Van's preferred method of entering a guarded building — drainpipe, rooftop traverse, grappling hook, and if the hook slips while you're a thousand feet above the pavement, that's just one of those things — remains a source of what I can only call professional admiration. He threw the roof sentry over the eaves with the practised economy of someone returning a library book, then had the audacity to pour me a rhum while I was still processing the anecdote.

Van Hallam's argument against nascenti governance of The Dark Peak is that jellyheads queue at ballot boxes every four years to elect figureheads who hold precisely no real power while the organic network logs their every utterance on the hivemind. "Them fools has no idea they is votin' for a dictator," he told us in that cellar bar, before slamming his pint down hard enough that I lost about a third of my own. Dirty Leaves clicked sharply at this, and Van went quiet, which is the closest I've witnessed to a parliamentary point of order since arriving in The Dark Peak.

Van's approach to unidentified objects is to handle them immediately and establish terms. By the time I had finished categorising the blinking steel sphere as a probable bomb, Van had already picked it up, looked it in the eyes, named it Sinclair, and sent it back to the bitterfinger with a standing order for rockcrust delivery. Sinclair was a gutterball — Made class, messenger function — and I confirmed this against the hivemind afterwards, less because I doubted Van and more because I needed somewhere to put the information.

Van spent an entire night paralysed face-down on the Wisewood floor while demonspawn circled, waiting to skewer him. Something in the shadows routed them before dawn. He describes the episode as a predicament.