He’s focused on the Five, again, because they’ve always been resistant to his manipulations. He wants control. He wants all others’ surrender and obedience. He’ll do whatever it takes to get there, including murder or trickery.

At this point, there’s not much more to him than that.

I kinda *desperately* want that classic villain monologuing here, and failing that, some enlightening narrator / director commentary. T, can we prevail upon you to say more?

It seems like he’s still desperate to get the Five out of Arkerra because they stand in the way of HR’s plan to control it. Probably because they have started reshaping the world in ways HR had though impossible for players who didn’t know that they had this power. So by getting the Five to accept that they are players in a game, what would he gain? To get Frigg to let down the shield, so he can kill them? To get them to leave Arkerra voluntarily and return to their Sepia bodies (which we know would get them killed)?
And then what? Keep devastating everything until there’s nothing left worth ruling (and then maybe rebuild it in a different way? Was that his original plan? It seems like somewhere on his journey, HR turned from “ambitious young universe-ruler” to “universe-consuming monster”. He just seeminlgy regained some of his eloquence (how, why? Or was it just hidden in the previous few pages?), but his plan seems to be really superficial, very far from what Sepia HR might have come up with — which would be backed up by the fact that even the appearance of his likeness is off.

My guess is that he’s also started to become absorbed by Arkerra. He’s forgetting about Sepia world, or at least separating his existence from Sepia HR in some way, as did the Five. That would include forgetting what he actually came here for, or at least the details of it. At the same time, though, we know that some of all this is also manifesting in Sepia world, so the connection can’t be quite lost.

So … on some level it makes some sense, but I still find really hard to guess at what the whole story would look like from HR’s perspective. There are a lot of antagonists in this whole story who are extremely understandable, sometimes even sympathetic, which is rare — but HR is still a riddle to me.

There’s Quag Keep by Andre Norton (the first ever D&D novel), which is about a bunch of gamers who are incarnated as adventurers in Greyhawk with no memory of their former lives. At the end they discover the truth about their origins, but decide to stay on in Greyhawk rather than returning home.

Then there’s “You have no power over me” from Labyrinth.

And the “red pill” scene from Total Recall.

And “I am a person. You are not” from Severance.