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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.

Maybe a neuro-degenerative thing. Someone had to help her get dressed, probably.

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.

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.

An off-hand reference to Portofiro's colonial past.

A fighter's chin.

Portofiro as a warped mirror image -- re-annexed Luzian lands reflecting against this island's precarious independence.

Same place those old pilots came from, different reality.

The Tenantries of Saint Ulwen, re-annexed in the early 80s.

A particularly brutal annexation, the Tenantries were razed almost to the ground. What remains is a shrunken capital surrounded by non-arable land.

She is either well rehearsed or uncaring.

The irreverent self-image of a trickster people, eternal underdogs.

A fanatic's certainty, forged through sheer trauma.

The final stage of colonisation -- the oppressed become strange parodies of the people that colonised them.

Raised in a military boarding school while her family disappeared into camps marked on no map.

Snarky. Begging to be crushed.

Its smell is the same as all port cities -- damp concrete, diesel exhaust, drifting mats of golden-brown sargassum.

Up here you smell only pine needles, ozone.

Get in her head.

The burning, twitching gaze she fixes on you transmits the message with telepathic clarity -- you will not distract her -- she is onto you.

Those little uncontrollable movements of hers will grow up to become acts of violence.

The posture suggests prayer, but a violent one -- every muscle clenched and quivering.

On the statue, a smear of fresh blood from her hand. Open cut on dirty stone.

That stone is smooth. She did it to herself.

She was part of the trio standing in front of the Housing Campaign.

Her costume is a stylized but unemblazoned piece of Luzian military history.

She is disguised as herself.

Most likely a mid-rank Weeping Eye asset.

The air quivers alongside her movements.

Itching to commit violence.

Out-stared. A small tactical victory.

Though she speaks fluent Illuminado, she is not Luzian.

Clean diagonal slit. Superficial. Self inflicted.

ALL GROUND CONCEDED TO WAR CRIMINALS AND ROTTING MICROBES. THE ERA IS LOST.

Skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 145 of 197