A registered entity can grant favor to a human in exchange for service, attention, ritual observance, or material tribute. Favor-contracts are formal documents. A favor manifests as small impossible things: the right elevator arrives when needed, a knife slip stops drawing blood, a stranger gives you the answer you needed without being asked, a drone’s camera fails at exactly the right moment.
Scale
- Minor favor — small probability adjustments, common, cheap. Most contracted humans hold a few of these continuously.
- Major favor — significant intervention; saves lives, opens doors, breaks deadlocks. Expensive. Usually one-time.
- Standing favor — ongoing relationship; the entity considers you theirs in some functional way. Rare. Powerful. Difficult to exit.
What favor is not
Favor is not power. A favored human cannot cast spells. They can ask, and the entity can answer, and the answer manifests through the entity’s domain. Harbor House can shift the tide for you by inches; it cannot make you fly.
The slow costs
Direct costs — money, observance, service — are easy to measure. The slower costs are harder. Domain entanglement: once you’ve contracted with Harbor, water starts paying attention to you. Attention drift: long-term contracted humans often start dreaming in their House’s domain. Pattern erosion: over time, the lines between the contracted human’s choices and the entity’s domain begin to blur. Old broker-priests sometimes can’t tell which decisions are theirs anymore.
Burnout and breaking
Humans who take too much favor too fast can suffer burnout — temporary loss of the ability to receive favor — or, in extreme cases, breaking — a permanent estrangement from a House that the human can feel as a kind of grief. Crews watch their broker-priests carefully for early signs.