Glass Desert Emperor - The Prewriting

These are the notes I took for myself when writing this story, basically a skeletonized conversation with myself over where I was going, what I needed to establish, and how I needed to establish it. There's a lot of stuff here that's probably never going to be explicitly spelled out in the text, but it's nice to have the reasoning behind it ready, so if I do want to offer a Pro Wrestling-level of explanation, sure, here's the kayfabe. This might be a little maddening to read, as I can kinda just ramble at myself- if you think I'm longwinded in text, this you're getting me after I pare my shit down, most of the time -but, if you want to see what's under the hood of this storyline? Welcome, I'll have more for you soon.

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[Van is hunting a Hargrave associate that’s apparently lost his nerve: where is he hiding? How many does he have with him? Where’s he set up?]

• He’s on Evergreen, in the mountains, near where the Green Belt ends and the Northern Megacap begins. He’s got a squad of security with him and this isn’t by his choice, as Hargrave has allowed him to cut himself clear of his racket under condition: this man lives his live in a well-furnished cage, as a canary waiting to be gassed by his household staff the second they hear him singing.
  • Make it clear that Van’s fine with putting these guys under dirt, because they’re openly stinking trash.
  • Also, there’s an AX lurking nearby…
• He’s in the Freelands because he’s sick, and Outlier worlds aren’t really the best place to get a doctor that won’t use you as an experimentation cadaver when you’re elderly and dying from exotic matter poisoning.
  • Is this Hargrave’s dad?

[What was the intel that Simon gave Van? How did it influence his plan of attack? What sort of a bodycount is his infiltration going to cause?]

• The guy’s sickness is related to the conditions aboard the Esorian- it’s an old ship, and the combination of power sources that are still running to keep the lights aboard the station it’s become emit a highly specific toxicant [Vaerite particles] that used to be a common source of poisonings, before the Consortium developed new fusion systems. It’s still enough of a problem that Freelanders make medicine to reverse or slow its progression [Divilvaerenex], but it’s also become a means for them to track the movement of Hargraves’ pirates- nobody orders as much as the stuff as Hargrave’s people have been, as they’ve learned it’s a good way to keep themselves right even without having to dose with Jolly Roger.
  • An anomaly: a large amount of the stuff is being shipped by a manufacturer on Evergreen into wooded foothills in the middle of nowhere. An associate of Simon’s was persuaded to go take a look, and some pictures: et viola, a Hargrave associate, hanging out on his chateau sundeck, like he was just waiting to get made.
• Long story short, Van’s going to handle the household staff lethal style, starting with making sure the officer among them never gets out of his chair, then crunching a few more before they notice he’s flatlining them. Then the shooting starts, and it’s their mistake.
  • Cool Note to Call Back To: Bleak’s agent on Evergreen was Spooky.

[How voluntary is this guy’s cooperation? Is he tired, or is Snare going to need to peel some information out of his head?]

• The guy’s too spent to have any enthusiasm for much of anything, but he’s completely forthcoming and willing to talk. He’s dead to seeing violence happen around him (maybe a stray round buzzes past him during Van’s infiltration and he doesn’t even flinch, he’s so over with life), and he actually feels better having his household staff splattered all over the place- at least their passive aggression is now at an end.

[The Questions]

• Who is Hargrave as a person? How does his inner life shape his outward performance as a man?
  • Hargrave is the type of person that will remind you that more than 50% of American Serial Killers lived some period of their life in Hollywood. He isn’t a small scale narcissist, but one that demands an audience. He’s that most terrifying of concept: a pirate lord that achieved that status in the age of interstellar social media, where an absolute scumbag can have an audience to do any goddamned thing they want, and still have an audience of daft chumpstains going “well, I liked it…”
  • So he’s not just a pirate lord, he’s a flamboyant pirate lord that doesn’t like to have his roll slowed. In other words, he’s an ongoing path of destruction and attempts to slow him often results in violence that only accelerates him, boldly ever onward.
• What experience shaped his views as a mutant supremacist? Was it just as simple as him being an arrogant bastard that grew an extra length of spine to support the framework for his extra set of arms?
  • It the narcissism, mixed with a confirmation bias, based around a Nietzchian outlook: he survived the ordeal of his mutation, long months of writhing agony as his body contorted and unnaturally grew; in his eyes, that he survived with new additions to his anatomy is proof that he and his likewise human crew were Born Better- they can handle these new graces instead of dying like all the others, so they are the ones fit to rule.
    • Hargrave has undergone bionic augmentation in order to support his own mutation- he suffered from terrible chronic pain from spinal compression and the haphazard integration of his new arms into his biology. He doesn’t seem to realize this is only going to get worse as he gets older.
    • There’s also the fact that his genome might not be as stable as he thinks- Hargrave could go into Bloom if ever pushed over the edge, provided he’s been partaking of his own product. It’s just that he’s such a self-assured bastard that people haven’t seen him lose composure.
• How does he structure his organization?
  • An outward-facing layer of unwitting patsies, paid proxies and motivated hangarounds form his ablative protection. People on this outside are kept peering in, like tantalus, paid in raw metal, powerful drugs and exotic guns, and given a look inside what the local Cool Kids Club looks like, a look that Hargrave heavily controls the optics of.
  • Those that prove they’re willing to work like Hargrave wants, and have a taste of for things to come, get folded into a layer of informal initiation: they’re allowed a position on one of Hargrave’s “veneer ships”, the ones that are fresh takes that haven’t been ‘converted’ to his specs. They’re called “partyboats” because they’re the least poisonous places in his fleet, and they’re made for the “guests” at the start of the “voyage.” These “guests” are given the light work, the fun stuff, the stuff that’s bound to succeed (where it doesn’t fail miserably, such as when Van popped out of a shipping crate and bodied two of his goons). While they do this, they’re either pressed to start taking Jolly Roger, or pressed to start doing them small scale atrocities, those little Rubicons of Soul Destruction that people can be pushed over like a crack in pavement when they’re properly cornered.
  • The ones that take Roger wind up rapidly and brutally addicted (not hopelessly, never at first, but that fuse burns every time they light up and they fry their brain and destabilize their genome further with absolutely fucked up drugs) and become Hargrave’s stock of sailors and footsoldiers, as well as his mutant gene pool. They don’t live much longer than a year after this point, as dying in combat while high out of their mind, or to a shipboard accident doesn’t get them? Exotic radiation poisoning, hell-drug overdose, a bad mutation or blooming just in general will make them suffer on the way out.
  • The ones that find they’ve got a hand for the atrocity end, managing minimal (or managable) Roger use become Hargrave’s officers. These people run his ship and shore crews, or they have some sort of twisted ‘stake’ in the Esorian. The most twisted among them become producers for channel H8.
• What exactly is the combination of conditions that causes people aboard his crew mutate like they do? What are the identified stable mutations?
  • In short: Vaerite particulate, named for the inventor of the Vaeraen Hyperfusor Power Plant, of the now dead House Vaeraen, has been leeching out of the Esorian’s ramshackle reactors.
    • What sort of dedicated bastards figured out a way to fuse cesium? A House that was so rich in fissionables, they literally unmade themselves through sterility, that’s who.
  • A design flaw in the Esorian’s plasma exhaust conduits: they run parallel to an atmosphere main. In a more sensible fusion setup, this would have the side effect of making the ship very hot; in the Esorian’s case, it means an even saturation of a highly mutagenic particle that will either result in death via rapid onset of radiation sickness and cancer, or painfully play with an individual’s genome. The survivors tend to take one of a few identifiable forms, with notable outliers. Alarmingly, the rate of mutation and survival seems to be directly linked to their usage of Jolly Roger. Relatively clean individuals just seem to die to the exotic particle exposure via rad sickness and rapid onset metastasis of tumors; people who pop or smoke his toxxed-up pervitin brand even a little develop some sort of strange resistance, and instead tend to have their DNA rendered unstable enough for the Vaerite to start resequencing their genes like the corruption in a low-resolution photo resequences pixels.
  • Alarmingly, Hargrave knows this is the case, or at the very least has sussed it out through his own means. This also means he’s set his crew of patchwork engineers to reverse engineer Vaeraen Hyperfusors to distribute out as auxiliary power plants to his fleet’s ships. To those in his more inward circle, he speaks of the true reason for this: he calls them “Evolution Devices.”
  • So here’s what his idea of evolution looks like. It isn’t, by the way, it’s just body horror.
    • “Cane Toads” are what Harry the Frog is. Their blood, bile and saliva is both acidic and riven with bacteria, making long term exposure to one of their pressurized vomit sprays painfully fatal. Their bones are slightly hollow and their muscles have been restrung and restructured to support a leaner and elongated frame that allows them to leap multiple bodylengths vertically. They have textured sections of their body, such as on their hands, which allow them to grip to surfaces, and they exude a thin, filmy slime that can actually make them slightly resistant to low-intensity thermal hazards, beyond being a neutralizing agent for their own acidic bodily fluids.
    • “Scorpids” are what Ginny was starting to turn into, before she Bloomed out of control into a Transluce. Their arms turn to segmented, carapaced claws, and out their tailbone they grow a similar scorpion-like protrusion that emits a highly concentrated acidic and toxic agent from its dagger-like point. They overflow with the stuff seemingly, as their circulation has become a haphazard open-system that heals like a candle with a molten core bleeding a replacement hull out of cracks and punctures- healing to them, hell to others. Their claws are capable of tremendous crushing force and their carapace can deflect some degree of small-caliber arms; what breaks off them regrows relatively quickly. Their jaws also split in time, growing into a secondary set of segmented limbs to manipulate their mutated mouths with.
    • “Gliders” have a tendency to occur in crew that work the closest to the Vaeraen reactors, their bodies becoming efficient yet withered shadows of their former selves, with their legs all but wasted away to be hook claws, fit to cling to walls and the environment, their skin slung out into a fleshy kite that lets them move as their namesake. Though they maintain much of their former intellects and the skills they learned originally before they mutated, they are difficult to reckon with post-mutation, as much of the part of their brain that’s made for socializing has been rewritten to allow them to better navigate in 3D spaces. Hargrave doesn’t mind this- the little bastards are useful and don’t ask stupid questions.
    • “Bunions” are what Chuck-Chuck was in Harry’s story, before he bloomed into a Boneskin. Tends to occur in crew with large amounts of muscle mass, which begins to mutate into hardened plates moved by subsurface hydraulic pressure, individuals that are basically bio-golems with semifluid cores wrapping around their protected organs and reinforced skeletons. They are constantly surly, living with chronic pain and itching, and their biology is vulnerable to heat- the gel medium under their flesh is essentially their peripheral nervous as cerebro-spinal fluid, and if it heats up, they can enter into an enraged and hypervigilant state similar to Jimson weed poisoning.
  • When a perfect, horrible storm of Vaerite poisoning, Jolly Roger intake and emotional stimuli set a mutant member of Hargrave’s crew bubbling, one of two things happens: one, they quite literally melt down, and become the sort of mess a hose just won’t be cleaning up; two, they Bloom, and mayhemic chemistry occurs as Something That Shouldn’t happens, rapidly. This comes in the form of them hatching out of their skin like an egg, a volatile biochemical reaction turning the air to a death-stink as their new form rapidly grows and emerges, discarding the shreds of their old body as detritus. Bloomed Crew are much, much worse, and the best Hargrave can do about them, is cage them up and use them as living bombs, because they’re all uncontrollable in this state.
    • “Tongue Urchins” - What Cane Toads bloom into. The individual stops being an individual, and starts being a collective of highly acidic tongues, looking like something that belongs undersea, and also, In Hell. What intellect of the original person that is left is instead used to drive the organism’s instinctual feeding, which is to reach out for any sources of heat and bioelectricity it can detect to engulf it as nourishment. As much flora as it is fauna, a Tongue Urchin will grow continually, exhibiting no trace of the former individual’s mind that a covert quantum can even read as a person.
    • “Transluces” - What hides beneath the surface of Scorpids, a living jelly colony that is more or less an amorphous protoplasm that is the scorpid’s poisonous and acidic ichor in a state capable of oily-jelly pseudopodal and gastropodal motion. Despite its jelly form, they’re capable of significant penetrative force and hydraulic pressure if it launches itself or its extended pseudopods at a target. They resemble gelatinous amoeba/jellyfish hybrids and are of significantly greater volume than their original individual, as the dirty green-yellow plasm that is their loose ‘tissues’ are heavily expanded via a foaming effect that occurs when they emerge from their skin-egg.
    • “Hive Husks” - An absolute nightmare existence, a linked-consciousness swarm of stinging insects that are all the same person in the same diminishing and limited sense of enraged panic. What emerges when a Glider blooms out of its skin-egg, as which first appears to be a failed result, soon buzzes loose out of its collapsing and desiccated shell, a swarm of grey-green wasp things with eye clusters that seem to point every way but dead ahead, flying in a furious formations that only the individual that is now insects can discern the meaning of. Their sting itself is not only venomous, but radioactive. Thankfully, they do not live long. Terribly? They do not die all at once. Their thoughts are a wide-awake terror to a quantum that can hear them screaming.
    • “Boneskins” - The horrifying and destructive end result of a Bunion coming to bloom, Boneskins are what occurs when the internals of a Bunion become a loose connection of macro-organelles in a soup that thinks, with all the hard tissues remaining in their body inverting and becoming a hardened outer armour. Powered by a rage that’s a symptom of being in constant pain, they are unfortunately very efficient scavengers that can eat nearly anything biological and catalyze it for energy very quickly. If a Boneskin gets loose, expect casualties- they don’t sleep, they just eat, and try to stay still when nothing seems a worthy target for their anger, so they are capable of an ambush.
  • Why is Aldous Hargrave the only Fourarm on the crew?
    • He kills all the others that develop that mutation, naturally.
• Why does he do the showman thing? What explains Channel H8? Is this guy a narcissist who craves fame or is he a businessman who’s figured out a clever way to recruit?
  • It’s all that, but also worse: the man believes he’s some god that has created a domain, an ecosystem. Of course he knows that if he creates Sicko content, he will attract Sicko recruits, but that’s just basic means of pushing people that fancy themselves fellow travellers to his perversity into his thrall, it’s only a perk of the art. To him, Channel H8 isn’t just some vanity project or propaganda channel, it’s his SuperMedia Documentary Experience (yes that’s his term for it, he’s a cock) that offers a window into the greater glory of all he’s created: an engineered wilderness that roils and rages and consumes all that is weaker than it, that laughs while lessers scream. He’s not offering some product for sale, some club to belong to; he’s offering a new path of evolution, and a chance to pillage the old one like a wealthy graveyard. The worst thing? He can be shut down and he will be killed, but he’s also ensured that, at some point? Some species out beyond our borders of understanding is one day going to get hit with the radio waves he’s been broadcasting, the literal bad energy he’s feeding into the universe, and it is going to cause damage we can only hope we won’t be around to reckon with if whoever picks it up ever decides follow the signal home…
• How did he come to inhabit the ruins of the Esorian-Noisz as a base? Has he always been in the Frostbite Nebula? Did he sink the SINN Malibu and convert it to the Merchant of Menace? How? Just how many people can you fit on a gutted out and reconfigured drone carrier. How much of it has he expanded into a station?
  • Fittingly, he treasure hunted for it- just one more thing to feed his own inflated self-image. He and a crew hunted for it, and he was actually the low many on it. He took it like a tontine, with the hunt killing off the first half of the crew, and him murdering the last few members that didn’t throw in with him. This is because the Frostbite Nebula isn’t just an opaque mass to sensors due to its sheer density and depth, but it’s also riven with cryonic anomalies that can turn the interior of a starship into a frozen crypt- it’s an easy place to kill people and make them disappear forever. The Malibu is another prize of his ability to manipulate others: once upon the time, it was another captain’s ship, called the Pacific Heat, and kept relatively stock; he led the captain in as a prospective business partner, and that command retinue died as a broken popsicle after being caught in a cryonic vortex. As for the Esorian? A surface carrier is the equivalent of a small city, but a starship drone carrier? With modifications, it’s probably got the potential to hold around 30k at least, and that’s not including whoever’s out in the flotilla outside, which contain cruisers that can hold near a thousand each.
• Just how much does he have? How much more does he need before he’s willing to go after the Hurricane Coast?
  • The things that they’re flush with is drugs, bullets and entertainment- the economy of Hargrave’s crew quickly stops being a share of pirate takes, and starts being a fucked up form of Bread and Circuses. This is because all wealth trickles up to Big Man and his coterie of nightmare people, while the deckswabs live in conditions worse than all but the harshest Inner Galaxy poverty. He’s got enough competent hangarounds that can work as shore parties and stay clear of the worst of Hargrave’s mutative debauchery, but eventually, people start trying to actively get off his ships if they know what’s good for them, and that means they either flame out trying to take something big to prove their worth, or they actually manage it. This is why Hargrave has neutron bombs in his arsenal; this is why Hargrave has wide-dispersal neural disruptors in his arsenal; this is why Hargrave has aerosol nanite acid in his arsenal. What he’s looking for, is more bodies and more ships, and that’s what Channel H8’s helping to fix- day by day he builds his legend and controls the narrative over his setup as an Outlier micronation. He seems more to those like a charming outlaw than a scumbag ruling over a radioactive pile, and once they fully get folded in, they quickly get too high to care that it was all a big pretense to do horrible things for money and party whenever they’re not working. These are the people he needs: cannon fodder he can dose up with Roger and mutate in the fucked up conditions aboard his ships.
• Who is this guy to Hargrave?
  • It’s not his dad. Hargrave killed his dad, to get the Esorian. The guy is Hargrave’s uncle, who was only ever good with numbers, who was fine with riding the tail of a superior thug and manipulator. Then he got to see the monster Hargrave became, and realized: Hargrave’s father was the far lesser of the two evils. The elder Hargrave just wanted to be a warlord, make his money, and disappear; the younger Hargrave wants anything he can get, starting with interstellar celebrity, and ending with worship as a creator-being.
    • His name is Edison Hargrave, and he’s just, very, very tired.

[Who’s the AX that comes for this guy and Van?]

• His callsign is Lazzo, the term for a joke in Commedia dell'Arte. He’s a clowncore hitman with advanced Lazarus Tech augmentation, an escapee from the sprouting seeds of what will become the Fog Clan- he liked what they could do with dead bodies, but they’re just so drab all the time, goddamn it! Like a funeral for an SS officer, that’s what those motherfuckers dress like. He’s lost track of his resurrections at this point, due in part to his eagerness in testing their ability to bring him back when they were first completed- he’s completely unafraid of physical harm at this point, especially from long drops. He shows this on the outside, however- he passes for a nominal, if highly augmented terran at first glance, but the more you look at him, the more he seems uncanny and wrong, pale in a way that suggests mild hypothermia, with a look to his face that suggests that every time he’s been reconstructed and resurrected by his augs, a bit of the people who were sacrificed to make the Lazarus components assert themselves in his appearance, not in any dramatic fashion, but just enough to make him look like a refashioned wax figure. He looks like he’s dying of oiliness, and that oiliness is the only thing keeping his hair from turning to straw and falling out at this point. But hey, that’s what the bright coloured makeup and dye is for.
• Lazzo is both animated and empowered by advanced Laz-Tech, stuff that a gutter enforcer that lucked into being physiologically compatible with Franken-augs could only dream of being wired up with. Gizmo’d up with overdose-levels of silver cell nanites, secondary bio-grafts spliced directly into his system, and as many multi-function synthetic organs stuffed into him as his body can handle, Lazzo is a corpse with only a brain that’s truly alive, and even that’s beginning to suffer some side effects despite his tech’s preserving capabilities. But to his eyes, his body was only a canvas to paint his art on, and his peers were of likewise mind- it doesn’t need to perfect, it needs to prove their truth, and the fact that he’s got a ‘healed’ magnum-diameter scar right between his eyes is a beautiful truth to him.
  • The electro-impulse cabling network that Lazzo’s spinal cord has been replaced with is not only capable of keeping him upright despite a broken back through some ‘clever’ aftermarket-neurological detours, it also supports an array of antennas that allow him to control a pair of neurologically integrated flying-insectoid drones, which he calls Punch and Judy. Controlled by submodules mounted in the left and right hemispheres of his brain, Punch and Judy are extensions of Lazzo’s ressurective augmentation, able to administer enough Final Intervention Restorative Medicine (FIRM) to a recently dead body to flash-repair any structural damage it might have sustained in death, before penetrating points in the body’s nervous system with electro-impulse cabling. This juices the body with enough voltage to quite literally tase it into an effectively ambulatory state, allowing Punch and Judy to animate and hijack corpses like a pair of highly mobile Dr. Frankenstines, raising them as proxy killers for Lazzo- in other words, corpse puppets, moved by invisible strings. Capable of animalistic movement and the sort of strength the corpse’s species would be capable of in an enraged and frantic state, these proxies are actually surprisingly dangerous, as Punch and Judy will frequently opt to use the mass of the corpses as their primary weapon, launching them at high speed without regard for a safe landing, before forcing them to claw and kick with force sufficient to break their own bones.
  • Lazzo has learned how to operate Punch and Judy independent of one another while also managing to keep enough of himself in his own body to move at a functional combat speed. While he’s not as fast and aware as he is when he’s fully unburdened from the extra mental processing, he’s also learned how to ‘fire and forget’ his puppets, maximizing the time he’s in his own body, minimizing the time he’s partially dissociated into a drone. This means when he’s moving evasively, he’s got a very herky-jerky, stop-start motion of subtle accelerations and speed-bleeds that’s actually sufficient to confuse the shallower and more basic layers of even sophisticated targeting systems. There’s also the fact that he doesn’t tend to flinch from injury that doesn’t directly compromise his body’s physical integrity, and that he also doesn’t even bleed any more, and taking everything into perspective, you get an understanding of how hard Lazzo is to hurt, even though he’s barely wearing any armour whatsoever.
    • And of course, unless you completely pulp his brain or irreparably destroy his body, he’ll get back up with an alarming quickness from traditionally fatal injuries.
    • His brain’s encased in something really solid, too; it’s the only subdermal armouring he actually has.
      • Idea: Van will make the mistake of thinking this guy’s a safe asset as a torn loose head and spine on life support, with his body contained in a morgue; no, actually, he can come back from that.
  • Lazzo uses a suppressed kinetic machine pistol as his weapon of choice, and like Van, he knows to keep Blacktip ammo on hand to deal with his cybernetic peers. He also makes the bold choice to not only employ a charged filament whip as a melee weapon, but a pair of them as well. Nominally this would take unbelievable skill to use without risk of terrible self injury, but in Lazzo’s case, it’s more that he’s completely nonplussed by slicing his own limbs off and just, reattaching them by holding them in place for a few seconds. He thinks it’s funny, more than anything.
• Lazzo’s purpose is a common one among Able X-Rays (it’s a 99 jargon term for Advanced Outsider Threats- a mercenary agent that is considered a peer in capability to a 99 operator), which is to say: he’s a deniable freakshow that can be used as a smartbomb to clean up a mess and leave an indecipherable aftermath of a crime scene. Lazzo is particularly good at corrupting a crime scene, given the nature of the tech he’s empowered with, and was given specific order to move in on the VIP’s chateau should the biosigns of the household staff go either AWOL or flat. His task? Make the VIP not V or I any more, forcibly.
  • Why’s he so late to show up?
    • He thought he’d like Evergreen, but he mostly just fucking hates how impossible the roads are to drive when it’s dark and snowy out, which is frequently. In other words, he’s petty, and sometimes doesn’t try very hard, instead being the sort of expert that’s good at making a botched job a successful one in time for the boss to come by and check out his work.
    • “Oh well, looks like he talked, doesn’t matter, killing you now,” that sort of an attitude. Because again, the first bit of his neurons are beginning to go live with the fairies, and he’s experiencing a diminished ability to feel the gravity of a situation.
• Why Lazzo?
  • Because he’s cheap and cheerful, and also can’t be frozen to death. Only preserved, and freezer burned. Again, he doesn’t mind the cold, he just hates the roads. He’s never been a good driver, and now he’s a reanimated corpse, so figure how much of a hassle driving is for him.
• What’s Lazzo’s weaknesses?
  • Beyond an opening (and slowly broadening) disconnect with consensus reality, Lazzo can’t acquire a target worth a good goddamn. He makes up for this by being capable of dramatic and horrific phenomena that can make even hardened infantry freeze in fear, because a frozen target is an easy shot. But against someone just as weird as him, that isn’t shaken up by his Laz-Tech necromancy, who fights from a highly mobile firing base and doesn’t tire easily, the most effective gameplan Lazzo has is to make a combat space a chaotic hellstorm of automatic gunfire, molecular-thin blade swipes and shambling dead bodies. While he is quite good at doing this through sheer reckless abandon and augmented vigor, he also lacks many of the symbiotic perception/reflex augs that combat cyborgs traditionally have, as his cortex has instead been saturated by his drone controllers instead. Van will find out: this guy doesn’t feel pain, but he also can’t see or hear worth a shit, and typically does it through his puppets. Puppets that he himself can be made to hit, if he’s not careful…
• What does Lazzo know?
  • Something of a solid map point in the grand scheme of things: Hargrave is building up a stable base of operations right outside of Port of St. Joseph, the sort of installation that could only exist because of some sort of local corruption. St. Joes is the central spur of the current Freeland map, a debris field colony inside the hollow wreckage of a planet destroyed aeons ago- it ships a lot of freight and mines a lot of weight. But it’s also a reasonably central point to and from the Hurricane Coast and the Esorian in the Outlier Reaches, meaning Hargrave’s been covertly piggybacking off of legitimate trade routes to both ship his goods, and run his hijacking operations. But from what Lazzo was willing to say of his time at the installation: they’ve got some sort of bigger plan going, one that’s requiring a lot of space for people.
    • Lazzo doesn’t know: Hargrave wants a specific sort of fresh body, healthy and hale and smart ones, because for as much blood as he can recruit to his crews through Channel H8 and the garbage it puts out, he can’t attract any educated workers to build his shit any more, for obvious reasons. The ones that he does have, including the crazy-quilt of disciplines and expertise levels he calls his ‘scientists’, are all either dying off or mutating into forms that make it difficult to have coherent thoughts, let alone do fine work. His brain trust is going dead, and he needs a transplant before he can move on the Cross Daughters to complete the toys he’s building for his invasion plan.