#somewhere in the background don breaks five of her front teeth as she bites down. yi sang's hardtack has a full on bite mark as if it was a

[outism-had-a-purpose]

Ishmael's canto should have a unskippable cutscene where she eats hardtack. Nothing else.

[niskrp]

:// SEARCHING OPERATIVE …

… searching for AGENT 030 / THE DEATH. classified files indicate that they go by LEE HANSOL, and are also known as ZERO. born in NEW YORK, USA, in 1993/03/14, further investigation makes it clear that they joined the agency FIVE YEARS ago. they are an INTELLIGENCE AGENT who specialize in HACKING. higher clearance is needed to access further information…

… ENTER PASSWORD TO ACCESS THE COMPLETE FILE.

:// ACCESSING BACKGROUND FILES ...

a mission: to unearth the flesh from the skin, leaving the marrows exposed for the maggots to consume. sanity is an option that comes together with an exit wound. not a precise incision, not a seamless suture. there’s a scripture that becomes a guide to how much you can dissect yourself without dying, and here are the trembling fingers, trying to mimic the culture of an open heart surgery.

the autopsy doesn’t end here. in fact, it has just begun, a set of scalpels on the table. a glyph in the machine, data decryption of the anatomy…

he lives circa post-mortem. the interior of his ribcage has too many deaths mounted on its brittle walls, the necrosis of the organs turned into reminders of the life once a mirror of lies. traces his footfalls, there is a path left by the shrapnel, back to the road prior the forked ends. reminds himself that once upon a time, the only dichotomy was naught but his bone tongue: he spoke two languages vastly different, now six. he doesn’t recognize which is native to him anymore.

boyhood was a gossamer chrysalis that enveloped. appa was two syllables that he kept in his mouth for safekeeping, sometimes enunciated so carefully so his mouth didn’t get seared. eomma was a fistful of handcrafted untruths, and she tied him with piano strings on each limb. he grew up peculiar with a set of inward teeth, biting into his own lips he spoke in riddles. he grew up dissonant with a pair of bruised knuckles, breaking into his own ire he shattered in pieces. eomma built his spine ridge by ridge, placing him everywhere he didn’t want to be.

sometimes, she told him to bend his knees and fold his hands, prayers towards nothing in particular, for there was soft violence that came with a religion in which death was mounted on its altar. he did not register the face of a god, a singular freeform that held eomma captive. he only located each gentle stroke of war in every verse, the urban bible that he’s carried until now. counted the beads of the rosary with a falsified belief he became a body of notions.

six when he saw the fear that stained eomma’s expression for so long, it had become a part of her construct. the exoskeleton of this american dream riveted in a concept that lasted with a supporting crutch. she was crucified by her paranoia — or was it? psyche that he did not know how to navigate, but the trepidation was there for his perusal. it felt like dermatillomania, watching her drowning in an ankle-deep ocean at three am. pills that cured, and he turned his back on her once again to carve a dent on the tallies.

appa was a missing incisor that cut him deep enough to remind him that there was a price to pay for each inhale, exhale. his systole and diastole did not come free, the liberty not theirs to begin with. shot with a glock once, twice at the age of nine, appa scorched his insignia in the form of a beast. he was not the same boy that had walked into the room an hour prior; the mechanism of these planted seeds turning his being into more than just the palpitation.

this liminality was a syllabus of conundrums: appa and eomma hid too many secrets at the bases of their throats. tracheas that swelled with the weight of the world. thought it wasn’t an anomaly when he’d only known how to pretend all his life, mandible filled with grenade pins scripted with homemade lies. the columns of his throat were pillars of sanctioned daydreams that deviated from public norms. realization came late like a garrote around his neck at sixteen, when eomma stripped him away from her. his grandparents, absent for over a decade, took over.

manhattan sighed a quiet goodbye in exchange for seoul, where nobody knew the history of familial negligence over his violent streaks. distilled himself for a name sixteen years late, donning ruptured backgrounds that remained consistent as fabricated by eomma. told him eomma was coming — soon, soon. excelling in the art of excavating his own laments, he turned to ace in academics. or, when his synapses glitched, there was always a punching bag, a shooting range. when he was red and raw from the personal rotting, he believed that devastation tasted like false comprehensions over his own upbringing. what if, what if, what if…

filaments of this boyhood lattice speak of an artwork so intricate, but what’s stranger than the scar tissues that marred his back without any recollections of who painted them?

and so, he sought. crowned himself with teeth, and last time he had asked his grandparents what his parents actually were, he was met with a weary look. at least they didn’t question the money spent for a one-way plane ticket to new york. instead of the rattled welcome, however, he was met with a deafening silence. she’d moved. she hadn’t mentioned it in their monthly calls. he returned with anger planting bruises in his being, camouflaged by each night of punching and kicking and shooting and thrashing.

he became feral, but contained. enrolled himself in the closest thing he knew to be close to appa, somewhere in the deep web. a man didn’t just spit out a son to leave. so he learned to decode, decipher. certain that along the line, he’d find the semblance of a long-lost father. eomma, on the other side of the story, came to seoul four years late for a visit too transient. but she kissed each cheek with fervor so ingrained, he thought she’d break nails digging them into his skin. she left the week after; an ounce of goodbye in a letter meant zilch. he clasped his jaw, moving on.

he had issues that swelled, but nothing that he couldn’t handle. learning his way into the depthless casket of the internet, he found appa with a relationship more complicated than what the years of hacking could offer. an agent, it said. for what? for whom? the ends of the information were too frayed for him to tell. there was his understanding, of all the secrets buried in the nooks of each joint. when he graduated, he chose to follow the barely known steps. there was no eomma, no appa. his grandparents wilted in the silence that shrouded their dinners. he barely came home, the smudged edges of his presence eventually were erased completely when he moved away on his own.

twenty-three. he was everything resembling half-smoked hymns, voice constricted to the hoarse sound of his past, haunting him in the poltergeists within his chest. he was a good agent in the making, marksmanship a particle of his existence since he was young. that was, until a detour in the midst of the sleepless night caught news about a woman. shot dead. point blank. he plummeted six feet under, the soil bled ice he developed hypothermia. he didn’t even have it in him to cry. appa found him one of those nights, telling him he was proud. eomma was proud. ( “for fuck’s sake,” he retorted. “you don’t have the right to be.” )

she was the hyacinth that bloomed in the winter, premature blossom that ended with slivers eaten in caustic measures. she still had her strings around his sternum. he couldn’t undo her with these shaking hands. the training gave him flashbacks of the news, so he ran until he splintered his ankles. joined another division to put his education into use instead. that way, he didn’t need to deal with the paraphrase of eomma’s passing. he didn’t even have a corpse to bury, a funeral to attend.

instead, the only corpse to bury for him would be his. a backyard funeral, elegies handwritten in an uneven penmanship. he is unhinged— vultures gnawing on his insides, charred black. some nights, he doesn’t know how to place his limbs anymore.

:// ACCESSING PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION ...

the archives of his psychological profile maintain a great deal of feigned apathy with a dash of pretense placed in the front. there’s a tough shell to even fissure, although upon peeling the skin there would be too much to discern. dissection is not advised, please proceed with cautions. diagnosis would include depression and anxiety. there are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. prominent issue is the anger management contained through violent means. the channeling itself is not the core to the peril — it is the general lack of disclosure towards himself. he doesn’t have any healthy coping mechanism, often choosing to swallow everything down. addictions are often found in drowning himself in workloads. surrounded by fellow agents, he can socialize to an extent but doesn’t exert himself much. remains in the comfort zone of shallow social interactions. amiable, easy-going. his typical appearance would be described as charming, albeit off. some sensitive people might be able to tell that he’s not everything that he chooses to divulge, as it’s often limited to what he’s comfortable with, and that level merely scratches the surface.

... END OF FILE. CONTACT THE AGENT DIRECTLY FOR MORE.