What is Operation FALX?

Operation FALX is a Latin exploratory of about fifteen class periods for younger students meeting Latin for the first time. Like Operation LAPIS, it is a practomimetic simulation: students take on roles inside one long story, and the choices they make in that story are the learning activities. FALX works as both a prequel and an on-ramp, so students who finish it arrive at Operation LAPIS already knowing its world, its machinery, and what it feels like to learn by playing.

The story runs in six episodes across fifteen class periods of about 55 minutes each; the two counts measure different things, and the pacing between them is flexible. Each team of three or four students shares a single Recentius, an operative in training, inside the TSTT, the simulation where the story happens. The adventure itself runs in English, and the Latin lives in five CODEX entries that students work through between sessions, with novice-level readings, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural background.

The Premise

The TSTT, the simulation at the heart of Operation LAPIS, is coming apart. Saturn's falx, the sickle he used to overthrow his father, has been stolen from the very beginning of mythic time, and without it the whole chain of myth comes undone: Saturn never overthrows Caelus, the Olympians never rise, mortals are never born, and Rome is never founded. The world the machine holds together is unraveling from its first link.

The thief is Prometheus, the Titan who gave mortals fire and was chained to a rock in the Caucasus for it. He has taken the falx to undo the chain of events that ends in his own endless punishment. He acts out of real pain and a real love of mortals, and the curriculum's moral weight depends on students seeing both, so he is never played as a villain. The team's job is to follow his trail backwards through mythic time, mend 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 session opens with an immersion prompt, a short scene read aloud that sets up the situation and ends on a task or a dilemma. The team talks it over, decides together what their Recentius does, and declares the choice along with the reasons for it; you answer in character, and the story moves on. Every major choice in the curriculum belongs to the team, and every prompt asks them to say why they chose as well as what.

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 story itself treats the CODEX as mission-critical intelligence, which keeps it from feeling like homework bolted on from outside. See The FALX CODEX for the full picture.

The curriculum ends in an oral performance. On a hill above Rome at its height, their guide Quintus asks each team to tell the story of their whole journey, naming the people they met, the places they went and the choices they made, and saying what they understand now that they didn't at the start.

One Approach

Operation LAPIS offers three alternative approaches, and a teacher chooses one. Operation FALX has only one, so its episode pages carry no RPG and CYOP tabs. Every FALX classroom runs the same team-based role-play in English, with the Latin carried by the CODEX. That keeps the curriculum easy to pick up for a teacher running an 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 on to Operation LAPIS. The eight Recentius personas are the same ones students meet again in LAPIS, and the TSTT, the CODEX, Mission Control, and the team rhythm all carry forward. The Latin brings students to ACTFL Novice Low, with 25 mastery words and a working feel for how a Latin sentence fits together, which positions them for the Novice Mid work that opens LAPIS. The story closes on a recruitment hook as well: Quintus tells the team that his brother Sextus runs "the longer version of this program," and the Demiurge encourages them to re-enlist.

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.