It is true that most madboy devices are built for purely utilitarian purposes: I want to go faster; How can one person stack all of these starfish; I will gain the respect of my peers if I can turn this entire town into ham, and so on. But there are some things that burst forth from their creator’s brain simply because they want to make the world more aesthetically pleasing. So what if it doesn’t help one conquer the world? It looks awesome. It’s Art.
23
This sort of historical revisionism is quite common amongst entertainers. If something amazing or terrible happens to them out in the wilderness, then by golly, when it gets told to the paying customers, it’s going to have a satisfying conclusion. It’s analogous to writing a business loss off on one’s taxes.
24
The troupe’s dressmaker, Organza Fifield, had once won a bet by visually deducing the correct clothing sizes of an unfamiliar group of men who had, at the time, been dressed respectively, as an armored knight, a monk, a construct with three arms, and a pantomime horse.
25
In the Transylvanian region, Saint Nikkolaus is known as a benevolent Spark who has learned how to bend time and space in such a way that he can deliver presents to good children everywhere in one night. His companion, Blank Peter, is a construct, who does all the heavy lifting. So onerous is this job, that Blank Peter actually wears out from the strain (cookies depicting him are a holiday favorite, and small children take a sadistic joy in “nibbling Blank Peter Down.”). Jolly old St. Nikkolaus then selects several “Bad Children,” takes them back home to Spain and uses them to create
26
Yeti was a very tall Asiatic man covered in a coat of soft, golden fur. He claimed that he came from an enlightened, five-thousand-year-old utopia, the last remnant of a lost civilization that had deliberately hidden itself away from the eyes of mankind high in the Himalayan Mountains near Tibet. He further claimed that everyone there was as tall, as furry, and as Sparky as himself. Nobody believed this, of course, since Yeti’s accent sounded exactly like the ones found in the Chinese neighborhoods in Istanbul, but they agreed that it was a great story.
27
Science has proven that this position actually improves memorization. One of the reasons older people have difficulty remembering things is that they refuse to sit like this because they feel foolish doing so. More fool they.
28
Admittedly, attacks these days were few and far between, but Zumzum had a fair number of young people who maintained a fine old tradition of nighttime assignations. This assured that the scope was manned almost constantly. Sergeant Zulli always glumly predicted that when the town
29
It wasn’t.
30
While mercantile trade was common within the Empire, there were certain local specialties that simply didn’t travel well. For the best Viennese pastries, for example, you had to go to Vienna. Every town had a local beer, seasonal fruit, wine, fried dough recipe or scam for cheating tourists that the locals were proud of.
31
Grounded was the term used when a Spark was sane enough to function on a day-today basis. It says a lot that many people, including Sparks, are unfamiliar with the term.
32
Regular travelers throughout the Empire were issued warning signs by the Empire and required to post them, as well as report on problems they’d encountered. The penalties for anyone except the Baron’s troops removing a warning sign usually involved becoming a warning sign yourself.
33
In addition to rewarding travelers who posted warning signs, the Baron’s agents were known to pay well for unusual specimens. Initially, there had been a number of people who had decided to “put one over” on the Baron by constructing and selling him fake madboy tech and handmade chimeras. The Baron bought them all, and the counterfeiters had a good laugh—until these same fakes appeared at various museums and auction houses, where they made the Empire significantly more money than it had paid out.
