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This message is no courtesy. It's a debt slip.

Troubleshoot the fax machine.

She would. She will.

Earnest, masked with a laugh.

His eyes narrow ever so slightly as if to place your face.

A quick, apologetic smile.

He looks away from you while he decides which script to follow.

His lips ready themselves for a pretend smile.

Unclear whether he's trying to convince himself of this or you.

Media, distribution. Perhaps there's a sexy techno-angle to this!

Wrong crowd? He's talking about us!

All you had to do to make her your KINDRED was to separate her from her own.

Not since the crew dissolved and you left Portofiro.

A wound he is unable to sew shut.

A long while, by the sound of it.

The sound of his own voice makes him wince.

His fingers twitch like he's fighting the urge to shuffle the papers on his desk.

He bristles a touch at being lumped in with a school of notorious glue addicts.

A sunbeam accidentally puncturing a low overcast sky.

An astounding custom rig. One you must get your hands on.

You have a strong suspicion you know who.

He'd give nearly anything for an excuse to do just that.

Because her interest was actually your interest.

Not a direct answer.

A conversation. Fogged Mirror. Two gin cocktails, her regular table.

A dream that tastes like ashes on his tongue just now.

Immediately apparent in the copies she passed you. Annotated, pertinent sections marked with colour-coded flags.

You must understand that, he means, if you're going to understand what happens later.

You gain nothing by making this poor man repeat the words he's most regretted saying in his life.

On the contrary, you gain immense power over him.

That he could clear it all up. That things could go on, as though none of what happened had happened.

Your eye gravitates toward the framed credentials on the wall, the dusty anatomical torso, all of it.

They showed him evidence. Irrefutable, damning, and absolutely covered with Karolina's fingerprints.

Better for him that they remain that way. Dark, sticky, unexamined.

Her skin: pale. Eyes: tired. Muscles: atrophying.

The doctor's heart is a snowglobe, a thin glass shell surrounding a moment of perfect pain. You feel it in your hands now.

He looks around the houseboat. It feels incomprehensible to him now. How he came to be on it.

Abject disappointment. Her response is all he's been thinking about since he put himself at your mercy.

A weight appears to lift from his shoulders.

That's how she was and remains for him -- a mirror of his own qualities and flaws.

'Doing fine, without you,' is all he hears.

The doctor overtakes the father.

A great fall, for someone of his professional stature.

If it's a fairy tale, it's one he's either grown very tired of or never wanted to hear in the first place.

The Quisach backways are known more for fly-tipping and feral boars than for 'families'.

Five years ago, he was one of the top experimental somnologists in the Developed World.

Complicated subject matter.

He briefly nurtured the hope that he'd simply misheard you. Now he must confront the reality that he's actually having a conversation with you.

3,676 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 25 of 74