When she brought him back to her loft, it was clear that, one way or another, she’d been planning on having company. There was a bottle of Chardonnay plugged into the wall, emitting a faint, amber glow.
Wild trumpets must be dried out before they can be safely played by a human mouth. The local tribes of Hyperborea's easternmost islands have mastered this process: they hang the bulbous creatures over a pyre of burning inkwood, whose smoke drains their bells of any lingering venom and stains their skins an obsidian shade. The instrument that results has a limited range, yet this is counterbalanced by its powerful timbre.
There is no topological model which can easily account for what astronomers at the University Beneath Chicago have observed under the ice of Jupiter's sixth moon. Though its surface is indeed a sphere, with a finite diameter around three-thousand kilometers, Europa’s volume is infinite.
By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed to many as though there was nothing that an acrobat could do with their body which had never been done before.
Claudia changed all that: during one particularly spirited performance, she leapt from her trapeze into the pupils of her audiences' eyes, down into the depths of their visual cortices, and landed to loud, sincere applause.
When Narcissus gazed into the pond, and saw the wonder of the universe in the beauty of his own reflection, all meaning was drained from his physical flesh. At that exact moment of realization, he withered into nothingness, for his image had superceded his presence in reality. A single flower grew in his place, one which bore his name, and its own reflection served as its roots.
"This is the library's killswitch," she explained. "In an emergency, we can use it to generate a hyperglyphic field that turns the Roman alphabet inside-out within a quarter-mile radius.”
“Christ. What would we ever need to use something like that for?"
Few visitors can be found within the walls of the Red City, and among these few, there are none who dare set foot in its Burning District. There is very good reason for this, as its name might suggest; it is a place set aside for destruction to live, so that what remains of humanity’s works beyond might be spared.
When confronted with the possibility of being devoured, the common gecko is capable of making a somewhat brutal compromise [...] the lizard can shed the entirety of its own tail as an offering to potential predators. During such a transaction, the predator receives a much smaller meal, but the gecko’s life is spared, and its tail eventually grows back.
Eighteenth century explorer José de Almagro claimed to have discovered a much more curious specimen in the mountains of what is today Chile: a gecko which, when threatened, could shed its entire body at once.
