Hellsborough Exposed — soulprint

Long before the Chronicles find him at Van's table, Pip dug up this exchange between a young boggy Lomas, working the junkyard as a self-styled pest controller, and his symbiot, jason, mid-hunt.

"But that's unethical, criminal."

"In Hellsborough, sure, but we're outside city limits here, we're off limits! I'm only aiming to wound, ha! I like them better that way, without their symbiot! Crack-shot, sir, crack-shot!"

"I think you've cognitised one too many, boss."

"Never! Ever! Say that again!"

"OK, boss, OK. It just makes me feel uncomfortable, that's all."

"Tosh! Cognitisation is a drug and I'm — we're — addicted. You'll soon start moaning when we leave them behind."

Mold came round in the Gruizer graveyard with a gutterball nestled into his neck feeding him back to life, his own symbiot Hassan already degraded to nothing, and the bond was complete before he thought to ask the obvious question. "So you're my buddy now, Kibble. What happened to Hassan?" "Dead. He wasn't well, Lomas killed him. Used me to kill him." "I don't remember. I don't remember anything; nothing at all."

She knew you were coming before you arrived. She was already looking up.

Symbiots are the creatures most often described as harmless - I have heard this said, exclusively, by people who have never encountered a disassociated one. A symbiot that has lost its host does not simply stop needing; it needs more, and in this context available means within range and not moving fast enough.

A disassociated symbiot does not grieve — it acquires. The clicking starts first, then silence, and then the inside of your head becomes considerably busier with someone else's accumulated life. A man in the Middlewood Road bar came out of a forced bond with three days of the previous host's memories intact and a hum behind his left ear that had not dissipated in six months; he considered himself fortunate, which tells you something about the alternatives.

Rockcrust is slurped through a straw directly into the olfactory canal and — critically — does not wait to be inhaled; it moves toward intention. Van obtained it from Dirty Leaves. Its primary effect is not euphoria but clarity: hivemind noise becomes signal, and a sufficiently focused user can interact with it directly. Pip used this, on the first dose, to cancel a psycmask infomercial through concentrated will. Van described this as expected.