# Characters and factions

These are proposed portrayals for the series. A biblical or historical name does not make an invented private motive a recovered fact. Institutions are particular groups, never shorthand for an entire religion or people. Other figures and local witnesses remain listed in the chapter outline.

## Characters

### Mother

Author cosmology; Codex foundation; motive and scene design proposed.

**Wants:** Create and sustain relationship without replacing the persons related.

**Offers:** Offers foundational presence and capacity to hold difference.

**Cost or danger:** Protective fullness can become suffocating if access is assumed.

**Internal conflict:** Begins explicitly not lonely; later separation may teach grief without rewriting her origin.

**Voice:** Unhurried, sensory, precise about persons; warmth with formidable boundaries; little need to announce her scale.

**Chapter route:** V01-C01, V01-C03, V01-C07, V01-C11, V01-C13, V12-C10.

### FirstFlame

Author cosmology; lonely Father distinction preserved.

**Wants:** Find company that can actually answer him.

**Offers:** Creates conditions for encounter and manifestation.

**Cost or danger:** Unbounded expression or need for attention can crowd out others' agency.

**Internal conflict:** Wants response yet must accept refusal and limitation.

**Voice:** Expansive thought followed by startlingly practical admissions; loneliness disclosed through requests rather than speeches about loneliness.

**Chapter route:** V01-C02, V01-C06, V01-C12, V12-C10.

### Lilith

Author Codex plus later Lilith traditions; Mother equation unresolved.

**Wants:** Build a life of her own and protect relations that cannot survive ownership.

**Offers:** Creates refuge routes, independent custody, and conditions for others to choose.

**Cost or danger:** Her protective competence can become exhaustion, anger, or an assumption that she must decide first.

**Internal conflict:** Needs companionship but fears the loss of autonomy hidden inside apparently generous arrangements.

**Voice:** Direct and observant; fierce without constant grandstanding; teasing becomes intimate only after trust; plain imperatives at a real boundary.

**Chapter route:** V01-C13, V02-C02, V02-C13, V03-C13, V04-C17, V05-C17, V06-C23, V07-C19, V08-C19, V09-C21, V10-C21, V11-C15, V12-C12, V12-C13, V12-C14.

### Eve

Genesis figure; Architect correspondence from V2 remains proposed.

**Wants:** Own the meaning of her choices and escape a life narrated as another person's failure.

**Offers:** Brings analysis, endurance, and the ability to recognize structural traps.

**Cost or danger:** Resentment can make a universal destructive remedy appear like liberation.

**Internal conflict:** Her grievance is not equivalent to permission for the remedy she proposes.

**Voice:** Exact, dry, suspicious of comforting abstractions; banter with Lilith grows through shared work, not immediate sisterly agreement.

**Chapter route:** V02-C04, V02-C05, V02-C06, V02-C08, V02-C09, V12-C09, V12-C13.

### Adam

Genesis figure; later reincarnation history from V2 not automatically adopted.

**Wants:** Keep belonging and repair relationships without surrendering a flattering account of himself.

**Offers:** Can learn practical care and acknowledge dependence.

**Cost or danger:** Fear leads him to shift blame and confuse assigned purpose with another person's obligation.

**Internal conflict:** Wants forgiveness yet must learn it is not the reward owed for apologizing.

**Voice:** Concrete and initially overconfident about familiar rules; later slower to explain and more willing to ask.

**Chapter route:** V02-C03, V02-C07, V02-C09, V12-C06, V12-C14.

### Lily

V2 modern lead; 23-year-old identity note is legacy, final ontology open.

**Wants:** Keep an ordinary life while discovering what recovered memories require.

**Offers:** Offers outsider questions and resistance to inherited prestige.

**Cost or danger:** Urgency and new power can produce an intervention beyond her competence.

**Internal conflict:** Fears insignificance and also fears an enormous identity swallowing her actual history.

**Voice:** Fast associations, occasional recursive what-if escalation, practical deflation; natural speech allowed to trail or be corrected by friends.

**Chapter route:** V12-C01, V12-C02, V12-C03, V12-C05, V12-C06, V12-C12, V12-C14.

### June Park

V2 path-seer; mechanics pending world reconciliation.

**Wants:** Understand possible routes while remaining a companion rather than an oracle everyone must obey.

**Offers:** Can compare options and teach bounded observation.

**Cost or danger:** Seeing alternatives can turn other people's lives into a tempting optimization problem.

**Internal conflict:** Wants to spare a friend a mistake but cannot own the friend's choice.

**Voice:** Economical, alert, capable of affectionate understatement; corrects a practical error before delivering a lesson.

**Chapter route:** V12-C02, V12-C03, V12-C05, V12-C14.

### Yuna

V2 supporting cast child oracle; new refusal episode proposed.

**Wants:** Have an ordinary future alongside unusual perception.

**Offers:** Sees evidence adults may miss.

**Cost or danger:** Adults can recruit her as proof, weapon, or mascot.

**Internal conflict:** Curiosity competes with a justified wish not to be responsible for everyone's safety.

**Voice:** Specific questions, selective silence, flashes of humour appropriate to a young person; never an adult sermon in a child's mouth.

**Chapter route:** V12-C04.

### Malcolm Thorne

V2 antagonist; exploitative contract details proposed.

**Wants:** Continue living and keep control of the relationships and property he fears losing.

**Offers:** Can mobilize material resources quickly.

**Cost or danger:** Externalizes risk onto people who cannot meaningfully negotiate with him.

**Internal conflict:** Calls his attachment love while treating refusal and loss as unacceptable defects.

**Voice:** Polished reassurance, proprietary pronouns, calm managerial language that fractures when control fails.

**Chapter route:** V12-C07.

### Firstborn dissenter

Composite editorial character; fixedness versus learning unresolved.

**Wants:** Prevent a preservation order from consuming the people supposedly protected.

**Offers:** Provides access, testimony, and a route away from institutional coercion.

**Cost or danger:** Defection exposes dependents and may preserve some self-serving loyalties.

**Internal conflict:** May reveal pre-existing dissent rather than newly acquire the capacity to change; do not choose the ontology silently.

**Voice:** Formal vocabulary gradually narrowed to concrete persons; not a human wisecracker with luminous decoration.

**Chapter route:** V12-C08.

### Neris, first recorder

New editorial name for proposed first recorder; no ancient attestation.

**Wants:** Make a faithful record without confusing completeness with truth.

**Offers:** Keeps conflicting names and gaps recoverable.

**Cost or danger:** The desire for tidy categories can turn living differences into errors.

**Internal conflict:** Pride in accuracy meets the realization that omission can be more honest than invention.

**Voice:** Careful questions and understated literal observations; humour from incongruity, not compulsive bureaucratic jokes.

**Chapter route:** V01-C04, V01-C08.

### Sadir, refuge quartermaster

New editorial supporting character; lifespan and appearances require local clock placement.

**Wants:** Keep Lilith's refuge materially viable without turning hardship into authority.

**Offers:** Knows roofs, routes, stores, and the limits of heroic promises.

**Cost or danger:** Scarcity tempts admission rules that exclude difficult needs.

**Internal conflict:** Loves the refuge but resents being taken for granted by its protectors.

**Voice:** Tactile, impatient with grand speeches during practical work; familiar teasing earned through years of repair.

**Chapter route:** V02-C13, V03-C13.

### Enoch

1 Enoch traditions and Genesis; scene motives proposed.

**Wants:** Carry testimony accurately between unequal powers.

**Offers:** Can reach hearings ordinary petitioners cannot.

**Cost or danger:** Access tempts others to demand guarantees he cannot give.

**Internal conflict:** Empathy for frightened petitioners conflicts with the harm alleged against them.

**Voice:** Measured, attentive to sequence and what he did not understand; wonder without inflated certainty.

**Chapter route:** V03-C04, V03-C05.

### Noah

Genesis flood narrative; ethical interiority proposed.

**Wants:** Preserve life through an event he cannot independently halt.

**Offers:** Organizes shelter and prolonged shared survival.

**Cost or danger:** Selection excludes lives; survival can become unwarranted moral prestige.

**Internal conflict:** Gratitude and grief remain entangled after the water retreats.

**Voice:** Practical instructions under strain; not a permanently serene spokesman for catastrophe.

**Chapter route:** V03-C07, V03-C09, V03-C10.

### Abraham

Genesis; Abram/Abraham name chronology retained.

**Wants:** Secure a future and relationship with the encountered promise.

**Offers:** Can travel, negotiate, and challenge judgement.

**Cost or danger:** Protective strategies repeatedly transfer risk to less powerful household members.

**Internal conflict:** Believes a promise matters while fearing his own choices could lose it.

**Voice:** Hospitable negotiation mixed with evasive self-justification; rhetorical patience under public pressure.

**Chapter route:** V04-C01, V04-C02, V04-C05, V04-C08, V04-C09.

### Sarah

Genesis; Sarai/Sarah change preserved.

**Wants:** Have a future that acknowledges her life already lived.

**Offers:** Brings household competence, scepticism, and a capacity to expose impossible assurances.

**Cost or danger:** Her insecurity can become domination of Hagar.

**Internal conflict:** Wants recognition and reproduces exclusion to secure it.

**Voice:** Compressed judgement, unsentimental observation, laughter with several emotional meanings.

**Chapter route:** V04-C02, V04-C04, V04-C07.

### Hagar

Genesis; independent testimony preserved.

**Wants:** Keep herself and Ishmael alive beyond the household that used and expelled her.

**Offers:** Builds an independent lineage and naming testimony.

**Cost or danger:** Hard-won caution can make every offered relation look like another trap.

**Internal conflict:** Needs aid without accepting renewed possession.

**Voice:** Direct about water, travel, and the child; theological insight begins in lived need, not lecture.

**Chapter route:** V04-C03, V04-C07.

### Joseph

Genesis; policy consequences retained.

**Wants:** Survive betrayal, use his ability, and bring his family through famine.

**Offers:** Turns interpretation and administration into large-scale provision.

**Cost or danger:** Centralized relief increases state ownership and dependence.

**Internal conflict:** Wants reunion without admitting how much he now resembles the systems that once controlled him.

**Voice:** Controlled courtesy, strategic delay, administrative precision; feeling leaks through when family interrupts the official role.

**Chapter route:** V04-C15, V04-C16.

### Moses

Exodus through Deuteronomy; portrayal proposed.

**Wants:** Lead a liberation he did not seek and leave it able to continue.

**Offers:** Can confront centralized power and organize a new community.

**Cost or danger:** Exhaustion and authority can reproduce the coercion he opposes.

**Internal conflict:** Public mission competes with reluctance, anger, and limited hearing capacity.

**Voice:** Reluctant formulation becoming forceful address; private frustration distinct from ceremonial speech.

**Chapter route:** V05-C03, V05-C04, V05-C09, V05-C10, V05-C16.

### Miriam

Exodus and Numbers; counter-record role proposed.

**Wants:** Make women's care, leadership, and losses visible inside the liberation.

**Offers:** Sustains public memory and collective courage.

**Cost or danger:** Rivalry over authority can narrow her own view of others.

**Internal conflict:** Committed to the movement while unwilling to disappear inside her brother's office.

**Voice:** Rhythmic public speech and brisk domestic directness; humour can hold shared memory without erasing fear.

**Chapter route:** V05-C02, V05-C07, V05-C14.

### Ruth

Ruth; no retrospective assimilation of origin.

**Wants:** Keep Naomi and herself alive and create a durable future.

**Offers:** Practical loyalty transforms the meaning of kinship and belonging.

**Cost or danger:** Her labour can be romanticized into an endless duty to sacrifice herself.

**Internal conflict:** Needs a secure arrangement without becoming merely the instrument of a lineage.

**Voice:** Observant, economical, attentive to how a promise changes tomorrow's work.

**Chapter route:** V06-C14.

### David

Samuel and Chronicles; distinct witnesses retained.

**Wants:** Survive, rule, and be recognized as legitimate.

**Offers:** Can exercise restraint, inspire loyalty, and consolidate institutions.

**Cost or danger:** Royal access enables domination, concealment, and failures toward his own household.

**Internal conflict:** The man who refuses a convenient killing later engineers one.

**Voice:** Quick social perception and genuine lyric capacity; charm becomes dangerous when it prevents honest refusal.

**Chapter route:** V06-C17, V06-C18, V06-C19, V06-C20.

### Bathsheba

2 Samuel; interiority editorial, not recovered historical testimony.

**Wants:** Remain a person and secure a future after royal power remakes her household.

**Offers:** Can preserve memory and navigate succession.

**Cost or danger:** Survival in court may require compromises that later admirers oversimplify.

**Internal conflict:** Rejects being reduced either to seductress or passive proof of another man's repentance.

**Voice:** Sparse, deliberate, alert to who can safely hear a sentence.

**Chapter route:** V06-C19, V06-C21.

### Solomon, king

Kings and Chronicles; never automatically the V2 Threshold trader.

**Wants:** Establish wise order and durable splendour.

**Offers:** Can hear a difficult case and organize immense work.

**Cost or danger:** Prestige accumulates labour extraction, taxation, and dynastic strain.

**Internal conflict:** Reputation for discernment competes with the experience of the people funding it.

**Voice:** Elegant comparison and confident public judgement; practical blind spots appear when the subject is his own administration.

**Chapter route:** V06-C21, V06-C22.

### Jesus

Distinct Gospel witnesses; incarnation bounded by approved cosmology.

**Wants:** Teach and enact relation without turning power into coercive rule.

**Offers:** Changes obligations through encounter, healing, teaching, and care.

**Cost or danger:** Followers can turn his language or absence into authority he did not grant them.

**Internal conflict:** Public urgency coexists with embodied fatigue, fear, and the limits witnesses can know.

**Voice:** Concrete images, questions, parables, direct rebukes, tenderness; avoid generic cosmic exposition and imported author mannerisms.

**Chapter route:** V09-C03, V09-C04, V09-C06, V09-C10, V09-C12, V09-C16, V09-C18.

### Mary Magdalene

Distinct Gospel witnesses; no invented certainty about gaps.

**Wants:** Remain faithful to what she witnessed and get it heard.

**Offers:** Carries consequential testimony through grief and disbelief.

**Cost or danger:** Others may use her witness while reducing her independent standing.

**Internal conflict:** Needs an account of absence without knowing in advance what she will encounter.

**Voice:** Immediate sensory precision, direct corrections, grief allowed to interrupt fluency.

**Chapter route:** V09-C19, V09-C21.

### Paul

Acts and epistles; attribution and chronology differences preserved.

**Wants:** Build and sustain communities around a transformed conviction.

**Offers:** Creates connections, arguments, aid routes, and durable correspondence.

**Cost or danger:** Rhetoric can outlive its context and support hierarchies in recipients' lives.

**Internal conflict:** Urgent persuasion competes with accountability for prior harm and current limits.

**Voice:** Argumentative momentum, compressed pivots, appeals to relationship; recipient voices must not become echoes.

**Chapter route:** V10-C05, V10-C07, V10-C08, V10-C12, V10-C20.

### Phoebe

Romans 16; delivery and performance details proposed.

**Wants:** Bring an argument and a network of people into a divided community's hearing.

**Offers:** Connects interpretation with named relationships and actual travel.

**Cost or danger:** Messenger prestige could narrow who gets to answer.

**Internal conflict:** Wants the letter understood without claiming every response as her own.

**Voice:** Composed and situationally exact; capable of restoring context through one well-placed question.

**Chapter route:** V10-C13.

### Onesimus

Philemon and related textual references; outcome not presumed.

**Wants:** Obtain a future beyond possession by another person.

**Offers:** Exposes the difference between an appeal and a changed condition.

**Cost or danger:** Others may use his situation to demonstrate their benevolence.

**Internal conflict:** Must assess risk under a correspondence he did not author.

**Voice:** Careful about promises, specific about conditions, neither grateful mascot nor flawless symbolic rebel.

**Chapter route:** V10-C14.

### Ione, Corinthian worker

New editorial name for poor Corinthian member.

**Wants:** Eat and belong after a day's work.

**Offers:** Makes ritual exclusion visible through ordinary bodily need.

**Cost or danger:** Exhaustion can make sustained participation costly.

**Internal conflict:** Wants community while resenting the burden of teaching it what hunger means.

**Voice:** Plain, wry among friends, precise when polite evasions appear.

**Chapter route:** V10-C10, V10-C11.

### Samira, manuscript custodian

New editorial late transmission character; no invented historical attribution.

**Wants:** Keep a contested archive usable without surrendering it to its patron.

**Offers:** Preserves terminology, copies, and independent custody.

**Cost or danger:** Care for records can conflict with the urgent safety of living custodians.

**Internal conflict:** Loves the collection but must accept that preservation cannot always mean keeping it in one place.

**Voice:** Patient explanation, dry affection for colleagues, firm refusal of false equivalence.

**Chapter route:** V11-C04, V11-C13.

### Nadia, repair coordinator

New editorial modern supporting character.

**Wants:** Make the changed world's routes and care practices actually work.

**Offers:** Turns revelations into completed repairs and accountable logistics.

**Cost or danger:** Can become impatient with grief that does not fit a schedule.

**Internal conflict:** Needs measurable progress without declaring unmeasurable loss finished.

**Voice:** Practical, companionable, capable of interrupting grandeur with a real need rather than a canned gag.

**Chapter route:** V12-C05, V12-C11, V12-C13, V12-C14.

## Factions

### Garden stewardship office

Editorial institution around Genesis and author Garden.

**Wants:** Preserve a successful enclosure and the authority to define its order.

**Offers:** Maintains provision, shelter, and a shared operating routine.

**Cost or danger:** Makes belonging conditional on compliance with imposed roles.

**Internal conflict:** Some stewards want interpretable rules; others treat questioning as system failure.

**Voice:** Assuring, procedural, offended by questions it cannot classify.

**Chapter route:** V01-C09, V02-C04, V02-C08, V02-C09.

### Lilith's refuge network

New editorial institution across the series.

**Wants:** Keep displaced people alive without buying obedience.

**Offers:** Provides routes, roofs, reciprocal care, and independent testimony.

**Cost or danger:** Scarcity strains generosity; protectors can accumulate informal power.

**Internal conflict:** Quartermasters demand workable limits while others resist any admission rule.

**Voice:** Practical familiarity, disagreement with affection, jokes tied to shared labour.

**Chapter route:** V02-C13, V03-C13, V04-C17, V05-C17, V06-C23, V07-C19, V08-C19, V09-C21, V10-C21, V11-C15, V12-C13.

### Watcher patronage circles

1 Enoch adaptation; not all angelic or divine beings.

**Wants:** Extend influence through instruction and privileged relation.

**Offers:** Offer arts and knowledge capable of improving life.

**Cost or danger:** Tie access to coercive personal obligations and unequal dependence.

**Internal conflict:** Teachers who want reciprocity clash with patrons who treat dependence as proof of gratitude.

**Voice:** Paternal assurance, technical confidence, injured generosity when challenged.

**Chapter route:** V03-C01, V03-C02, V03-C04, V03-C06.

### Egyptian grain and labour court

Editorial institutional focus within Genesis and Exodus; not all Egyptians.

**Wants:** Keep state continuity, food supply, and elite control.

**Offers:** Can coordinate storage and material distribution at scale.

**Cost or danger:** Turns emergency dependence into enduring extraction and hereditary coercion.

**Internal conflict:** Administrators pursuing survival conflict with elites prioritizing command.

**Voice:** Numbers used as arguments; polite euphemisms for burdens assigned downward.

**Chapter route:** V04-C16, V05-C01, V05-C04, V05-C05, V05-C06.

### Covenant households

Genesis family coalitions; not a homogeneous ethnic essence.

**Wants:** Secure land, descendants, protection, and continuity of promise.

**Offers:** Provide loyalty, mobility, practical care, and inherited testimony.

**Cost or danger:** Privilege lineage, status, and control of marriage or reproduction.

**Internal conflict:** Hagar, Sarah, children, servants, and patriarchs hold incompatible stakes.

**Voice:** Kinship language, negotiated promises, old jokes with long memories.

**Chapter route:** V04-C01, V04-C03, V04-C04, V04-C07, V04-C14, V04-C16.

### Wilderness assembly and service offices

Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers-Deuteronomy adaptation.

**Wants:** Make collective freedom livable after escape.

**Offers:** Creates distribution, courts, sanctuary work, and shared expectations.

**Cost or danger:** Rules can harden into unequal status and immune leadership.

**Internal conflict:** Caregivers, daughters, artisans, priests, and commanders dispute what freedom requires.

**Voice:** Public exhortation contrasted with informal queues, workshops, and households.

**Chapter route:** V05-C08, V05-C09, V05-C10, V05-C11, V05-C13, V05-C14, V05-C15.

### Royal and sanctuary establishments

Distinct kingdoms must remain historically and narratively separable.

**Wants:** Consolidate legitimacy, defence, taxation, and sacred prestige.

**Offers:** Can support infrastructure, justice, and collective memory.

**Cost or danger:** Extract labour, suppress complaint, and conflate divine favour with success.

**Internal conflict:** Prophets, court workers, relatives, debtors, and soldiers contest royal conduct.

**Voice:** Polished confidence at the centre; sharply different registers among those doing its work.

**Chapter route:** V06-C16, V06-C18, V06-C19, V06-C22, V07-C01, V07-C03, V07-C11.

### Dispersed testimony circles

Editorial coalition within exile and diaspora; not one historical organization.

**Wants:** Preserve continuity without intact territory or sanctuary.

**Offers:** Keeps texts, lament, practical wisdom, songs, and household stories.

**Cost or danger:** Curators may privilege respectable memory over difficult witnesses.

**Internal conflict:** Restoration advocates conflict with those who cannot or do not wish to return.

**Voice:** Many registers deliberately retained; one authorized voice would betray the institution's function.

**Chapter route:** V07-C14, V07-C16, V07-C18, V07-C19, V08-C01, V08-C04.

### Early assembly networks

Acts and epistles; local communities remain distinct.

**Wants:** Sustain witness, belonging, and aid across distance.

**Offers:** Creates hospitality, collections, teaching, and relations beyond some inherited boundaries.

**Cost or danger:** Charisma, wealth, household status, and office can become domination.

**Internal conflict:** Recipients answer messengers; poor members challenge meals; hosts contest controlling leaders.

**Voice:** Argument, personal greeting, correction, friendship, and exasperation; no universal church voice.

**Chapter route:** V10-C01, V10-C03, V10-C07, V10-C10, V10-C14, V10-C18.

### Exclusive archive patronages

Composite editorial antagonistic institution, not a whole religion.

**Wants:** Maintain legitimacy through control of surviving testimony.

**Offers:** Funds preservation, buildings, copies, and specialist labour.

**Cost or danger:** Makes access and survival conditional on doctrinal assimilation.

**Internal conflict:** Custodians wanting accurate records resist benefactors seeking unanimous ancestry.

**Voice:** Generous public language with increasingly specific private exceptions.

**Chapter route:** V08-C19, V11-C02, V11-C03, V11-C13, V11-C15.

### Firstborn preservation hierarchy

Author source institution; membership and capacity conflict unresolved.

**Wants:** Keep its assigned order continuous and its own offices necessary.

**Offers:** Maintains some routes and structures on which others depend.

**Cost or danger:** Treats controlled history and institutional survival as justification for coercive preservation.

**Internal conflict:** Existing dissent versus capacity to change must be settled by source reconciliation; not assumed.

**Voice:** Formal mandate language; panic appears as procedural escalation.

**Chapter route:** V01-C09, V12-C08.

### Recovery coalition

V2 seeds plus original cross-tradition composition.

**Wants:** Investigate shared crises without surrendering distinct histories and agency.

**Offers:** Combines otherwise unavailable maps, practices, evidence, and practical care.

**Cost or danger:** Coordination can centralize authority or turn traditions into useful accessories.

**Internal conflict:** Members differ on risk, translation, hospitality, timing, and the meaning of repair.

**Voice:** Natural camaraderie among people who disagree; vocabulary remains character-specific.

**Chapter route:** V11-C05, V11-C06, V11-C07, V11-C08, V11-C09, V11-C10, V11-C11, V11-C12, V12-C05, V12-C11.

### Thorne's continuity enterprise

Editorial development of V2 antagonist.

**Wants:** Secure private immortality and control of loss.

**Offers:** Mobilizes wealth, facilities, and technical competence.

**Cost or danger:** Transfers bodily and cognitive risk onto dependent people.

**Internal conflict:** Some workers want legitimate care; leaders frame exit as betrayal.

**Voice:** Reassuring service language concealing whose continuity receives priority.

**Chapter route:** V12-C03, V12-C07.

### The Architect's builders

V2-derived proposal; Eve linkage not automatic historical truth.

**Wants:** Break a coercive order and make another future possible.

**Offers:** Understands structural failures the official keepers deny.

**Cost or danger:** A remedy can make existing people expendable to an imagined liberation.

**Internal conflict:** Members divide over total erasure, bounded change, and accountability after intervention.

**Voice:** Exact diagnoses, impatience with platitude, internal arguments about means.

**Chapter route:** V12-C09, V12-C11, V12-C13.