0. . Which was a firing offense (Category: Gross misconduct; subcategory: Insolence towards the Dignity of the Enterprise).

0. . That particular road was powered by a family curse, although twentieth-century demographics would eventually put an end to it. If she or Imp had children, the curse would return to claim one of their offspring’s lives, or the life of a parent. It wasn’t picky. It exchanged blood for power, and the ancestor who’d bound himself to the curse had never imagined the need for an “off” switch because exception handling code hadn’t been invented in the nineteenth century.

0. . TPRs followed employees from job to job, unseen and inscrutable as Odin’s terrifying snitch-ravens, Thought and Memory: they were a godsend for HR departments, having put an end to the litigious train wreck that had rendered employment references utterly useless. Ade’s TPR was visible to the Department for Work and Pensions, and any employer considering him for a job, but not to Ade himself. It was yet another example of how the New Management made everything better—at least for its willing executioners.

0. . Because, let’s face it, razors are cheaper than razor blades.

0. . One of the Boss’s coves was quite a talented artist, in the magical sense of the term, and he forged banknotes as a hobby to support his embryonic career as a Postimpressionist pornographer.

0. . Actually Khufu. Whatever.

0. . The Prime Minister was trying to encourage the adoption of the Aztec ball game, but the only people who showed any aptitude for it were Eton College graduates. A not-dissimilar bounce-a-ball-through-a-tiny-hoop-on-the-wall activity had been played for centuries at Eton. However, old Etonians were proving remarkably adept at hiding from the draft, perhaps because in the version of the sport they were used to, league tournaments didn’t end with the losing team being sacrificed.

0. . Rupert, clearly enamored of the old-time SS uniforms, had decked his heavies out in Hugo Boss, and Eve hadn’t gotten around to changing the dress code yet.

0. . Daddy punched monsters for a living: whenever he opened the bedroom door, the monsters ran and hid.

0. . Dad had put her in the driver’s seat of a main battle tank during an open day at the Bovington Tank Museum. Then he’d knocked up an assault hovercraft in the garden shed and taken her for a hair-raising, ten-minute ride along the North Circular at rush hour. As he explained, hovercraft lacked brakes, steering, directional control, and seat belts: these were all optional extras she could pick up once she had the basics down. Then when she’d asked for a motorbike, Dad had pointed out what tanks, hovercraft, and bikes all had in common.…