Current relationship with Equinox: Enemies
An internet forum that acts as the hub for a de-centralised international movement of anarchic artists. Members of CognitoHazard spend their lives online, on the run and undercover in order to make the world a more beautiful place by stealing priceless art pieces and installing pop-up exhibitions around the world. Their illegal activities have garnered the attention of the world’s law enforcement and media but they’re relatively harmless as an organisation – right?
In reality CognitoHazard are a constant thorn in Equinox’s side. Increasingly, in the last two decades, CognitoHazard have stolen dozens of paranatural artefacts from several groups of interest including Equinox itself. This would be bad enough, if it weren’t for CognitoHazard’s desire to share the paranatural with the world without any respect for moral boundaries, secrecy or the potential consequences of sharing the supernatural with an unprepared humanity. As a result, Equinox on more than one occasion has had to clear up CognitoHazard’s mess – often at substantial financial and personal cost. To that end, there is no love lost between the two organisations.
So why not shut it down? Well for a little over two decades, Equinox and its allies have tried. Repeated attempts to track down the group’s leaders (known only as “The Administrator” and “The Moderator”) have met with failure and CognitoHazard is technologically savvy enough to have established plenty of back-ups should any of its servers be taken offline. The result of a not insignificant amount of time and money has ultimately been very little.
More concerningly, in recent years there has been increasing evidence that there are members of CognitoHazard that seem to have the ability to create paranatural items or wield paranatural powers. Many wonder if CognitoHazard are using the paranatural to hide their tracks but due to their lack of unified leadership and lack of forewarning when it comes to taking action, it can be hard to say. Nonetheless, the idea of a group of paranatural empowered artists regularly keeps Equinox’s more senior leadership awake at night and many wonder whether it is a matter of time before CognitoHazard brings the whole masquerade crashing down around them, all in the name of unchained creativity.
References and Inspiration:
CognitoHazard are inspired by the Phantom Thieves from Persona 5, the Stellaron Hunters from Honkai Star Rail and ‘Are We Cool Yet?’/’Gamers Against Weed’ from the SCP Wiki.