I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningle… - Charles Stross

He's an artist," she said calmly. "I've dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they're some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe—shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction."

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.

It’s a classic case of misplaced accounting priorities, valuing depreciable capital assets a thousand times more highly than the fruits of actual labor—but that’s the nature of the government organization.