Reading

Open fileNeed to knowMy clearance

A.Journal

Checks

373 checks

It started in sub-level three. Rose like a prayer through ducts and electrical chases. A slow, fungal liturgy.

Smuggling the ethereal objects of the subconscious into the physical world.

The child trembles in his ice bath. He can't tell the shivers of cold from those of fever, nor the numerous unknown words in the book from the gibberings of his delirium, but he sits there and trembles and holds the matico leaves to his brow.

Communication has been established between the doctor and something within you, real or imagined, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Ribboned flesh, spots of white fat beneath the skin. A tuk-tuk horn blares outside.

Ring binders stacked on a glass-topped conference table, a chair at either end. She notices a tiny circle of paper on the carpet -- lost from a hole-puncher? A polite cough brings her attention back to her interviewer.

Waves curl endlessly onto a shore of fine pebble. Pascal takes the lid off the teapot, notices two men walking up the garden path. He opens the door with a smile.

Alone in her apartment, knife under her pillow. She dreads the sound of footsteps approaching her door -- until she learns to recognise his.

A breeze rolls through a plantation in Lágundi. Leaves hiss at its passing.

The board is set. The Manus Fati wriggles its fingers above the pieces.

You know the school well. You've already seen the courtyard, the old ginkyo, the barracks where the boys' minds are beaten until they're no longer their own.

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

A soul vacating the premises.

Where would I go, if I were me?

A suburb of Almina al-Azraq. Green bushes, knee-high, stretch across a plateau. Boys with skirts woven into nets pluck small white flowers from between the leaves, pinching just beneath each bud.

Mud-soaked canine groin, leg lifted, as it pisses all over a bed of springy plants. You blink -- the piss hits your face, sours your taste, throwing you out from your pleasant dream among the budding white flowers.

Overhead, something stirs. It has been waiting.

Shades from another time move endlessly across the ancient wood, pickling it with nostalgia.

The bullet, the monotheist agent who fired it, all of them in on it.

Twelve thousand years ago, the Paleolithic huntress stumbled onto this place much as you just stumbled onto the location in your mind.

In the distant beyond, a massive luminescent body turns in silence amid a sad black cosmos.

Individualism, emotion, even existence dissipates across the full stretch of eternity.

The huntress watches the long, reddish back of a sea mink as it snakes through the water, a thorny lobster still struggling in its jaws. Pups run to the water's edge, yipping with excitement.

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