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You know the kind: vaguely colonial, full of misinformation and the promise of erotic adventures with cannibals in far off jungles.

Exploitation money. Reserved for those willing to undergo serious bodily harm for what they do.

One by one, your crew was picked off while you were whisked away to safety.

RADIAN is an audio engineer. That scene you walked in on looked nothing like his line of work.

Conclusion: You are speaking to a phantom.

Perhaps, but behind it all there is something else, far simpler -- the power to pay someone to have a medical emergency for your viewing pleasure.

Prognosis: almost identical to the one Dr. Gonza gave you. Either they are onto something or these men have the same kind of brain parasite.

He dismisses it with that special bitterness reserved for smothering dreams that hurt.

Payment. The price of Ramses' nervous system.

No wonder it's still here, people with that kind of money don't shop in the Bazaar.

This is a cat. You are upset about the corpse situation and you are taking it out on a cat.

You're going to go insane with feline apathy.

Squished and bounced around in the bag, they've come un-stuck from the textbook's pages.

Sniff test determines you may be dehydrated.

A work of psychology. SILHOUETTE's been honing her craft in her free time.

No boots in the house. A tidy, meticulous occupant.

Assuming an eight-digit combination, you're looking at a hundred million possibilities. Rounded up by one.

But what's the order? And there's four digits. Which number's repeated? You're not just going to guess, right?

Surely you weren't anticipating otherwise? That's ghost 'fetti.

A Pocket Combatant -- a type of miniature army which reached its sales height in the 50s. Recalled, discontinued, sued into oblivion when the figures were found to be made of lead.

Your mind rebels at the thought. Zero out this uncanny monster.

Abandon all logic. You're about to enter the Poet's Domain.

Very vague. Almost... secretive.

Older than anyone else there by at least ten years. Small eyes in a smaller frame, looking out from her corner with cold intelligence.

Into the dustbin it goes.

One of many such things -- non-choices, counter-factuals, pebbles in the mind's shoe -- that make up a life.

You can feel your own sanity pulling away from you, as though on the cusp of a black hole, stretching, spinning...

Probability of a future encounter: 0.000006%. Then again, the odds of your trajectories intersecting as they did were far lower.

There is no correlation between mental petitions and the fusion of distant bodies. Praying is a recursive loop.

'YOU BUT FROM A DREAM'. The words on the red disc that was unceremoniously stripped from you.

His information was good once before. There's no reason to think it won't be again.

He's not seriously suggesting...

You feel that subcranial itch coming on, the one that longs to draw little lines between the glowing dots inside your head, until your mind smiles at the picture that emerges.

A cost-benefit analysis. The probability of determining the why of him is near zero. Conversely, the utility of him is high.

The strange fax. The one that was waiting for you at Foto 24.

The girl. The paper heart.

You had all the pieces, you only needed to slot them together.

In other words, he was in three places simultaneously, each separated by thousands of kilometres. A physical impossibility, unless...

He can't be serious. The gastrointestinal system isn't designed to make those kinds of call.

The dialectic assumes a predictable trajectory. It does fail to account for one thing.

Knowledge, exactly what you're lacking just now.

Making inroads with his persona. Competent in-theatre, at least for this period of play.

Now speaking proudly of the stock he earlier disparaged.

In his baroque hierarchy of shame, 'cool' falls just under 'replayer', the cardinal sin.

In his baroque hierarchy of shame, being 'cool' falls just under being a 'replayer', whatever that is.

Incapable of competing with Luzian media on the most basic neurological level.

This merchandise isn't 'smuggled' at all -- they're government-sanctioned from the Luzian Cultural Ministry.

The most important history is the one that never makes it into the books, but defines how those books are written -- or aren't.

Crucially, such a process would result in an empty disc... like the one you found on PSEUDOPOD's body.

Fanatical, biased, not to be taken literally.

885 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 16 of 18