LOOK 01 — THE PROPHET
Every year, the Governcorp chooses ten criminals with life sentences to compete in an arena-style fight to the death, an event which draws billions of viewers. The winner of the duel gets their sentence removed and is often incorporated into the entertainment sector. The year 2122 was different.
Little is known about the Prophet’s life before entering the arena. Their cloak covers up scars and cuts on their face from their fight to the death. After surviving the arena, they moved off the grid for a life of solitude, waiting for death. On their hundredth year of solitude, they understand that they have a purpose, and that their soul cannot pass from this earth until it is fulfilled.
For the first time in a century, the Prophet returns his mind to the arena. The ghosts of the past encircle him. He begins writing the stories of the other fighters who passed, so their stories will live on.
LOOK 02 — THE INVESTIGATOR
A true reader and debater. After her sister was suspiciously killed in an arena battle, she falls into a conspiracy rabbit hole and becomes determined to discover and expose the wrongdoings of elite members of the Governcorp and the arena VIPs.
She teaches herself how to physically rewire encrypted internet servers. The Investigator spends the year following her sister’s death living and navigating within the cable tunnels, visiting different server rooms across the region, gathering intel on a hunt to identify every person responsible for her sister’s death. She connects the dots to a web of criminals complicit in human trafficking. Out of grief and seeking vengeance, she forms a plan. She disrupts a Governcorp propaganda transmission and causes a region-wide blackout, ensuring she gets imprisoned and sent to the arena. Once there, she can find the last piece of the puzzle and expose the Governcorp during their biggest media event. She was unsuccessful.
Charged with: conspiracy to commit treason, disruption of the power grid, and involuntary manslaughter.
LOOK 03 — THE LOYALIST
Longtime watcher of the last freshwater lake. Neither assigned nor on payroll. Used to fish in the lake with his dad. Now he stands still on 20-foot-tall columns that once belonged to a dock where they would stand. Every day and night, he watches in service as the lake slowly recedes. Over many months and years, he watches the lake turn into a swampy pond. Then he watches as it shrinks from a pond to a puddle. For the past eighteen years, he has been staring at what is now only a patch of mud, growing drier every year.
One night, a group of Governcorp patrols walks under the columns, speaking vulgarity about the regime. The patrol notices the loyalist standing above them, eyes locked on the water. They begin to threaten him. He says he has no interest in exposing them. The soldiers arrest him anyway, out of fear of the consequences if he did speak out.
Charged with: trespassing, resisting arrest, and conspiracy against Governcorp.
LOOK 04 — THE PEACEMAKER
Raised as a monk, the Peacemaker has advanced to a much higher awareness, operating from a place of ever-being unity, solely limited by her devotion. A renovator of consciousness using technical cognition, breathwork rituals, and arranging stable weight tensioning done by balancing stones on her head. The Peacemaker was the first to conceptualize a plan to take down the Governcorp by uniting forces that had been placed in opposition, to restore peace to the lands.
Charged with: transcendence and conspiracy to commit treason.
LOOK 05 — THE GIVER
Child of a botanist, brought up for labor. Active-duty plant soldier, handler of seeds. The Giver collects and transports rare seeds to their mother’s Governcorp-contracted factory greenhouse and laboratory. Their siblings categorize and incubate thousands of different seeds, from fine grains of dust to boulder-sized specimens, to be patented and exclusively distributed.
They desire to consume an illegally harvested hallucinogenic flower that their mother withholds access to. After years of labor, study, and help gone unrewarded, the Giver develops a rage against their mother. They decide to retaliate by going rogue, stealing as much flower as can fit in their pockets, and blowing up her warehouse with a fertilizer bomb. They envision the explosion beautifully as the blooming of the biggest flower of life again; for new petals shall come with the disappearance of what they previously were. To release all forms of stagnance, and to be born again.
Charged with: premeditated murder, terrorism, and acts against humanity.
LOOK 06 — THE PERFORMER
At 10 years old, she escaped from her unjust family. Seeking shelter, she unknowingly finds herself isolated in the last natural forest. After many years, she learns to bend the tree branches to build sculptures across the forest’s canopy. The branches become a replica of her family tree through grafting and breeding hybrids of trees in the ecosystem. Through this process, the Performer reflects on her own molding and the life that created her. She discovers the way each branch connects to each other is the truth of how each living consciousness is entangled together, each pulling or pushing on the other to form one superorganism.
In the understory below the branches, she continues building an externalization of her memories out of narrow paths through sculptures of broken branches, formed by webs of vines and ivy, haphazardly pruned and hedged. She re-enacts her old family dynamics by performing desired routes through conflict in this replica of her internal universe, each step through the forest reeking of a traumatic core. She had eventually twisted all of the last natural trees left on Earth. In her pursuit of self-actualization and beauty, she disfigured the last forest.
Charged with: trespassing, ecocide, and destruction of Governcorp property.
LOOK 07 — THE PERFECTIONIST
Achieved perfection in the creation of robot animatronics. After decades of being the best machinist on the planet, the Perfectionist became complacent and eventually fell into an entirely mechanical state of production with zero emotional initiative. His suicidal thought was that no matter how far he strived to achieve radical results on the planetary plane, the real perfection lay beyond death, for the unattainable.
He had been performing rituals of transcendence involving a machine with several mechanical arms cutting the skin and injecting small amounts of poison to portray the feeling of death in small amounts. The Governcorp deemed him a threat to the realizations of humanity and raided the ritual, leading to his arrest.
Charged with: ritual crime, body modification, self-mutilation, and surgical harm.
LOOK 08 — THE INDIVIDUALIST
Cliff miner. Hangs on ropes and mines the rare sediments found on tall cliffs. The Individualist is the last in a familial line of cliff miners, a job which has a sense of duty to maintain as it has been automated by climbing arachnid robots. While spending hours scaling walls and crevices, alone with her thoughts, she falls into a state of meditation to endure the labor of the rock. In her trance, she carves stone, and at the same time imagines she is the stone, and she is seeing herself being carved into.
She becomes consumed by this. She began forging labyrinths and massive architectural structures within the geological landscape out of limestone, marble, slate, and coal. Eventually, the scale of her massive sanctuary begins to carve through mountains. In her tunnel vision, she carves out the biggest work of art on the planet. It becomes an obvious sight from satellites, leading to her discovery and arrest.
Charged with: illegal mining and trafficking of precious metals.
LOOK 09 — THE ENTHUSIAST
Vivid explorer and painter. The Enthusiast invented a style of using their body to spray paint from their limbs. She seeks out abandoned structures to perform dancing rituals. Over the years, she becomes a legendary and well-known figure throughout the towns. One day, while exploring an abandoned cement mill, she falls down a large tower into a mountain of ash, damaging her paint nozzles.
The Enthusiast becomes trapped for two years, doing little but eating ash and sitting alone, her only source of sun and water being the large hole that she fell in from. Over eight hundred days of solitude spent in an abandoned cement factory. Eventually, her followers find the trail of paint leading to the cement factory and ascend the tower to see an Enthusiast turned inside out, her colorful paint replaced with black tar, sticky and warm. Upon seeing her in this state, the effect extends to her followers, who become consumed by the same black goo. Now an army of sick goons.
The black tar slowly climbs backwards, covering their trail of art. It goes back and corrupts all of their murals and works throughout the lands, leaving only voids of sticky black goo.
Charged with: criminal vandalism, trespassing, and property damage.
LOOK 10 — THE CHALLENGER
Robotic mechanist and autodidact of anarchist innovation. The Challenger set up robotic defiances in his region powered by heat, magnetic poles, sound frequency, and metallic torques meant to trap and disable Governcorp robots invading his region. These traps are meant not to harm people, but to instill fear and awareness in Governcorp military leaders.
Through collaboration with the Peacemaker and the Perfectionist, they successfully disable the Governcorp’s propaganda bubble. Due to chance and perfect timing, this aligned with the power outage caused by the Investigator, and for three long days, civilians had access to suppressed knowledge and information. On the third day, all of them were discovered.
Charged with: conspiracy to commit treason.