Does it look more like Red Death is a coincidence or a direct allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death? The short story has to do with a prince taking his closest upper-class friends and advisors and sealing themselves off from the rest of the plague-infested world in an impenetrable fortress.. only to be killed by the very disease they sought to ignore. Red Death's caption reads: "Vanguard policy urges guardians to destroy this weapon on sight." It was said to have been the weapon of a guardian murderer, and so the Vanguard seek to destroy it and blot out its name and story from from their memories, yet guardians do little to put it to rest. As the Red Death itself walks from the sombre, black room on the far side of the building to the more brightly-colored one where the prince stands in disbelief, the partygoers step aside and allow him a path. Coincidence or allusion? ';{)