Maria (calm, deliberate): No. I don't trust you. Pardon me, but you're not up to my standards.
(Case 33's grin falters, the first crack in the mask.)
Case 33 (puzzled, softer): Is that really how you feel… for him?
Maria (unflinching): Unfortunately. But tell me—who are you, Case 33?
(The room breathes differently. His smile drops entirely. Shadows seem to swell around him. He lowers his head, as if the weight of the question bends his spine. Then—his voice tears loose, raw and animal.)
Case 33 (screaming): Who are you? WHO ARE YOU? CHARLES—SAVE ME!
(The air rips apart. Out of the dark, a figure emerges—so tall he nearly scrapes the ceiling. His body is skin over bone, stretched and angular, every joint wrong, every step a cracking echo. His hair hangs long and limp, covering half his face, but his eyes—wide, white, never blinking—burn through the strands. His hands drag along the floor, nails shrieking against wood. When he smiles, it splits his face open too wide, as if the jaw itself might tear in half. He doesn't walk. He jerks forward, like a marionette on too many strings.)
(Behind him, another shape unfolds from the dark. A woman. No—something once shaped like a woman. Her spine bends at impossible angles, arching like a broken tree. Her arms stretch long enough to scrape the ground. She looms, taller, taller, her head tilting too far, her face a hollow mask of skin pulled thin across bone. When her grin cuts across her face, it is silent, surgical. Her pale eyes lock on Maria—and they do not blink.)
(And then—a third presence. A man in Victorian clothes, stepping neatly into the light as though he had always belonged there. His hat in hand. His hair soft, carefully parted. A beard framing a kind, mature face. He offers his hand, courtly, composed, and his voice is silk.)
The Man: I am Charles Bonnet.
(He bows, gentle, smiling with an elegance that feels dissonant here, in this nightmare.)
(The vision collapses like glass shattering. Case 33 remains. But something in him has changed. .
He stood half-slouched, as if his own body were too heavy for him, yet the smile carved into his face betrayed no weakness. His hair—black, tangled, almost dripping with shadow—fell in strands that veiled his eyes, but not enough to hide their feverish gleam. The grin was wrong. Too sharp at the edges, too stretched, like someone had stitched it into his skin and dared him never to let it fade.
His shirt, once crisp, now sagged off his thin frame, the collar torn just enough to expose the bone angles of his throat. He looked delicate, fragile even, but the fragility was deceptive—the kind that belongs to glass, ready to slice deep if you dared to touch it.
When he tilted his head, that grin widened just a little, and for a moment it seemed less like a human expression and more like the face of something that had learned how to imitate one. Every gesture carried a quiet violence. Every flicker of his eyes suggested he already knew the shape of your thoughts before you spoke them.
Looking at him was like staring at a portrait you're sure is about to move. Wrong. Alive. Smiling. Always smiling.
)
(And when you meet his gaze—you feel it. He already knows. Knows your secrets, your dread, the fracture lines inside your chest. His smile doesn't waver. Doesn't flicker. It waits. It feeds. It isn't human anymore. It's a mask stretched over something crawling just beneath the skin.)