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Ruins paved with red and white chequerboard. Frilled curtains, velvet sofa. A folly.

YO-YO. Should've been YO-YO.

You have become Pseudo-PSEUDOPOD.

It is singing the song of Ramses' own death.

He falls like he's praying.

He falls like he's praying.

For a place you'll never know.

Lighter, then darker, then lighter again -- an ever-changing violet shade.

You're hit by a bolt of unconditional love for dolphins and their magical ways.

The pre-Mircean poets-resuscitants saw pain as the soul rejecting unearned memories. Speak more, ancient wisdom man!

A life lived in a permanent state of war.

The immense, blubbery mass of a manatee's lower half appears in your mind, utterly out of proportion with the svelte female torso that protrudes from it like a tumour.

What had been foreshadowed was significantly darker. Everything post-extraction is, in a sense, already an unlikely best-case scenario.

The boat has been set alight, the chants intoned, the cuts made on the body to attract the vultures. Some kind of ritual action performed to obtain closure from death.

Did you hear it? The song in your head? 'Twas the sacred art of versecraft, inaccessible to all but the most radiant of hearts.

Every grand finale needs an epic cue.

You remember it all too closely -- hopscotching through the lightning strikes of youth.

Arthur Killingwire, for his poem Ode to a Worm on a Figleaf.

Nonsense words he's making up on the spot.

In his mind's eye, a gigantic Lolita Calista-faced train hurtles toward him.

Wandering from one peccadillo to another like an inverted travelling circus; the world is their clown.

You danced with a lover, in the nascent stages. Lingering moments, a meeting of flesh that only you could feel. Brief enough to deny, long enough to know.

Criminally underappreciated. Retrospect will vindicate her.

Behind the customary barbed wire-tangled corpses, the outline of a riot cop suggests political rather than wanton violence, and the logo -- now that you look at it -- does seem slightly more intelligible than his usual fare.

A lighting strike that finds you when it had the whole earth to choose from.

Dositeo Fernandez... nevermind.

Closing the neat nutritional loop as the culture digests itself.

That's inspiration, baby.

Above, a bottomless well, depths aglow with pale fires reaching out.

The coat was supposed to help.

To follow him home.

As a star is dragged into a black hole, it emits periodic bursts of light that scientists liken to dying screams.

She will sing of you in a secret song someday -- and you will hear it and never know it was meant for you.

Time to deck the cancer patient in a party hat and tell them not to worry about the future.

You wonder vaguely what your stage name would have been if you, too, shined bright enough for Popstar School.

Ultra Violeta Live: From High Lunar Orbit.

Or maybe only one core dream, iterated upon every night by the sleeping millions.

You are surrounded by representations of his mind, in all its facets and incarnations.

HOLOCENE thinks, and the fog of war dissipates before the both of you. The landscape does not look inviting, but at least it is visible.

A banishment of mirrors.

Origin point for a long-held dream of being smothered by the firmament.

His eyes suggest that he could give you one, if you really wanted it.

All of life's waiting rooms.

Every grand finale needs a soundtrack.

Like the master sword-makers of Tsun's Arc, he is a relic of times long past, an initiate in some forgotten craft now performed in seconds by machines.

Hints of a new life looming -- unless you occlude it.

A man with access to more of humanity's secrets than nearly anyone, and yet the simple pleasure of a good pop song eludes him.

She attempts to smile on the last word, an unnatural twitch like broken clockwork.

53 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual