“Wait, if we’re puzzle pieces, what image are we trying to form? Gah,” Foreigner kicked at the ground, “I hate having to ask so many questions!”

“If you hate asking them, then I hate having to answer them.” The Inconvenient Truth shifted its gangly body from side to side as it approached Foreigner, its face never shifting away from the form of its past and the Samuel in the lab coat. “We’re all a part of that despicable bastard. Right there.” Its slender fingers pointed at Samuel.

Foreigner’s eyes furrowed, “You’re all a part of me? Why would I have gone so far to these ends?” The amalgam frowned before severing an arm into loose sheets of paper.

“Take these. They’ll organize what is sure to be a grand revelation. I can’t bear to have such an incompetent form running around. Although Samuel tormented me to keep me in line, I could at least relate to his ambition and curiosity. You are far too… soft, too human even. Begone, Puppy.” The sound of a book closing ushered the Inconvenient Truth away from the scene, sending Foreigner in the opposite direction. His hands were tightly balled around the pages gifted (?) to him by this part of himself.

Another blink and Foreigner was in that endless black water, embers dancing underneath his feet with fleeting memories both new and old. The presence of Snake in the Water was absent, leaving the area to be one expansive void from end to end. Foreigner turned to the pages and at their corners, numbers lit up, suggesting an order from which to organize them.

Wordlessly, Foreigner laid page over page, the words written on the paper shifting around in a jumbled mess until everything aligned itself upon the completion of the task. Holes formed at the ends as thick bands of twine wrapped around the side of the page bundle, and from the ink sea below leapt an ink colored hardcover with the title “In Case of Betrayal.”

Foreigner took a single gulp and opened into the first page. The words now illuminated with light and the scene around him shifted in accordingly, revealing Samuel speaking to a man in a lab coat. The words “Doctor Milton” crossed his mind and the scene began to play out. The two were sitting at a coffee shop, his hands warm with the hot chocolate in the glass he was holding. Across from him was Milton, a former Ruins spelunker turned R & D head.

“I think you’re better off finding someone else. My wife is expecting soon and I can’t be bothered to participate in your experiments. I can recommend a couple of other Ruins researchers but this isn’t the sort of work I’m interested in.” Samuel rejected Milton when he was first approached by this proposition. The Seven Association was looking for researchers to helm their investigations on the Distortion Phenomenon, something that had interested him somewhat since the incident on his return trek from the Ruins. Even after a voluntary mind wipe of the endeavor, the lingering sensation that something was dwelling and growing within him didn’t sit well in his mind.

“I’ll keep the spot open. I’m sure you’ll change your mind sooner or later.” Milton with his narrow eyes and smug smirk was already putting the effort to rope him in.

The page turned to reveal Samuel standing out on his fenced lawn, his wife staring out at the encroaching Fixer force with Milton in tow. Ana turned around with a hard expression on her face. It looked like he was going to have to break another promise after all.

Samuel walked past her and confronted the group assembling outside of his home, “I didn’t expect you to bring the cavalry, Milton. Maybe you shouldn’t do something that you and your group would regret.

“We wouldn’t dream of doing anything like threaten you or your lovely wife, Sam,” Milton pulled out a clipboard with numerous documents clipped in and a pen, “No, this would be a lot more pleasant if you just signed on the dotted line and took over the research on our latest project. We have enough information on you at the moment to designate you and your held relics as dangers to the City and District 25 as a whole. You might be able to spurn off this advance, but someone like the Black Silence? And it’s not like the work you’ll be doing is anything you wouldn’t have had your mind on already, or are you ignoring that strange sensation in the back of your mind?” Milton smiled with the teeth of a predator.

There were too many avenues that had me cornered and he hated to admit it but there was this gnawing sensation pressing him to look into these Distortion events. A morbid curiosity of finding monsters only rumored about (and encountered if his scars have anything to say about it) in the Ruins currently emerging from the citizenry had him enraptured.

He played up his frustrations to Ana, if only to placate her own anger and he signed on the dotted line. The next few days were about setting him up with a team and a location convenient enough for him to travel from his home in the Outskirts into the rest of the City.

Another flip of the page and the scene transitioned into that large labyrinthine laboratory, grand window panes exposing empty padded cells. Samuel was walking with his own lab coat now, in a hurry to observe a captured specimen. The running theory was that whatever power dwelled within the Pianist was dwelling inside of all the citizenry. The Seven Association assumed that these powers took the form of the humans desires, twisting and distorting to have the victim achieve their dream.

The first experiment involved operating on a relatively benign Distorted human. Questions from whether these physical modifications were merely cosmetic additions or provided tangential power and to what degree the power manifested when comparing benign hosts with destructive ones were only the tip of the iceberg.

Samuel gladly dissected into the flesh of their first subject at the behest of his benefactors but argued to have mental examinations for all future subjects. If the Distortions were formed via desires as suggested, then psychologically stimulating and needling the mind was important/

Their second subject yielded the seeds from which his future fruit would grow. They had created a psychological profile from which to torture the subject into a forced Distortion event, but their will proved surprisingly resilient. They reacted violently with a power clearly of their own design, but they didn’t show any of the characteristics that the Distorted had shown. Another avenue of exploration.

The moments were moving faster now, wider swathes of time passing with each page highlighting triumphant discoveries. Samuel had discovered that at the cusp of a Distortion event, the victims confronted a being of some kind in their heads. This voice would lure them into distorting but those that resisted would manifest Thought Tools, implements taking the form of a victims desire without having the victim succumb to such a desire. Although pesky to deal with in a clinical setting, the discovery of this augmentation to the Distortion event meant that the Seven Association was now keenly interested in the extent of field application of his research.

And he delivered on their curiosities with a theory of his own –

Samuel was in a boardroom with masked black tie guests delivering his proposal to the funding group backing his research. “We’ve singled out that the source of the Distortion is from this voice and we see here that resisting the voice grants the wielder with supernatural abilities that they can control. What would happen, then, if the mind were to be split? My theory is that splitting the mind into compartments provides a host of benefits as well as numerous safeguards to the Distortion process, the first and foremost being the potential to utilize multiple Thought Tools in one host.” Even then, Milton and Samuel had salivated at the scope of the project and the advancements that could be achieved in fitting future Fixers with such power. Hell, it hadn’t evaded his mind that with the level of power he was showcasing, even a lowly individual like himself could behead the Head and take over.

The full scope of his research was theoretical and fever dreamed. Assuming that the voice was a singular entity, the signal of the voice should weaken relative to the number of slivers in a body. The weaker the signal, the less likely the sliver is to become corrupted, and if they do corrupt, the host body only loses that sliver. Maximizing the slivers chance of success was equally important, so potent desires capable of reaching Distortion events combined with anchors or traits that allowed them to utilize their desires were equally important.

With the help acquired from J Corp, the compartmentalization of the mind and Project Gestalt began to form. Thinking ahead, Milton had suggested to Samuel that an arbiter or overseer stand in between access of the main mind and the rest of the slivers.

“It wouldn’t really benefit the host body if all of the other forms were vying for access to the host. At that point we might have an event compounding multiple Distortions onto one host, which would not be worthwhile.” And thus his overseer was implanted into his mind, an artificial creature with explicit and implicit authority over Samuel’s headspace.

On that fateful day, as his focus ebbed in and out under the blinding light of the operating table, he spared no thought to the fears of failure. If his ambitions had carried him thus far, he would be happy to see it to the end, regardless of the outcome.

Samuel woke up feeling quite different from before. It was this difference, this clear and undivided attention towards a singular goal that suggested to him that his plan had worked.