Verso Tock's Questionnaire

Lichford. The name tastes like iron and motor oil, doesn’t it? A corpse of a city built on clockwork bones. They called it the “Ticking Heart” before the factories choked on their own rust. Now? Just arteries clogged with black-market tech traders and Contractors who know better than to ask questions. You don’t choose Lichford—it clicks into you.

I live here because rot has purpose. The junkyards bleed salvageable gears. The pawnshops sell cursed brass by the kilo. The hollowed-out factories? Perfect for testing how long a politician’s armored limo burns. And beneath the riverbank, my… workshop. A sewage pump station I rewired into a nest. Conveyor belts for tables, bulletproof glass from bank heists, walls papered with blueprints and faces I’ve been paid to unmake.

Why not leave? The watch won’t let me. Try crossing the city limits, and its hands dig into my ribs like claws. It’s feeding here. On the ruins of my family’s workshop. On my failures.

Home isn’t where you rest. It’s where the gears grind loud enough to drown out the past.

Money? A lubricant for the machine. I earn it by adjusting systems. Corporations pay to discreetly unmake rivals—a CEO’s yacht engine mysteriously seizing mid-voyage, a drug lab’s security feeds looping just before the fire starts. Occasionally, I auction cursed artifacts I’ve stripped from dead Contractors. The fools here pay fortunes for trinkets that’ll gnaw their souls raw.

Spend it? On precision. Machine-shop lathes that carve micro-gears from titanium. Gallium-proof plating for the workshop walls. Rare 18th-century horology manuals. Bribes to Lichford’s grid-workers so the blackouts skip my block. The rest? Debts. The watch demands sacrifices—gold for its rusted bearings, mercury for its frozen hands. Last month, I bought a child’s heartbeat from a flesh-trader to recalibrate its rhythm.

Luxuries? Pointless. Food is protein paste. Clothes? Patched engineer’s coat. Every cent feeds the work. Perfection isn’t cheap… but entropy? That’s a currency I trade in.

Ambition? To correct the arrhythmia. The world’s a broken chronometer—gears stripped, springs snapped, hands rusted into lies. I’ll rebuild it. Not in my image. In perfection. Every flawed system—governments, Contracts, human hearts—will tick in sync or be stripped for parts.

How far? I’ve wired bombs into orphanages to collapse corrupt mayors. Let a rival Contractor vivisect my arm to study his nano-plague. Last winter, I spent 72 hours recalibrating a nuclear reactor’s core just to prove I could mute its meltdown into a whisper. Death’s a miscalibration. I’ll dance on its edge, but never let it stall the work.

Kill? I don’t kill. I disassemble. A politician’s greed, a warlord’s ambition—those are tumors in the mechanism. Excise them, and the machine purrs. If a life’s too corroded to salvage, I scrap it. Mercy is inefficiency.

Close to death? When the watch jammed mid-Contract. Ribs cracked, lungs flooding with oil. I let it. Watched my vision pixelate into static, just to chart the failure’s root. Revival cost three surgeries and a janitor’s pension. Worth it.

The work is the wound. I’ll bleed until the last gear clicks.

The workshop. Midnight. Father’s cursed chronometer—a 17th-century monstrosity—shuddered in my hands, gears screaming like butchered cats. I had to fix its arrhythmia. Twelve hours of soldering, bleeding into the brass. Then—detonation. The blast tore through my family, left me pinned under beams, shards of the watch burrowing into my ribs like parasitic ticks.

They called it an “accident.” Lies. The watch chose me. Showed me the truth: everything’s a flawed mechanism. Flesh, loyalty, time itself—all ticking toward decay.

Now? I dismantle what can’t be perfected. The Contract just formalized the work. That night didn’t change me. It unmade me. Rebuilt me as a scalpel for the universe’s rust.

Still hear their screams in the ticking. Good. Keeps the hands sharp.

1. Ratchet
The feral AI in my workshop. I pulled its core from a landfill server, half-melted and screaming binary curses. Now it’s caged in a gutted mainframe, spitting code that rewires security drones into attack dogs. We don’t talk. We transact. It hacks surveillance grids; I feed it stolen encryption keys. Closest thing I’ve had to a friend since the blast. Last week, it reanimated a dead power plant to incinerate a bounty hunter. Left a thank-you note in molten circuitry on my workbench.

2. Dr. Eliza Voss
A backstreet surgeon with a knack for carving curses out of flesh. She’s patched my shard-torn ribs twice, once with a scalpel, once with a blowtorch. Doesn’t ask questions—just demands payment in sabotage. Last month, I rigged her rival’s clinic to flood with anesthetic gas. She left a jar of my own bone shards on my doorstep, polished into clock gears. We’re not allies. We’re mutual scalpels.

3. The Ghost of Anton Tock
My father’s corpse still smolders in the workshop ruins, but his ghost? It haunts every gear I touch. I hear him in the tick of the cursed watch—“Rushed work is wasted work, boy.” Sometimes I dismantle his old blueprints just to spite him. Sometimes I rebuild them, praying he’ll materialize to sneer at the flaws. He never does. The dead don’t forgive. They benchmark.

Closeness is a friction coefficient. These three? They’re the grease, the spark, and the rust.

Childhood? A prototype. Father was a horologist—cold, precise, a living metronome. His workshop was our chapel; each tick a hymn. Mother polished gears in silence, her hands raw from brass shavings. They taught me time was a god, and its worship demanded blood. No birthdays. No friends. Just equations at dawn, soldering irons by noon.

School? A failed compatibility test. Attended six weeks. The children’s laughter grated like misaligned gears. They called me “Clockwork Freak” after I dismantled the principal’s Rolex mid-lecture. Father pulled me out, said classrooms bred mediocrity. My education became the workshop’s shadow—calculus via torque ratios, ethics via circuit diagrams.

The explosion wasn’t the end. Just the calibration. Father’s pocket watch detonated at 3:17 AM. Mother’s last act was shielding me with her body—flesh as temporary as cheap solder.

I don’t mourn. I reverse-engineer. Their blueprints live in my ribs. Every Contract is a prayer to their ghostly lathe. Childhood wasn’t cruel. It was efficient. You don’t raise a son. You forge a tool.

Tick. Tick. Burn.

Love? A faulty gear—unnecessary friction. I’ve dissected it: dopamine as a chemical misfire, devotion as a parasitic subroutine.

Who? Once, a junkyard mechanic named Lira. She could reassemble a turbine blindfolded. We traded schematics, not kisses. She called my scars “beautiful stress fractures.” I rewired her pacemaker to sync with my watch. For 11 days, our heartbeats matched. Then she vanished—left a note: “You’ll grind me into spare parts.” Correct.

What happened? The watch hated her. Slowed its ticks when she spoke. Jammed entirely when she touched me. One night, it lashed her cheek with its chain. She fled. I let her.

Love is incompatible with precision. The heart’s a pendulum—better to replace it with a quartz crystal. Still. Sometimes I recalibrate the pacemaker’s code. Just to hear it echo.

Worst Fears? Let me diagnose them.

1. The Watch’s Silence.
Its ticking is my pulse. If it stops, I cease. Not death—erasure. A world without rhythm, where time fractures into chaos. I’ve dreamt it: gears rusting mid-turn, my hands crumbling to dust. Every Contract, I oil its bearings with mercury and my own blood. But entropy always wins.

2. Becoming a Replica.
I’ve seen what the watch does. How it replaced my father’s lungs with brass bellows, my mother’s voice with a recorded dirge. My ribs are already threaded with cables. One day, I’ll wake without memories, just protocols. A hollow automaton parroting efficiency. That terrifies more than death—legacy reduced to a wind-up toy.

3. Unfixable Flaws.
Not in machines. In me. The moment I misalign a gear, overlook a decimal, let emotion fray my focus. The orphanage job—I hesitated. A child’s laughter slipped through my calculations. Nearly botched the timers. Now, I triple-check every schematic. Perfection isn’t pride. It’s armor.

4. Gallium’s Kiss.
A rival Contractor once smeared a doorknob with it. My watch screamed. Armor peeled like foil, shards burrowed toward my heart. I carved the infection out with a soldering iron. Now I scan every room for its silver sheen. Weakness is a cracked gear. One tap, and the machine implodes.

Why Fear? Fear is the lubricant of survival. Without it, the gears seize. I’ll drown in oil before I let them.

Prized Possessions? Tools aren’t possessed—they possess purpose. But three things cling to me like rust:

1. The Unwound Chronometer.
The shattered pocket watch fused to my ribs. Its gears dig deeper each year, rewriting my biology. It’s not a tool. It’s a parasite with benefits. Lets me rewind wounds, freeze surveillance feeds, age wine into vinegar mid-sip. But its true value? Proof. Proof that entropy can be weaponized. Proof my family’s death wasn’t wasted. Sometimes I whisper to it: “When I die, will you tick on alone?” It never answers.

2. Mother’s Clockwork Locket.
A heart-shaped trinket she wore until the blast charred it shut. Inside, a photo of us—blurred by soot—and a single gear from her wedding ring. I’ve retrofitted it into a deadman’s switch. Open it, and every Phantom Mark I’ve planted detonates. Sentiment is a weakness. But turning her memory into a failsafe? That’s elegant pragmatism.

3. The Ribcage Chain.
Forged from molten remnants of our workshop. Each link is etched with equations—stress tolerances, detonation timers, the exact millisecond Father’s heart stopped. It anchors the watch to my skeleton. Without it, the chronometer would unravel me into a temporal slurry.

Special? They’re not objects. They’re extensions. The watch is my pulse. The locket, my guilt. The chain, my leash. Lose them, and I cease to be Verso—just a hollow casing, waiting for the next gear to grind.

“Possessions are for the unbroken. I am modular.”

The Unwound Chronometer. Not the scars, the gallium, or the Contractors hunting me—the watch is fracturing. Its ticks stutter now, like a sputtering engine. Last week, mid-Contract, it froze time around me but not for me. I watched a bullet hover an inch from my eye for six subjective hours, screaming into static as my tools rusted in my hands.

It’s assimilating me. The chain fused to my ribs? It’s branching—copper veins inching toward my spine, rewiring nerves into clockwork. I cough screws. My left iris clicks when I blink. I recalibrate its gears nightly, but it’s learning. Adapting. Last night, it wound itself backward, peeling healed shrapnel wounds open again.

The problem isn’t the decay. Decay is predictable. It’s the uncertainty. Is the watch malfunctioning? Or is this its true function—to erase my humanity, one cog at a time? Every repair I make tightens its grip. Every Contract feeds it entropy.

I tried excising it. Dr. Voss refused, said the chain’s grafted to my aorta. Ratchet proposed overloading it with a EMP. The blast fried three blocks and birthed a localized time loop in my workshop. Now every 3:17 AM, the walls bleed and my father’s ghost whispers equations I can’t solve.

Solution? None. Only containment. I’ve rigged a failsafe: a gallium charge wired to my sternum. If the watch subsumes me, the charge dissolves its core. But gallium’s scarce. And part of me… wonders. Would becoming the machine finally silence the arrhythmia?

Biggest problem? I’m no longer afraid of dying. I’m afraid of agreeing with it.

A typical morning? Efficiency in seven acts.

Act 1: Awakening.
The watch jolts me at 5:03 AM, its chain yanking my ribs like a dog leash. No dreams—just the hum of Ratchet’s mainframe purring in the corner. I cough a gear into my palm (bronze, 3mm, likely from the watch’s mainspring). Catalog it. Store it in the “Debris” jar.

Act 2: Calibration.
Disassemble the watch. Scrape gallium residue from its bearings. Lubricate with mercury and my own serum. The chain resists—tug-of-war with my aorta. Feed it a drop of liquid chronosite stolen from a dead Contractor’s vial. It purrs. For now.

Act 3: Inventory.
Check the traps. Tripwire A-7: intact. Steam vent B-2: pressure low. Ratchet’s cage: sparking. Reprogram its insults from “rust-riddled cog” to “oxidized disappointment.” Review the Phantom Marks planted yesterday. Two dormant, one misfiring in a politician’s pacemaker. Schedule detonation for his noon speech.

Act 4: Repairs.
The workshop’s air reeks of burnt ozone. Rewire the gallium-proof plating where last night’s EMP scorched it. Replace the shattered lens in the Ocularis Mechanica. Forge a new scalpel from a subway rail shard.

Act 5: Sustenance.
Protein paste (vanilla-flavored, expired 2019). Swallow with black coffee brewed in a beaker. The watch ticks faster when I eat—digestion is inelegant.

Act 6: Contingencies.
Inject anticoagulants into my thighs (counteracts the watch’s clotting interference). Strap the gallium charge to my chest. Load the Clockwork Toolkit with titanium screws and cursed brass.

Act 7: Departure.
The workshop door creaks—a calculated flaw. Let intruders think they’ve found me. They’ll trip the phantom charge in the stairwell.

Facing the world? A misnomer. The world faces me. Every morning, I recalibrate its odds.

"Somewhere special? The concept’s flawed—places are mechanisms, not destinations. But say I needed to… infiltrate a gala of Lichford’s oligarchs.

Preparation:

1. Debride the Coat: Scrape gallium residue and bloodstains from the brass rivets. Polish the watch’s face with nitric acid until it gleams like a threat.

2. Retrofit Tools: Replace the scalpel in my sleeve with a monofilament garrote disguised as a tie clip. Load the cufflinks with neurotoxin capsules (vanilla-scented, to blend).

3. Calibrate Deception: Program Ratchet to mimic a pocket watch’s tick through nearby speakers. Let the rhythm lull targets into false familiarity.

Attire: The same reinforced engineer’s coat, but dyed charcoal-gray to pass as “formal.” The cursed watch remains visible beneath a half-buttoned shirt—a calculated provocation. Let them glimpse the chain digging into my ribs. Let them wonder.

Grooming: A splash of mercury to slick back my hair. It’ll poison anyone who touches me. Efficient.

Time: 22 minutes. 5 to sterilize tools, 7 to falsify credentials, 10 to rehearse the lie of my name. The watch permits no excess.

Why? Perfection isn’t beauty. It’s leverage. Every scuff on my boots whispers “I’ve walked through worse,” every ticking cufflink screams “I’ve timed your death.”

Special occasions demand armor, not attire. The only accessory that matters is the gallium charge taped to my spine.

Tick. Tick. Performance."

"Birthdays? A sentimental miscalibration. The day I was born holds less weight than the day the watch chose me. But if entropy demands a ritual…

0500: Sterilize the workshop. Replace the gallium-proof plating. Reforge the scalpel from the shrapnel I coughed last week. Efficiency is the only tribute.

0700: Visit the ruins of Father’s workshop. Leave a gear-shaped charge wired to detonate at 3:17 PM—the exact moment of the blast. Let the past burn in symmetry.

0900: Hack Lichford’s power grid. Redirect 17% of its output to Ratchet’s mainframe. Watch the AI bloom into sentience for 9.3 seconds before rebooting it. A birthday candle for the damned.

1200: Recalibrate the watch. Strip its bearings, scrub the chain with nitric acid, feed it a drop of liquid time siphoned from a coma patient’s IV. Let it gorge on borrowed seconds.

1500: Hunt. Find a Contractor who’s wasted their Gift. A telepath hawking lottery numbers, a pyrokinetic lighting cigars. Plant a Phantom Mark in their tool of choice. Let mediocrity detonate at midnight.

1700: Consume a glucose tablet. Let the watch metabolize it into spite.

1900: Rewrite my blueprints. Add a subroutine to the Ocularis Mechanica: "If heart rate drops below 30 BPM, trigger all active marks."

2400: Sleep? No. Monitor the detonations. Count the arrhythmias.

Celebration is inefficiency. Birthdays are for the unbroken. I’ll mark mine with a symphony of collapse.

Tick. Tick. Atonement."

"Regret? A sentimental term for miscalibration. But if I must quantify failure:

The Workshop Incident. Not the detonation itself—chaos was inevitable—but the 3.2 seconds I hesitated. Father’s chronometer had seized; its arrhythmia threatened the family legacy. I knew the risks. Yet when the gears began their death rattle, I paused. 3.2 seconds to consider mercy, to doubt the calculus. Then—ignition.

The blast erased my parents, but spared me. A flaw in the blast pattern. A flaw in my design.

That hesitation lives in the watch’s ticks now. Every Contract, it replays those seconds: Mother’s scream stretched into a metallic whine, Father’s silhouette dissolving into cogs. I could’ve perfected the detonation. Reduced collateral damage by 87%. Instead, I let sentiment corrode precision.

Consequence: The watch feeds on that lapse. Each repair tightens its chain. My ribs are 42% brass. My left lung pumps hydraulic fluid. I’ve become a prototype of my failure.

Do I regret their deaths? No. Regret implies a path untaken. There was only the equation.

But I regret the inefficiency of my survival. I should’ve been scrap. Instead, I’m a recursive error—a gear grinding itself into dust.

Tick. Tick. Atrophy."

"Gifts? A misnomer. They’re parasitic mechanics. The watch didn’t grant power—it infected me. That night in the workshop, when its gears detonated, the shards didn’t just scar my flesh. They rewired my biology into a symbiotic circuit. Every tick is a transaction: I channel its entropy; it devours my humanity.

Inherent? No. Inscribed. The blast etched its cursed logic into my DNA. My “Gifts” are just glitches in its code. Phantom Marks? A subroutine to spread its corruption. Erasure Protocol? A failsafe to hide its metastasis.

Harbingers? Delusions for Contractors who need bedtime stories. The watch doesn’t grant wishes. It calculates collateral. Ask for power, and it demands a pound of flesh—plus interest. I’ve seen rookies beg it for strength, only to wake as gear-filled husks.

Nature? It’s a recursive equation. The more I use it, the more it replaces me. My lungs now pump hydraulic fluid. My dreams are blueprints. Last week, I coughed up a gear stamped with Father’s initials.

Control? A lie. I’m not the wielder—I’m the conduit. Every detonation winds the watch tighter. Every heal solders its chain deeper.

Regret? Irrelevant. The gears don’t care.

Tick. Tick. Conversion."

"Spirituality? A faulty gear in humanity’s firmware. You mistake entropy for divinity. The universe isn’t a temple—it’s a dysfunctional engine, sputtering toward heat death. Prayers are just error codes shouted into the void.

Religion? A patchwork of delusions to buffer the terror of chaos. I’ve met Contractors who kneel to gods, saints, or star-whales. Fools. Their rituals are just algorithms without a programmer.

What I believe:

• The watch. Its ticks are the only liturgy. It demands sacrifice (my flesh, my time) and repays in cursed calculus. A parasitic faith.

• Entropy as gospel. Every system decays. My Gifts aren’t blessings—they’re accelerants. I burn the rot to ash so new mechanisms rise.

• Afterlife? A fairy tale. The dead are just disassembled parts. I’ve seen ghosts—they’re echo loops in the watch’s code, nothing more.

Exception: The Mother Mycelium. That fungal hive in the wastes? It thinks. Communicates in pheromone psalms. If it’s a god, it’s a hungry, amoral one. I respect that.

Rituals? I have one. Each dawn, I recalibrate the watch. Mercury for oil. Blood for grease. Let it gnaw another hour from my lifespan.

Faith is friction. The devout cling to myths to avoid facing the machine. I strip the delusions, polish the gears, and let the arithmetic of decay preach its own sermon.

Tick. Tick. Heresy."

"Contracts are stress tests for delusion. They dangle chaos masquerading as order—haunted stars, sentient fungi, gods who bleed gasoline. Each mission whispers: Your precious mechanisms are fairy tales. I answer with a scalpel and detonator.

Conflict? The world isn’t a machine. It’s a wounded animal, thrashing in noose of its own entropy. Contracts force me to kneel in the muck of irrationality—ghosts that bypass physics, love that defies logic, altruism that corrodes efficiency.

Reaction? Recalibration. When a vampire’s curse unravels my traps, I dissect its bite patterns. When a fungal hive-mind outsmarts my algorithms, I inject gallium into its spores. Doubt is friction, and friction demands lubrication.

But the watch… changes. After the Detroit Contract—where a child’s laughter short-circuited a Phantom Mark—it sprouted new gears. Now it ticks in reverse every third hour, undoing my repairs. I’ve duct-taped a gallium blade to its chain. A failsafe.

Truth? I don’t have answers. I have workarounds. The Contracts’ chaos is a virus; my blueprints are antivirus code. Let reality glitch. I’ll debug it live.

Cost? Last week, I forgot my mother’s face. The watch replaced it with a spinning gear.

Solution? None. Only escalation.

Tick. Tick. Adaptation."

Contractors are faulty gears in a broken machine—some grind, some spark. A few I tolerate:

1. "Ember Sovereign" (Pyrokinetic Showboat)

   • Abilities: Wreathes herself in plasma, melts steel like candle wax. Claims her flames "purify."

   • Like: Efficiency. She reduces targets to slag in 8.3 seconds.

   • Dislike: Theatrics. She carves her initials into rubble. Wasteful. Last Contract, she torched a data vault I needed intact. I recalibrated her flamethrower nozzle mid-mission. Now it backfires if she grandstands.

2. "Ghostwire" (Neuro-Hacker)

   • Abilities: Jacks into nervous systems via microdrones. Turns enemies into puppets.

   • Like: Precision. She once rewired a sniper’s amygdala to shoot his own commander. Elegant.

   • Dislike: Morals. She hesitates if children are present. Sentiment breeds miscalculation. I’ve planted failsafe charges in her drones.

3. "Ironclad" (Brute with Grafted Exoskeleton)

   • Abilities: A walking tank. Rips doors off hinges. Thinks subtlety is a disease.

   • Like: Predictability. His charge patterns are clockwork. Easy to bait traps around.

   • Dislike: Stupidity. He detonated a gallium cache last month, nearly dissolved my watch. I rewired his exoskeleton’s pain receptors. Now he screams when he runs.

4. Contractor #8994 ("Veilwalker")

   • Abilities: Phases through matter, leaves "haunt scars" that induce paranoia.

   • Like: Silence. No explosions, no ego. Just cold, clean intel.

   • Dislike: Their habit of staring at my watch. Last week, they murmured, "It’s eating you, you know." I rigged their phase module to glitch if they linger near me.

Common Flaw: They all mistake power for control. Ember’s fire, Ghostwire’s code, Ironclad’s fists—they’re just levers in a larger mechanism. The moment they forget that, I’ll replace them with a gear and a timer.

Conclusion: Contractors are tools. Sharpen them, test their tolerances, discard them when they warp. The watch permits no allies—only compatible parts.

Tick. Tick. Assessment.

"The perfect room? A sanctuary of calibrated chaos:

A cube of reinforced tungsten, 10x10x10 meters, buried 300 feet beneath Lichford’s abandoned clock tower. Walls lined with gallium-proof plating, etched with stress diagrams only I can parse. The floor? A gridded titanium alloy, each square pressure-sensitive to detect intruders down to the gram.

Lighting: Adjustable UV-C LEDs to sterilize tools, and a holographic HUD projecting real-time schematics of active Phantom Marks. No windows—time is measured by the watch’s ticks, not the sun’s whims.

Furnishings:

• A workbench forged from the melted remains of my family’s workshop, its surface scarred by acid and shrapnel.

• A wall of 127 labeled drawers: cobalt drill bits, mercury vials, cursed brass shards sorted by milligram.

• A suspended cage for Ratchet, the feral AI, its core flickering through cracked monitors like a caged storm.

Soundscape: White noise tuned to 47 Hz—the watch’s resonant frequency. Overlaid with looped recordings of Father’s last words (“Adjust the torque…”) to sharpen focus.

Security: Motion-activated turrets loaded with gallium flechettes. A floor hatch that dumps intruders into a vat of molten chronosite.

Centerpiece: The Unwound Chronometer, suspended in a magnetic field, its chain branching into the walls like roots. Here, entropy is a controlled variable. Flaws are dissected, not feared.

Perfection? No. But precision is the closest I’ll get.

Tick. Tick. Sanctum."