A flint catches in your chest -- a stubborn spark flashing where you thought only ashes remained.

You see it: the bullet's perfect trajectory, and blood arcing in sunlight. One shot rippling across time. History wobbles like a drunk on a quay.

Static skitters across your palms as a thought dawns: history is littered with failures.

You feel the warmth of shared blood and smokes, in the aftermath. Heartbeats humming in tandem; every small, defiant smile its own flag.

You've been outplayed. By an asset.

Act like this was all part of The Plan.

The technical kind. The payphone is compromised.

A wizard. Of course. The beard was a dead giveaway.

Ramses is one of us. He's gäng. If he stumbles, we catch him. If you stumble, he catches you. That's the deal.

It's a simple calculation: company inevitably increases entropy.

He won't let you down.

Every vowel turned into a dipthong -- umistakeable Azzurri accent.

That's a call-and-answer routine, also known as a sphynx. He asks a question to which there is only one right answer.

If you're wrong, that means you're talking to an oblivious civilian -- you can just hang up.

Your gaze turns instinctively toward the ginkyo plaza.

On the ground, a pool of golden tears.

All across the world, subjects of the Illuminated Empire are looking at trees like this, and thinking of home.

To redeem the failures of your past.

Your blood beats a kick-drum rhythm behind your ear.

Ask the paleolithic part of your mind: Would the ancient huntress stalk the megalosloth with this band?

In the auditorium of a decrepit movie theatre, a young woman staves off sleep with a continual drip of artificial dreams...

In an unmoored houseboat, windows lit with strobing lights, a bearded man prepares once more to sacrifice his body for the sake of prophecy...

In the bottom of an old rocket silo, a man in an eccentric bathrobe waits in his messy room for someone to save him from his own thoughts...

In the spare room on the ground floor of a twenty-four hour photo shop, a fleshy vessel that used to contain a man waits for someone to breathe new life into it...

In a small recording studio deep in the Housing Campaign, a man slips his arms into an old military-style coat. He pops a tablet of pure L-theanine. On the desk nearby, a brown paper bag, reinforced with ultra-thin foil, waits for the head that will unleash its power.

COLD OR HOT THE WORLD CAN'T STOP FOR US.

Wrong, that shit should be forefront.

You have today. Make of it what you will. Tomorrow, it ends.

The days are gone, only hours remain.

High pressure coming in from the Noscorrentes means cooler and wetter times ahead. Questions remain as to when this change will come, best to prepare for all scenarios.

Headlines like 'Chapter 4: Your last chance to stay legal' and 'Chapter 7: Your Conscience and Me' immediately jump out at you.

Law-abiding individuals are treated with the utmost derision. If this book could Wang them all, it would.

If you spit on the law, then the Gun Saint has given you his absolution in advance.

Across time and space you feel another intelligence reaching out to you: insane, methodical, murderous.

The precarity of anything resulting from these materials is self-evident.

A fair amount of this stuff is lying around the workbench in Foto 24. You have definitely seen sheets of plywood, work tools, and a broom there.

Best place to start would be Foto 24. There's got to be some of this stuff lying around there somewhere -- it's a working photo lab, after all.

Mathematical and yet crude, the lines display a profoundly un-sober competence.

The spirit of Wang reaches out to you through the pages of the book. It doesn't just want the gun to be built, but to be used. On somebody.

'Machine Gun King', if your limited Tsunese serves you well.

Almost certainly a pseudonym.

Not exactly how you would be best described.

Very you, in other words.

You may have his permission, but he probably didn't intend to extend his hospitality to you showing up in the middle of the night.

You don't climb so much as glide; feet hovering over each wooden step, the chorded muscle of your biceps hauling most of your body's weight up the ladder.

A TRUE MAN OF THE PEOPLE WOULD OPEN HIS HOME AND HIS PROPERTY TO HIS COMRADE.

His tiny mind is blown.

He's doing nothing.

WRONG -- COMMUNISM IS OMNIPRESENT!

Belly sexy. Man wrong.

Checks