Status Updates From The Heads of Cerberus

We love a mysterious dust!

This story doesn’t really marinate in its twists. The council of rogues is defied, like, several times; we get a history at the creation of the sovereign state of Philadelphia; and then Trenmore gets a good swashbuckling show where he strikes the perverted Liberty Bell, which—for whatever reason yet to be explained—sends the travelers back to their own time, though I assume it annihilates the villains.

This is very roundabout a dystopian novel but due to where it’s placed in history it has more of the air of the weird / speculative fiction of its age. It’s still really fun! Now that we are in the contests we get a sense of just how absolute the tyranny of Penn Service is. There’s a lot of info that’s communicated by Loveliest in an off-hand fashion that makes the world-building feel like it’s zooming by.

We are now in Philadelphia 200 years in the future, after having passed through the Dunsanian fantasy of Ulithia. We haven’t hit upon the main features of this dystopia, yet, but we know that everyone has a number, and some people are submitted to some sort of a series of Contests. Also, holy shit, Trenmore. The Irishman gets super violent when he can’t understand why neo-Philly is the way that it is.

The least likely situation here is that Bob manages to randomly pick the one building to burgle that his very good friend managed to be housed in at the time, and that he was surprised by a thief who was looking for… the dreaded Heads of Cerberus!!!

Now that we are here in “Purgatory” we can see what sort of madness ensues as castles mysteriously manifest and robots ride around on horses.

🫩