[Hard: Failure] — My god. It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in your entire life.

— "According to our survey across various platforms, it was revealed that certain modders are actively developing a means to transform Yasuke, originally depicted as a Black man in the latest Assassin's Creed installment set in Japan, into an authentic Japanese character."

[Trivial: Success] — The run-on chaff breezes past you, leaving only the core conceit. "Depicted as". Changing him "into an authentic Japanese character."

— Certainly takes far less imagination to view a Black samurai as a Black samurai than the tone of this article would suggest.

[Challenging: Success] — I need you to not listen to what your instincts are about to tell you. Ignore them and walk away from this. Close the tab, close the article. It isn't worth your time.

— Pull your gun.

— Yes, Ukraine has no serious chance of coming out of this with anything remotely resembling a victory and the immediate brokering of peace has been the only sensible path forward for the past two years.

— "You know...I'm not going to tell a Palestinian voter to vote for Biden. I'm really not. I won't."

— But...

— "What I am gonna do is tell a white voter who couldn't find Gaza on a map 6 months ago to miss me with their work-from-home-slacktivism and choose the lesser evil."

[Easy: Success] — Of course. Only the white votes matter to her.

— If a DDOS were launched on this website right now — if the feds came crashing down and an emote of a DPRK soldier took the entire server with it — this woman would hurl herself in death's way to post for you. You are sure of this —but why?

— Hold on, who is she to me?

— She is your half-sister.

— "I love pot. I can't get enough of the stuff."

— The Union leader raises an eyebrow. "Oh, do you, Harry? Excellent! Truly wonderful. I'm certain you'll find many men in the Union who would share your moral position on drugs. Not that they use them, of course! It would be both illegal and extremely unprofessional to be under the influence of drugs at the worksite."

— He's lying. He doesn't know that you're cool, yet. Everybody lies to uncool people.

— People don't think I'm cool?

— What? No, everybody thinks you're cool. But you're a cop, so he's expecting you to be a narc. Narcs aren't cool.

— "So, you wouldn't mind if I...smoked in here, would you?"

— "Actually, Harry, I would very much prefer if you didn't smoke anything in my office. It's my lungs, you see. Can't handle all of that second-hand stuff. It's nothing against you personally. You can step outside if you'd like to spark up." Evrart grins, tapping his fingers on a stack of papers. "Besides, there's still the matter of your missing gun to attend to."

[Hard: Success] — Nobody tells you what to do, least of all a civvie. It's time to show him what happens when someone refuses the request of a uniformed officer. You'll have to wait until he clocks out before you can strike, but he'll come back in the morning to the skunk-scent of a message.

New task: Smoke a blunt in Evrart's office

— The Yemeni maritime border meets Saudi Arabia's near Al Qunfudhah, splitting the Red Sea across the middle. From there, it stretches all the way South to Aden, and then continues a few hundred kilometers off the coast into the Gulf of Aden.

— Is that why the United States is bombing Yemen?

[Easy: Success] — Partially.

— It's the Houthis, sire. They've warned all of those ships heading down the Suez Canal that they're going to blow them to bits if they enter their sea-space. The captains haven't been listening, so they've been getting shot at. And the United States! Oh! The United States have started giving the companies military escorts! It's a dreadful, dreadful situation! Everyone needs to know how you feel about this!

— But...if Yemen says that the ships can't go through, isn't it illegal for the ships to go through their borders anyway?

[Medium: Success] — The international rules-based order doesn't seem to like it when other countries enforce the rules.

[Legendary: Success] — The weight of a world is lifted off of a dozen others. In Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Timor, in Cambodia, in Chile, in Cyprus; the undercurrent breathes a collective sigh. One more piece is off of the board. The empire is running out of material.

— τελειωτικό χτύπημα.

— What happens now?

— For you, Detective? Or the world?

— For the world.

— Nothing.

[Hard: Success] — An old man who did his damage is dead. His spirit is gone, but the mark will remain. Him being gone solves nothing.

— And for me?

— For you? You celebrate.

[SIGHT] — Right there. That blotch of blue stapled to the end of the username. The suspiciously low follower count. The community notes calling them out for misinformation. This Twitter poster bears a sort of digital aposematism; all the hallmarks of someone who vastly overestimates their own importance.

— And this no-name on some non-descript Discord is a revisionist on top of everything else, if not wholly against Mazovian thought. You're not wasting your time engaging with this drivel, are you?

— I'm engaging with it, alright. I'm engaging with it hard.

[Hard: Success] — Ooh, yes, good show, comrade! An excellent show, indeed! What will it be, then? Inducing a massive struggle session? Manipulating the power users to eventually seize control of the server? Death threats? Goodness, I hope it's death threats!

— "Kim, take a look at this post. It's a revisionist."

— "That would appear to be so. Does this have something to do with the investigation?"

— "Absolutely. If we can find some evidence to connect this post to this murder, then we're gonna blow the whole case wide open."

— "Of course." The lieutenant turns his attention back to the crime scene. "Let me know if you find anything else, Detective."

-1 MORALE

[Impossible: Failure] — You are submerged deep within the milieu of news cycles and chauvinism, and you are drowning. Air. You need air. It burns at the corners of your eyes and claws at your throat. Everything hurts. If this is the way it's going to be, you don't know if you can keep going.

— How could you, when everything is so terrible?

[Challenging: Success] — A world away, further than any place you'll ever go, a young boy sits outside a crumbling, concrete apartment block. Sea spray and smoke swirl through the air together, salty and acrid, coating the world in a shade grayer than usual. He sits and stares up at the sky, at the planes carrying missiles overhead, and he listens for the sounds of catching powders and marching footsteps. He sits with two million siblings. None of them may make it to tomorrow. The sufficiently old and sufficiently able take to the streets. The shelters and tunnels curling beneath them like veins tremble against the tension.

— Have they given up?

— No. They haven't. And that means neither can you.

— Nobody ever lets you have fun anymore.

[Hard: Success] — The perspective on the doctor's right hand is impossible, like an Escher mezzotint. The ring and middle fingers cannot connect to the palm at the angle they're sticking out from it. The "baby", similarly, is anatomically incorrect; the large, hollow tube emerging from its right shoulder doesn't match any bone that a human has.