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Woah! The TAXMAN making some serious post-mortem plays!

You know this man is partial to a loaded gun. Given your last encounter, you should be in control of the bullets.

Looking at it does not fill you with positive feelings.

The beloved cosmonaut figurine, ready for takeoff.

The words are firm, despite the gentle trembling that's overtaken her.

"Of course it is."

You feel nothing. This is all part of the big comeback, baby.

Your guts twist in new knots.

She is less certain with every passing hour.

KALEIDOSCOPE wants mere 'info'? Playground stuff. Here she is -- offer to trade her wholesale. Blow the perv's mind.

The Grand Lich of Techno-Fascism. Your target.

This girl is an antenna. A lightning rod.

A communal painting on the courtyard wall of a lunatic asylum.

Better that they don't know you exist at all.

Life is sad. That's the reason. Starts sad, gets sadder.

True dark. No light in the night sky but the dead stars.

You're speaking with its champion soldier. Its glass cannon.

The photograph is hard to look at, but easy to touch. When your fingers find its edges, a kind of strength charges through them.

You shouldn't have kept this photo. You should have left it where you found it, stained in your ally's blood, smashed upon the ground, sealed behind a locked door.

Long-submerged dreams of popstardom float to the surface of your consciousness like drowned corpses.

A melancholic sledgehammer. The musical world would find itself ill-prepared.

Here we go. The spontaneous audition that launched a thousand collabs.

Playing the keyboard in front of her is one thing... singing quite another. No way.

Sing... in front of a mega-talented popstar? Back up, CASCADE, this is far beyond your training.

Because you fear it carries a curse. CASCADE, emissary of failure, death and the plague of human disunion.

Her gaze has both hold and fight. It takes effort to meet it evenly.

The passage engraved 'MID-THIRTIES' is soon to seal itself behind you, magic mountain cave-style.

He's made up his mind.

A high dose of adrenaline from such a small source. You were like that before the world got to you.

Impressive. No way this kid's a board inspector; whoever sent him on this 'mission' is way scarier than any pencil pusher.

He keeps glancing left to right -- nervous, cagey. But he seemed to add that last bit out of a sense of moral duty.

That did not look cool at all.

The sound makes you wince.

Tongue the enemy.

Existential dread is a foreign concept to her. Must be nice.

You imagine her drooling, twitching, brain a fine gruel.

You imagine her screaming soundlessly, both legs blown off and hanging by shredded flesh somewhere above her.

You imagine her crumpled and dead from a stray bullet, blood running down the front of her mirrored sunglasses.

Hopefully a nicotine-addled teenager with expensive taste is what the Lich saw, too.

Gut churn vertigo.

If she survives, she will be the first to be interrogated. They will make an example of her.

The vacant smile hits you like a bag of bricks.

An obnoxious little mirror, well-worth the seven years of bad luck incurred by breaking him.

He's like a laboratory where you can see what you actually think, stripped of all niceties.

Is that the problem? Do you have to fuck your imprint? Is that the only way to resolve the hatred between you?

He's like a laboratory where you can see what you actually think, stripped of all niceties.

You should have never left him unsupervised.

Hope. The possibility of death in hostile rather than friendly hands is presently a comfort.

Seems like a natural for violence.

704 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 10 of 15