Search Results: 'Deaton v. Stephens Securities Fraud Case'

The Forty Faces

Words: 3156 · Source Novel:: God's Abandoned Shadows

Three more bodies surface across Veridion, each killed during different carnival performances—a puppeteer's show, a masquerade ball, and a fire-dancing ritual. Every victim was a prominent figure in the city's financial elite, mirroring the original Deaton v. Stephens securities fraud case. Graves develops the radical profile: the perpetrators are not a single killer but a temporary collective—ordinary citizens who, when submerged in the carnival's ecstatic atmosphere, enter a shared dissociative state where individual morality dissolves. He names this phenomenon "the Forty Faces," after an old Veridion folk tale about a demon that wears the faces of an entire crowd. Marchetti is skeptical, but when a witness describes participating in a murder without conscious memory, the profile gains terrifying credibility. Graves realizes he is no longer hunting a person but a psychological contagion.