Doll: Inferno

Genius and madness are a hair apart. She was once the brightest mind Mythag had, and her fall came like a great tower coming down; out of the rubble of all that reason crawled nothing but a raving fiend.

She still puts on the vestments of science as she always did, pouring life, humanity, love, and ruin into the crucible, cooking up a poison to destroy the world.

Unlocks at: Awakener Level 1

Until the whole truth came out, no one had ever suspected that Doll was the one behind that string of appalling disasters.

Inside Mythag and out on the Dissolution front, she had always been the mainstay, the lamp at the top of the tower, the one thing everyone believed would never move.

As one star after another in humanity's night sky was broken and scattered by Dissolution, that unwavering lamp was cruelly snuffed out as well, and became a hand in the shadows, working with the same darkness it had once held back.

Tornadoes, floods, great earthquakes... crude murder was far too inefficient for a genius's plans. With her intellect not diminished by a single degree, she remade the Silver Technology she had once been so proud of into lethal instruments for "moving the world," and sent one gift of ruin after another into places Mythag's eyes could not reach.

By the time she was captured, her corroded brain could no longer control the doll's body with any precision. The face that had once been calm as still water was full of twisted, uncanny expression, as though meeting her eyes would be enough to drop a person into madness.

Without ever agreeing on it, everyone chose to ignore her occasional blurred muttering, even though it may truly have given away the truth of the world.

Because what happened to her had proven once again that human beings, in the end, cannot live without meaning.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 3

As this Genesis Awakener, formerly the "Brain in a Vat," has a history of breaking free of the S355 restraint unit, Director Czort has carried out its transfer into a new type of specialized Dissolution restraint unit.

The unit is located deep in the Black Pool. No other instrument or object is to be present within a thirty-meter radius of it, and the Black Pool monitoring team is to run inspection rounds at least once every sixty minutes.

Monitoring shows that the Awakener remains conscious at all times and has almost never been observed to sleep. She has attempted to tell patrol members about the illegal Silvercore modification experiments she previously conducted; one team member fell into madness after a brief exchange with her.

All patrol teams now consist of three members. Contact or conversation with the Awakener is strictly forbidden, and soundproof ear protection must be worn for the full duration of the round.

...

This Awakener's confidentiality classification has been raised to the highest level of Awakener custody. No one with knowledge of her may disclose any information about her within Mythag or outside it, and no one may visit without the Director's approval and personal escort.

Excerpt from the Mythag Black Pool Monitoring Team Report Log

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 5

As someone working at the very front of Dissolution research, Doll always knew perfectly well that the footsteps of annihilation were closing in behind her, and when it came to being dissolved, she knew the subject better than anyone.

Her search for the truth advanced and failed, advanced and failed, until she slowly came to suspect that the human body was blind by its very nature: no one who belonged to reality could ever see what lay on the far shore, however hard they tried.

Then, as the black sludge unmade the body, might it also lead the soul to that far shore?

She sat in silence with the maxims on those ancient stone tablets and let Dissolution eat into her brain vat. Whatever waited at the end of the road, there was no turning back now.

Fortunate and unfortunate at once: she staked her own existence and won her way to the inside of the world, and in that instant, truth, void, and ruin drowned her all together.

In a single blink she witnessed everything the universe held: the nature of Dissolution, the truth of the world. Everything she had wanted all her life was there for the taking.

Every article of scientific faith, every rational conviction, burst like a bubble. The iron wall of her mind collapsed all at once.

The genius called Doll was already gone. What stood there now was only a living husk with the void inside it.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 7

All meaning scatters like sand, the world's false curtain falls away before her eyes, and everything returns to the first darkness.

In the last performance on that lightless stage, the dancer of science goes on dancing with everything she has.

She no longer minds that Dissolution is slowly eating her, because the ending of the piece was written before it began.

As always, she will give the world every ounce of her genius, by the method that comes closest to truth.

Press her a little and she will insist she still loves humanity and the world, that she means to end all suffering here, and bring people home to where they truly began.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 9