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All sense of humour is gone. All he wants is to go chasing after those meds.

It's pointless to argue. You won't be stopping him.

The stories affect them as much as any listener. They reopen the wound with every telling.

A leaden silence descends. You have touched on something that should not have been touched upon.

He will not lower it. Defiance keeps it aloft.

In your gut you already know what's coming.

Mild generalized discomfort. You have pointed out the elephant in the room.

A shudder passes through you from the sheer pleasure of his company.

He's getting worked up again. This group has no inhibitions surrounding public arousal.

If orgasm is 'the little death', then death is the big orgasm.

The dolphin is inside your head. Pressing its blubber against your skull.

Everyone but you.

An open door at the end of a long, silent corridor.

Oh no. Here we go.

You'd say 'eerie'. An eerie moment.

Do not tell him.

The words alone have struck awe into his heart.

Excrutiatingly. Robotically.

The suicide clock ticks one stroke closer to midnight.

A curious intimation that, maybe... you have found your place. This is what you are meant to be doing. What you should have been doing all along.

Show it to EMTERR's spineless junior negotiator. He can't ignore this!

Your skin crawls at the girlish sound, bubbling out of a woman who it doesn't at all seem to belong to.

Your friend's little vanities seem especially hopeless now.

Feel that. Life and death trembling beneath you, a single gram of pressure between them.

Light shines for the first time on territories it has never before reached.

Stop this now. Human beings were never meant to do this.

By now you are an expert in speaking to the non-responsive and the absent.

There is, however, a response from within.

A sudden urge leaps within you -- you want to see the sky again.

You are deep in it this time. So deep you can almost touch dream.

This game's getting played, even with a handicapped substitute.

Plaintext. No cipher. Good start.

The mere sight of HOLOCENE's handwriting incurs a shiver of post-codebreaking trauma.

A shudder runs through you, as if brushing against a frayed wire.

A little bell inside goes 'ding-ding'.

Don't look at the clock. Don't look. Don't...

That did it. She's becoming hysterical.

A scenario she has been forced to create in order to ignore a heartbreaking truth.

She can only ignore it for so long.

A childhood boogeyman, suddenly and horribly real.

A scenario she has been forced to create in order to ignore a heartbreaking truth.

No matter how terrible reality might be, it's better than the not-knowing.

No longer can she live with the burden.

Or dumped in a mass grave...

A chill runs up your spine. The beginnings of an uncanny convergence.

This is one pissed off monkey. You may not have the edge like last time...

But imagining that it is could certainly make them less intimidating, at least in your head.

The monkey stares you down. His adorably well-fitting shirt does nothing to tamper the threat.

Effortless. Nothing but grim inevitability and dawning madness now.

704 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 4 of 15