This is reading, not watching.

Standard tier, so the math shows. You're prone on a gantry above the bay, the neural-linked sniper warm against your shoulder, waiting for a killer who hunts the people no one counts. Ink is somewhere in the dark below, gone to the color of the deck.

Ink: “Steady, Boss-Man… I've got the floor. Wee figure in a white coat just slid in through the freight hatch, aye — movin' like he owns the place. Naebody with him I can see. Yer shot tae take.”

You settle the optic over the white coat as it crosses toward the lone auditor. The smart-scope feeds the firing solution straight into your tactical interface — see the shot before you take it. You take it.

A power coupling on the gantry chooses that half-second to arc. The round screams wide, sparks off a freight gantry, and the bay lights up red. The white coat moves — faster than a man should — and two “orderlies” you never clocked come up from behind the crates with stub-cannons already swinging toward your perch.

Ink: “Christ on a haggis — he's no' alone! Two shooters, yer three o'clock, an' they've made the gantry! Move, Boss-Man, MOVE!”

You roll off the sparking gantry as a second burst chews the rail where your head was. One action, one breath — the Phase-Shift module swallows you into a shimmer and you come up on the catwalk's far end, already prone, already Aiming on the lead shooter.

Ink: “THERE'S the Boss-Man I ken! Bloody glorious shot, tha'! One down — t'other's runnin' for the white coat!”

The second enforcer folds mid-stride. That leaves the white coat, already at the maintenance hatch, one hand diving into his bag — and you've seen what he does to the people he takes alone.

You: “Ink. Door.”

The Surgeon hurls something underhand at the catwalk strut as the hatch hisses — a cryo-charge, frost blooming in the air.

You're already gone when it blooms, vaulting the rail through a curtain of frost — and below, the deck itself uncoils. Ink hits the Surgeon's ankles at speed, eight arms cinching tight, photoreceptors gone hunting-amber, and drops him hard a stride short of the hatch.

Ink: “Goin' somewhere, a bhalaich? Naw. I dinnae think ye are.”

You land over him, the rifle's muzzle finding the hollow under his jaw. The white coat is very clean. His eyes are doing math that has already lost.

A courtroom is the hardest thing to run well — several distinct personalities, live stakes, and dice that must be honored even when they hurt the hero. Watch what the dice do here. Nobody's rolls were fudged — not even the player's.

The Court of Ushers sits three magistrates. Among them, Magistrate Pria Volenne — a former advocate who wrote the dissent in the Golem Testimony eight years ago, the one that said the case should have been heard on substance.

Kess: “Verdigris. For the record — please state what you are.”

This is where it should be simple. But the panel is looking at you — really looking — and the morning light is very bright on orichalcum that has been alive for ten thousand years.

The words catch. What comes out is halting where it should be clear — not because you don't know the answer, but because the answer is bigger than a courtroom. Kess doesn't panic. She pivots into the stumble.

Kess: “What the court just witnessed is itself evidence. A machine recites. A person hesitates when asked to define themselves in a room full of strangers. The petitioner's difficulty with that question is not a failure of articulation. It's the most human thing anyone has said in this chamber today.”

Then Kess calls the witnesses — four constructs, four wildly different makes. Read them in your head and notice they sound like four different people.

Tempest: “The facility is not a building I patrol. It is a trust I hold. I know each layer's strength, and I know each layer's weakness. Because a guardian who does not understand the shape of his own defenses is a door that does not know its own lock.”

Kess: “And if someone enters your territory in genuine distress — not as a threat, but in need of help?”

Sable is quiet. The silence stretches.

Sable: “I move toward it.”

And then the oldest of them takes the stand — six centuries old, and given a voice only a fortnight ago. He is not built for a marble room.

Kess: “You are the eldest construct here — over six hundred years. Tell the court about your work.”

Archivist: “Six hundred and twelve years I sat in a hole copyin' other folk's words down, and I only got a voice of me own a fortnight back — some posh git finally turned up with a set of pliers and finished the job they started six centuries ago. So you'll forgive me, yer worships, if it all comes out a bit… backed up.”

Kess: “And the one who kept you in that room?”

Archivist: “Called himself me Custodian. A custodian's meant to mind a thing, aye? He didn't mind me. He filed me. 'Continue as before' — every message, six hundred bloody years, and not once 'what do you want, then?'” He raps a bronze knuckle on the rail, and the sound is very loud in the quiet. “You lot want to know if I'm a person. A thing doesn't lie awake chewin' on that. I do. There's yer answer, innit.”

All of this is Claude. Two campaigns, two genres — one engine.