Mnem is feeling really bad about not posting actual posts, but is too lazy to write anything, so has decided to inflict random passages from random stories (all her own) with the intent of fooling you into thinking that she actually wrote something this time (yay! I mean... uhh... wait, what?)

Self-explanatory, really. Or maybe not. Look, just keep reading.

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"Tick. Time passes. Like candle wax, melting in its own heat, so humanity will end.

Tick. Time passes. And with every moment the end comes nearer.

Tick.

Tick.

***

There is a land, similar to our own, where they make watches. The careful reader may make suppositions; the curious reader may look it up; the cynical reader may laugh at the clumsy pastiche of a real place. The good reader reads on. Careful, now; time is passing. When the hourglass runs out, so do we.

There is a land, similar to our own, where they make watches. A land where the snow moves only in high summer, where the bells ring twice, where the people move like melancholy machines, imbued with the precision and dullness of their creations. They suffer, reader, from Chronic Chronology: in a life so ordered by time, a life built around that very thing, the rest of it has lost all meaning. They see the end every day, help it pass with every movement of their hands. Tick. Time passes; these people make it so.

They make the watches, reader, they make the clocks. They pull the steel bars into delicate hands and polish the crystal caps till they shine. They painstakingly slot together every single gear and wheel and spring and then test it, a hundred times over, to ensure its accuracy. It is said that a watch from this land will lose a hundredth of a second every hundred years—that is to say, it will be many eons before an owner of the watch notices some irregularity. This makes these watches somewhat popular with the immortal gods and mortal humans alike.

And yet these people have lost their joy. Their clockwork is beautiful; the ticking of the second hand is like the beating of a heart, steady and precise, always. But in measuring time, they have fallen underneath it and drowned. Time means everything and nothing to them. Silently, diligently, they wait for the End.

--from "Time" (working title)

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"Unholy," I breathed. It looked just like a giant--

"Hee-haw!"

The donkey cantered away with a definite glint in its eye; Rose screamed a little and went to fetch it.

I turned back to Natalie, who was shaking her head at the tower. "It doesn't matter how many times I see it, the sheer audacity of the thing always gets me wondering."

"I know," I agreed. "Why do you think he built it that way?"

"Who knows," she shrugged. "Maybe he has a complex or something. Current thinking is actually that's he's got a very small one and is trying to make up for it."

I whistled. "He didn't need to make it so ... so ... dammit, what's the word I'm looking for?"

"Ostentatious?" she grinned.

"Yeah," I said. "It didn't need to be so fugging large."

Rose huffed up behind us, golden curls askew. "No donkey," she said cheerfully, grabbing Natalie's arm with one hand and mine with the other. "C'mon, let's go."

Above us, the gigantic Old Man's Tower loomed in all its moustache-shaped glory.

--from "Crazy With a Chance of Murder"

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"Don't be so cynical. It's unbecoming for a girl your age."

"You don't know anything about girls my age."

"On the contrary. I once knew very much about a young lady quite as old as you--wonderful eyes--"

Rick rounded on him. "What happened to my sister?"

Jan held up his hands. "I did not do anything to her."

"Then where is she?"

He looked away.

"Where is she? What have you done to her?"

"Watch your tone!" Jan snapped. "I did nothing to your sister. I never harmed her in any way. I never met her. All I know of her is what your father told me--and what I found myself."

"Dad would never tell you anything about Reine. He wouldn't even tell the police."

"It's amazing what a few beers will do to a man's moral scruples," Jan said, with some asperity.

"You did not," Rick hissed.

"I did. I did. I'm not proud of it, but that's work. You think I enjoy plying a man with beers just to ferry him from one miserable world to another? You think it makes me feel warm inside when I leave him drunk and snoring in his car, full of alcohol and regret? Save your moral quandaries, kid, I didn't do anything wrong. I drove him home and parked him nicely on the steps and made sure someone took him inside before I left. That someone was you. Remember that night? You do, don't you?"

Rick glared at him. Jan went on unconcernedly.

--from "A Chase of Mysteries" (working title)

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And I should be getting to sleep now, so rest easy, you've been let off light. -smirks-

~Mnemosyne