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373 checks

What's this disc doing to you?

No... you're coming home.

Gunshot echo. A cold splash. Together, infinitely resonating.

A hollowed out shape. The outline of a man.

A shape among darkness. Panting, running.

A click, a woman in a rented apartment picks up a ringing phone. On the other side, a man with a deep voice utters words that will make her consider ending her life tonight.

Voiceless, limbs tied to a chair, both eyes pushed all the way in. Frantically, they trace the word 'help' on the roof of their mouth with what remains of their tongue.

A whisper beyond the doorframe. Ripples of frozen air, a shattered seal. Seven people stare through a window as an unseen hand taps at the glass.

A rapid montage of people entering and exiting this room over a series of months. All of them wear loose-fitting outfits in mismatched colours.

Petrol fires blackening the sky over razed jungles. Mountains levelled under the ant-labour of a thousand slaves that lived and died to produce a single, gleaming shard...

Blood hangs in ghostly shapes amid the dark waters of a ravine. Curious trout follow the trail and discover a body -- gore streams from a barbaric crater, where there was once an eye.

An officer of the Pious Order knocks twice on the door of an apartment in Mircea's ever-dwindling Arts District. The person inside does not answer, too busy throwing everything they own onto the fire in the hearth -- the smell of burning paper and plastic.

Some weeks ago, sweat gathered on his bald head under the strap of a forehead lantern. Broad hands delicately protected by latex gloves, he rummages through the back rooms of the abandoned Essilk No. 3, hoping for a bolt of stained fabric.

Beautiful young women with eyes weakened by candlelight tend to each short-lived grub as if it were a princeling.

Concrete and plastic. Droplets on dark air. Voices raised under moulding canopy.

Slick crimson river of parted sinew and cartilage. With the utmost care, two strips of membranous tissue are ripped from the surrounding meat and tensed over a wood tuning peg.

Deep inside, somewhere in the bloody recesses of your genetics, something primal and long-dormant stirs.

The words are just the modern brain attempting to decipher a voice from the ancient, pre-human parts of itself.

Tune in to the sound of death. (Have Ramses play the Death Whistle again.)

A faint bleep on a sonar gone quiet for too long.

A woman, scarf framing her face in muted colours, places a basket of lavash and stuffed grapes by the houseboat door. Her husband, a silent sentinel, nods for her to step back. A thin bridge, beckoning Ramses back.

It is the future. Your old asset, aged one hundred years in the five that have elapsed.

Thousands of miles away, sad people in pressed suits wander the cold, hexagonal halls of Satellite Facility B, longing for a pop of colour.

A flicker of light, arranged by the cosmos, as if to wink at you.

An electric shudder passes through the deepest canals of your body. Painless but concerning.

Tune in to the building's frequency.

You hear a few chords on a guitar, just for a moment.

For a second you think you hear someone singing behind you, but there is nobody there.

A barracks full of small boys, huddled together on a cold floor. An older man reads aloud from a worn and dogeared book. His words echo off the low, tin ceiling.

Cicatriz Frontera, La Luz. Fabricators from the Ministry of Cosmonautics present three custom spacesuits for inspection. A young publicist with severely angular hair scans them, then shakes her head and says, 'She'll want one in all purple'.

Offer a prayer to Deneb.

Below your feet, the prisoner slips in and out of a terrifying dream.

Only ghosts can pass freely between such crevices.

At the Greater Quisach Gymnasium, the bell rings three times: Recreation Period is over. The children file back into the building covered in peeling plaster. The grey play-yard is empty.

The receiver buzzes warmly in your hand. In the wiry nerves of the city you just left, ideologies crash against one another like waves. Across the Developed World and beyond, telephones begin to ring...

The doctor blows onto his tea. A smell of mint rises with the steam.

It's at this moment, as the Paleolithic huntress pinches shut the great aurochs' lower intestine with one hand while with the other she expertly slices the hide around the anus from without, that the boundary is suddenly and fatally crossed. 'What am I doing here?' her brain asks in her own voice, as her head falls back and the terrible weight of sentience descends on her with a roar.

Of course, some possess this to a greater degree than others.

Collapsing the mind's conscious defences in order to channel raw cosmos into human language.

A solitary anchorite in a cell of aluminium and carbon fibre, 400,000 kilometres above the world.

Not a weapon, a tool of psychic eviction, a means to disinhabit the soul.

A senior aide with a mistress he's committed to an asylum for her own protection. A secretary who's been indiscreet with certain carbon copies. An old torturer for the Weeping Eye who was photographed taking an envelope from someone he shouldn't have.

Crackling tree squirrel impaled on a spit. Savoury smoke rising into the night. The Paleolithic huntress turns her gaze upwards.

A spiraling column of amber and green lights, twenty stories deep, pulsing as one.

Whatever happened in 69, it may not have had anything to do with him at all.

A phantom itch. He's scratching at something that hasn't happened yet.

Another plaything of the stars, impelled by processes beyond its comprehension.

A shimmer across your field of vision, or was that the television screen?

Back in Foto 24, your would-be double gurgles his assent.

Portofiro at the break of the 60s. A teenage boy sits on his bed and gazes at a full-page magazine ad for a brand new single-play format. The crimson of the disc spellbinds him. Excited thumbs leave sweat prints on the page.

373 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 7 of 8