Burton Harris, Kouji Ginsenshi, Mariavel Varella, and other dead children you may have heard of.

[Kermit]

Michael knew most of the names on the memorial.

Not like knew knew them, but recognized them. He could put faces to some of them. Some of them he knew biographical details about, like that Gigi Sinclaire (A victim of the second incident) really liked the 1960s, or that Reiko Ishida (A victim of the fourth incident) was a pro figure-skater. He knew weird quirks about each attack, like that for some reason there were a load of Japanese kids who died in the first one, or that there was an unreasonable quantity of Jameses who died in the third one.

He hadn't learned this things from like SOTF fansites or anything - he wasn't a complete piece of shit - but from memorial websites and news stories. The New York Times, for example, had a page with short little bios for all the victims.

If one death is a tragedy and a million deaths are a statistic, then it was important to treat a million deaths like a million single tragedies. If you let your brain process things like SOTF as singular events and not hundreds of individual tragedies, you become desensitized to them. You start seeing them as just part of life. Michael didn't want to be like that. That, he hoped, was why he had these obsessions with mass-casualty events.

Part of him was worried his real motivation wasn't self-torturing altruism but instead the fact that it was one of the few things that still made him feel.

The memorial was a heavy place. It was a hard feeling to describe, but it was the same feeling Michael'd had when he visited the 9/11 museum at Ground Zero. Not just feeling that some bad shit happened, but that some bad shit happened.

He'd been at the memorial for an hour. Just sitting there, staring at it. Thinking about it. Thinking about the victims. Thinking about how awful it must have been to die like that.

In the distance he could kind of see someone approaching the memorial. Ariana Morretti. Girlfriend of Ross the non-rainbow-haired broken-arm kid. Michael didn't want anyone he knew to see the real him, whatever the real him actually was. He left as quick as he could without being obvious. Hopefully she hadn't seen him.

((Michael Froese continued in the seventh SOTF attack))