The first genuine response you have elicited from him at all.

For a moment, the character disintegrates.

He savours it. Like a sommelier detecting notes of oak and cherry, he swirls the particular kind of death around his mouth.

What was a lie upon utterance may now be a half-truth.

SLOW DECAY IS FOR TEPID DEMOCRACIES. ZERO OUT LICH, THEN MARTYRDOM.

Formal term for one of various conditions that up until a few decades ago were known collectively as dying of old age.

The last refuge of fading intellect. As it prepares to be snuffed out, it hones in on death as both condition and subject matter.

The breath of obsolescence whispers its song. A lullaby of bodily decay.

He is daring you to doubt him further.

There is something you can perceive through his layers, but the form is too opaque to make out.

A different, gelatinous sheen coats the surface of his extruding eyes. Never tears.

Ducts atrophied millenia ago, tongue periodically flicking out to wet the orbs.

His stare is packing all the sympathy of a mass-produced medical device.

Did he actually perceive something in you or is he just trying to scare you?

The smell of nearing death is all over you. Maybe not yours.

He seems bred for observation.

Watching is what he does, it is what he is.

All of life's waiting rooms.

Now. Turn the Sympathetic Stare on him. Look into whatever he has that you have also.

Look at him with a sympathetic stare.

Highly-trained. Blood under the fingernails. Unfamiliar with the cold of the freezer.

The corners of the mouth vibrate pathetically against the rags that stuff it, gagging the scream in its throat.

The day hasn't even begun, and already his hands are dripping with the blood of your sometime-asset.

And he wore the same imperturbable smile as he forced his hand down Karolina's throat.

His hands are dripping with the blood of your asset.

It's an extinction level event for your crew if Karolina finds out he's here. You cannot let her see him.

Your asset loses control over herself in ways no one can predict.

The spectacular in-theatre eruption of psychic capsules, a thousand months of nightmares unspooling in one instant.

He's known from the beginning.

It is happening. The pain just hasn't hit yet.

Breathe.

ZERO OUT THE GRAND LICH OF TECHNO-FASCISM.

He knows, but he does not necessarily know you know. This smallest of advantages you can retain.

Your adversary's grudging acknowledgement is the greatest compliment you can receive.

No attempt to deflect or deny. He takes it all into himself like a landslide, generous and remorseless.

A genius of pain.

Shattering even the faintest confidentiality at the last moment. You are now exposed on every level possible.

That voice. It wafts out to you from some obscure recess in your memory.

No matches found in the facial archives, and yet the voice...

A natural intensity of gaze. The eyes that weigh you up do so coldly, openly, and with genuine curiosity.

Wearing the same imperturbable smile.

This is him. You are talking to the man who tortured your asset with his own hands and ruined her mind.

The sound of his voice stirs some vague primal discomfort.

A natural intensity of gaze. The eyes that weigh you up do so coldly, openly, and with genuine curiosity.

By 'ill'... does he mean 'sick'? As in, you and your Crew?

This is not a man who is dying. Something, however, is very wrong with him.

Not dying, already dead.

You are not ill, but you are surrounded on all sides by death. Maybe it's the same thing.

Profound indifference exudes from him.

... Because they should've spread out to cover off potential threats.

Checks