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"A Gang of Seven"  rounds off the replacements portion of the branch. Seven is enough of the things to directly manage. The next few chapters will show the gang of doppelgangers in action.

This is also the first chapter since Kim got replaced to show a replacement being done in all its detail—other chapters have skipped over it during chapter breaks. This is partly design but mostly serendipity. I worry that you can show a "process" like this only a few times, especially in close succession, before it palls, and instinctively I shied away from showing the full process with Patterson, Kelsey, and Kirkham. But I went for the full act with Jack, at the end, as a kind of punctuation mark.

Also, as the chapter more or less stated, by this point Will would have evolved something like a script to go with the process. Where does that script come from? Will himself probably doesn't know; I'd hazard that he and Kim between them have read enough fantasy stories that their joint consciousness could come up with something evocative. But it does kind of come out of nowhere. Still, I went with it, because it felt like something that would explain just how completely he has been able to obliterate the golem's sense of self and replace it with an empty and abstract ability to mimic (rather than be) the person they are replacing.