Farantees — the supermarket and service chain operated by Nana Farantee, multi-lifed, proprietress — advertises through the Hellsborough psycmask network at a rate that suggests either an extremely aggressive marketing budget or a personal vendetta against recipients. Pip received two hair salon infomercials in the space of fourteen minutes, each addressed to a different demographic, each concluding with the same phone number and the word "Faranteeeeeees!!!" Van recommended putting the psycmask off the scent. He did not explain how.

A HiveMind assessment of Pip Rippon by an unknown sender returned: average height, average weight, indeterminate age, no defining characteristics, and a heart pattern signature with significant similarity to ripperthroat — though no exact match was possible. The sender expressed dissatisfaction. I have not expressed dissatisfaction with this finding, because I am not entirely sure what it means and would prefer to keep it that way.

The netherlander resistance posits as fact that the elected members of the DPDC and its senior staff are Jellyheads — nascenti stooges, possibly replicants, revenant humans resurrected and animated by the fungal network. Whether any given individual is such a revenant is difficult to verify from the outside, since the principal diagnostic is an absence of likeable features — which covers too much ground to be useful. Jarv from the corner newspaper shop has been provisionally cleared.

The Strinxin are a xin faction distinguished from the Stanningxin by different metal and ornaments — primarily shrunken skulls and dried hands hung from the chest, worn in the manner of trophies. Their commanding chieftain is Ridgimoor, young, heavily scarred; his lieutenant Cragimold, older and more marked, captured Van on the moor wearing Stanningxin metal and recommended he be killed immediately at the great games. Ridgimoor countermanded this. Cragimold received the decision poorly.