Every once in a while he accidentally wanders close to the edges of his limited experience in the world, and when he does a deep and primal fear enters his eyes.

Not nearly as confident his put-on persona as he pretends.

He shrinks even as he is suggesting.

Fucker of mothers.

He stays at the bar until they kick him out, and then wanders around town until they let him in again.

It's conceivable he's even convinced them to let him sleep here.

It's not obliviousness, at least not primarily-- there's something else holding him back..

Fear. One foot back in that place, and his fantasies about being the original will collapse on him.

A tiny reflected Hershel stares back at you, framed in hair.

Like a well-scrubbed bathroom tile.

The paleolithic huntress exhales as she fondles the precious river stone, the primal superstition inside her calmed -- for the moment.

Smile of feral victory.

It's like watching all the worst parts of yourself bound up in a male body -- and an ugly one, to boot.

The last time you spoke, there was a hint of desperation in how he insisted he was the original. Not anymore. Now he's had days to indoctrinate the idea into himself.

And still no pants on him.

He has made it clear he will betray you first chance he gets. A treacherousness so overt, it is somehow easier to deal with.

The vicinity displays a marked absence of 'new friends'.

When he runs up against the limits of his memory, the fantasy threatens collapse.

Like an epic romance from mythology, your hatred of Eszti echoes through your incarnations, undying.

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

Nothing short of an in-theatre liability and, what's worse, one that's auto-generating false lore in real time.

It's in the air. In the smell of your sweat, in the rhythm of your breathing.

Like a well-scrubbed bathroom tile.

The paleolithic huntress exhales as she fondles the precious river stone, the primal superstition inside her calmed -- for the moment.

It's never going to work like that. You have to believe.

This tradition is sacred to him.

Still no pants, though.

It's not just earnestness... what fills his voice is a kind of anti-irony. A wilful, forced belief.

And below, the abyss of doubt.

It's exactly the way those kids learn the lore from their wolf show -- fiction imbibed with a seriousness that outstrips anything in real life.

Nearly the entire sub-thirty population of the city, most of whom are hooked on Luzian fashion.

The importer persona is simply not deep enough to occupy his whole personality, so it multiplies by nature, trying to fill the empty space where a person should be.

Instead of a vegetable, you've created a man in a perpetual psychotic break. And now he's robbing random pedestrians.

There's nothing you can't get this guy to do, as long as it's for socks. He's a menace.

And still, no pants.

He knows he's a loose end, and he knows what happens to loose ends.

Every time that door has opened over the past few days it has been another Opera assassin. He has been killed countless times over the past few days.

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

On further inspection -- physically trained and capable of doing damage.

Seems like a natural for violence.

Her gaze performs a quick triangulation -- blood smear, cut palm, you.

As if an equation is forming in which you are subtracted.

Her blood a black streak on the stone, already starting to dry.

You are surrounded by representations of his mind, in all its facets and incarnations.

It is not.

The contact between stone and open flesh was a transference, an attempt to gain something that she does not have.

Her hands were not there to pray. She was trying to absorb the essence of that stone.

Desperate yearning.

Leatherback turtles often emerge from unknown battles in the abyssal depths.

A sinuous rope scar wound around his arm and across his shoulderblade, he screams.

Checks