Realizing NPCs: The Agent of Chaos

Your murderclown shtick is old. No, shut it, it is. Put these cowboy boots on, we’re going to be Anton Chigurh now. 

We understand that fear stems from distrust in what is unknown. People like to mock others over their fear of the dark, which is not only cruel, but also kinda dumb. After all, what is more unknown than a dark void, which could be concealing most likely nothing but also quite literally anything. You know that when you look into a dark basement, what’s most likely down there is excess storage space and possibly mildew. But you also, in the back of your mind, are highly aware of the people, hypothetical-but-must-have-existed or people you may have heard or read about, that were murdered by strangers in basements they probably thought were just as empty. And maybe it wasn’t something so intelligently malevolent lurking down there? Maybe it was only a hazard, a force of nature, unthinking but just as deadly, like a build up from a pinhole gas leak or the accelerating growth of black mold that’s slowly poisoning the air.

Thinking like this is borrowing trouble, especially if you’re like me and have the type of morbid anxiety that is optimally held in check with cipralex and enough kush to mellow out a bull rhino. But if it’s incorrect to at least consider, if not ruminate over? I’d say, if so, it’s only arguably so.

So what then for those dark basements that should have been empty but were instead concealing danger, that just so happen to be shaped like people?

It’s important to get one thing straight before we’re going any further: when I endorse characters like this, I am never endorsing a character that is “crazy.” There’s a bunch of reasons for this, the biggest one being is that with the growing realities of widespread mental illness in modern society, it’s time to destigmatize and learn to be kinder to people who can’t even find safety within their own heads sometimes. We need to stop associating people who hear voices and people who have difficulty discerning cause and effect with irreconcilably inhuman evil. The mentally ill are not the threat; if anything, the neurotypical are the threat to the mentally ill when you put the work in to run the numbers. And if you’re the type to fold arms and exclaim “reals before feels” when presented with an argument for the progression of social justice, I invite you to engage your nearest search device to check the consensus on this statement before you feels how reals these nuts.

Then there’s the part where it’s just stupid, shitty cliche writing. He’s dangerous because he’s CA-RAAAAZY! HE DISASSOCIATES from time to time and feels AFRAID and GUILTY because of it. CHECK OUT HIS ANTIPSYCHOTIC PRESCRIPTION. How bout go fuck yourself?

We’re here to be better than this, to think deeper and demand better. But I’m not going to say that we have to discount the Agent of Chaos altogether. On the contrary, some truly excellent pieces of media are home to characters that, were they to be boiled to bones, could be described as such an archetype. But what makes those characters effective and memorable isn’t simply because they are by nature violent prime movers within their given story. It’s also not any edgelord tendency to mistake interest and fascination with a murderous and sinister individual in gravitating toward them as some sort of personal aspiration, because let’s be clear, were I that sort of dork, I’d just stop writing here and swirlie myself. And I’d be right to do so.

Instead, what makes them worth examining is what makes them plausible in the first place, what people can often mistake for relatability: their different views and logic as to what the world is and how it works. This understanding, or at least the brushing up against understanding we are allowed, of how they perceive things? That is what makes them fascinating.

So there was this Batman movie from a few years back that you might have been aware of. No, further back, the one that people like to shit on but was really quite good, even if it’s readily apparent why rugged individualist garbage people are way into it. In it, the departed and great Heath Ledger poured himself into a role that would redefine a popular villain, who in one scene proclaims in front of a burning mountain of cash, when asked why he was torching a fortune in hard currency, “I’m an agent of chaos.” In that, this character described both his intent, and the critical point that sets him apart from you, me, and basically everyone else: that he serves a distinctly different purpose than a member of the human tribe. His goal is not advancement of himself or others, his goal is simply cosmic static, and more of it. And that’s it. It’s flimsy and it’s insubstantial; it’s a worldview that offers nothing to anyone who hasn’t forsaken hopes, dreams, a future, or even just a routine that’s bearable and momentarily pleasant enough to hang on. You can’t put yourself in frame of mind of it, because it’s narrow unto infinitesimal, or backwards and upside down, twisted up with its insides out. Yes, I’m aware the movie and the portrayal is divisive and that Nolan Writing is unbearable, I know, I saw fucking Interstellar in theatres. I’m not saying reverse whatever your opinion on the film is, but what I am saying is, this is so much better a reason to be than “he’s just crazy.” Because it actually is a reason, just one that we can’t frame in mind, because it’s too distant from our way of thinking, strange unto alien.

And the thing about this character is that we can’t be rid of it in the things we create, because it is a rare yet notable feature of our society. They are not as broad unto flatness as being an actual “agent of chaos,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, but their motivations are similarly distant to what we see as reasonable. We have them in the hollow-hearted politicians to who try to frame their starving and brutalizing of all but the wealthiest as a virtuous and responsible policy focus, because they see groups of humans as competing species. We have them in the sullen, sludge-eyed mutants that cringe-smile to news cameras after fulfilling whatever idiot cause can be fulfilled by gunning down a bunch of innocents en masse in a public place. We even have them at pettier and less threatening levels than the really heinous scumbags, but in petty ways. There’s people out there that think minor drug offenses deserve capital punishment; there’s people out there who think a chicken’s life is equal to a human’s life. You can’t say were you to give every one of these fucked-up opinionhavers the capability of enforcing their worldview that they’d all start butchering their neighbors and replacing the insulation with dead bodies. But you can say there’s non-zero chance of something like that happening when a wide enough net is cast. Because this stuff does happen, and it’s perpetrated by someone that everyone probably thought was just normal-ordinary, or at least unremarkable, up until they let the things they believe start speaking through their actions. It can all start in one little twisted seed of wrong that gets planted and a person and left to germinate unaddressed.

It’s that twisted little seed that makes an Agent of Chaos. Because the Agent of Chaos doesn’t have to be someone raining fire in the streets or cackling at absurdist acts of terrorism. All an Agent of Chaos has to be is someone with values and goals sufficiently perpendicular to the system they are a part of. Like a boulder thrown in the path of a river, they change the flow just by being there, and if drastic enough, they can do some real damage. It’s like when you get a new boss that has no clue what they’re doing, or a politician that thinks they can stimulate growth by defunding services. And when called on it, they can’t be made to think they’re anything other than an expert in their field.

That’s why we can’t discard this character: infuriating as it is to say, they reflect in our society. But this is all the more reason why we should strive to be better in their portrayal. We are not here to be edgelords, some sheltered 15-year-old boy’s rendition of how, like, the world is really cruel and fucked up, you know? We’re here, because chances are good by now in our lives, we’ve gotten an inkling of someone who is just not right, because looking them in the eye is like staring into a dark basement. There’s probably nothing wrong down there, not profoundly, anyway. But you looked anyway, and it was enough to make you wonder.

Five Points of The Agent of Chaos

1. The Wrong is Deep Seated. The Agent of Chaos is unchecked and most likely morbid in the long term. Habits form early, and the longer they go unchecked, the harder they are to undo. If the Agent of Chaos is new to their gig, it’s because what changed their view of the world was drastic, they embraced it with a zealous enthusiasm, or both. Otherwise, the inciting incident to the how and why and what they are was planted deep, something sank inside and became a living part of them. It’s this seed of wrongness that imparted the weight on them that altered their gravity and caused them to diverge from norms, quietly and subtly altering them into what they are. It can be subtle, but the effects are drastic, because people aren’t simply stubborn, but prone to act in defense of a thing if it’s held deeply and strongly enough. And that is the very nature of what makes the Agent of Chaos what they are, not some stereotypical cackling lunatic with a cartoon bomb who is JUST SO GODDAMNED CRAZY; it’s that they run perpendicular to the norms, often completely under the radar, until given cause to enforce this worldview. That’s why they make such a threat, why they can cause the chaos they do- it’s not just that they’re wrong, it’s that they have conviction.
2. The Wants of Others Are Irrelevant. The Agent of Chaos is an individual that works to their own end, the operative word here being ‘theirs.’ Don’t mistake this for having the tendency towards being a loner, as the Agent of Chaos can be charismatic and persuasive, and very capable of making others serve them. But again, ‘them.’ Agents of Chaos don’t have friends, because friends are not what they want. Or maybe it’s the only thing that they want, and it’s just that their idea of friendship is “hundreds of human beings stuffed into a series of cages, slowly going delirious from hunger and thirst.” This is because to them, whatever they want is whatever they can take and however they can make the world fit their world. You, me, or anyone else doesn’t factor in, because why would we? What are we to an Agent of Chaos but individuals who are different, difficult, annoying, stupid, useless and incorrect? It can be hard to get into the frame of mind, but you need to think not from the perspective of someone looking at themselves in a funhouse mirror, but from the reflection of the mirror looking back at a person who is all wrong and composed of lines that can hardly be called “wavy” at all. Why would they care? The rich can’t even figure the poor in as human beings, you expect someone that developed with “human sin is an infectious disease” as a cornerstone of their thinking is going to be good at walking in another person’s shoes?
3. This is How the World Really Is. The Agent of Chaos is absolutist. They are not open to differing opinions; they’re not open to opinions, period, because all they deal in is truth. They know how the world works, because they’ve been over it over and over in their head, and the facts shake out in their favor, at least as far as they can discern things. If you ask, they might be inclined to explain it, and they might do so in a way that’s very matter-of-factly, like they’re describing something even a child knows. They might also relish getting to share their worldview, going full demagogue and lapping up the attention. Or they may simply take the stance that if you don’t know, you’ll never understand, and you should just get out of the way. Because you can’t dissuade an Agent of Chaos- remember, conviction.
4. Happiness is a Well-Tended House. The Agent of Chaos loves their work. In fact, it defines them- a serial killer is a person that’s probably worn a number of hats in their life, but the one that says “serial killer” on it fits over all at once. This is why when the Agent of Chaos goes from ‘potential’ to ‘active’ they’re such a threat. Everything they do is in service to whatever it is they’re about. Idleness and unhappiness become synonymous and boredom is intolerable. They want to be doing, and in their own way, they do with gusto, even if they’re flying by the seat of their pants without a plan or even a general goal. They want what they want, from deep inside them, and nobody will keep them from it; in the pursuit of this want at the cost of all else, with flagrant and even gleeful disregard for consequence, the Agent of Chaos is defined by their eagerness to achieve, even if what they see as achievement is drastically different from everyone else.
5. If This Fire Be Truly Mine, It Shall Not Consume Me. The Agent of Chaos is a true believer. Like an Ouroboros of self-sustained reinforcement of their revelations, and revelations gleaned from their reinforcements, they become more and more certain of their absolute right. The Agent of Chaos is a true prophet, even if they serve no god, because that’s the sort of faith they’re working with. They don’t shrivel up like the average craven rotten vegetable when they’re surrounded, calling no backsies and claiming that everything they did was all just a misunderstanding. The Agent of Chaos is a last stand type, not because they’re just nuts, but because that’s what faith is- going until the very last, because you’re convinced that you will be delivered in time of need by divine hands, or that you’ll be remembered by history as a heroic martyr. When they go, if they scream, it’s because they weren’t expecting it to be painful, and the tone will probably speak to the momentary shock and confusion that they don’t get to win after all. If they don’t, it might have been because they hit upon the realization that they were wrong after all, and the reality of that in their last moment left them with too many questions to decide on proper last words. It may also mean that, from their perspective, they didn’t lose, but in their waning moments, saw their perfect vision of what the world is supposed to be to them, and they faded to black, self assured with no regrets… provided the setting has no afterlife for them to wash ashore in.

Three Expressions of the Agent of Chaos

Anton Chigurh - No Country for Old Men

“So this is what I'll offer - you bring me the money and I'll let her go. Otherwise she's accountable, same as you. That's the best deal you're gonna get. I won't tell you you can save yourself, because you can't.”

Javier Bardem hates violence. You couldn’t tell it by his performance as Anton Chigurh, where he in his mushroom haircut, purposely styled for maximum visual dissonance, wears the smile of a particularly dumb 8-year-old boy being handed candy as he takes a captive boltgun to the head of a man whose car he needed. If you’re unsure of what that is, it’s basically the first tool used on a cattle ranch when a cow begins its journey to becoming steak. Chigurh is expedient in matters like that.

Cormac McCarthy has spent his career describing the shapes of evil. In No Country, evil was a man, an implacable abyss of anti-charisma and methodical but barely contained violence. He was a lurching, seething, leering doofus of indeterminate age and origin, who in his cunning and skill could be described as one of God’s Own Mutants, were he not clearly by his deeds made by the goddamned Devil.

The plot of No Country goes like this: Llewelyn Moss, a veteran of the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol group in Vietnam, runs across the wreckage of a major cartel deal gone bad while out hunting the Texan wild country in the early 80s. After a quick search, he finds the remains of the money man, and with him, a case containing millions of dollars. Moss, who lives with his partner in a trailer home, makes off with the case, which unbeknownst to him contains a tracking device. This attracts the attention of the wide awake nightmare that is Chigurh, who is called in as the cleanup guy in the aftermath of the deal. Smelling blood and his only one clear chance for a payday, he immediately goes feral, kills his handlers and takes off in pursuit of Moss and the money. What ensues is not for the feint of heart, involving two men repeatedly wounding each other with shotguns across multiple locales in Texas and Mexico, only to miserably survive to do it again. In the end, they don’t even kill each other- the cartel catches up with Moss and guns him down, but fail to find the money that he hid in the vent. Chigurh, who scouted that trick from a previous encounter, recovers it and makes off with the payday. But not before he fulfills a promise he made to Moss. Namely, that if Moss didn’t come to him, put the money at his feet and then accept a bullet in the head, he would kill Moss’ wife after Moss was dealt with.

People's lives can end, even while they're still breathing, while they're heart is still beating. This is a dead man, even if he technically lives for like another 5 minutes in the plot.

In the final scene of the film version, Tommy Lee Jones’ small town Texan sheriff, who is retired after only being around to clean up in the aftermath of the story’s various horrors, describes a dream he had to his wife. In it, he describes riding through a winter storm on his horse, bundled against the chill. He saw his father pull up alongside him, a lawman like he was, carrying fire with him, and he rode on ahead to make sure there was a place that was safe and warm for regular people. He said that it was his deepest wish that he’d be able to one claim he did the same. And he pauses, and says, “then I woke up.” Black screen.

He had one encounter with Chigurh, and it was from behind a closed door. It ended him.

Chigurh could be thought of as something as an enforcer of his own concept of fate. The proper introduction to his character involves him emotionally torturing a gas station attendant, forcing him to bet his life on a single flip of a quarter, a quarter which he explains made its journey over decades to find him there, at that very crucial moment. The attendant lives, and Chigurh explains to him that now he has to keep that coin, as it is his lucky coin, and to not put in his pocket where it will mix in with the change and become just another coin. “Which it is,” he adds at the end.

I think that was supposed to be his idea of fun.

Chigurh is an individual with an apparent fondness for the simplicity of binary choice and personal control over a situation’s framing. He is option one or option two, but never three, yes or no, but never maybe, and all because he deems it to be just so. In the film, there’s a scene where he grows visibly frustrated when Moss’s landlady refuses to disclose where he works, even after asking her three times. He’s frustrated, because he realizes that murdering this woman would get him nothing except extra heat, which is upsetting to him, because he would really like to. Meat does not talk back to the knife.

You don't love your work as much as he loves his.

But this doesn’t mean Chigurh is subtle in his methods, just measured. Mayhem one of many tools, such as a scene where he quietly lifts medical supplies to treat his wounds from a fight with Moss from a pharmacy. He does this, by noisily blowing up a car outside by lighting its gas tank on fire. There’s the aforementioned use of the cattlegun to facilitate grand theft auto, but also to punch the tumblers out of locks when doing B&Es, demonstrating his gory resourcefulness. His murder of Moss’s partner, after his own undignified and unglamourous death, was pointless, and yet was perhaps the deepest insight into his character and values. In his eyes, what he did was fair- he gave Moss an ultimatum, and not only did Moss refuse, he failed in his own vow to get Chigurh first. He even was even so kind as to give her the coin flip treatment, just to give her fifty-fifty chance of surviving. But her coin wasn’t lucky, and so he fulfilled his promise, making protecting his honesty and his self-respect as a man who follows through.

His exit from the story is inglorious; after coming out on top, his strangely venerated faith in fate pays him back by having a car t-bone him in a residential neighborhood. Alive, but with one arm rendered a mangled and bone-pierced wreck, he pays a neighborhood kid with a hundo out of his case for the shirt off his back and his silence, and flees the scene and the approaching sirens. But even though he’s wounded hideously by random chance, the story makes no mistake that though he staggers off painfull into anonymity, he, and perhaps in a greater sense, the evil he represents, simply bleeds back into a callous and worsening world that will undoubtedly make more like him. And as the sheriff realized when he woke up, that world is no country for old men.

 Lorne Malvo - Fargo 

“I haven't had pie like this since the Garden of Eden.”

The first season of Fargo is an accurate depiction of what happens when Satan comes to Minnesota. A really fucking goofy, Satan, mind, but Satan nonetheless. He arrives on the scene after hitting a deer on the road, plowing into a snowbank and knocking himself blurry on the wheel. Then the guy he had stripped to his underclothes and trussed up in his car trunk breaks loose, runs across the snowy field and freezes to death in the woods.

Then the really bad stuff starts happening.

Milquetoast scandawhovian doormat and insurance salesman Lester Nygaard, who earlier in the day got his nose broken by his old high school bully, has a chance encounter with Malvo in the hospital. Displaying his truly benevolent nature, Malvo manages to steer their conversation towards murdering Lester’s bully within the first one hundred words. Lester is flustered, and when called by the triage nurse, he frustratedly bellows “okay!” in neither the nurse nor Malvo’s direction. This is enough to seal the Faustian deal for Malvo, who then on his own time cases, measures and inserts a knife into the brain of the bully.

Before you ask, this was something Malvo chose to do on his own time, he had no beef with the bully, he wasn’t even the reason why he was in Minnesota in the first place.

Malvo is a hitman. He is also a cultivator of human suffering, who harnesses it to make his job easier and more lucrative. His initial function within the story is as a troubleshooter for a local business mogul that’s being blackmailed by an unknown third party. This somehow changes to him hijacking the blackmail operation from its hapless original perpetrator and turning it into a recreation of biblical plagues to terrify his original client, a man who put his luck and success to his God, into compliance. This is because Malvo is trustworthy only in these sense that he can be trusted to follow his own set of primitivist values. See, at several points in the show, Malvo, who is expertly portrayed by Billy Bob Thornton, proclaims his belief in the natural anarchy of humankind, and that modern society is a useless and artificial construct. “We used to be apes,” he explains at one point, and that modern human beings have been conditioned to be subservient to preexisting power structures. “You’re raised to think there are rules,” he says. “There aren’t.” He says that to be empowering, perhaps inspiring. 

The person he says it to ends up dead in the end. Most people that associate with Malvo do.

This is the thing that is fun about Malvo and his role as villain. There is nothing about him that’s a half measure, and nothing about him that stays in bounds. This is a character who upon being told to come over and help out Lester, who killed his wife in a rage, does so… and without hesitation murders the chief of police with a shotgun as he shows up. This is a character who rigs a man’s shower to disgorge pig’s blood. This is a character who defines what it is to be a habitual line stepper, because it never occurred to him why he shouldn’t be. Why wouldn’t he be? It’s a blast, and it’s really useful in his line of work. Which is murder, by the way.

Yet as confident and competent as Malvo is, he doesn’t skate. Eventually, he meets his end, having withdrawn from an encounter with Lester in which he didn’t account for a beartrap being hidden under laundry. Cornered trying to patch up a wrecked leg, podunk but scrappy cop Gus, played by Colin Hanks holds him up at gunpoint. “I figured it out,” he says, alluding to the riddle Malvo left him an in earlier encounter. Malvo responds, “And?” Then Gus dumps half his revolver in him.

A still moment follows.

Better safe than sorry.

Then Malvo chokes up a breath. He tries to say something. He grimaces, furiously. Then he decides something’s funny and has a laugh. Gus puts the rest of his cylinder through his head and finishes him off. Then Gus weeps, because that’s sort of the only logical response to that sort of an experience.

It’s Malvo’s death itself that ties him up as a good example of the Agent of Chaos. He lived by his sword, sowing chaos in his midst in order to reap benefit, dehumanizing himself into something more akin to a predator that learned how to walk upright and developed great taste in scarves. Ultimately, he died by it too, and went into its arms, first hesitantly, then with a laugh. In his final moment, he got the punchline to the cosmic joke of his existence, and perhaps all of ours: that in the end, none of this shit matters. Not when you can terrify a man into submission by running God’s own playbook on him, and still get your ticket punched by having some dork named Gus shoot you in the face.

Still, though… fun while it lasted.

Yoshikage Kira - Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure

“I simply want a peaceful life. It's just that it's in my nature to kill.”

You never knew you wanted to see David Bowie portray the killer in a Hitchcock movie. Kira is a treat in that respect.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is a daunting task to describe in a few sentences, but trying to go as broadly as possible, it’s weird adventures that are sometimes globe-trotting, sometimes domestic, involving the scions of one very unlucky family of adventurers with a variety of very weird powers. It has been produced since the mid-80s without delay primarily by one man, Hirohiko Araki, an eccentric and highly fashionable Japanese polymath who appears to be getting younger as time goes on and who just names characters and powers after songs playing on the radio. The acid comes built right in, practically. It’s amazing.

Part 4 is highly regarded by the fandom, and it follows a simple premise that then proceeds to run in every conceivable direction with, yet still manages to remain cohesion: doofus superpowered teens hunt an equally superpowered murderer in their weird, but otherwise sleepy hometown. The search digs up a lot of mayhem, all with the signature absurd and unpredictable charm the series has become known for, but it takes its time with even hinting who the actual killer in town is. The reason isn’t because he’s lying low, either, it’s because he’s effectively the perfect blueprint for a killer.

Yoshikage Kira is a man who only wants what he feels he’s owed as an honest, upstanding man. He’s a responsible adult, fastidious, polite, well-mannered. He always makes sure he gets a proper night’s sleep so he can rise well in the morning. He believes that proper exercise and a healthy breakfast set the tempo for a productive day, after which he can come home and relax with his girlfriend. His girlfriend, who just happens to be one of the hands of his latest female victim, the rest of which was incinerated and atomized by his fearsome hidden power.

Kira is what’s called a “Stand User” in the Jojo’s setting. Imagine if you had superpowers, but in addition to the powers themselves, you could also emit a variably-tangible, possibly humanoid projection of your inner self, which in addition to being able to fight on your behalf, was also a conduit for those powers. That’s a Stand. Stands have names, and since part 4, they’ve been named after bands or songs. Kira’s is Killer Queen, a sinewy, androgyne humanoid construct with an intense predator stare. Killer Queen is unbelievably fast and strong within its short range around Kira, but its main draw is its ability to render an object as a bomb, one which can explode like any other mundane device, or be precise enough to only annihilate a single living being that touches the object in a flash of light and a whiff of smoke. Kira can even control the amount of the victim that burns away, which his how he claims his grisly trophies.

You versus the guy she told you not to worry about.

Thus comes Kira’s modus operandi, and why he’s a fantastic Agent of Chaos- because all he seeks is a dull, routine, starched-collar existence, he can exist unnoticed against the backdrop of weirdos emerging in town to challenge (and also, misdirect) the heroes. What’s really cool about this? Going back through chapters before he’s formally introduced and finding all the places he’s hiding in plain sight, as just another face in the crowd.

But despite Kira’s desire to be ordinary despite his remarkable abilities, he doesn’t stagnate. Not only do his powers evolve and become multifaceted, as is the case with long-running Jojo’s villains, but he bends the rules harder than possibly any Jojo’s villain to date. By the end of it all, he’s quite literally just stuffing new stands into himself just to see what new bullshit he can pull off. The protags have to start rules-lawyering the laws of time and space, just because this certified general accountant motherfucker wants to be left alone to a life where he can murder as much or as little as he pleases. In his very last moments of life, as he lies in the street bleeding from having been gang-beaten by multiple stands, he quite literally tries to blow up a chunk of time in the hopes he’d be able to go back and try the past hour over again.

For a moment, it even seems like he pulls it off, where he falls through grade-A audio-visual psychedelia with Killer Queen in tow, screaming “I DID IT!” before finally winding up in a seemingly normal alley. Until his first victim reveals herself and welcomes him to the afterlife. An afterlife filled with people he put there, who would really, really like a posthumous word with his immortal material. As he’s torn apart by vengeful shades, we see what actually happened- Kira, lying delirious in the street, was rolled over by the same ambulance a bystander called on his behalf, not understanding who he was or what was happening. His last words were him senselessly and pathetically mumbling about setting off his final bomb as his skull was smashed apart beneath its rear wheel. For an individual that nobody knew, let alone would assume was some sort of superpowered murderer, it’s the closest thing to justice that could be exacted from him, because everything else is simply too bizarre to believe. 

Because that’s what an Agent of Chaos is, at the core of their being- a something irrational, and yet, a present danger. Something that marks you, makes you doubt the totality of Order. Something that gives you pause when you look into a dark basement, or into the eyes of someone that tweaks you as wrong. Because in both cases, it’s probably nothing. But it could also be anything. And that’s a terrifying prospect.