“ Beware of towns afflicted with Time Cancer.
For every second you progress through time, an infected town goes back 48 hours. Old buildings slowly become new, then incomplete, and finally just a frame and foundation, giant old trees turn to saplings, birds hatch into eggs.
one must not linger in a chrono-cancerous village for too long, before you know it you'll be a fetus. Tme cancer in unstoppable, no cure or treatment is knwn, it eats through the past until the inhabitants of a village turn into primordial protein ooze”
“ In the Middle Ages, and even up to the early twentieth century, most of Europe's executioners were related: the Sansons and Deiblers in France, the Pierrepoints in England, etc. The reason for this was that, it generally not being socially acceptable to, well, kill people, executioners and their children could, generally, only marry other executioners or <i>their</i> children.
The parallels with massively inbred, Hapsburg-style dynasties are obvious- imagine a rather clever but politically inept satirist noting this, and being sentenced by the latter to a meeting with the former; even worse, imagine a dynasty of deranged and deformed executioners- think Texas Chaisaw Massacre with government funding.”