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Rush of nameless river in broadleaf forest, ancient riparian zone. The paleolithic huntress stalks her prey...

Boxes of popcorn on the floor around them, a stop-motion beast roaring flame. She laughs, he pulls her closer.

Her subconscious was stuck, reliving the event over and over again.

A man leans over a fluted balustrade, savouring a pre-bed cigarillo. The Noscorrentes sea churns like liquid mercury. At his back, a suite of malachite and glass -- and a figure detaching itself from the wall, gun in hand.

A pale, screenlit face watches in expectation.

Rivers of waterlogged rainbow silk, clogging the canals. The body of the radio host soon to join them.

High-heels tapping on the metal gangway, skirts fluttering in the wind. A gang of men stand on the dock beneath them, eyes all whites.

<<Good job, CASCADE. M.I.H.O. salutes you.>>

His fingers ripple nervously across the handle of his briefcase. He checks his watch.

A missile flies through the sky, screaming its arrival. They pick up their instruments one last time.

Gleaming discs fall like a strange plague upon the city below. The sun blooms little rainbows between them. From the tram windows, children laugh.

Strange things tend to happen around world-shifting events such as these. Synchronicities. Reverberance. Repetitions.

To the extent that our lives matter even one iota, it is only under the gaze of this cat. The moment it closes its eyes, we may as well cease to be.

In an apartment block in a suburb of Novessa, twenty minutes by commuter rail, a middle aged woman watches a few seconds of a heavily censored erotic thriller before changing the channel. An open can of treacly liqueur has gone warm next to her.

A sinuous rope scar wound around his arm and across his shoulderblade, he screams.

And he wore the same imperturbable smile as he forced his hand down Karolina's throat.

Wearing the same imperturbable smile.

No... you're coming home.

Concrete and plastic. Droplets on dark air. Voices raised under moulding canopy.

It's at this moment, as the Paleolithic huntress pinches shut the great aurochs' lower intestine with one hand while with the other she expertly slices the hide around the anus from without, that the boundary is suddenly and fatally crossed. 'What am I doing here?' her brain asks in her own voice, as her head falls back and the terrible weight of sentience descends on her with a roar.

A solitary anchorite in a cell of aluminium and carbon fibre, 400,000 kilometres above the world.

The child trembles in his ice bath. He can't tell the shivers of cold from those of fever, nor the numerous unknown words in the book from the gibberings of his delirium, but he sits there and trembles and holds the matico leaves to his brow.

Waves curl endlessly onto a shore of fine pebble. Pascal takes the lid off the teapot, notices two men walking up the garden path. He opens the door with a smile.

Overdetermined, like so much else in the smashed and leaking world.

A soul vacating the premises.

25 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual