What is Operation FALX?

Operation FALX is a 15-session Latin exploratory curriculum for younger students encountering Latin for the first time. Like Operation LAPIS, it is built as a practomimetic simulation: students take on roles inside a sustained narrative, and the choices they make in the story are the learning activities. FALX is a prequel and an on-ramp. Students who complete it arrive at Operation LAPIS already knowing the world, the machinery, and the feel of learning by playing.

The curriculum runs across six episodes in fifteen class periods of roughly 55 minutes each (both counts are correct; they measure different units, and the pacing between them is flexible). Teams of three to four students collaboratively control a single Recentius, an operative-in-training, inside the TSTT. The adventure itself runs in English. The Latin lives in five CODEX entries that students work through between sessions, carrying novice-level readings, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural background.

The name is Latin: a falx is a sickle, and the sickle in question is the one Saturn used to overthrow his father at the very beginning of mythic time.

The Premise

The TSTT, the simulation space at the heart of Operation LAPIS, is unraveling. Saturn's falx has been stolen from its place in primordial mythic time, and with it gone the whole chain of mythic events comes undone: Saturn never overthrows Uranus, the Olympians never rise, mortals are never born, Rome is never founded. The world the machine holds together is coming apart from its own beginning.

The thief is Prometheus. He is not a villain. He is the Titan who gave mortals fire and was chained to a rock in the Caucasus for it, and he has taken the falx to undo the chain of events that leads to his own endless punishment. He is a being in genuine pain, acting from a genuine love of mortals, and the curriculum's moral weight depends on that. The team's job is not to defeat him. It is to follow his trail backwards through mythic time, restore what his interference has broken, and finally persuade him to accept his fate for the sake of the world his own gift made possible.

Along the way the team meets Vesta at her hearth, Vulcan and the Cyclopes at the forge, a young and uncertain Jupiter, and Tellus, the earth herself. Each stop pairs an act of restoration with a morally weighted choice, and the choices grow harder as the operation goes on: assisting a willing figure, persuading an uncertain one, failing to persuade a resistant one, and at last succeeding.

What Students Do

Each 55-minute session opens with an immersion prompt: a short narrative scene, read aloud, that sets the situation and ends on a task or a dilemma. The team discusses, decides together what their Recentius does, and declares the choice with its reasoning. You respond in character, and the story moves. Every major choice in the curriculum belongs to the team, and every closing prompt requires them to say aloud not just what they choose but why.

Between sessions, students work through the five CODEX entries. Each entry carries five components: Key-texts (short original Latin passages at the novice level), VERBA (five mastery words drawn from the key-texts), GRAMMATICA (one grammar concept, taught from the entry's own Latin), Culturalia (cultural and mythological background with embedded interpretation questions), and Attunement (vocabulary work, comprehension questions, and a reflection task that primes the coming session). The CODEX is not homework bolted onto the story; it is mission-critical intelligence, and the story says so. See The FALX CODEX for the full picture.

The curriculum culminates in an oral performance: on a hill overlooking Rome at her peak, the team narrates the story of their whole journey, naming the people they met, the choices they made, and what they understand now.

One Approach

Operation LAPIS offers a teacher three alternative delivery approaches. Operation FALX offers one. There are no tracks to choose between and no tabbed workflows on the episode pages of this guide: every FALX classroom runs the same team-based, English-immersion RPG with the Latin carried by the CODEX. This keeps the curriculum simple to pick up for a teacher who may be running a Latin exploratory alongside a full teaching load, and it keeps the whole class inside one shared story.

From FALX to LAPIS

FALX is designed to hand students to Operation LAPIS. The Recentii personas are the same eight personas students will meet again in LAPIS. The TSTT, the CODEX structure, Mission Control, and the team rhythm all carry forward. The Latin lands students at ACTFL Novice Low with 25 mastery words and a working feel for how a Latin sentence fits together, positioned for the Novice Mid work that opens LAPIS. And the story itself closes with a recruitment hook: the students' guide sends them on to "the longer version of this program," and the Demiurge encourages re-enlistment directly.

The events of FALX also sit quietly inside LAPIS canon as the original incursion whose traces LAPIS students later encounter, so a student who plays both gets the pleasure of recognizing what they themselves once did.

A Note on Terminology

FALX shares its vocabulary with Operation LAPIS:

Term	Meaning
Agent	You, the teacher. In FALX the Agent is also a live in-fiction role at the opening frame.
Operative	An individual student, tracked in Mission Control.
Recentius / Recentii	The player characters. Each team of three to four students controls one persona.
TSTT	The Texto-Spatio-Temporal Transmitter, the in-world simulation the story happens inside.
CODEX	The curriculum's reference backbone: five entries carrying the Latin, the culture, and the practice tasks.
Mission Control	The web app used to manage cohorts, track LP, and handle character data. Agents use mc.practomime.com/agent; students use mc.practomime.com.

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Next: Learning Objectives, or jump to Running Operation FALX for the session-by-session shape.