The Authority.

The international containment system. Government agencies, secret from the public, that manage and suppress unnatural power.

The Authority is the United States arm of the global containment regime — the apparatus that replaced the old order of vampire lords, wizard-kings, and faerie courts with something quieter and less photogenic. It does not eliminate the supernatural. It manages it.

The Authority believes it is protecting humanity from Delirium — the psychological damage witnessing the unnatural inflicts on minds at the population scale — and from any return to the regime that came before. It is probably correct about both threats. The people running it are administrators of a real hazard, not villains performing bigotry.

They also press supernatural criminals into currency. That is policy.

In the 1750s, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin — then in London, in contact with the Cambridge Circle — described what would later be called the Franklonian system: a methodology allowing trained magicians to identify unnatural elements in society, classify them, and route them out of public life without the open warfare that had ended the courts.

Across the late 18th and early 19th centuries, state-sponsored magicians began confining practitioners, inhuman creatures, and others to ghettos — controlled zones designed to contain Delirium's spread. After American independence, the Authority emerged from Franklonian-aligned groups inside the new federal government. Its original jurisdiction was the United States.

It is the same agency, more or less, today. Its existence remains unknown to the public it operates within.

The Authority is the American node of a global network. The postwar settlement formalized what had already become fact: supernatural power is real, and will be managed by mundane human institutions. Not eliminated. Managed.

The Royal Geometric Society United Kingdom

Descended from the Cambridge Circle and Godshouse College. Operates with the longest unbroken institutional memory of any containment agency. Politely contemptuous of younger services.

European Commissioner for Human Stability continental Europe

Multi-state administrative body. Functions through a network of national bureaux. Maintains the European ghettos and the post-war containment treaties that underwrite them.

Secret divisions, various services worldwide

Most national security and intelligence services contain an internal organ for containment work. Their relationships to the Authority range from full cooperation to operational silence; few are fully sovereign over their own region.

The Authority suppresses illicit pressing. It also sanctions pressing, in limited cases. Both sentences are policy.

Lachryms — crystallized units of suffering — are the operating currency of supernatural trade. Each lachrym is pressed from a helpless subject through a personal bodily medium, with the intent to capture suffering. The practice is normalized inside the Syndicate's markets, morally contested in scholarly literature, and prosecuted everywhere the Authority can prosecute it.

Officially, the Authority classifies lachrym movement as supernatural trafficking and pursues illicit pressing as one of its higher priorities. Officially, it also sanctions pressing in limited cases involving supernatural criminals whose powers make ordinary incarceration inadequate. The policy is defended internally as a controlled penalty.

The Authority's local presence is Joint Task Force Omicron — the JTFO, pronounced exactly the way it looks, in the only name anyone uses for it. It operates out of the Calusa Correctional Institution on the edge of town: a working state prison whose federal liaison wing supplies the JTFO its cover, its address, and a permanent reason for the kind of foot traffic that would draw notice anywhere else.

The choice of facility is not incidental. A prison provides what an Authority field operation needs in a town this size: secure custody, a federal–state interface that explains the badges, and a building nobody looks at twice.

JTFO's jurisdiction is Calusa County — Pluto Beach and the smaller communities along the surrounding coast. The larger South Florida diaspora traditions — Vodou in Little Haiti, Santería across Miami-Dade, long-established Cuban Lucumí networks, the Bahamian and Jamaican diasporas — sit inside other Authority field offices. JTFO touches them only at the margins. Its relationships with the communities inside its own beat are bad in ways that go back decades to specific enforcement decisions.

Lachrym traffic moves through Miami's ports, diaspora channels, tourist economy, and criminal infrastructure, and some of it crosses into Calusa County markets. Provenance is easy to falsify. The Authority monitors the wider trade as trafficking; JTFO's part of the work is the slice that reaches its jurisdiction. The Syndicate operates the whole thing as a market. Local operators do not draw a clean distinction between trafficked and sanctioned supply, and the Authority's own sanctioned channel has given them reason not to.

Pluto Beach itself is small enough that everyone with reason to know what the JTFO is knows. They are polite to each other on the street.

Containment is uneven by any honest assessment, and the Authority's internal documents say so. The US–Mexico border is a known operational gap; the Authority cannot track what moves through it and no bilateral agreement has produced a workable arrangement. In Caribbean Vodou and Lucumí, formal institutional access exists only where temple hierarchies were willing to negotiate, and the terms of those agreements are not public. Cuban Santería has been inaccessible to direct contact since 1959; what the Authority knows about it comes from the diaspora.

Inside the United States, the Authority's field capacity is shaped by the same problems any large federal agency has: turnover, regional rivalries, budget cycles, and a long institutional habit of resolving ambiguous cases in favor of more enforcement rather than less. Most operatives are competent. Some are not. The system is durable enough to survive both.

The Authority is not the villain of Shadow Beach. It is also not the hero of Shadow Beach. The hazard it manages is real; the harm it does managing it is also real.

Stories that make the Authority straightforwardly villainous are wrong for this setting. Stories that make the Authority straightforwardly heroic are wrong for this setting. The right register is the harder one: an institution doing serious work with genuine legitimacy, and doing harm at the same time, and not getting to be simply right.

Characters who work for the Authority belong in that register. So do characters who oppose it.