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A twelve year old child in the gun-crafting colonies of Dream of Rustam makes the exact same movement.

Clang. A can clattering down, cutting through the Bazaar's noise. Patrons walking around, sipping cold coffee.

WHAT WILL YOU SAY TO THAT CRUEL ANGEL --

In a dim recording studio in the Luzian capital of Cicatriz Frontera, a young girl and an old man discuss an unfolding of light. A cultural hypernova. A map across the stars.

A middle-aged vendor begins carefully laying sheets of tarpaulin over his wares. As he smooths out the creases, he hums an intimate melody meant for no one but himself.

A middle-aged vendor carefully arranges his wares in accordance with a strict personal algorithm. As he does, he hums an intimate melody meant for no one but himself.

A six-year-old girl slowly lifts the corner of a heavy white sheet with frayed edges. Behind the sheet is a mirror. There is no one else in the living room. The girl catches a glimpse of herself and drops the sheet in shock.

You can't quite shake the feeling that this girl is seeing visions of your death as you talk and keeping them all to herself.

Solo-karaoke, no one around to hear her shout-singing along to the griefsludge disc she keeps in her bag for days like this.

Not the bald spot! The font of luck.

You're milking your lucky cow dry, take it easy on him. Once a day is more than enough.

Every once in a while he accidentally wanders close to the edges of his limited experience in the world, and when he does a deep and primal fear enters his eyes.

It's never going to work like that. You have to believe.

You're the highest thing in Portofiro. She can see you from up there.

In a dark basement in Novessa, a female controller in her mid-thirties shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

It dawns on you that you've delivered the punchline to a cosmic joke only he will understand.

In sync with the snap of his fingers, halfway across the world a young man in the midst of his birthday celebrations is stricken to the ground with an aneurysm.

In a dimly lit ground floor flat in Novessa, a boy no older than eight picks up a toy rocket. 'I'll be like daddy one day,' he tells his mother.

Somewhere, in whatever cosmic accounts are settled, there has been a mixup. Until such a time as it is cleared up, you appear to be off the hook.

Another time, another place. A different life overlapping for a moment.

Gunshot echo. A cold splash. Together, infinitely resonating.

A hollowed out shape. The outline of a man.

A shape among darkness. Panting, running.

A whisper beyond the doorframe. Ripples of frozen air, a shattered seal. Seven people stare through a window as an unseen hand taps at the glass.

Petrol fires blackening the sky over razed jungles. Mountains levelled under the ant-labour of a thousand slaves that lived and died to produce a single, gleaming shard...

Blood hangs in ghostly shapes amid the dark waters of a ravine. Curious trout follow the trail and discover a body -- gore streams from a barbaric crater, where there was once an eye.

An officer of the Pious Order knocks twice on the door of an apartment in Mircea's ever-dwindling Arts District. The person inside does not answer, too busy throwing everything they own onto the fire in the hearth -- the smell of burning paper and plastic.

Some weeks ago, sweat gathered on his bald head under the strap of a forehead lantern. Broad hands delicately protected by latex gloves, he rummages through the back rooms of the abandoned Essilk No. 3, hoping for a bolt of stained fabric.

Beautiful young women with eyes weakened by candlelight tend to each short-lived grub as if it were a princeling.

Deep inside, somewhere in the bloody recesses of your genetics, something primal and long-dormant stirs.

It is the future. Your old asset, aged one hundred years in the five that have elapsed.

Thousands of miles away, sad people in pressed suits wander the cold, hexagonal halls of Satellite Facility B, longing for a pop of colour.

A flicker of light, arranged by the cosmos, as if to wink at you.

An electric shudder passes through the deepest canals of your body. Painless but concerning.

Cicatriz Frontera, La Luz. Fabricators from the Ministry of Cosmonautics present three custom spacesuits for inspection. A young publicist with severely angular hair scans them, then shakes her head and says, 'She'll want one in all purple'.

Only ghosts can pass freely between such crevices.

The receiver buzzes warmly in your hand. In the wiry nerves of the city you just left, ideologies crash against one another like waves. Across the Developed World and beyond, telephones begin to ring...

Collapsing the mind's conscious defences in order to channel raw cosmos into human language.

A senior aide with a mistress he's committed to an asylum for her own protection. A secretary who's been indiscreet with certain carbon copies. An old torturer for the Weeping Eye who was photographed taking an envelope from someone he shouldn't have.

A spiraling column of amber and green lights, twenty stories deep, pulsing as one.

Portofiro at the break of the 60s. A teenage boy sits on his bed and gazes at a full-page magazine ad for a brand new single-play format. The crimson of the disc spellbinds him. Excited thumbs leave sweat prints on the page.

Smuggling the ethereal objects of the subconscious into the physical world.

Communication has been established between the doctor and something within you, real or imagined, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Alone in her apartment, knife under her pillow. She dreads the sound of footsteps approaching her door -- until she learns to recognise his.

Where would I go, if I were me?

Overhead, something stirs. It has been waiting.

Shades from another time move endlessly across the ancient wood, pickling it with nostalgia.

Twelve thousand years ago, the Paleolithic huntress stumbled onto this place much as you just stumbled onto the location in your mind.

Individualism, emotion, even existence dissipates across the full stretch of eternity.

The huntress watches the long, reddish back of a sea mink as it snakes through the water, a thorny lobster still struggling in its jaws. Pups run to the water's edge, yipping with excitement.

150 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 3 of 3