The Miasma Bureau

Elias Thorne, a scholar of forgotten lore and dismissed as an eccentric, thought he knew the dark secrets lurking in the margins of history. He meticulously documented the 'apocryphal' entities and 'absurd' rituals from every obscure text he could find. Then, he woke up in Veridian City, a sprawling metropolis perpetually cloaked in a sentient, suffocating smog. Here, the 'fictions' he studied are horrifyingly real, and his encyclopedic knowledge is his only shield. He's landed a coveted position at the Bureau of Anomalous Manifestations—ostensibly a municipal sanitation department, but truly the frontline against the city's unspeakable horrors. Excellent benefits, a respectable uniform, and a steady paycheck are hard to refuse, even when your colleagues keep vanishing and the paperwork demands sacrifices more than signatures. Elias uses his desperate meta-knowledge to navigate the labyrinthine, lethal bureaucracy, trying to survive another shift. All he wants is to go home, but every file he processes, every eldritch anomaly he 'sanitizes,' binds him tighter to Veridian's suffocating embrace.