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668 checks

A painter's nightmare, etched in bodies and fire.

You picture the words in bold on the cover of the world's least enthusiastic travel brochure.

The fleeting shapes of ghost-words flit through your vision.

Terrifying sterility. The inherent cruelty of human curiosity.

Rapturous fantasies of masturbatory death overtake them.

Your controller's razor-edged voice comes to you, cold light from an infinitely distant star.

The immense, blubbery mass of a manatee's lower half appears in your mind, utterly out of proportion with the svelte female torso that protrudes from it like a tumour.

A sunken grey cunt lost amid vast expanses of rubbery skin.

Anglerfish smile. Predatory. Testing. Infinitely patient.

A card would have been a good start. One reading 'Condolences We Met'.

Reality itself is the text, and you the dyslexic third-grader. It lies before you, open for perusal, and yet utterly impenetrable.

A small bird flutters onto his mind's shoulder, catching him completely by surprise.

What had been foreshadowed was significantly darker. Everything post-extraction is, in a sense, already an unlikely best-case scenario.

The answer comes to you in the moment -- he's always been a frustrated poet first, spy second.

Sinking into quicksand thought.

You can almost hear the emotional blast doors slamming shut.

'Modern' in this context doesn't mean 'new'. It refers to an old future, as obsolete as the buildings that represent it.

Man-alley symbiosis, neither doing great.

You can almost hear the emotional blast doors slamming shut.

No dreams of peace, justice or equality -- only those of a well-oiled machine.

Life is a palliative measure.

The last impression you register is the brush hairs scraping ineffectually over a layer of sad decrepitude that is not exactly filth.

Tomorrow, the dust will have spread again. Objects will erode, and total amount of dust in the world will have increased by an infinitesimal amount.

'Nice Campaign' certainly sounds better than 'laboratory of urban decay'.

The way you phrased that makes it sound like you're in possession of a knock-off.

It's you, but from a bad dream.

He's staring at the sky like it's his first time seeing it.

From this altitude, it looks like Portofiro has been caught in a web of dark yarn.

He wanted to meet his nemesis head on. He wanted it to have a face.

Tarsier shaped! A little curled-up tarsier!

He looks like PSEUDOPOD.

If you want to eulogise him properly, use someone else's words.

Not exactly eulogistic material, but better than anything you can produce.

The boat has been set alight, the chants intoned, the cuts made on the body to attract the vultures. Some kind of ritual action performed to obtain closure from death.

His aura sketched in lightning.

Hemorrhoidal anus, disabled bird, squiggly line of undefined intent.

A jagged cathedral, wreathed in smoke and flames, quivering against a bruised sky.

The rituals of a bureaucratic autopsy.

All self-perpetuating cycles are a form of the hunt. Addiction, anxiety, conquest. The Chase, the Flight.

The glow of the candles' collected light reflecting on the awning, their warmth cutting through the cold.

Perhaps the mountain will keep a little of your voice. For company.

Dormant stars waiting for ignition.

It seems they lack an artist's spirit.

No one in this establishment has a chance at understanding your art. Perhaps no one does.

You at least deserve to be judged by someone with an eye that has been trained by years of experience.

This promotes the analysis of soul-work as if it were a logic puzzle. It's pity-inducing.

There should never have been any doubt about that. You are possessed with art.

Scancions, used to represent stressed and unstressed syllables. Prosodists have fought over whether they're worth anything for millenia.

Did you hear it? The song in your head? 'Twas the sacred art of versecraft, inaccessible to all but the most radiant of hearts.

668 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 4 of 14