Upside Ann

 “He was a very bad king, Mom!  He had gone to a very dark place in pursuit of organizational excellence!” Everyone in the Kingdom of Sunshine was cheerful, in that extremely graying way that makes your teeth ache… “Everyone seems very… happy…” said Wilber. “Yep,” said Harriet.  “Not gonna lie.  If I had to live here, I’d go evil in a week.  I’d be building an army of giant spider-chickens and saying things like, “No, Mr. Wilbur, I expect you to fit, muahahaha.”

 *We note that the Library has not had fire drills for the last two hundred years.  This is because we found the two default responses unhelpful.  These being “running away screaming” or “resigning yourself to death while clutching your favorite books.”  Librarians with more useful suggestions should contact Yves via email and attach a full benefit-threat analysis. “It’s not the duel I’m complaining about, it’s the calligraphy challenge that started the quarrel.”… But even here Kai had his sense of aesthetics.  “The choice of ink colors available was completely unsuitable, she should have demanded a steel pen, ands frankly the whole thing ought to have been called off until both parties could get better paper.  No wonder they came to blows instead of competing as planned.  It simply wasn’t possible for either to produce work representative of their skills.” “Jerome…what if we just pay them?” “Seriously?” Jerome seemed personally insulted by the very id...

  “My life is painfully full of learning experiences where I’ve had to be an expert at short notice,” Irene said. “I look forward to being able to sit down for a few years, at some point, and try to forget them." She shuddered, and it wasn’t just from the cold. “When I think of all the things that could go wrong . . .”       “Hopefully not cyborg alligators this time,” Bradamant said with a frown.

 "And David saw himwelf reflected in the Woodsman's eyes, and there he was no longer old but a young man, for a man is always his fathers child no matter how old he is or how long they have been apart." "...and each man dreams his own heaven."

 "The gaslight flickered, making her look even more like a barely preserved corpse than before.  She was thin enough that, in her heavy black dress, she resembled a marionette from the sort of Punch and Judy show that ended in a zombie apocalypse." While the story starts with vampires, and here makes alusions to zombies, it really centers on dragon politics in a mobbed up 1920's -esque New York.  Irene is forced into the role of mob boss.  Great fun.