Ennovy was an easy town to find on a map, but it wasn't easy to find in real life. It was only accessible by complicated, branching, sometimes circular hiking trails that could only be navigated by someone who really knew where they were going and how to get there. The people in the nearest towns were aware that there was a Hessite compound somewhere in the local hills, and they occasionally encountered people who were trying to travel into or out of Ennovy, but most people had never seen it and no one really knew how many people lived there. Usually the people who were looking for the place were never seen again, but no one ever really found out whether they had joined the compound, been taken hostage, or simply died along the trails somewhere.
Actually, there were about 150 people living in Ennovy,100 adults with their 50 children, living in log houses, meditating in small wooden shack-like chapels, and attending an old-fashioned wooden schoolhouse until the age of 12. They were cremated in boats or buried in unmarked graves when they died, because the first generation to grow up there had developed a superstition that the infamous "Crony-backer" would suck their souls out of the afterlife if it managed to find their graves. The townspeople had frequent rituals, including outdoor feasts and barn-raising ceremonies, and everyone was expected to say their nightly prayers to "Old Lady Hess" in hopes that she would protect them against the Crony-backer. Most of them had never seen a cell phone or an electric light, and they had even changed their calendar, so they considered themselves to be living in the 1830s when it was actually the 2280s.
The Crony-backer was their boogeyman, a quasi-mythical monster or demon based on what the small town's founders had told their own children about the Chronivac nearly two centuries earlier. It could look into your soul and steal your deep dark secrets, and it could turn you into a monster and stop everyone from remembering who you used to be. It wasn't even just strange-looking inanimate objects that you had to worry about, because people could carry it around with them, and they didn't always stay people if they did. Any person or thing could be carrying a Chronivac (or wearing it, like in a smartwatch), and this morphed into the legend that any unknown human or cryptid could be the Crony-backer in disguise.
There were different roles in the community depending on people's ages. Children went to "school" from the ages of 3 through 12, and they learned their letters and numbers there, but mostly it was indoctrination about why everyone should stay inside the town and never go beyond the part of the forest that was considered their safe space for hunting and foraging. They were taught that the Crony-backer was lurking in the deep dark woods to find them and try to steal their souls. Teenagers took turns guarding the edges of town and manning the lookout towers. They had torches they could light and large bells they could ring to alert the each other and the rest of the townspeople if they thought they saw the Crony-backer. When they weren't standing guard, they were with their parents to help them hunt, farm and forage. Most of the middle-aged people were responsible for making food and clothes, but a few young adults would be set aside as schoolteachers or as caregivers for the elderly. The elders could be leaders or clergy-like spiritual guides to make sure everyone knew what they were supposed to do to stay safe.
What only the elders knew was that a select group from each generation was chosen to leave the community serve it elsewhere. The townspeople were allowed to think that they died of illness or that the Crony-backer got them. They would be taken out to a small hut where a single person would operate a single Chronivac in secret on behalf of the elders. Their souls were scanned and their bodies were transformed. Some of these chosen ones were given new, unrecognizable human forms and sent into mainstream society to find new people and resources for the community. Anyone or anything they brought back was transported into the village through a tunnel and announced to the villagers as a blessing from "Old Lady Hess". Other chosen ones were turned into forest animals so they could live in the woods and use their animal senses to spy on anyone approaching the community. Still others were turned into monsters to scare away outsiders and frighten the townspeople into staying home. Most of these people were chosen as loyal "sacrifices" whom the elders trusted in their new roles, but sometimes unruly delinquents would be transformed just to get rid of them.