Obligers

Obligers are sapient meta-dimensional predators — Class II in the meta-dimensional beings classification. They exist at the intersection of the Conceptual and Etheric layers and feed on dynamics that occur in the Material and Social layers.

They present as obliging, and they feed on the obligations that creates. The name records how the counterfeit runs, as every Unfounded name does. Filed as Court-Fae until 2026-09-23, and renamed because court claimed a hierarchy the Unfounded cannot have and fae collided with the Celtic Union's word for the Caomhari. Court-Fae survives as a practitioner's and folk word, and a character who uses it is speaking in her own vocabulary, not the record's: at the Marsh Causeway it is Elvira's word (her Court thing), and Galahad, reporting in the committee's grammar, says Obliger.

They are goal-directed and adaptive. They have no Cascade standing and are not bound by or protected by Cascade constraints.

Their food sources are:

• Ambiguity: unresolved social or relational situations
• Desire loops: sustained wanting without pursuit or release
• Social debt: undefined obligations that are never discharged

Obligers do not use force. They operate through passive aggression, indirect suggestion, and the careful maintenance of situations that never quite resolve. After contact they leave residue: a background sense of obligation, a value drift, a faint loop of obsession that persists after they are gone.

What starves them: a settled thing. They cannot feed on a named method, a discharged debt or a broken loop, which is why the Rangers' doctrine is clarity. That describes what they feed on, not a move that works twice: each one feeds its own way, and the record promises nothing about the next.

Example: Aldera registers an Obliger feeding signature at the Marsh Causeway before Elvira has named what is wrong: an unresolved social debt between two locals, sustained rather than settled, that the Obliger has been quietly maintaining for its own benefit.

See also: Predatory Entities (Lore) · Meta-Dimensional Beings: Classification