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A gun kicks twice. A girl's scream cut short, as if violently unplugged. Blood splatters the pink fabric of a plush dolphin.

Outside, closer. The beating of an impossible heart.

The inner walls of the temple sparkle with gems, a million insect eyes. Blue-tongued priestesses hum in the language of rock. Their voices cause tectonic shudders in the villages beyond.

Ahead of you, futures shear off each other.

The hand of the oscilloscope twitches in recognition, giddy for its chorus.

This is strange, wrong. A mutation.

Her mother kept pointing to the birds which circled below, then the valley beneath the cloud. But the little girl was only interested in looking up.

'Take that thing off', a stocky woman demands. 'You're not helping your case at all'.

Could these be the sensitive, invisible fingers you've always felt, hovering darkly above your days?

The slowly collapsing mind of an old political philosopher, violently working through its own contradictions.

As the sun smears across rooftops, a man with a briefcase full of carefully-folded socks sits on a metal bench. He sits there for a long time, considering the tangle of alleyways that surround him.

A rough voice down a splintering phone line: 'No silly cunts! CASCADE only, person to person! CASCADE or nothing!'

You see him, boots braced on a trembling deck. His vessel noses out past the breakwater, into the Noscorrentes sea. Behind, Portofiro dissolves into a golden blur beneath a pale sky.

Like you never even had it -- only dreamed that you once dreamed of having it.

Time slows as the world falls towards her. The descent is still too fast, but just long enough for a single thought: 'Why am I doing this?'

The sound of boots, the warmth of people and a simple, stupid, stubborn hope.

A woman leans in close over a monochrome plastic cup. The lights of the factory are harsh, and her eyes water. She licks the tip of her tiny paintbrush -- a few hairs in width -- and carefully applies a dollop of green paint to the polycarbonate wolf's eyeball.

Tempo had never begged for anything in his life. The words felt unnatural, covered in blood and spit, the coke long-faded, an odd fit for his last: 'Stop. Please. I don't want to die.'

A jagged mouth pressed against phone receiver: 'It's CASCADE or nothing! And you tell her -- if we pull this one off, all will be forgiven!'

Already the outlines of the whole picture are beginning to shimmer. Your fingers tingle at the chance to fill them in.

A child sits cross-legged, giggling at 'the funny man' on-screen. Her parents look on, glad she's there and not caught up in any trouble -- not realising how much their overprotectiveness will cause in years to come.

Hunched over the phone, desperately thumping his half-flaccid cock while teenagers laugh just a few feet away. Duchess' voice in his ear, claiming that it wants him.

Neither particle nor wave, but some other fundamental entity, uniting and penetrating all things at once.

Old Viúdas shifted around him. There was a route traced for him, but he veered off. Around the corner, a car kept waiting, engine ticking. In the trunk: carpet and old rope.

The huntress balks. The fear inside her is the germ of that which one day will become religion -- an intuition of powers existing beyond, outside her world.

The huntress kills a boar, but instead of eating it, she sets fire to the massive corpse and watches the smoke ascend -- an offering to the superstructures which she can only conceive of as Gods.

A pair of blue boxer briefs hang from a washline in Besanoble. A plain dress shirt crumpled on a cold bedroom floor in Landau. Somewhere in Treffe, a man leans on a marble counter, breath shallow from exhaustion.

Hair in a silk wrap, eyes closed, hands clasped, she mutters under her breath for a full minute. Her husband is already asleep, used to this.

A soft click as he places his briefcase on the cobblestone, stops to clean his glasses. He replaces them, blinking up at the aerotrams and the birds circling beneath. He smiles.

The man kills the engine and waits, watching the morning mist part like a curtain. Slowly, the array emerges: twelve slender, glinting giants, shoulder to shoulder -- all facing north.

She smooths her skirt as she stands, slipping from her desk and walking over to an ancient mainframe -- LITOST's altar.

A recent darkening night. Dr. Gonza waits in his office chair. Unable to show his usual bravado, unable even to say 'Board', he surrenders to the sadistic mercies of whoever and whatever comes through his door.

A tuk-tuk pulls up on the dock. A young woman peers through her window. Two men step out, and walk towards the houseboat. Something is wrong.

A slender finger slips into the black curls of a phone cord and twirls them around itself... suddenly it pulls, and your breath cuts short.

Two-hundred chisels working in rhythm. Rock chips gather on the masons' eyelashes; they blink, dust falls, and slowly a face blinks back in the hardstone opposite them.

A man in a hardhat and blue vest finishes the last twist of his screwdriver and gets up from where he's knelt, knees-down, on the pavement. His fingers brush the dolphin on the way up -- for luck.

Inside the Containment Vessel, the entity protests. You have brought along the Small Controller.

Inside the Entity Containment Vessel, a mass stirs.

A belt hangs off the railing, the area is cordoned off.

Living... living and round... living and round and within...

Here, the foundation of a house -- two middle-aged women inside, silent as they pack up furniture that belonged to their mother.

A stolen keyboard watches the underside of the thief's bed. Alone but not forgotten, it develops rust.

A loose wind rattles the window fittings in a long-deserted building.

Thud, thud, thud. The War Drum's crowd thunders its beat.

The last words she said to him replay in her head.

Tempo grins with her.

T+16:34: PERDA DE TODOS OS DADOS.

Beyond the apartment's walls, this girl has a form of family, friends, classroom enemies, unfinished homework. None of them will know her again as she was.

146 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual