“ The city was cursed many years ago. Since then it has not stopped raining. The gutters are inhabited by eels and the doors are on the first floor, coated with pitch. On a bad day, you can see the water level rise above the ground floor windows. Carts have both wheels and bladders filled with air to keep them afloat. And yet everyone is surprisingly dry.”
“ The villages around the capital have a strange new disease cropping up. Spread by a fungus (much like ergot poisoning), it causes its victims to be very sensitive to sunlight. Hundreds of peasants are hiding from the sun, only coming out in the darkness to labor in the fields. Unfortunately, rumor makes their behavior sound more sinister and secretive than it really is.”
“ Idea from the Aeneid. Could make an intriguing encounter when searching for firewood...'Quite near there happened to be a mound of earth, at the highest part of which were growing thickets of cornel and a dense cluster of spiky myrtle-stems. I went up there and tried to wrench the green growth from the ground to provide a leafy covering for our altar. There I was confronted by a horrible and astounding miracle. For from the first bush which I tried to break off...blood oozed in dark drops, fouling the earth with its spots...A piteous moan came from the base of the mound and I heard a human voice answering me: 'Why, Aeneas, must you rend a poor sufferer? I am buried here...for I am Polydorus. Here death overpowered me in a crop of piercing iron-pointed spears. And so a crop resembling javelins has grown over me...''”