A brothel in a shack.

"Our Frayeur's in the middle of tea. Can you wait for eight, brother prince?"

Oliver, his eyes glowing, nodded with excitement.

He was directed by the brothel keeper to a stool at the bar, where, taking a seat, he kept his vision locked within a ten-degree cone ahead, away from another disguised player fidgeting to his side. Both flinched when a rowdy group of NPCs barged in and pushed ahead of them to order, a Carcassworker shouting his buddies, likely with the lucre of a new job at the WBAE. The bartender, eventually getting around to serving Oliver, asked for his Martial level to know what strength of drink to mix. They then pushed him a tiny demitasse cup of a green-hued tea and requested 3,000 gold.

"3K," remarked the undercover journalist, "that's a bit..."

"The service cost has been included, sir."

"It's for the whore!" yelled a hammered patron. "Cough up the cash or take your noodle elsewhere!"

"Oh." Oliver paid without negotiating and downed the drink in one swallow.

A few seconds later, a warmth permeated through his body, concentrating in his loins. The mixture seemed to have been laced with an aphrodisiac - a cheap method of compensating for the sub-par services of this brothel in a shack.

As the effect set in, he stared at the basin of the tea-cup, and the invasive, humiliating sense of his body being possessed by the drug reminded him once again of Alex Wong smugly sipping away during their interview, not one indication of being perturbed by the exposure, moments from killing him and his career.

Before Oliver's mind could drift off, he refocused it away from his greater adversary to the one directly before him.

King Ramiro...The Saviour of The Slums...

Oliver had hit a series of failures after identifying the third severed hand. The other leads had all turned out to be duds - kids murdered by other psychos or murdered by The Saviour but without the honour of having their preserved body-parts flaunted during Ramiro's public framing of The Priest of Wanaagsan. Consequently, Oliver had gone back and immersed himself more deeply in the background and mindest of Suchi's sadistic Saviour. He'd hoped thereby to arrive upon a pattern, a tell, a perverted modus operandi with which he could then find and name the remaining hands.

Obviously, the evidence collected so far was adequate for a take-down of Ramiro. However, Oliver, a completionist and—to be frank—having nothing better to do in this shithole, wouldn't be content until he'd obtained his five. Looping on repeat in his mind's eye had been a centrepiece image of his story: the day of the priest's framing, The Saviour on the stage before a crowd stirred up by his furious rhetoric, his lungs roaring with the spirit of the people as he waved the ghastly jar around, the vigour of his jostling causing the undersized hands to slush about the liquid inside, and then, suddenly, zooming in on the jar, beside each of the hideous flesh trinkets, five cute portraits appear. Who's this chubby-cheeked innocent with a missing tooth and an ailing aunt? Oh, it's sweet little Piszok, with the same diamond-shaped mole at the base of his left ring finger, abducted, murdered, and dismembered by The Saviour at age 10 while delivering a replacement bowstring.

Beautiful, wasn't it? Oliver's favourite subject had always been these beautiful hypocrites, these audacious frauds who prettied themselves up in skirts and pranced around so openly when one compromising shot from below could expose their unsightly nature.

"Hello, handsome!" A thickset woman in her late 20s squeezed in beside the brooding journalist.

"HI!" He rudely ogled, confirming her identity from her pale-white eyes despite this NPC having matured a haggard 17 biological years since his last picture of her.

She also sized him up in a glance. "My throat's parched. Could you?"

"SURE! Of course. Please."

He caved to purchase another overpriced cup, and the prostitute chatted him up for a couple minutes. Taking the lead, she guided him along with the free-flowing ease of one who'd convinced many men that they possessed the sprightly tongues of poets. Then, with an older sister's trust-imparting touch, she grabbed his fingers.

As she led him off, Oliver pretended to clam up even further.

In terms of why Ramiro conducted his depraved killings, the journalist had ruled out any financial or power-grabbing motives – publicity-wise, the costs of being exposed for child-murder out-stripped any material to be looted from penniless orphans. The reasons therefore had to be personal, internal. Of these, a delusional mission like saving the planet through child sacrifices could be eliminated, the loose mind that invented such absurdities being unequipped for the complicated dynamics of Suchi's political situation. In the conventional typology of serial killers, then, the sole motive left was pleasure, the thrill of the kill - sadism.

The sadistic angle aligned with Oliver's gut instinct when he'd first fixed his sights on The Saviour after having his attention brought on the attempted cullings of Suchi's Instructor's Union and Earthfriend Society. It was also corroborated by the fact that Ramiro's orphan hands had been preserved using the techniques of the gluttony demon Xun. For NPCs, this demon was worshipped by power-seekers who bolstered themselves from consuming the alchemically-infused corpses. Players, though, were never so desperate; those who followed Xun tended to be demented serial killer roleplayers who used the preservation methods to prevent their victims' corpses being absorbed by the game universe, giving them time to mutilate the bodies and fashion them into signatures and mementoes - e.g., a cute set of baby hands.

But The Saviour wasn't a serial killer roleplayer. No, this scoop was much, much sexier than that.

The potential losses he'd risk couldn't ever be justified by the low-brow buzz of pretending to be a villain from a tacky crime drama. There was real money on the line here - look at how well the bandits at The Company had made out, buying up sky-scrapers and theatres and clothing brands.

No, to have been unable to restrain himself, The Saviour was likely an actual serial killer. At least by psychological constitution. In the modern day, real-world sprees were unsustainable due to surveillance; thus, Ramiro, a son of the new era, must have been using the freedom of the game as a substitute for his murder fix, a digital methadone. Like, when Oliver tried to block out the artificial context, then the grip of this NPC prostitute dragging him along and the moaning of others through the padded walls could seem indistinguishable from the real deal. The same, from a child killer's perspective, must have also applied to the struggling and whimpering of NPC kids.

Thus, Oliver had immersed himself into the sicko's background, had simulated and become his derangement. Soon, he'd recognised a telling pattern to Ramiro's killings that was congruent with an emotion-based drive. Of seven Delivery Roach victims that could be definitely tagged onto The Saviour, four had been murdered following major public setbacks for The Empire. That bully orphan, Piszok, had vanished on the evening that a lucrative sponsorship deal had fallen through, the sponsor being put-off after a mugging; another child, not one of the lucky hands, disappeared after a group of Empire craftsmen sailed off for a wealthier region. For Ramiro The Sadist, extinguishing the lives of these children was a cathartic response to his troubles, an outlet for relieving the pent-up tension of his failures. He was like a stressed-out proboscis monkey embarrassingly cranking away at its loins - except The Saviour's inner beast found nirvana by wrapping its palms around the necks of kiddies and squeezing until they were dead. That was the method, Oliver had believed - a cross-contamination of predator and prey...his and their hands committing a gross deed of personal befoulment...the guilty little strangler's hands deserving a WHACK for being so naughty, deserving to be CHOPPED OFF!

"Ay, Frayeur, looks like this one's already rearing to go! Nice one, comrade!"

Oliver and the NPC prostitute were passing down a corridor when they bumped into a player with an Empire bandana corresponding to the rank of Count. Although undisguised, they were unrecognisable to the journalist, Suchi having over seven hundred bozos who'd been granted the title.

"Th-the drink tasted weird," Oliver mumbled with genuine embarrassment. "I think, think it was the drink."

The Count flicked a thumbs up on the way past. "If you didn't fraud that monster, consider transferring to Panther Village!"

While virginal Oliver continued to mumble, the NPC prostitute laughed and assured him that such reactions were natural.

But what a sexy scandal this was shaping up to be.

Oliver'd used his insights into Ramiro being triggered into murder sprees by stress to sift through a database from a local guild of crime-watchers and vigilantes. Of the 2,000 plus NPC homicides logged in The Slums each real-life day, a small portion stemmed from several hundred active serial killer roleplayers who thrived in Suchi's anarchy, the crimson usernames from their dirty deeds invisible amongst those of all the lesser dirt-bags and forgiven without questioning by The Slum's Peopleworkers if the payment was right. When Oliver restricted his search to serial killer incidents concurrent with setbacks for The Empire, one repeat offender captured his attention, 'The Hog'. The investigator who'd abandoned the case had given the name to the suspected killer due to a distinctive pig-mask they wore. This weirdo, although never caught red-handed or red-named, had been spotted wandering in the vicinity prior to a number of murder-arsons, where the abduction of victims had a strange coincidence with a shack being torched nearby - Ramiro destroying the evidence of Xun's corpse preservation techniques.

Activity for The Hog stretched much, much further back than The Saviour's public timeline - what victims Oliver had found thus far were merely the tail-end of the spree. The Hog's first recorded sighting had been 18 months earlier, and after that, over a period of half a year, they'd averaged one incident every three real-life days, before tapering off the killings. This termination point happened to align with Ramiro starting the mission to unify The Slums, when his sadistic fancy must have switched from murdering lone children to entire gangs and families.

However, the first fancy had never vanished entirely, 'The Hog' making its return on occasions of troubles for the burgeoning Empire. Oliver had supposed, even once you're a king, strangling children remained as taboo and tempting as ever, perhaps more so. This might explain why Ramiro had eventually ventured out from his pig mask to commit his deeds undisguised. By meeting the orphans first as the lovable Saviour, chatting them up and getting to know them, giving them hope of a brighter future, he was escalating the excitement for himself, conducting a bit of risque, public foreplay.

For a last piece of poetic proof, the mask hadn't been of a pig. Oliver'd obtained several recordings of The Hog on their night-time prowl. The costume was a grotesque multi-chinned thing with sagging, weeping features like a wax-head half-melted by a candle - although pig-like, it was definitively humanoid. The design, not corresponding to any monster in the game, seemed to be custom-made, so Oliver, throwing a random hail mary, searched into the mythology of Ramiro's homeland of Argentina, whereupon he discovered an obscure indigenous creature called an 'ookempan' that some artists had depicted with a similar ugly visage.

What was this monster renowned for?

Abducting children and eating them.

Could you believe that? The crime weighing so heavily on The King's hands wasn't some softcore shit like strangulation. This sick bastard had actually been eating people! Children! Raw, unadulterated cannibalism, morsel by bloody morsel picked up by those befouled fingers.

How delicious!

So there it was, another tantalising hypocrite to add to Oliver's naughty menu. A bonafide kid-eating sicko turned messiah. A false saviour who'd united the rat-filled streets with the intimate knowledge he'd picked up while stalking them. A gluttonous pig who—its lips still moist with the sweet blood of children—dared to make a mockery of its followers by putting on a crown shaped for men. King Ramiro, The Sadist of The Slums!

How delicious.

As for the butchered hands that united El Salvador with his hoggish half, Oliver had since identified the missing two in the expanded timeline of The Hog's murder-spree.

Hand number four, collected 13 real-life months ago, had been the orphaned daughter of a knife-smith, her preserved fingers still sporting the nicks and scars from practising her father's trade.

Hand number five, the first hand, collected 17 months ago, had been an intimate of this prostitute NPC.

Welcoming him into her boudoir, the woman gestured at an array of bedside accessories. "Whatever you're into, handsome. Or," she slipped open her dress, revealing a trail of plump flesh from her neck to below her belly button, and did a quick shimmy to flaunt it, "just you and me."

"I do have one minor kink." Oliver, his former nerves discarded, swept the room for threats and clues. "Criminal scum getting fucked by the law."

Dropping one act for another, he pompously flashed a fake ash-grey badge for The Company's investigators—fuck them—and produced a picture copied from a Memory Sphere. In it, a girl, age 10 or so, was snuggling in a hammock with another orphan girl and using her pale-white irises to glare at the footage-taker for disrupting them.

"An arsonist-killer has recently become active in our jurisdiction," he continued. "Tracking down matching incidents, we believe he had his origins in this lawless shithole. Any information you provide will be valued in leading to his arrest and justice for your dead girly friend."

The woman's face contorted through emotions. Shock and pain at the open confirmation twisted with alarm that this Offworlder who'd isolated her might be the murderer trying to tie up loose ends.

Oliver answered her concerns bluntly. "If I were that scumbag, I would have done it in your house while you were sleeping rather than create this trail of witnesses. Secondly…" He performed a rapid set of gestures, displaying his throat and fingers, to indicate no Martial Class visual indicators, before sighing with the impatience of a Company member sick of dealing with the trivialities of this crime-riddled backwater. "If justice isn't enough incentive to tattle, what do you want? Money? Medicine?" He pulled out a satchel of drugs and shook it, its contents clinking like pebbles. "I've got harder stuff if—"

"We're not all addicts." The woman interrupted, closing off her dress and her heart in repulsion.

"Forgive me," he apologised. "It's my job to make inferences from patterns."

"Sometimes, patterns are wrong."

"Sometimes, but not today." He shoved the picture of herself and the victim towards her. "What was her real name?"

The woman, stalling a few moments to process, eventually took a cushioned-seat by a tea-table and indicated for him to join her. Making a potent brew to calm herself, she began pouring out her recollections in response to his questioning.

While the prostitute NPC shared and wept, Oliver—building his profile of the slain girl, the likes and fears and aspirations and quirks, all the humanising ornaments that would build sympathy for his fifth hand—let slip an ecstatic smile.

Who's this emaciated innocent with the button nose and love of weaving? Oh, it's sweet little Lany, with the same supple fingers, abducted, murdered, dismembered, and eaten by The Saviour at age 9 while delivering a pair of slippers she'd made herself.

5 out of 5.

But Oliver wasn't finished yet. Not quite. There was a final touch to come, one extra teaspoon of spice to make this revolting dish pop.

The Empire were wedged claustrophobically between The Church and The WBAE. Their currency had been rendered worthless, their labour was defecting, and, adding to the problem, several of their events had been blown up by act of Trickster God. Under the stress of these mishaps, Ramiro's blood pressure should be awfully high right now. If he hadn't already, it was only a matter of days, maybe hours, before the tension won and he succumbed yet again to his piggish urges.

And when The Saviour next broke, Oliver Spears, 2049's Gaming Journalist of The Year, would be there, his camera and his pen aimed as unflinchingly as always at the gorgeously nasty truth.