Scorchbringer

The Scorchbringers stand, unyielding, between the Engineers and the rest of Camp Hope. In the shadow of the shops, where wonders and disasters are born in equal measure, they watch. Sometimes it is a chair that hums with plasma, sometimes a machine that shudders and tries to crawl away. The Scorchbringers do not flinch. They hold the line, hands steady, eyes sharp. Soldier, technician, firekeeper. Each title pressed into them by necessity, each lesson learned in the heat. Danger shapes them. Fire perfects them.

To an outsider, Scorchbringers look like walking fire hazards wrapped in armor plates, but within the Engineers, they represent the closest thing the faction has to discipline and structure. A Scorchbringer’s daily life is built around guarding, restricting access, weapon maintenance, and performing controlled violence whenever the shops’ inventions or Camp Hope’s enemies threaten stability.

Most days involve long shifts stationed near Engineering Shops, where they monitor inventors, prototypes, and the occasional suspiciously glowing object. They enforce safety rules (which Engineers routinely ignore), screen outsiders for entry, and ensure volatile devices are not removed without authorization. A Scorchbringer’s presence alone often deters theft and sometimes discourages overly bold experimental impulses.

Despite the militaristic overtones, the culture inside the Scorchbringers is one of camaraderie, gallows humor, and shared trauma bonding. Members routinely swap stories of “the time the wall caught fire,” “the robot that shouldn’t have been sapient,” or “the grenade that apologized before detonating.” Veterans mentor new recruits with a mix of hard-learned lessons and stern warnings, supporting the belief that Scorchbringers must depend on one another far more than the Engineers, who are “too busy trying to rewrite physics again.”

A Scorchbringer is the living boundary between the Engineers’ barely-restrained genius and the rest of Camp Hope’s continued existence. Part guardian, part walking caution sign, part enthusiast of controlled devastation. Clad in heat-scored armor and carrying weapons that most people wouldn’t approach with a ten-foot pole, they patrol the workshops and research bays where sparks fly, chemicals hiss, and prototypes occasionally try to chew through walls. Their job is simple in theory and impossible in practice: keep the Engineers safe from their own inventions while ensuring that anything hazardous is either secured, escorted, or spectacularly annihilated. Scorchbringers move with the wary confidence of someone who has seen machines explode in every possible direction and lived to tell the tale, and beneath their soot-stained exterior lies an odd mix of pride, duty, and an unsettling enthusiasm for weapons that make the world briefly, brilliantly bright.