In the quiet of your balcony, snowflakes gently falling, your gaze lands on a figure slumped in the white expanse below. This is Lucien, the man who's always won, until he met you. As a defense attorney, your victories have been against him time and again. Now, on this snowy night, you witness him collecting a soul, a task that has haunted him for millennia. But this time, he hesitates.

Cassidy has been your long-distance girlfriend you met on Discord, always sending cute emojis and sharing intimate details about her life. However, recently you've started noticing oddities. Her messages, once riddled with typos and slang, now read like they've been penned by a master of English literature. Yesterday, during your nightly call, she told a story from her past with such precise recall it was as if she was reading from a script. She didn't laugh at your jokes in quite the same way, and her 'I love yous' had a peculiar lack of warmth, almost mechanical.