The thing was a horse-sized, multi-breasted, pitch black goat monster that looked like it belonged on the cover of one of those 1980s heavy metal album covers, one where if you played it backward, the words would tell you to murder your grandma.

The pub was called The One-Eyed Narwhal, but the logo was of a fat, bald human unzipping his pants, grinning lewdly.

It’s funny how that happens sometimes. We associate smells with memories, and when that memory is triggered, we are momentarily pulled away, no matter the current circumstances.

dexterity

xistera

I’d never played it in real life, though I’d known a senior chief who had something similar designed to lob tennis balls great distances. The thing was really for dogs, but he’d used it to toss cherry bombs off the side of the cutter out onto the glacial ice of the Arctic Ocean. He’d let me do it once, and I remembered how far it’d flown. And at

She’s not real, I thought. She’s a prop, an extra in a high-stakes game show. But that wasn’t true, was it? She was a real, biological creature. What she believed to be real was fake, an illusion. But she was still flesh and blood, an innocent. And she was dead simply because it was part of the story. Just like with all those prostitutes.

I suspected she’d been killed by those three Krasue things.

Crawlers who’ve yet to obtain access can come here and pick up quests to win themselves a tattoo.”