"Is it just me or do you guys feel like each step we take we're literally walking backward in time?" Sailil said as she, Apatt, Jezromiah and Teerkedas wandered through the streets, desert land pathways and green plains.

"Yeah, it's like walking on a conveyor belt," Apatt said raising a brow.

There was a double-decker horse-drawn omnibus and wagonette company called Bus & Wagonette Station Co. nearby as they walked through the frustrating awkwardness of their steps. The horse-buses were made to hold four to six passengers inside with room for luggage and additional seating on the roof. On the uncovered upper deck longitudinal benches are arranged back to back. Apatt, Teerkedas, Jezromiah and Sailil chose to ride in the bus.

The Death Storyteller civilization was built on a reverse electro-magnetic-winding-synchronous-tuning fork electric clock formation, infrastructure and landscape. This electric clockwork was created and widely manufactured in the nineteenth century and used extensively in the mid-twentieth century. The top surface of the ground was a grassy knoll, but the impression of the five electric clocks lay imprinted like shadows in motion.

The gear train was turned by a spring or weighted lever called a remontoire or winding mechanism wound up more frequently by an electric motor or electromagnet, making it more accurate than a mainspring, keeping time with a pendulum or balance wheel. The pulses to keep it going are operated from a magnetic force through a solenoid. In addition it relied on a megahertz utility frequency of the AC electric power grid as a timing source, driving the clock gears with a synchronous motor.

Essentially this counted the cycles of the power supply. The frequency varied with loading on the grid, the total number of cycles per twenty-four period is rigorously maintained and consistent, keeping time exact for much longer. Time is tracked through counting the fluctuations of a standard tuning fork in a specific frequency, powered with an electric battery. These five clocks combined into a whole; a master clock or astronomical time piece for the Death Storyteller world.

Billions of kerosene lanterns, candlelight, fireworks, lava lamps and lightbulbs lit up the whole Death Storyteller territory.

No one was human here. Most of the population needed no oxygen because they were similar to the first multicellular organisms that lived entirely without oxygen. And other residents required just enough to fill a felt tip pen to capacity. The felt-tip-pen-sized air was administered as needed through atmosphere spores pouring down like rain, pollen or dust. There was no weather, no temperature. There was no sky. There was something more bottomless above; a blank canvas with no color, manipulation or transparency.

Straw-bale homes made from bales of straw such as oat, wheat, rye, rice used for building, insulating or both covered the lower parts of the land while dry stone huts with conical roofs called trulli sat near pinwheel-shaped or locus point lakesides and some hilltops shaped liked yokes.

The bus route ended at the sheriff's office. The driver stopped and let them off before heading back to the station.

Sheriff Cadimere Warselight had grayish-light mint green hair worn in a sheep's head or pouf hairstyle with flowers with pearl buds and strawberry stems. The hair was combed up high from the forehead to the back and gathered in a bun with short curls worn at the neck and going up the back of the head and locked around the forehead. She was half-Andamanese, Khoisan and half-Sentinelese. She was twenty-one years old. She had big, silver-amber eyes.

She had rouge on her cheekbones and lips. She wore a pink, black and ivory Lolita hat. She wore a cerise-colored and taffeta pet en l΄air jacket over her corset and deep blue bodice. A sheriff's badge was pinned on the jacket. She wore a black gown-like skirt with white gold Victorian boots. She had a pair of ottoman flintlock pistols in a red ottoman holster worn around her waist. She was eating a bag of red velvet-chocolate covered pretzels. The sheriff's office was a food truck house.

"Food or crime. What's your torture?" Cadimere asked them.