Elster woke up in agony.

It was a pain far worse than anything she had ever experienced before in her short life. As her consciousness returned, her heads-up display was flooded with blaring damage warnings and reboot notifications. For the first few minutes, it was all she could do to groan futilely, hoping that whatever wound she had taken, her calibration pod would sort it out soon.

Except… this didn’t feel like her calibration pod at all. She shifted her body, feeling her muscles ache from poor positioning and her skin chafe against a cold surface. Elster opened a blurry eye and found herself staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, rather than the fogged-up glass from the inside of a calibration unit capsule.

Definitely not in my pod, then, the Replika thought. She found herself lying haphazardly on the hard ground, but spotted her calibration pod barely an arm’s reach away from her position. Had she somehow fallen asleep outside of it? That was odd. She had never done that before.

She shakily propped herself up on an elbow and looked around. It took her a few disorienting seconds before she recognised the place as her apartment room. Having spent her entire life in the Penrose base at Vineta, the sight of waking to a new environment still confused her sometimes.

It had been late afternoon when she returned to her apartment, but a quick look through the window revealed that the sun was already down. Her built-in clock told her she had been passed out for nearly two hours.

Elster laid back down on the linoleum floor, her body still aching and fatigued. That discomfort was barely comparable to the mind-splitting agony in her head, however. Its rhythmic pounding briefly intensified the pain with each heartbeat, leaving her thoughts disjointed and giving her no chance of escape or relief from her torment.

Her eyes felt hyper-sensitive to the artificial street light filtering from her window, and the dehydration plaguing her throat was an unwelcome ache, each swallow akin to scraping sandpapers. She tasted the unpleasant, bitter mix of dried blood and spit in her mouth, which nauseated her further.

Was this what a hangover felt like? Elster had heard tales of how Gestalts would sometimes drink themselves into a stupor, only to awaken the next day with a terrible migraine. Back when she was still working at the Penrose base, the Eule and Star units would occasionally organise faux social settings with Replika-grade alcoholic drinks. She was sometimes invited to a few of those gatherings, but she never took the opportunity to participate before. Perhaps she should have, on the off-chance that it would have given her a better immunity towards the excruciating pain engulfing her mind.

But if hangovers were anywhere near this agonising, Elster had to wonder why anyone, Gestalt or Replika, would ever consume alcohol at all. The thought sprang a vague memory to her mind, and Elster allowed the recollection to wash over her consciousness, to better distract herself from the pain.

Ariane had made it look so easy when she drank. Alcohol wasn’t entirely forbidden by the Nation, but it was frowned upon and heavily controlled. Such restrictions, however, no longer held any weight to a pair who were drifting through space, far from any overbearing government supervision.

A few bottles of wine had been stashed away in the ship, a small luxury. Ariane had made use of them to celebrate their anniversaries. Those were the only times Elster had ever drunk. The pleasantness of the memory made the pain in her head fade. Elster closed her eyes and smiled fondly, remembering the bitter taste of the wine and the shared moment with…

Ariane. Ariane? Who was Ariane?

Elster frowned. Something was wrong.

With a groan of effort, Elster shakily pushed herself off the floor and tried to clear her head of the peculiar thoughts that seemed to come and go. The headache had rapidly faded moments ago, but her mind was still foggy from having just woken up. Combined with the foreign quality of her room, perhaps it was no surprise that she was still unbalanced.

Yes, that must be the reason. After all, this was not her bunk back in the Penrose base in Vineta, nor was it her personal room onboard the Penrose-512 scouting ship that she had spent so many years in. This was the apartment bedroom passed to her by her superiors after she was transferred to Rotfront for her new assignment. A little disorientation was to be expected. It probably didn’t help that she kept feeling this strange sense of discomfort and… déjà vu…

She rubbed her eyes. Penrose-512 scouting ship? That marks twice now that she thought of something that made no sense. She winced as a sudden torrent of disjointed memories blazed through her mind. Memories of lives she shouldn’t have. Memories of days spent working onboard a spaceship with a Gestalt pilot, first in indifference, then in bliss, and ending with despair and grief.

And then, memories of somewhere else entirely. An endless nightmare, a monument to insanity and desolation. An eternity spent in dark hallways and the company of monsters. An infinity of blood, screams, gunshots, and the acrid scent of spent bullet casings mixed with rusting metal.

Always fighting, always dying. Cycle after cycle, death after death, attempt after attempt. All to reach her and fulfil her Promise, to kill Ari–

No. Stop. None of this is real. Elster shut the fake memories away from her head and forced herself to breathe. She had to stay level-headed. She was Elster-512, a newly created Elster unit merely a few months old. While she did serve the Penrose Program, she was never formally assigned to any ship, and she had not spent years inside a spacefaring vessel as its technician, attending to its maintenance, laughing together with a pale-haired girl, and failing for years on end to fulfil that damned Promise she made to kill–

Elster suddenly snarled as she drunkenly stumbled back and grabbed the wall for support. What is this? More signs of her Persona degradation, no doubt. She began to recall what happened before she blacked out. Breaking down the door to her room. Repeatedly crying out a name like some deranged lunatic. Hallucinations of a strange, wraith-like woman. A frantic conversation which led to her shocking herself with her own stun baton, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, remember, or explain.

The shock would explain the headache, at least; the damage she dealt to herself, while non-lethal, would still be significant enough to temporarily fry some of her optical and neural systems. It didn’t help that she had been tinkering with the stun prod to make it more potent. She eyed the weapon lying discarded on the ground, its single charge spent as the tip of the prod was burnt and fused to uselessness.

Shocking herself, however, doesn’t explain the sudden escalation of schizophrenic symptoms that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. She would fully admit that she had sometimes behaved a little oddly when she was working back in the Penrose base; she wasn’t ignorant or delusional enough to not acknowledge her random bouts of disorientating visions or peculiar habits. But she never expected things to get this bad so quickly. She went from a fully functioning Replika to a malfunctioning, dangerous lunatic in less than a day, and the symptoms just kept getting worse and more sporadic.

She needs to get in her calibration pod, not just to fix up the physical damage, but also to re-centre her mind with the hopes of getting rid of these persistent, eccentric memories her mind kept conjuring to play tricks on her. It was doubtful that a simple calibration cycle would solve all her mental issues, but given that the alternative was to accept her apparent madness, Elster was willing to give it a shot.

Because if this kept up, Elster was just going to shoot herself and end her misery before she went and embarrassed herself in public. Just the thought of making an outburst like that in the open was enough to make her reach for a gun. Not that she had a gun, or that shooting herself would work. She would just wake up in front of the restroom Mirror at S-23 again, and be forced to fight her way back down to the Gate and the Red Dream. Tracking through the ever-shifting Nightmare, killing all those monstrous Repikas, fighting Falke once more, all to fulfil the Promise and kill Ariane again. All in the vain hope that this time, it was the one that would work, and that she wouldn’t ever, ever have to wake up again–!

“Dear Empress, would it just stop already?” she pleaded aloud, more scared than frustrated. She felt more of those accursed memories flood in. Her sense of self was being slowly eroded by the remembrance of a fake life.

How did her mind even conjure up such dark, fanciful tales anyway? She had always prided herself as a logical, centred individual; the events being played out in her imagination felt like the plot written by some deranged madman.

A pointless tragedy wrapped in an appalling veneer of forbidden romance between a Gestalt and Replika women pair. She didn’t even like romance! She wasn’t even sure she liked women!

“I don’t think the Empress can hear you. She’s still a little too busy pacifying the Kitezh Nobles to answer back right now.”

That was not her own voice.

Elster reactively twisted to face the newcomer, her body stiffening in alarm and fear. She was absolutely certain there had been no one in the room when she woke up, and she had not heard anyone enter.

And yet, in defiance of all logic, there was someone right there with her, casually sitting on the chair propped up against the wall opposite to her.

It was the same white-haired girl she spoke to before she fell unconscious. Her name left Elster’s lips before she could stop it.

“Ariane,” she whispered, her voice filled with equal parts longing and fear.

The girl nodded but said nothing. For a long moment, the two of them just stared at each other; Elster with wariness, and Ariane with an inscrutable expression.

The mere sight of the wraith was triggering another rush of memories, snippets of another life that couldn’t possibly be real. She felt like her mind was being swallowed whole, and it terrified her to no end.

The Replika swallowed down the rising hysteria bubbling up from her throat. She had to remain calm. Remember the training ingrained in her mind, and approach the situation rationally.

She studied the wraith methodically. The girl, Ariane, looked the same as she had before she fainted: white hair, red eyes, and dressed in nothing but a nightgown. Her features were unusual, but hardly to the point where Elster would call them inhuman. There were rational explanations for her appearance. As she had theorised on the train, albinism would account for most of her unusual features. The hair could also simply be dyed, and the red eyes possibly be the product of coloured contacts.

Those lingering suspicions were gone the moment she stared into those vibrant, blood-red orbs. Elster shivered. They were real, of that the Replika had no doubt.

The dress looked as impractical as ever, doing little to hide the thinness of her frame or limbs. She looked like a porcelain doll, unspeakably beautiful and fragile.

There was also something else. The wraith looked a lot more… corporeal than before, for lack of a better word. If not for the strange events of that day, Elster could almost believe that it was a person sitting before her, and not some imaginary construct. Almost.

Elster briefly thought about trying to arrest her again, or at least try and inflict some form of physical harm. AEON protocol demanded the Replika to detain her. Her fight-or-flight instincts were also encouraging her to attack, as fleeing had already proven to be impossible.

And yet, Elster could not bear to take even a step towards her. Not just because the thought of harming her left her with a strange sense of revulsion, but because she felt certain that nothing she did could hurt her. Even with her more tangible presence, there was still something undeniably otherworldly about the white-haired girl. Something she couldn’t explain.

Or maybe she was just insane. It was most likely that. Elster closed her eyes, ignoring the other girl, and thought through the day’s events. She had been having hallucinations all day, suffered from multiple irrational fits of paranoia, and had deliberately shocked herself to unconscious with her own stun baton hours earlier. A girl had just appeared out of thin air in her room, a girl whose name she already knew. Her mind was conjuring fake memories of being with her in some alternative reality where she had spent most of her life as the girl’s lover before their tragic end.

The only logical conclusion was the same one she had already repeatedly come to: that she was simply mad. No matter how she looked, there was just no way this girl could be real; too many inexplicable things were happening to allow for that possibility.

A product of her dying mind. A hallucination. All physical evidence points towards the fact that the girl could not possibly be present in her room. Therefore, Elster didn’t need to do a damn thing about her, because she was imaginary.

Elster forced out a breath and tried her best to relax. Then, doing her best to ignore the fictitious construct sitting in her chair, the Replika got to work.

The first thing she did was pick the stun baton off the floor and place it on the personal workbench that AEON had graciously given her for the mission. The civilian sector of Rotfront hardly had military-grade fabricators, plasma tools, or Replika-grade repair gels lying around, so it was more of a necessity rather than a luxury. The alternative was for Elster and the Eule unit to repeatedly head to the Rotfront military outpost whenever they needed to repair minor, superficial synthetic damage or glitches.

The damage to her arms went a little beyond superficial, however. The supplies they brought along from the base will help, of course, but it will still take a proper AEON workbench to patch things up completely. Remembering that she still had the items she grabbed from the storage room, she took them from her utility belt and laid them out on the workbench. Thankfully, none of them were damaged from her shocking herself or when she collapsed to the ground.

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Once everything was neatly arranged, she went to her en suite bathroom. Still defiantly ignoring the wraith who was now smiling in her chair, the Replika washed her face and poured herself a cup of water to spit out a mouthful of foul spit and blood, as well as to wash away the burning thirst in her throat. A semblance of calm returned…

Until she looked in the mirror reflecting her room beyond the bathroom door and saw that the wraith was missing from her chair.

She spun around, horror and relief intermingling in a heady mix, only to be left flabbergasted to see that Ariane was still seated in place. Elster turned back to the mirror, whose reflection showed no one in the chair, then back again to see Ariane still there, who was laughing into her hand while waving the other merrily at her.

No reflection. Somehow the realisation made Elster relax. It was definitely a hallucination, then. While it was a clear indication of her ailing mind, at least it was confirmation that it wasn’t a physical threat lingering in her room. As long as she kept ignoring it, she should be fine until she could find a solution.

Elster went back to the bench, reaching for the medical tools before hesitating. A few seconds later, she reached for her power tools instead and got to repairing the stun baton.

The Replika frowned when she accidentally grabbed the wrong appliance. Strange, had that power drill always been there? She distinctly remembered placing it somewhere else. In fact, the entire arrangement of her workbench implements felt off, as if it had been reshuffled without her knowing.

It was probably just another side effect of her disorientation. The Eule wasn’t one to touch the engineer’s belongings without permission, and the wraith was just a fictional fabrication. Shaking her head, Elster resumed her work.

“What are you doing?” Contrary to what she expected, the girl’s voice sounded curious and amused. Elster had thought that she would be more wrathful or insulted, given that the Replika had been ignoring her.

Elster didn’t reply, although the wraith’s voice did make her freeze for a second before she forced herself to continue her work. Even with the pain in her arms, her hands made quick work of dismantling the baton, moving with smooth, practised motion.

“You were always like this in the nightmare.” The wraith continued speaking, even as Elster remained silent, choosing instead to continue her work. “Prioritising your weapons first over taking care of yourself. I suppose at some point during the cycles, you adapted more towards aggression rather than caution.”

Weapons came first, always. What did wounds matter, when death resets her body each time, regardless of the damage she took?

The baton’s batteries slid out of their sockets, ruined beyond reuse. The acrid smoke pulled forth unpleasant memories: clawing hands and rusted blades cutting into her flesh, as she hurriedly pulled forth her baton. Monstrous screams, followed by the smell of electric-charred flesh. Yelling in fear and adrenaline as she brutally stomped on the creature’s head. Again, and again, until they were but mere gore on her boots.

Haste over prudence. What was pain worth, compared to the satisfaction of killing another wretched stain in her path?

“I understand, of course. The trials of the cycles were harsh beyond what you or anyone should suffer through.” Lies. The one who suffered most from the nightmares was never herself, but the girl trapped in the pod. “I still wish you took better care of yourself.”

There was never any time for that. Every minute wasted was another minute where you lay there in agony.

Elster did her best to ignore the barrage of incoherent thoughts and instead examined the disassembled weapon. While the stun batons were designed to be single-use, they could be brought back to working order with the right components and tools, and she had made sure to bring enough from the military base before she was moved into the apartment.

The local quartermaster had adamantly refused to give her a handgun to bring off-base, but they were at least willing to compromise with a single EIG-2 disposable stun prod. What they probably hadn’t expected was for Elster to modify it beyond its safety limits, or for her to be capable of fixing it up after using it.

She carefully replaced the damaged components. Idly, she thought back to when she used the baton on herself and found herself frowning. Even after the modification she made, it still wasn’t strong enough. The standard stun prods were made to merely incapacitate. The fact that hers managed to shock her into unconsciousness was a good sign, but she had modified it to be near-lethal in mind.

Perhaps it was abnormal to feel disappointed at the baton’s lack of power, especially since she would have died if the shock was any more potent, but she couldn’t help feeling that she could make it better. More useful.

Being a detention facility, S23 had a small stockpile of security weapons distributed across the station. One of the most commonly disseminated among the Protektor Replikas were shipments of EIG-2 stun prod, meant to be used as ‘correctional equipment’ against the detained Gestalts. Non-lethal, standard-issue, single-use disposable solutions made to incapacitate non-cooperating detainees. A potent tool for suppression, liked by the Protektors for its simple and practical nature.

Simple and practical, yes. Under normal circumstances, that was.

Against the monsters in the nightmare, it was woefully incompetent. The biomechanical nature of Replikas already gave them higher resistance to the prods compared to Gestalt, but the corrupted versions took this natural resilience to another level entirely. Whatever unholy mutations the Nightmare gave them, it made them freakishly durable, with an absurd threshold against shock or pain. The stun prods became unreliable, and Elster had died more than once when the prods failed to incapacitate a frenzied Eule or charging Star.

But she was an Elster unit, a Replika with the neural blueprint of a combat engineer. The defunct mining facility had spare tools and parts all over the place.

She was a survivalist, and she had everything she needed to tilt the odds in her favour.

What should she change? A higher voltage, at the very least. But the entire prod had to be modified to allow that increased output. Larger battery packs, stronger capacitors, and maybe even different electrode materials.

The standard voltage output of the stun prod is insufficient for reliably penetrating the corrupted Eule’s skin resistance and delivering its electric payload; the mutation had thickened their surfaces with chunks of overgrown necrotic flesh. The resulting ‘armour’, a web of mucous membranes, gave them improved tissue resistance. It would take a significantly higher voltage and current to achieve the same physiological effects on them as it would a Gestalt or normal Replika.

It was an easy enough remedy; the addition of jury-rigged power packs could replace the standard battery arrays, allowing her to triple the output to several hundred thousand volts. More than enough to break through her foe’s unholy fortitude, creating a pathway for the electrical shock to flow through her target’s circuitry and nervous systems, disrupting electrical signals and inducing involuntary muscle contractions. The upgrade to its capacitors would improve the stun prod’s arcing capabilities as well, letting her dispatch multiple targets with a single charge.

The usual brass electrodes used for the EIG-2 disposable stun prod were of poor quality but would have sufficed for their intended role against Gestalts. However, after the modifications made to the voltage output, they became prone to malfunctioning. The higher heat generated during discharge would soften and melt the electrodes, potentially leading to them fusing mid-shock.

Swapping the brass electrodes for improvised tungsten ones was the first step. After that, a coating of melted gold or nickel usually did the trick. She was fortunate that the facility’s workbenches and built-in fabricators were sophisticated enough to produce the necessary material from the scraps she salvaged around the station.

And in changing out the entire electrode, the process presented the opportunity to replace it with a longer variant and extend the reach of the weapon. The design of the entire shell would need to be replaced, but what did that matter? Something like that merely opens up the chance for her to make a complete overhaul to its handling.

How about a Taser-like framework? A system firing pseudo-bared electrode tips that would penetrate the flesh armour of the corrupted Replika and deliver the electric pulses directly to the target’s internal electronics and organs. The additional range would be a boon and allow her to avoid dangerous contact entirely.

She had tried that before. The voltage output had to be lowered to allow for the projectile-firing systems. There wasn’t a reliable way to implement both the high-voltage capacitors and the ballistic launchers. And so, after more than a few inglorious deaths at a failed shock delivery, she abandoned the idea. Still, there were many other ideas available. A hundred different possible minor alterations and adjustments. Each death, a learning experience. Each failure, another piece of the puzzle.

Her hands moved like they had a mind of their own, re-routing delicate wiring and pulling apart unnecessary housing to make space for the bulkier battery packs and capacitors. Elster fell into a stupor. The work felt… almost familiar. Like she had done it a thousand times before.

By the time it was finished, the baton looked nothing like what it once was. A bulkier, Frankenstein reconstruction from the spent shell of its previous corpse. Elster felt herself smile in satisfaction, before frowning. Something still felt missing.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

The sudden voice beside her made her flinched. She turned and saw the white-haired girl beside her, looking at the baton in her hand. Elster instinctively leaned away from her. The girl pretended not to notice.

“I don’t have the same mechanical knowledge that you do,” the wraith admitted. “But I’ve seen you do this a thousand times. Sometimes you would even explain it out loud, even though you couldn’t have known I was listening.”

“What?” Elster blurted out, against her better judgment.

Ariane pointed towards the baton’s new capacitors. “To get the maximum shock output, you need to disable the baton’s safety features. Normally, they help regulate the discharge so that it doesn’t explode in your hand. However, your capacitors don’t work unless you remove them. Granted, with the greater discharge, there’s now a higher chance the whole thing will just blow up and take your hand with it.”

Ariane turned to smile at her. Her crimson eyes looked sad.

“It took you a few dozen tries, but you eventually fine-tuned it right. I suppose one good thing about it is that you usually don’t long after losing your dominant hand, so your suffering doesn’t last in those iterations.”

Ariane took a step back and placed her hands behind her back. Elster could only mutely stare at her for a moment before putting the baton back down, dismantling and rebuilding it again.

A dozen, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand. She had to remake it from scratch at the beginning of each iteration. It all blurred together for her in the end.

In time, she finally arrived at a satisfactory end product: a highly modified electro-impulse device that was utterly unrecognisable from its original form. She would still need the parts and batteries from the other disposable prods after each use, but it was undoubtedly superior to its original, and far more reliable against the denizens of the Nightmare.

It was also the first of many modified weapons in her arsenal. She was hardly going to stop at one overly-excessive weapon project. Any advantage she could find in this Hell, she would take.

A sudden clap broke her out of her reverie. Elster straightened up, startled. The wraith, Ariane, was by her side, and looking at her with a smile.

“Well then! Now that you got your toy finished, what say you put down that thing and we get yourself patched up?” she said.

Elster looked down, blinked a few times, before just staring in wordless wonder. In her hands was the product of madness. An agglomeration of twisting wires, freakishly oversized power packs, and nickel-plated tungsten. Far too long, bulky, and obscene to be mistaken for a mere stun prod. It was a desecration of practical engineering; a sacrilege against moderation, and an utter profanity of the device’s original non-lethal nature.

And yet, the weight of it felt familiar. Reassuring. For a split moment, it felt like meeting an old friend again. A stalwart companion, one that had been at her side for an eternity. Its weight was comfort, its obscenity welcomed.

Then the moment passed. Elster scrutinized it for several long seconds, observing every inch of the monstrosity she crafted, before declaring flatly: “This is going to get me arrested.”

Ariane nodded. “Probably.”

“I can’t even bring this atrocity out when it looks like this,” Elster said dourly. “Any Protektor Replika is going to tackle me to the ground and declare me a terrorist the moment they see this.”

“Assuming you don’t accidentally kill them with that first.” Ariane leaned over and inspected the weapon. “I know this goes without saying, but don’t use this thing against anyone unless you intend to electrocute them. A corrupted Replika might be resilient enough to survive it, but against a regular Gestalt, that abomination is going to fry their organs and set their skin on fire.”

“It was my only weapon,” Elster lamented, voice void of emotion as she stared at the blasphemous piece of hardware in her hand. “Now I have to walk outside unarmed. What was I thinking? Why did I even make this? I just wanted to repair the stun prod. Now I have to waste time breaking down this contraption…”

“C’mon, keep it! You never know. It might come in handy.” Ariane encouraged.

Elster turned to her with a disbelieving look, no longer caring to pretend she couldn’t see her. “In what situation would I ever need something like this? What would I be fighting? An elephant?”

“You never know. Maybe the Chimera sneaked out of the Nightmare too,” the wraith pondered. “It could be out there, roaming around the moon and eating people.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ari. The Chimera doesn’t eat people, and if I see that damn thing again, I’m grabbing the elephant gun with the 16mm armour piercing rounds, not this malformed rubbish.” Elster tossed the thing on the table and groaned. “Why did you even let me make this? You should have at least stopped me.”

“Well, you looked like you were having so much fun building it, I can’t bear to just stop you!” Ariane tilted her head at Elster, grinning playfully. “You were even smiling! You’ve been grouchy all the day. It was nice to see you happy again.”

Elster closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “And whose fault do you think that is? Stalking me around all day from a distance, making me paranoid. Honestly, Ari, you should have just come up and talked to me rather than just… just…”

Elster stopped. After a length of silence, she slowly turned to face the wraith. Ariane's grin faltered upon seeing the Replika’s expression.

“You are not real,” Elster whispered slowly, gritting her teeth. “I need to stop talking to you. All of these thoughts… These memories are fake. I’m losing my mind. Have to remain…”

She sighed, turning away and ignoring the wraith. The Replika cleared the desk of the cluster that formed during her frenzied makeshift project and laid out her medical items instead. Just as she was about to grab the Repair Patch, a hand moved to stop her.

It didn’t grab her, but the mere sight of it moving towards her wrist was enough to make Elster freeze. Ariane backed off a step and raised her hands in a placating manner.

“I won’t touch you,” she said soothingly. “But starting with that to mend your wounds would be a mistake. I picked up a few things in the Nightmare too, mostly from when I could watch you. There’s a better way to fix those burns.”

When Elster didn’t say anything, the wraith continued: “You don’t have to follow anything I say, but just give me a chance and listen first, alright? That’s all I ask. You know the proper triage protocols, so if I say something suspicious, you will know immediately.”

Elster didn’t want to listen. Didn’t want to consider the wraith’s words. But… the concern in her voice. It sounded genuine. And more than that, as pathetic as the thought was, Elster did not want the wraith to look upset if she rejected her help.

And so, the Replika gave a slight, resigned nod instead. Ariane's face lit up with an elated smile.

“Great! Now c'mon, let's treat those wounds! I know a trick I saw you did once with a wound just like this…”