One postcard, no fax. The meeting place, your home turf. Before you is an operant gone way off script.

He's not playing with house money. He's got his own chips down.

Sounds pretty 'off the books'... Eszti's going to be even more mad at you now.

Worth a shot.

News to him.

Of course he does. Perv factor off the charts.

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

TYPICAL BOURGEOIS APPROACH TO THE DAY'S LABOUR -- COMMITTED ABSENTEEISM.

He's tense around the shoulders. Twitchy at the edges.

A professional courtesy. He knows your real name. You gave it to his colleague under extreme duress.

And doomed spies.

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

Whatever you say, do not say 'Hershel'.

The key appears to lie within the mangled plastic of the fracture-point. You'll need to prune a few millimetres before what's left can fit together.

You should do this kind of work more often. It suits you.

No suture-line. No scar. Only two little droplets of liquid solidifying as one.

Covered in white, gooey spiderwebs of glue.

AN IDOL TO MINDLESS CONSUMERISM, NOW BECOME WHAT IT IS.

It cools in real time, re-solidifying before your eyes.

That thing's not surviving a gunshot.

It emanates the desperation of the battlefield, the ugly cunning of guerillas fabricating weapons of war from out of nothing but saliva and bolts.

You can hear the prayers of the tribespeople echoing up from the pass:

The tape on the grip is slick and uneven in your hands, the barrel heavy.

May death be at your back, and may the stars direct your hand.

Looking at it does not fill you with positive feelings.

Gripping the barrel in a plastic vice.

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

Brother death. Salud.

Simple: the strike of a metal pin ignites the bullet's firing cartridge. Having nowhere else to go, the energy from that contained explosion pushes the bullet out of the gun's muzzle.

All found among the junk in your near vicinity.

See? The Opera provides.

The inside of your skull lights up like a cheap arcade cabinet -- flashing, loud, deeply satisfying.

From the profoundest, most autistic depths of your self, a sense of universal harmony and order wells up.

Like a guerilla fighter in the depths of this human jungle, you have gathered piece by piece the tools for your campaign.

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

Reno's beloved model train.

One of the prized Wolf Cups.

The techno-fascist fuckwand. Possibly last used by a monkey.

The beloved cosmonaut figurine, ready for takeoff.

The plastic is to craft the feed mechanism. Without that, what you have on your hands is a one-shot zipgun. A dangerous toy for delinquent teenagers, not a weapon to carry in-theatre.

The mould that emerges looks... less than impermeable.

A clotted, sickly rainbow sludge, haunted by the tenuous remains of discernible shapes.

Bubble of molten gun pop out between the corners in the plywood.

Poppers. Squirming motes in the visual field. Idiocy and pleasure.

Unmade back into synthetic polymer, the primordial soup from which a race of anti-lifeforms might emerge.

Don't start thinking that, after your last success, this will be child's play. Model trains can get complex -- it's serious craftsmanship.

It can be finnicky, but you should have the nimbleness of finger to deal with that.

The perfect place for your first attempt at improvised weapon manufacture.

Nestled among the camera gear, a black cardboard box with a red band immediately catches your eye: SIDEWINDER 9mm.

Or they're Constanz's: Another manifestation of the murky impulse that got her mixed up with your people in the first place.

Checks