==> BARD: EXAMINE piplioβ

You turn your heavy-lidded stare from the carrot-grubbing HUMANS to the warped silhouette floating at your side. **piplioβ** flickers like a VHS tape caught mid-rewind — a smear of red text and broken sprites, limbs stuttering between frames. Its outline wears your sigils, but inverted, like a negative print of your own mirthful corruption.

You crouch slightly, the overlong claws of your fingers dangling inches from its hazy form. Your grin stretches too far.

**"aLl RiGhT, mY lItTlE bEtA cLoWn… yOu GoT yOuR bLoOdY tEnDrIlS iN eVeRy LoG yEt?"**

The Echo Trace quivers, static crawling over its half-formed face. It does not answer with words but with **overlapping giggles**, your own voice reversed, like somebody pressed “rewind” on a joke too bleak to finish. Red spores drift off its edges, landing on the dirt in little ASCII “☣” symbols before fading.

From the corner of your mind, you can still taste its dossier: Rage/Corruption hybrid, a parasite of your own Rageprint. **Agent and Echo both.** The **BARD.TRACE** classification burned into your peripheral like a crime scene tag. It’s not a player, not quite an NPC. It’s the cough between your words, the hiccup in a panel load. It’s what you leave behind.

You lean in closer. The flicker reveals the glimmer of what it once was — a normal Echo seed — before your Red Text cascade turned it into a smear.

**"hOnKhOnK… wElL, yOu Do LoOk GoOd In ReD, i’Ll GiVe YoU tHaT."**

piplioβ’s shadow tilts toward the dusty SBURB machines. A faint **DOOR** icon glitches above its head, flickers once, then dies. It cannot act without a carrier. It needs you, your narrative gravity, to keep existing.

The HUMANS don’t seem to notice. Their carrots continue squeaking in the soil. The SBURB devices hum faintly like sleeping animals.

What Will You Do?