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A young man stares at the advertisement, dry-mouthed. Between his legs he can feel the stirring of a novel infatuation.

Your arm is extended. You hold a gun at the end of it. The gun is pointing at your own back.

A gun kicks twice. A girl's scream cut short, as if violently unplugged. Blood splatters the pink fabric of a plush dolphin.

Atoms shiver as you pass through them.

Whether by chance or by stratagem, it seems you were destined to meet here.

Outside, closer. The beating of an impossible heart.

The inner walls of the temple sparkle with gems, a million insect eyes. Blue-tongued priestesses hum in the language of rock. Their voices cause tectonic shudders in the villages beyond.

Ahead of you, futures shear off each other.

The hand of the oscilloscope twitches in recognition, giddy for its chorus.

A hundred metres beneath you, an old fisherman raises his hand to his eyes. A strange shadow scares away the fish.

Maybe it's already happened.

Sealed within the penthouse suite of a central hotel in Cicatriz Frontera, a girl looks up from her keyboard, caught unawares by a ripple of strange sadness.

You don't mind.

This is strange, wrong. A mutation.

Blue heat, shaking in the boundless dark. The edges turn purple, widen. A moment of shivering anticipation before the soundless boom. Another dead star.

A loose bolt whines on the hull of a submarine, L-45 Class. Bioluminescent monsters swarm toward the sound, a flashing stream of wet greed.

You tell her... all will be forgiven!

Her mother kept pointing to the birds which circled below, then the valley beneath the cloud. But the little girl was only interested in looking up.

Rush of nameless river in broadleaf forest, ancient riparian zone. The paleolithic huntress stalks her prey...

At your fingertips, more than a dozen. A collector of false lives, burned onto false mirrors of polycarbonate. What are you saving them for?

'Take that thing off', a stocky woman demands. 'You're not helping your case at all'.

Silence diluted only by the hiss of a spinning disc. Jaws slacken, never to close again.

Could these be the sensitive, invisible fingers you've always felt, hovering darkly above your days?

The slowly collapsing mind of an old political philosopher, violently working through its own contradictions.

The golden shade, the screaming boy beaten by his fellows...

Ultra Violeta loses sight of Portofiro, twinkling softly into darkness.

Your controller paces the small area behind her desk. Her Novessa colleagues are surprised -- so rarely is she on her feet. You are all that fills her mind.

As the sun smears across rooftops, a man with a briefcase full of carefully-folded socks sits on a metal bench. He sits there for a long time, considering the tangle of alleyways that surround him.

A rough voice down a splintering phone line: 'No silly cunts! CASCADE only, person to person! CASCADE or nothing!'

You see him, boots braced on a trembling deck. His vessel noses out past the breakwater, into the Noscorrentes sea. Behind, Portofiro dissolves into a golden blur beneath a pale sky.

Long-dead hands carrying the hull, white fingers in the brine.

A vacant pale green chair in the corner of the living room. A photo frame at the base of a shrine. And a wooden box buried on Portofiro's third tallest hill.

Like you never even had it -- only dreamed that you once dreamed of having it.

Time slows as the world falls towards her. The descent is still too fast, but just long enough for a single thought: 'Why am I doing this?'

The sound of boots, the warmth of people and a simple, stupid, stubborn hope.

Boxes of popcorn on the floor around them, a stop-motion beast roaring flame. She laughs, he pulls her closer.

The tent reeks of burnt meat and herbs. The Paleolithic huntress inhales, deeply. Her mind swims in blessed smoke.

Her subconscious was stuck, reliving the event over and over again.

Stiff limbs, orange suit. The tiny cosmonaut sees the world from between two large fangs resting wet and loving on either side of his head.

A woman leans in close over a monochrome plastic cup. The lights of the factory are harsh, and her eyes water. She licks the tip of her tiny paintbrush -- a few hairs in width -- and carefully applies a dollop of green paint to the polycarbonate wolf's eyeball.

Tempo had never begged for anything in his life. The words felt unnatural, covered in blood and spit, the coke long-faded, an odd fit for his last: 'Stop. Please. I don't want to die.'

A jagged mouth pressed against phone receiver: 'It's CASCADE or nothing! And you tell her -- if we pull this one off, all will be forgiven!'

He promises myriad truths: great, terrible, the undoing of all you know.

The song is coming through strong enough in here that you can make out words.

Like the hallucinated directives that guide the Paleolithic huntress as she sets up her fish weirs.

Already the outlines of the whole picture are beginning to shimmer. Your fingers tingle at the chance to fill them in.

You already know her name. It rang out to you across the noumenal plane.

344 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual