A.Journal

Checks

9,179 checks

Legendary

A faint but all-encompassing shiver passes through the old man like a tree-shaking wind. Then it's gone -- the tree resettles, a few leaves less than before.

Legendary

That was his last show of fear, now he sucks it all back into himself.

Challenging

Behind you, a hundred black-and-white faces regard you with the sublime indifference of the dead.

Medium

He seems to be perplexed by his own question.

Challenging

It's hardly news. The Opera did not drag you back into the field to live a long and productive life.

Legendary

Meat dragged out of the freezer starts going bad the minute it is done thawing.

Challenging

The images come to you, one by one.

Challenging

Prison, torture, madness, a bullet to the temple. A variety of fates, and history repeating itself.

Medium

Unfortunately, he's right.

Formidable

No sense in lying at this point.

Formidable

CARVE THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLICS INTO HIS MEMORY AND HIS FOREHEAD.

Legendary

Understanding dawns on his features, and with it something like peace.

Formidable

An echo from your first meeting with the prisoner.

Formidable

No mocking inflection in his voice. He's asking honestly.

Challenging

He's really outdoing us in the mystique department here. We're going to need a sick line before we slab him.

Formidable

Best to engage your subject first. Get into his soul. You can't rush quality.

Legendary

Enough fooling around. Drop the false livery. Let the Operant Bureau's anthem play him off the world-stage.

Formidable

A pointless series of little gestures meant somehow to communicate death-readiness.

Medium

Seeing something beyond, or absent from, his immediate surroundings.

Legendary

Each new sentence is appended to the puzzle of the preceding ones.

Formidable

SUBVERSIVE MURMURINGS INTENDED ONLY TO CONFUSE THE PEOPLE'S SPY. DISREGARD.

Challenging

The feeling of a rug being ripped from under your feet. Beneath there is no floor, only void.

Legendary

He is the hiss in the tapped phone, the thud of boots in the hallway, the unmarked car and the form letter to next of kin with the bill for the bullet.

Formidable

HERE COMES TECHNO-FASCIST DAREDEVIL.

Formidable

As the old man speaks, a little bubble of doubt rises up from your subconscious and bursts through the surface of your awareness.

Easy

Your would-be asset Ignatz wasn't far off. All's not right in the enemy camp.

Easy

Imprint-on-imprint violence. You're in the middle of an old mind attacking itself.

Legendary

You suddenly picture Melita, Luzian features behind her clipped, trained Kohilan accent, smiling to herself as she manipulates you from a control room just across the Noscorrentes.

Challenging

Stop, stop, stop. This is getting phantasmagoric. Your controller is right where she belongs, in Novessa, five-thousand kilometres away.

Challenging

Stay calm. Even if the Opera's purposes dovetail with those of the Weeping Eye, it makes no difference to your mission.

Legendary

Overdetermined, like so much else in the smashed and leaking world.

Medium

This old fool just wants to live. He's just trying to get under your skin.

Challenging

It makes no sense -- Melita wouldn't have you jumping through hoops to obtain the Lich's itinerary if she had a direct line to the Weeping Eye. And yet...

Legendary

Simple, obvious. The only way it could be.

Legendary

With that, one of the final loose pieces slots into place.

Heroic

The sacrifice. Centrepiece in a ritual orchestrated around it, but not for it.

Challenging

More than him. His face registers nothing, not even the acknowledgement that he has been shot.

Medium

A rustling sound, like a bag of dry leaves.

Legendary

A soul vacating the premises.

Easy

What was that about a 'body double'?

Medium

A useless death. A small, fleshy monument to futility.

Legendary

ONE TECHNO-FASCIST DOWN. THREE HUNDRED MILLION REMAIN.

Challenging

Just fuck his body off the cliff. Let the boars have him.

Medium

There is no 'occasion'. Nothing has happened. All is right with the world.

Legendary

Say the line again. It will hit harder this time, for sure.

Legendary

Maybe you can redeem your line from earlier. Maybe this will tie it all together.

Medium

No parade, and no funeral, either.

Legendary

Sky burial by seabirds. The gulls will pick the scant papery skin from his bones.

Medium

Milk fills the glass of his eyes.

Legendary

Distrust. Then relief. Then an even greater mistrust.