Darlington might not know what a sonic is, but the general sentiment is clear enough. He smirks. "They sound about as much fun as Manuscript," he says, and while--just like Palamedes and his Eighth--he shouldn't get a vindictive satisfaction out of maligning his least favorite society, he can't exactly help himself. "Who do have a sense of humor, to be fair, but it's spent on inventive so-called pranks and other ways of fucking with people. There was an incident in 1982, a party that ended with a girl thinking she was a tiger. And never stopped. Her parents caught her trying to maul the mailman."

There was another example of Manuscript trickery more recent and more personally embarrassing to Darlington, but he wisely keeps his silence on that for now.

"Harnessing the souls of the living, though, that's a new level of disturbing. Tonally similar to the kind of ethics violations that led to the founding of Lethe, honestly."