YMMV / Firebird Trilogy

• Complete Monster: Dru Polar is one of the top-level leaders of the Shuhr. Polar is in charge of training up the teenage "potential adults", and all of them live in terror of him and his mercurial moods, as upsetting him—no matter how trivial the reason—will lead to their death, most likely as an involuntary test subject. He is also determined to increase his already off-the-charts Psychic Powers. In trying to reach this goal, he experiments on live people, subjecting them to a painful process without anesthetic or sedatives, a process that has killed every subject he's tried it on before he could actually test his theory. The Shuhr culture is ruthless, cutthroat, and revels in the pain of others, but even the other high-ranked Shuhr, ostensibly his peers, regard him as cruelty-obsessed and tread cautiously around him in order to avoid attracting his ire.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The dendric striker from Fusion Fire was designed to kill by disrupting the nervous system slowly. Muscles will often rip themselves from the bone.
  • Many of Netaia's execution methods are deliberately designed to be this way, as pain in the here and now supposedly shortens the amount of time spent in the Dark That Cleanses. Two are the D-wave guns, which slowly disintegrate the victim while leaving the nerves intact for as long as possible, and lustration: "Beginning at the fingers and toes, the condemned prisoner's extremities—and, eventually, torso—were compressed by slowly moving metal plates superheated to vaporize flesh and bone. Lustration could last for hours..."