page_0: "WARNING: Private diary. If found, return to Baronial Labs Cavitology Division c/o Vitreous Braunstein for a significant reward.

            [A paperclipped entry catches our finger]

The eyes of mere graduate students are not enough. Their acuity comes too slowly and at too high a cost. They insist on blinking. Perhaps when the City was younger I could have augmented my vision with that of only a few assistants - maybe even gone monocular. But the degree of Ocular Superiority I seek was not then accessible. The fact remains: I need more eyes.

There was always THAT option, though I swore I would never consider it...

My grasp of the neuroelemental transmutations that prompted my ancestor to create See-Monkeys, then organize them into paramilitary battalions remains frustratingly imperfect. That does not mean his actions were random. Dreydolf von Braunstein was not mad: he was just misunderstood.

Of course, so long as the common ruck equates understanding with endorsement, I must attempt the former privately. Blind fools! Their incuriosity appalls me, but, again, to call it madness would be ocular forfeit. Madness is a myth, like magic or"

page_1: "Kurshoks. The five-element system will demystify all.

My ancestor's See-Monkeys once brachiated through the City, looting and mauling and spreading their seed. I could never condone such blinkered savagery, rooted as it was in the false reality of a four-element system. Moreover, it was a tragic waste of See-Monkeys which might have otherwise been constructively employed. To a man of vision like myself, the See-Monkeys' characteristic miscegeny - their melange of subhuman and superhuman qualities - embodies to some extent the hidden dipole powering all great romantic ventures. The frolicsome creatures are so eager to please, they can even be trained.

Some say a tool has no morality but that of its wielder. So claimed the Syncretists when they forgave the sins of Mechanist inventions the erstwhile nobility had so impotently earmarked for the cracks of doom. Thus were weapons of self-destruction turned to the enrichment of our City by technocultural admixture, the broad utility of which affording Syncretism to outcompete a Hammerite revival. Why couldn't a parallel road be paved with See-Monkeys?

I am resolved not to follow in my ancestor's tracks. The army I am creating - no, I will call them \"pupils\" - must be safely interred where I can employ their deadly vision in service of my own. Their new purpose is man's benefaction."

page_2: "Then maybe we will annex the moon."