Severance

by Dan Erickson

Mark Scout leads a team at Lumon Industries whose members have undergone a "severance" procedure — surgically dividing their memories between work and personal life. Their innies know nothing of the outside world; their outies know nothing of their jobs. When Mark's innie begins to question what Lumon is really doing, both halves of his life are threatened.

33 characters, locations, and items in this world codex.

Characters

• Asal Reghabi — The woman who unsevered Petey — a former Lumon surgeon turned resistance operative who knows how to undo what the company has done, even if undoing it
• Burt Goodman — The gentle head of Optics & Design who fell in love across departmental lines — and whose retirement broke a devoted man's faith in everything.
• Devon Scout-Hale — Mark's sister and the show's voice of reason — a sarcastic, exhausted new mother who keeps telling everyone that severance is not okay, and keeps bein
• Doug Graner — Lumon's security chief — the enforcer who does the dirty work Cobel and Milchick's smiles are designed to hide.
• Dylan George — The guy who cared about perks and finger traps until he found out he had a son — then held two switches by himself so his friends could wake up in the
• Gemma Scout — Mark's dead wife — except she isn't dead. She's on the testing floor, conducting wellness sessions under a name she doesn't recognize, with a total co
• Harmony Cobel — Lumon's most devoted believer — a woman who invented severance, had the credit stolen, infiltrated her employee's personal life as his neighbor, and s
• Helly R. — Inside Lumon she is a prisoner who tried to kill herself rather than accept her captivity. Outside, she is Helena Eagan — the CEO's daughter who sent
• Irving Bailiff — A true believer whose faith in Lumon crumbled the moment he fell in love with someone from the wrong department — and whose outie has been painting th
• Jame Eagan — Lumon's current CEO — the man who stole the credit for severance from Cobel and sent his own daughter in as a test subject to prove the procedure was
• Kier Eagan — Lumon's founder, dead prophet, and corporate god — a 19th-century industrialist whose philosophy of controlling human consciousness became a religion
• Mark Scout — A grieving widower who severed himself to escape the pain — only to discover that the person he created inside Lumon is braver than he ever was.
• Natalie Kalen — The Board's liaison — a composed corporate spokesperson who translates the Board's mysterious directives into human language and delivers them without
• Peter Kilmer — The first one out — Mark's best friend who reversed his severance, saw what Lumon was hiding, and died with the truth bleeding out of his ears.
• Ricken Hale — A self-help author whose book is objectively terrible and accidentally revolutionary — the most sincere man alive, wrapped in the most pretentious pac
• Seth Milchick — The smiling middle manager of the severed floor — whose warmth is a performance, whose authority is borrowed, and whose smile never reaches his eyes.
• The Board — The unseen power behind Lumon — a mysterious entity that communicates through intermediaries and whose true nature nobody on the severed floor has eve

Locations

• Kier, PE — The company town — a small community built around Lumon headquarters where employees live, shop, and exist within the shadow of the corporation that o
• Lumon Industries HQ — A gleaming corporate campus that contains a labyrinth beneath it — where the elevators go down and consciousness goes sideways.
• Macrodata Refinement Office — Four desks in a room where people sort scary numbers into categories of human emotion — and nobody knows what the numbers mean or what happens when th
• Optics & Design — The art department across the hall — kept deliberately hostile to MDR to prevent solidarity, and the place where Irving found the only person who made
• The Break Room — Lumon's punishment chamber disguised as a conference room — where employees are forced to read a scripted apology over and over until they 'mean it.'
• The Perpetuity Wing — Lumon's shrine to the Eagan dynasty — a museum of wax figures, painted portraits, and corporate hagiography where employees are sent to worship their
• The Severed Floor — The white labyrinth — a windowless underground maze of identical corridors where severed employees spend their entire conscious lives sorting numbers
• The Testing Floor — The floor below the floor — where Gemma Scout exists as Ms. Casey and where Lumon conducts experiments the severed employees were never meant to know
• The Wellness Center — Where Ms. Casey reads you facts about your outside life and tells you to enjoy each one equally — therapy as performance, comfort as control.

Items

• "The You You Are" — Ricken Hale's terrible self-help book that accidentally became a revolutionary manifesto for people who have never been told they're allowed to be peo
• Music Dance Experience — A reward where employees are allowed to choose from five musical genres and dance alone in a room for a set duration — corporate-sanctioned joy, preci
• The Four Tempers — Kier Eagan's theory that the human soul contains four emotional forces — Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice — and that controlling them is the key to huma
• The Nine Core Principles — Vision, Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity, and Wiles — Kier Eagan's commandments, recited daily, enforced through the Brea
• The Overtime Contingency — An emergency protocol that activates an innie's consciousness outside the building — designed for evacuations, repurposed for revolution.
• The Severance Chip — A microchip implanted in the brain that splits consciousness in two — the technology that makes everything possible and everything terrible.
• Waffle Party — Lumon's ultimate employee reward — a private ceremony involving waffles, masks representing the Four Tempers, and a ritualistic performance that is de

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