwhelm human defenses until areas can no longer be lived in.
What we know for certain is:
The type of monsters that appear match the Gate’s frequency patterns.
Killing large numbers of spawns changes what comes out next.
Many monsters weaken or die quickly once separated from the Gate, showing they are not well adapted to @Earth.
This means we are either seeing real creatures that cannot survive here for long, or temporary constructs that only hold together for a short time in our environment.
Strategic Consequence: A Defensive Century
Because Gates cannot be entered, they can never be permanently closed. The best option is to keep containing them. That means building defensive belts, planning around surge cycles, killing the monsters when they appear, and sealing the Gates into dormancy over and over. The @KHATIM Array is the only reliable tool that makes this possible. Everything else depends on constant work, planning, and not letting Gates spread.