The Reborn Are Not Fine

The New Centrum celebration could not keep the damage off campus. Under the Skyglass Arches and through the VQU quad, the party ran into the Reborn not as a solved miracle, but as an open wound. Bauble confronted them with the kind of bitterness that does not care whether the people in front of it meant well. He had been resurrected into a damaged body. He had lost the life he knew. Being alive did not erase the rot, the pain, or the sense that someone else's project had used his future as raw material. Maine's guilt did not fix that. Bauble made sure he understood. Dupe turned the confrontation toward Sirocco, keeping the issue personal and unfinished, while Rush visibly glitched nearby: decay symptoms, unstable speed, and a body that did not look like resurrection had returned it cleanly. The Reborn were not enemies by default. That made the scene harder. They were angry people carrying bodies and lives that had been altered by forces larger than them. The festival wanted resurrection-adjacent power to look organized, useful, and heroic. The Reborn showed the other side. Lost futures. Damaged flesh. Anger at being brought back wrong. And the growing suspicion that the New Centrum's bright public face was standing on a system that had not answered for the people it remade.