A platonic loathing, based purely on musical taste. If placed in a jar together they would kill each other out of spite.

From this distance, Portofiro is just a cluster of dim lights in early daylight. Mist clings to it.

So not technically zero. Cool.

The problem has been weighed carefully from the perspective of one who knows themselves disposable.

A lighting strike that finds you when it had the whole earth to choose from.

You'd remember a name that stupid.

The rapture. Biggest cortisol hit the body can deliver and take, a knife bisecting the brain in the wrong direction, then -- silence.

No silence. Only the Eternal Tone, the tinnitus ringing that will play on until the end of life.

For better or for worse, he's pegged us and Deaf Romero as spiritual gäng of some sort.

You have merely been living 'Hearing Impaired Romero'. Time to crank the volume.

The boat thing.

The sickly-green horizon of the Noscorrentes Sea encircles the lonely radio vessel 360 degrees.

Self-annihilation gäng. We must respect it.

Tanka Hônen survived his assassination of East Kodian opposition leader Reido Saiji, whom he shot twice with a homemade firearm at a train station opening ceremony.

Archive yields zero results, bar a few unsolved mysteries where the perpetrator was never uncovered.

A flicker of hope.

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

No judgement, just a fact -- you have never lived through the bloody 'loose ends' phase of a spy network collapse.

Another little reminder. The subtlest of knife-twists.

Zero Out Lich is the primary objective. Survival and extraction of lead Operant, secondary. Survival of local assets, tertiary.

RADIAN's willingness to die mid-assignment has been repeatedly confirmed, and highlighted in theatre reports as 'likely ideational'.

Self-annihilation gäng. We must respect it.

He's never going to let you forget that you alone came out unscathed the last time.

It's your inner steel he is seeing. Disregard any criticism.

A hot fragrance of mango and mountain grass blooms through your air canals.

This is a known fact about you?

In certain cultures, a final sacrament offered to terminal patients and prisoners about to be executed.

Fully recognisable. No pretence of cover. Your credibility as lead plummets in real time.

'Fear', 'lack', and even 'discomfort' are concepts utterly foreign to this animal.

Show prey you are predator.

His standard of appearance suggests 'gambler on an eternal losing streak'.

Evidence of this 'training' is yet to manifest.

And what was it that killed the cat...?

He's really broken the intellectual 'bank' with that one.

EVERYTHING HAS TO DO WITH POST-HISTORICAL MATERIALISM. EVEN THE WHISKERED SHIRKER.

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.

The soft, airy fur seems to defy gravity.

Pet the cat.

There's something you should be doing, but you're not.

It finds you wanting, but how?

This cat is the apötheosis of cats, the teleological endpoint of a hundred millennia of cat-development. We cannot simply 'pet' it.

As though to suggest: There's a lot more where that came from.

Big, if true.

The wall of glass behind him is quite something.

POST-HISTORICAL MATERIALISM NEEDS NO PHOTOS OF IT -- EVERYONE CAN SEE FOR THEMSELVES HOW GREAT IT IS.

SUB-LEAD? UTTERLY UNACCEPTABLE.

Danger.

How about a self-portrait, or a still shot of a beautiful landscape?

Don't point it at yourself.

Checks