The House of the Reapr welcomes a Novice by the name of Simon to its ranks. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul."- François Rabelais
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The heavy hydraulic hiss of the clinic door sealing shut echoed through the subterranean space, locking the rest of Night City out. Viktor descended the narrow metal staircase from his apartment above the shop, his broad shoulders filling the cramped space. His hair was damp from a quick, scalding shower, and he had changed into a clean, short-sleeved surgical scrub top and dark cargo pants. The smell of cheap synthetic soap briefly masked the permanent odors of medical-grade alcohol and old blood that clung to the basement's concrete walls.
Viktor walked over to the primary surgical station, his face an unreadable mask of professional focus. He ignored Alejandro and Julia for the moment, his eyes fixed entirely on the small boy standing awkwardly in the center of the room. Santi had taken the oversized beanie off, his mop of naturally curly white hair catching the harsh fluorescent lights of the clinic. He looked small. Too small for the heavy chrome chair dominating the center of the room.
"Alright, kid," Viktor said, his voice low and gentle. He patted the synthetic leather of the operational chair. "Hop up here. Let's get you comfortable."
Santi walked over, his eyes darting around the room, analyzing the biometric monitors and the heavy restraints built into the armrests. He scrambled up into the chair, his feet dangling a good foot and a half above the footrests.
Viktor pulled up a rolling stool, sitting down so he was eye-level with the boy. He grabbed a sterile wipe and began cleaning the skin behind Santi's right ear, right where the mastoid bone met the skull.
"So," Viktor started, keeping his tone light and conversational. He needed the boy's heart rate down. "Your old man tells me you're a bit of a whiz kid. What do you do for fun, Santi? You play any of those braindance games? Elflines Online?"
"No," Santi replied politely, his violet eyes tracking Viktor's movements. "I find the algorithmic progression of commercial gaming to be highly predictable. I prefer optimizing heuristic loops and building polymorphic daemons in my sandbox."
Viktor paused, the sterile wipe hovering in the air. He let out a soft, incredulous breath while shaking his head. "Right. Polymorphic daemons. Because building a digital puzzle box is way better than shooting virtual dragons."
"Exactly," Santi nodded earnestly. "Though I do enjoy cooking with my mother. We were calculating the optimal spice ratios for synth-tacos last week."
A genuine, warm chuckle rumbled in Viktor's chest. Tacos. Finally, a shred of an actual eight-year-old boy beneath the corpo-tech vocabulary. "Synth-tacos, huh? Hard to beat a good taco. You'll have to give me the recipe sometime."
"I can construct a data packet for you," Santi offered.
"Sure, I'd like that, kid," Viktor smiled, his eyes softening. He reached over to a silver tray, his steady hands deftly preparing a pneumatic hypo-syringe. He loaded a clear vial into the chamber, the first stage of the Kjellberg cocktail, a heavy sedative designed to bypass the blood-brain barrier without triggering a histamine response.
"Just a little pinch, Santi," Viktor murmured, pressing the pneumatic tip against the boy's neck. A soft hiss sounded as the pressurized sedative was injected directly into the bloodstream.
Viktor stayed on his stool, maintaining eye contact. "So, what's your favorite part about cooking with your Ma?"
"I like..." Santi started, blinking rapidly. His perfectly articulated speech suddenly slowed down, the syllables stretching out. "I like it when she... when she smiles. The... the data output of her... happiness is... a positive variable."
"Yeah, I bet it is," Viktor said softly, watching the boy's pupils dilate.
"Vik...?" Santi mumbled, his head lolling slightly against the padded headrest. His violet eyes fluttered, fighting the heavy weight of the sedative. "My... my foundational variables are... they're my Ma and Pa."
"That's right, kid," Viktor whispered, brushing a curly lock of white hair from the boy's forehead. "Just close your eyes. When you wake up, the latency will be gone."
"Okay..." Santi slurred, his chin dropping to his chest. A second later, the biometric monitor above the chair chimed with a slow, steady beep. He was completely under.
Viktor's warm smile vanished the exact second the boy lost consciousness. He stood up, his massive frame turning to face the parents standing near the door. Alejandro was tense, his hazel eyes locked on his son, while Julia looked like she was about to be physically sick, her hands trembling as she clutched her fleece jacket.
"He's under," Viktor said, his voice flat. He pointed a finger at the heavy steel door. "Both of you. Out. Now."
Julia opened her mouth to protest, a desperate maternal instinct overriding her logic, but Alejandro placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. He knew better than to argue with a ripperdoc who was about to cut open a skull.
"Let's go, Jules," Alejandro murmured. He guided her toward the door. As Julia stepped out into the stairwell, Alejandro paused in the threshold. He looked back at Viktor, who was already turning away to calibrate the surgical lasers.
"Vik," Alejandro said, his voice thick with a raw weight. "Thanks. And... I'm sorry for placing you in this position. I know what I asked you to do."
Viktor didn't look back. He kept his eyes on the monitor, adjusting the synthetic cortisol drip. "Save it, Ale. Just get out of my clinic."
Alejandro swallowed hard, nodded once, and pulled the heavy door shut. The hydraulic seals engaged with a solid thud, leaving Viktor entirely alone with the sleeping boy and the terrifying weight of forty-seven-year-old experimental technology.
Viktor exhaled a long, shaky breath. He walked over to his central terminal and pulled up his audio suite. He filtered out anything with a heavy bass drop, stripping away the chaotic pop synths that usually fueled Night City, and selected a track of deep, ambient soundscapes. It was just a slow, synthesized hum that vibrated at a low frequency, mimicking the steady rhythm of a sleeping heartbeat. It helped him lock into a rhythm of calm precision, and the low-frequency audio waves actually helped stabilize the patient's ambient heart rate during deep-dive neurosurgery.
For the first forty-five minutes, Viktor didn't even pick up a scalpel. He prepped the field. He ran the Kjellberg cocktail through a micro-centrifuge, ensuring the synthetic neuro-inhibitors were perfectly balanced to suppress Santi's microglia. If the boy's immune system woke up and identified the carbon-nanotubes as a foreign threat during the integration, his brain would cook itself in a matter of minutes. It was the terrifying, razor-thin tightrope of biochemistry.
Once the cocktail was flowing steadily through the IV, Viktor picked up the auto-scalpel.
What followed was a grueling marathon. A standard copper-wired neural link installation on a ten-year-old took Viktor roughly four hours. He could practically do it blindfolded.
This took him six.
He didn't use the automated robotic arms for the delicate work since he didn't trust the machine algorithms to handle the highly adaptive, rapidly developing grey matter of an eight-year-old boy. He used his own flesh-and-blood hands, his fingers working with millimeter-perfect precision. He carefully pulled back the scalp, bored through the mastoid bone, and exposed the parietal lobe.
Integrating the microscopic mesh of carbon-nanotube threads was like trying to weave a spiderweb into a bowl of gelatin without breaking the surface tension. Viktor's chest was drenched in sweat, and his shoulders burned with the agonizing tension of holding his hands perfectly still for hours on end. He had to manually guide the synthetic webbing, aligning it perfectly with the boy's neural pathways while praying to a God he wasn't sure he believed in that the astrocyte cells would accept the foreign body.
Three hours passed. Then four. And the ambient music still hummed while the biometric monitor beeped steadily.
By the time the sixth hour rolled around, Viktor's hands were physically trembling from the sheer stress of the surgery. He sealed the final incision, applying a fast-acting dermal polymer to the skin behind Santi's ear. Where a bulky, ugly chrome socket usually sat on a street merc, Santi had only a sleek, matte-black neural port perfectly flush with the bone.
"It's finally over," Viktor said to himself as he stepped back, dropping his bloodied surgical tools onto the metal tray with a loud clatter. He stripped his surgical gloves off and stared at the monitor.
There were no spikes or localized hemorrhaging. Santi's Neural Link had been built.
Viktor walked over to the small sink in the corner, splashing freezing cold water onto his face and neck. He grabbed a towel, wiping himself down, feeling the adrenaline crash that was starting to assault his body. He walked over to his desk and dropped heavily into his chair.
He needed to destress, or his own heart was going to give out. He booted up his secondary terminal, pulling up a saved file from the 2020s. It was a heavyweight boxing match, stripped of the neon ads and staged violence of modern cyber-brawls. Just two ganic men testing the limits of their meat.
Viktor reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, pulling out a glass and a bottle of cheap synthetic whiskey. He tossed a single, cloudy cube of ice into the glass, poured three fingers of the whiskey, and set the bottle aside. He didn't drink it immediately. He just sat there, watching the ice crack and pop in the cheap liquor, listening to the ambient hum of the clinic.
He sat there for a full ten minutes, letting the adrenaline rush of the surgery bleed out of his system.
Finally, he stood up, walked to the heavy steel door, and hit the release valve.
Alejandro and Julia were standing in the stairwell, looking like they had aged ten years in the span of six hours. Julia's face was ashen, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow. Alejandro stood rigid, his jaw clenched so tight it looked like the cybernetics in his neck might snap.
"Come in," Viktor said, his voice exhausted.
They didn't need to be told twice. Julia rushed past him, practically sprinting to the surgical chair. Alejandro followed close behind, his eyes immediately locking onto the steady green line of the biometric monitor.
"How did it go?" Alejandro demanded, his voice tight, his eyes scanning the sleek, matte-black port behind his sleeping son's ear. "Did the astrocytes bind? Did the cocktail hold?"
Viktor walked slowly back to his desk, picking up his glass of whiskey. He took a slow sip, wincing slightly at the harsh bite of the cheap alcohol.
"Everything went as expected, Ale," Viktor said, his tone incredibly guarded. "The mesh is integrated, and his vitals are strong. Any localized bleeding was minimal." He swirled the whiskey in his glass, refusing to look at his friend. "But we are in uncharted waters here. The Kjellberg data you showed me is almost fifty years old. Only time will tell if his brain fully accepts the lobe without fracturing."
An awkward silence descended over the clinic. Julia stood by the chair, gently holding Santi's small, limp hand while Alejandro stood rigidly in the center of the room, the adrenaline of the wait leaving him restless.
Viktor sat down at his desk, his eyes locked onto the boxing match playing on his terminal. Jab, cross.
"Vik, the telemetry data I have-" Alejandro started, trying to fill the suffocating silence, needing to talk, needing to justify the last six hours.
"Shut up, Alejandro," Viktor interrupted, his voice low and tired. He didn't take his eyes off the screen. "Just... shut the fuck up and let me watch the fight."
Alejandro snapped his mouth shut and nodded slowly, accepting the hostility. He knew he deserved it.
They sat in the tense quiet for another ten minutes. The only sounds in the room were the muffled thuds of the boxing match on the terminal and the steady, rhythmic breathing of the boy in the chair.
Then, a soft groan broke the silence.
Santi's head shifted on the padded headrest. His brow furrowing as his violet eyes slowly fluttered open, blinking against the harsh fluorescent lights.
All three adults moved instantly.
Julia gasped, leaning over him, and Alejandro stepped up to the opposite side of the chair, his hands hovering, afraid to touch him. Meanwhile, Viktor set his whiskey down and rolled his stool over, shining a small, localized penlight into Santi's eyes to check for pupillary response.
"Hey there, kid," Viktor said gently, clicking the light off. "Welcome back to the land of the living. How are you feeling?"
Santi blinked sluggishly, his eyes darting between his mother's tear-streaked face and his father's tense posture. He frowned, taking a slow inventory of his own physical form.
"I feel..." Santi started, his voice a little raspy from the dry air. He tilted his head, processing the new Chrome that had just been installed in his head. "I feel tired. But... the same. I just feel the same."
Viktor let out a genuine chuckle, a massive wave of relief washing over him. "That's good, kid. Feeling the same is exactly what we want right now. It means the meat is holding together."
"Let's hook him up," Alejandro said immediately, reaching into his jacket for a silver personal link cable. "Let's patch him into the local clinic subnet. I need to test the latency threshold-"
Viktor's hand snapped out with terrifying speed, his fingers wrapping around Alejandro's wrist with enough force to make the chrome joints underneath groan.
"You touch that port right now, Ale, and I will break your fucking arm," Viktor snarled, his eyes blazing with absolute fury.
Alejandro froze, the silver cable dangling from his fingers. He looked at Viktor's face and slowly put the cable back into his pocket.
Viktor released his wrist, turning his back on the man in disgust. He walked over to a secure medical lockbox, punched in a code, and pulled out a heavy plastic bottle filled with thick red capsules. He walked back and handed the bottle directly to Julia.
"Julia, listen to me very carefully," Viktor said, his tone shifting into the authority of a medical professional. "These are highly concentrated neuro-inhibitors and synthetic cortisol stabilizers. You will make sure he takes one every twelve hours for the next three months. No exceptions. If he misses a dose, his immune system will wake up, identify the carbon-mesh as an invasive parasite, and his brain will literally attack itself. Do you understand?"
Julia clutched the bottle to her chest like a lifeline, her eyes wide. "Every twelve hours. Yes. I understand."
"Good," Viktor nodded. He leaned down, looking directly into Santi's eyes. "Now, for the rules. For the next two weeks, you do not connect to anything. Not the CitiNet, or a local subnet. Absolute isolation. Your brain needs to heal around the mesh."
"I know the protocol, Vik," Alejandro interrupted, stepping forward. "After two weeks, we introduce him to-"
"I said shut the fuck up, Ale!" Viktor roared, his voice echoing off the concrete walls. He pointed a finger at Alejandro's chest. "This isn't for you to understand! You were just about to connect him to the local net a minute ago, and you would have, had I not stopped you. You already made your choice! This is for Santi and Julia to understand, so you don't push him into an early grave because you want to see how fast his new toy is!"
Alejandro accepted the reprimand, clamped his jaw shut, and took a step back.
Viktor turned his attention back to Julia and Santi, his voice lowering back to a steady, serious rumble. "After the first two weeks of zero connectivity, you can start the integration. But it has to be slow. Some air-gapped sandbox environments. Maybe some filtered, throttled data streams. You want to keep the training wheels on for four solid weeks."
Santi frowned, processing the timeline. "That is highly inefficient. A six-week total delay before full operational capacity-"
"It's not about efficiency, kid, it's about keeping you from flatlining," Viktor said firmly. "Your brain is essentially learning how to use a brand new limb. If you try to sprint a marathon before you learn how to crawl, the sensory overload will trigger a localized stroke. That means that any real connection to the open Net before a month and a half is an absolute no-go. And even for the first three months, the exposure has to be gradual and limited. Only after the three-month mark, when the pills are done, and your body accepts your neural link as a part of you, can you freely connect to the open architecture. Are we clear?"
Santi looked at the massive ripperdoc, sensing the unyielding boundary in the man's tone. "Yes, Vik. We are clear. I will adhere to the safety parameters you've set."
Julia nodded fervently, her hand resting protectively on Santi's shoulder. "I'll make sure of it, Viktor. Thank you. Thank you for saving him."
Viktor offered her a sad, tight smile. "I didn't save him, Jules. If anything, I might have just killed him, and we don't know it yet." He sighed, rolling his shoulders to alleviate the lingering surgical tension. "Why don't you take the kid out to the stairwell? Give his legs a minute to wake up before you try to walk him to the cab. Ale and I need to have a little chat."
Julia didn't argue. She helped Santi down from the chair. The boy wobbled slightly, his equilibrium temporarily thrown off by the invasive surgery, but he caught his balance quickly. He looked back at Viktor, offering one last polite nod, before following his mother out the heavy steel door.
The hydraulic hiss sealed the room once more.
Viktor walked over to his desk. He pulled a second tumbler from the glass, tossed a cube of ice into it, and poured a heavy measure of the cheap synthetic whiskey. He walked back over and held the glass out to Alejandro.
Alejandro looked at the whiskey, then up at Viktor. "I'm good, Vik. I need a clear head."
"What, you too good for the well-rail sludge now, Mr. Executive?" Viktor mocked. "Take the damn drink, Ale. You're going to need it."
Alejandro hesitated, then reached out and took the glass. Viktor picked up his own, and they stood there in the sterile light of the clinic, two chooms from a past life sharing a moment of heavy silence.
Alejandro took a slow sip. The whiskey burned like battery acid going down, a stark contrast to the aged scotch he had grown accustomed to in the corporate towers. He lowered the glass, looking at Viktor's exhausted face.
"Vik, I know you think I'm a monster for this," Alejandro started, his voice low. "But if you knew what was coming-"
"Why?" Viktor interrupted.
"I told you," Alejandro defended. "The boy's latency-"
"Don't give me that optimized corpo bullshit!" Viktor snarled, slamming his glass down on the metal tray so hard the liquor sloshed over the rim. "I know you, Ale! I've known you since we were pulling gigs in Santo Domingo with nothing but pipe-iron and cheap handguns! You don't cut your own kid open because he types too slow! You may be a ruthless son of a bitch, but you love that boy. So tell me. What the fuck terrified you enough to make you run a fifty-year-old suicide protocol on an eight-year-old child?"
Alejandro stared at Viktor. His eyes shifted to the boxing gloves on the table, and then to the blood on the surgical tray. He had crossed the line. But there was no going back now.
"I fished something out, Vik," Alejandro said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "I used my Militech clearance and built an air-gapped terminal in my home. And I pulled a piece of encrypted telemetry out from the data streams."
Viktor's brow furrowed, his medical anger slowly shifting into a cold dread. "Telemetry from where, Ale? Who did you rob?"
Alejandro took a step closer, the neon lights of the monitors reflecting in his dead eyes. "I didn't rob anyone in the city. I used a chip I had from a few years back and pulled the telemetry from beyond the Blackwall."
Viktor froze. The blood completely drained from his face, leaving him looking like a corpse under the fluorescent lights. For a man who spent the last couple of years elbow-deep in blood and chrome, there were very few things that genuinely terrified Viktor. The Blackwall was at the top of that list.
"Jesus Christ, Ale," Viktor breathed, taking a step back, looking at his old friend as if he were looking at a walking plague. "You gotta be fucking kidding me."
"I'm not," Alejandro said grimly. "I had captured a microsecond from an entity's wake when it pressed against the membrane. The things waiting in the Old Net... they aren't just rogue code, Vik. Some of them are gods. And the Wall isn't going to last forever. It's only a matter of time before it cracks. And when it does, standard ICE isn't going to save anyone. A standard neural link isn't going to save anyone. They will burn the meatspace to ash."
"So you decide to poke the hornets' nest?!" Viktor shouted, his voice cracking with sheer disbelief. "You brought Blackwall static into your own fucking home?! Where you live with your wife and kid?!"
"I brought the armor!" Alejandro roared back, slamming his own glass down next to Viktor's. "I found the Chrysalis Protocol in that data! I found nanotech! I found a way to make my son strong enough to survive what's coming!"
"You didn't make him strong, you gonk, you made him a beacon!" Viktor screamed, stepping fully into Alejandro's space, towering over the Solo. "Do you have any idea how much noise a petabit-scale organic processor makes in the Net?! If NetWatch catches a whiff of him, they'll flatline him! If a rogue AI feels him in the stream, they'll possess him! You didn't give him no armor, you strapped a fucking bomb to his chest!"
"He will learn to hide!" Alejandro spat, his instincts flaring and his cybernetic arm tensing. "I will teach him to hide! I will be keeping him safe!"
"You're an arrogant dumb piece of shit!" Viktor bellowed.
Viktor didn't stop to think. The rage and the sheer moral revulsion of what he had just been forced to do boiled over. Viktor's right arm snapped out, his heavy fist twisting in a brutal left hook.
The punch caught Alejandro flush on the cheekbone.
Despite the synthetic plating reinforcing his jaw, the sheer force of a heavyweight boxer throwing a bare-knuckle punch sent Alejandro staggering backward. He crashed into the metal tray, sending sterilized scalpels and empty vials scattering across the concrete floor.
Alejandro touched his face. He pulled his fingers away, looking at the bright smear of red blood. He looked up, his hazel eyes completely devoid of warmth, shifting instantly into the cold stare of a Militech killer.
But Viktor, instead of backing down, stepped forward, slipping into a tight boxing stance. He threw a fast jab, aiming for Alejandro's nose.
Alejandro's combat reflexes engaged, and he swatted Viktor's jab away with his flesh hand, stepping inside his guard.
Viktor anticipated it, pivoting his hips and throwing a devastating uppercut meant to shatter Alejandro's ribs.
The blow landed, knocking the wind out of Alejandro. However, he absorbed the blunt shock, planted his boots, and retaliated.
Alejandro threw a short elbow strike right into Viktor's sternum, causing Viktor to grunt and drop his guard for a fraction of a second. It was all the opening an experienced corpo operator needed. Alejandro swept his leg, kicking Viktor's boot out from under him. As the massive ripperdoc lost his balance, Alejandro grabbed him by the collar of his scrubs and used Viktor's own momentum to slam him violently into the concrete floor.
The impact echoed through the basement and left Viktor gasping, the air completely driven from his lungs while his vision blurred. He looked up to see Alejandro kneeling over him, his matte-black cybernetic arm raised, the synthetic knuckles balled into a fist that could punch through a cinderblock wall. Alejandro's eyes were wild, the combat stims in his system screaming at him to finish the threat.
The metal fist hovered inches from Viktor's face, trembling with suppressed force.
Viktor stared up at the monster pinning him to the floor, waiting for the killing blow that never came.
Alejandro stared down at the man who had just saved his son's life. He looked at the betrayal and the raw, bleeding knuckles of the only real friend he had left in Night City. It reminded him of the look of betrayal of the people he had killed nine years ago in an attempt to erase all traces of Project BLACKGLASS.
Alejandro squeezed his eyes shut, letting out an agonizing yell of frustration. He lowered his cybernetic arm, unclenching his fist, and pushed himself off of Viktor, stumbling back until he hit the surgical chair. He leaned heavily against it as his breath came in ragged gasps. Blood dripped slowly from his cheekbone, staining the collar of his tactical shirt.
Viktor lay on the floor for a long moment, staring up at the harsh fluorescent lights. He tasted copper in his mouth. The blood coming from Alejandro's cheek was a testament to just how good a boxer Viktor had once been, and a testament to how dangerous Alejandro truly was to have ended the fight in a few seconds.
"Are we done?" Alejandro rasped, wiping the blood from his chin with the back of his hand.
Viktor slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, wincing as his bruised sternum protested. He ran a hand over his face, looking at the blood on his own knuckles.
"Yeah," Viktor muttered, his voice hollow. "Yeah, Ale. We're done."
Alejandro stepped forward, offering his flesh-and-blood hand. Viktor looked at it for a moment, then grabbed it. Alejandro hauled the massive ripperdoc off the floor, steadying him until Viktor found his footing.
They stood there in the mess of the clinic they had created, surrounded by scattered tools. Viktor walked over to the desk. Amazingly, the two cut-glass tumblers were still sitting upright. Viktor picked his up, swirling the remaining whiskey, but he didn't offer the other one to Alejandro.
Viktor took a long, slow drink and swallowed it down, his eyes never leaving the floor.
"I don't even know who you are anymore, Alejandro," Viktor said, his voice quiet and stripped of all anger. He looked up, his eyes meeting the man's. "Get the fuck out of my clinic. And don't ever come back."
Alejandro flinched, the words hitting harder than the hook to the jaw. "Vik, try to understand. I had to-"
"Get out!" Viktor roared, his voice echoing off the concrete. "Take your kid, take your corporate blood money, and get the fuck out of my sight!"
Alejandro stared at him. He knew a burned bridge when he saw one. He walked over to the desk, picked up his own glass, and downed the cheap synthetic whiskey in one swallow. He set the glass down softly on the metal desk, turned, and walked toward the heavy steel door.
As he passed Viktor, he paused, reaching out and laying his flesh hand gently on Viktor's broad shoulder.
"You're a real friend, Vik," Alejandro whispered, his voice thick with genuine sorrow. "Thank you... for everything."
Viktor didn't look at him. He kept his eyes locked on the concrete wall, muttering under his breath, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and heartbreak. "A real friend would have never forced me to do what you did today."
Alejandro closed his eyes, the truth of the statement carving a hole in his chest.
"I'm sorry," Alejandro said softly. "But you were the only one I ever trusted enough to perform the surgery."
Alejandro let his hand fall from Viktor's shoulder and didn't say another word. He left the chip with the eddies on a shelf by the door, hit the hydraulic release, and stepped out into the stairwell, leaving Viktor alone in the bloody light of the clinic, the heavy steel door sealing shut behind him.
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Tragedy is often accompanied by good intentions, and it would be a tragedy for you to give me your stones.... No, seriously, hand them over!
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