Ryan adjusted the collar of his ruined tuxedo, wincing as a loose thread snagged on his thumb. The alleyway behind the mayor's residence was narrow, suffocatingly damp, and smelled violently of uncollected municipal waste and old cabbage. Two shadows detached themselves from the slick brick wall, blocking both ends of the dead-end passage with the practiced, listless efficiency of men who had spent too much time loitering in low-resolution textures."End of the line, corporate," the taller thug growled, hefting a crude iron cudgel that hummed with erratic physics glitches. "Mayor Vance says nobody walks out of this sector with municipal relics unless they pay the heavy transit tariff. Hand over the beans, or we separate your synthetics from your skeleton."Ryan didn't flinch. He slowly extracted a crumpled notepad from his inner breast pocket, uncapped a dried-up ballpoint pen, and looked the thug dead in the eye. "Transit tariff? According to municipal code 4-B, subsection twelve, pr

Ryan stepped past the paralyzed thugs without breaking stride, his ruined tuxedo flapping slightly in the damp alley breeze as he made his way toward the lower merchant district. The cobblestones grew slicker and more irregularly rendered the deeper he walked into the lower quadrants, until the ground itself seemed to occasionally stutter between grey stone and flat, unshaded polygons. He ducked under a low-hanging wooden sign that swung violently on a rusted iron bracket, emitting a high-pitched metallic squeak that repeated every three seconds with metronomic precision.The sign read Voss & Sons Horology, though half the letters had de-rendered into floating black squares that hovered six inches above the lintel.Ryan pushed open the heavy timber door, triggering a frantic chorus of mechanical chaos. Inside, the shop was a nightmare of misaligned temporal engineering. Hundreds of pocket watches, grandfather clocks, and brass chronometers ticked, whirred, and stuttered in a dozen dif

"I don't care if it's 1884 or a leap year in the third quarter," Ryan said, stepping over a pile of loose brass gears that hummed with faint electrical static. "The clocks are running backward. My watch says twelve past yesterday, and my digestion agrees."The old clockmaker slammed the grandfather clock against the floorboards, making the horizontal pendulum snap back into a vertical arc with a sharp metallic twang. He whipped the jeweler's loupe away from his eye, glaring across the counter at Ryan’s ruined tuxedo. "Backward? You think I set them backward on purpose? The coordinate drift in this sector has been eating the mainsprings since the equinox! If I don't flip the clock faces upside down by sundown, every timepiece in the merchant district is going to start ticking into next Tuesday and implode the local timezone!""Then flip them," Ryan replied, dropping a single, flickering AA battery onto the wooden counter. "And while you're at it, check the calibration on your hourly ch

"You ruined the conclusion!" the scholar shrieked, lunging forward as the delivery cart's wooden wheel rolled directly over the three-foot parchment with a wet, squelching crunch. "That was forty years of foundational spatial-temporal theorem, compressed into a single definitive proof, and you used it as a mud-shield against municipal drainage!"Ryan didn't blink. He stood ankle-deep in the gray, static-laced runoff of the tavern roof, pulling the soggy end of the parchment out from beneath the cart's iron-rimmed wheel with the practiced lethargy of a man who had long since surrendered any hope of a functional reality."Your theorem had a rounding error the size of a regional province," Ryan said, holding up the ruined, ink-smeared document like a dirty flag of truce. "Besides, it kept my socks dry for approximately four seconds. That makes it more useful than anything else written in this zip code."The scholar grabbed his hair, letting out a high-pitched, tea-kettle squeal of academ

"I heard you’re the one entering the municipal broth-brewing invitational," a raspy voice grated across the sticky table.Ryan didn’t look up from his attempts to scrape a dried spot of mustard off his cuff. "If by 'invitational' you mean a desperate public gathering of people who don't know how to handle root vegetables, then yes. Unfortunately."Master Gorse, forty-year reigning guild master of the Oakhaven Culinary Union and holder of eleven consecutive Golden Ladle awards, slammed a heavy iron stein onto the wood. The fermented sheep-dip sloshed over the rim, hissing as it hit the table. "You have no right to step into that square, stranger. You’re an administrative anomaly. A walking clerical error. You don’t even have a proper ladle.""I have a plastic spoon I found in a dimensional fissure two counties back, and frankly, its ergonomic design puts your entire medieval blacksmithing industry to shame," Ryan replied, finally raising his eyes. "What do you want, Gorse? Did your cur