Unauthorized Construction

make sure to get all the permits approved by the city first. And by common sense second, I guess. You never know what stupid mistakes will be costing you your life. 

Transcript

Well, lookee here. I’m supposed to fine you. A good sum, too. But I’ve got a feeling that’ll be unnecessary. Well, if I was following my job to the letter, it absolutely would be necessary. But I kinda like you, right? And it’s not like the city’s gonna do much good with that money anyway. Did you know that the mayor’s salary takes up three percent of the town’s yearly budget? I kid you not. You can look it up. It’s public record. But, really, three percent. And if you’ve seen their place, you know that if I went and fined you for what you’ve done, we’d be having a horrible double standard. 

I’m not a double standard type of guy, right? I like to think that I’m above that corruption, and the only way to make that idea true is to follow through with it, right? 

But you’re an idiot. That’s where we’re starting, that’s where we’re ending. I’ve gotta give you a little bit of mental abuse, because, otherwise, you might do something like this in the future. I mean, you probably won’t. You probably won’t even be alive much deeper into time, anyways. From, you know, the stupidity. 

But that’s it. That’s all the name calling I’m gonna do. I had to get it out of my system, after all. You can’t just be doing good all the time. It rots the brain, the heart, the spleen, and a whole bunch of other internal organs that want you to be mean sometimes. But we’re done, we’re done. 

I’m telling you all this for a reason you probably already understand. Now, if you were less stupid, that ‘probably’ would have been an ‘almost certainly,’ but we can’t all be winners in the intelligence department. See, that chimney you’ve installed on your house goes against city ordinance. And colony ordinance. And common sense ordinance. Thus why the only two homes in town with extant chimneys on them are yours, and the mayor’s. Common sense doesn’t help you win at politics, let me tell you. 

You know, those ordinances are in place for a reason. I get that you’re new to town and the world in general, but they really should have told you about this. You know, they could have told you just any time; when you arrived, when you were getting into place at your new job, when you bought the house, when you were doing renovations, but… but I guess nobody really cared enough about you to care about your wellbeing. Well, nobody except for me, and I’m just here because this is in my job description.

Chimneys are exceptionally dangerous things. Here. They’re kind of dangerous things elsewhere, too, what with the pollution actually using them can bring to a house, especially when there are a hundred thousand cleaner ways of heating a room nowadays… but I get it. We get it. It looks nice. Analog stuff frequently does. And there’s been this whole trend on the network where this sort of architecture is stylish or whatever. I’m old. I’ve seen it, too. It’s why we made the ordinances official, after all. It happened a couple of times.

You’re dead meat walking, my friend. You’ve got a couple of days max to put in the measures I advise. That, and no more. Daudle too long and you’ll have the Linforz in your house. 

Yes. I did say a very weird word there. Linforz. Say it with me. Lin. Forz. In case you’re wondering, they were named after the first couple they killed. 

See those woods on the opposite side of your house? They’re not all that dangerous, thank heavens. The Linforz live there, they nest there, raise their young and eat giant scorpion like creatures there. A nice, peaceful life. Even if you go trouncing through there, you won’t be bugging them. It’s just that chimney. That chimney… that chimney…

The fires rose into the sky. No, not fires. Smoke. Smoke from them. From the undeserving, from the heretic and heathen, from the damned and unclean. Flesh and sinew and tallow and teeth. Burned. Gone. Free. 

Linforz don’t like chimneys. Or they really like them. It’s kind of hard to tell which, given how unreceptive the species are to any of our tranquilizing techniques; we’ve never really been able to squirrel one away into a lab. Not like we could do so legally, anyways, not under Environmental Bill 167 Section B Rider 4. But it really doesn’t matter, I guess. They’ve no doubt already seen your fully constructed chimney, and one will be on its way to nest in your house the night after tomorrow.

Yes, it takes two days. Unless I myself am a moron, you hadn’t finished capping off the thing yesterday. They’ll start the countdown from today, and it is always two days. Two days from the ten sample cases we’ve had, so, you know, our knowledge about this thing isn’t rocksteady or anything. But it’s been two days every time, and if you feel okay with gambling your safety on the first day and just slouch and sloth around, then good on you. The odds are probably in your favor. 

They all waited. Every single time they had waited. Why? Action was uncomfortable. And the risk assessment said no. No, it was never wise to make the first move. The others would have been satisfied with their victory, certainly. No other victories needed to be had. 

Two days. So we’ll assume you’ll take the free time you have this day to be mildly stressed out and berate yourself about needing to do something about this situation, but, you know, you won’t. You know you’d be less stressed and less risky if you just got everything done today, but there is tomorrow. Always tomorrow.

Until the tomorrow after tomorrow, of course. Once the Linforz has moved its nest into your chimney, there’s precious little that can be done. Of course, this is in part due to EB 167 S B R 4.  That’s the bill I mentioned before in short form, by the way. Legally, local animal control won’t be able to lay a finger on a Linforz once its moved onto your property. Of course, you can try, and I do mean try to extract the creature yourself. You'll be risking jail time and fines to do so. Real hefty sentences, both of them, especially for a creature that is neither particularly endangered nor beloved, but you know, Senatorial law is the law. And the guys down in the local environmental control section? Real pricks. Unlike me, they’re guaranteed to put your butt behind bars if they find you’ve hurt one of those nightmare things. 

And you can still try, of course. They’ll only know afterwards, and when your life is threatened, well… it would be madness not to try and protect yourself, now wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it?

Well, I mean, go ahead. Problem is, of course, that the Linforz has a diffuse nervous system, and is quite resilient to heat. This means that most weaponry that you’d be okay using in your house, like a gun or maybe even a flamethrower… just aren’t going to work. You shoot one of its legs, and you had better hope you can pinch off the next nine in rapid succession, otherwise that thing is going to be on your face, real fast.

Oh, did I say it was going to be on your face? Yes. On your face. That’s where all the best orifices for eating internal organs are. Do I need to say more? Obviously not. 

Thing is, it won’t be doing the whole eating you alive thing if you don’t bother it. No, it’ll be fine to just chill out in your chimney, eat the soot of the fires you’ll have to light every single day, and… yeah. Yeah, you’ll have to light fires every single day, going forward. And not play any music or programs out loud above a couple decibels. Or ever buy any pineapples or kiwis. Or wear cologne. Or take a shower that lasts more than eight minutes. Or leave the hair on your hairbrush after you’re done grooming yourself. Or…

Or I think you get the picture. The Linforz is the worst roommate anyone could ever dream of. The full list of requirements we’ve discovered are available on the city’s environmental compliance page. I’m not gonna list more of them, because, well… that’s like a few thousand words more, and it’s not what I’m focusing on, anyways. You won’t be able to live a normal life, long story short, and that abnormal life, well, you won’t have it for long. You’ll have to act as though you have the most crippling ocd imaginable, and even then…

Even then there will be a giant spiderlike thing in your chimney, staring at you. Watching. Those yellow eyes will blink one at a time, one at a time. The joints of the legs will click and clack like dominoes falling on a table. Your house will stink of soot and ash, and you will never be safe. Some day, some time it will be angry. And it will kill you.

They made themselves beyond redemption. Unto them we gave the knowledge of good and evil, and they would act as though they were stupid. They were hungry. There was food in the fields and trees for them to eat, but they wished for the food in their neighbors’ stockpiles. All of them. They made scarcity where it did not exist, shadow where there was nothing to catch the light. Again and again. The chimneys filled with the smoke of bone marrow once. And then twice. And then again, and again, and again…

Essentially,  you want to nip this in the bud now. I don’t care how highly you think of yourself; the only way to end this problem is by mass political movement, getting  EB 167 S B R 4 off the books. Right? And no one, and I do mean no one, in all of history, would be able to do that. No president, no conqueror, no congressional whip. And you’re just a stellar mail clerk, anyways. A good job. An important job. I’m not judging you for it. But you don’t have the skills or charisma to do that. Nobody ever has, or likely ever will. Trust me. We’ve got a petition up. Eighteen thousand signatures and counting. Isn’t even being tabled for review at the regional level. We’ve been at it for years. Because we all care, you know? We hate that we have this little stipulation on the place where we live. It’s stupid. There is nothing magical or beautiful about the Linforz, besides perhaps their intelligence. But that’s it. And the Linforz are literally the only species on the rider tabled for protection. The larger bill is about infrastructure development in the old core. Seriously. Take a look at it when you’ve got your head strapped on and time to kill. 

No. The only thing to do now is get rid of the chimney. Get rid of the chimney, and there will be no fines. None. I promise you that, and I do not go back on my word. 

If it was written down, then it was important. Just the writing implied authority, and authority was good. Authority was what bound the world about in order, what allowed the lowly apes to form empires spanning continents, and later entire worlds. It was easier to believe the thing that was written, the thing that was thought to have contributed to this millennial prosperity. But some words are young, and all are poorly considered. Thus the easy way always meant suffering in the future. Always. The chimney would burn eventually. The only question was for whom. 

I’ve got a good jackhammer in my garage. It’s three blocks up the hill, two to the left when you pass by the sign that says ‘The Pattersons.’ You can use that.  All you have to do is dismember the thing enough that you would no longer consider it a chimney. And don’t think about bricking the thing up, or adding a grate, or some kind of other barrier. The Linforz has already considered your chimney to be complete, and it will find its way into your home one way or the other. A window. A door. It will hide in the underbrush when you’re not looking, and scamper in the second your key leaves the lock. They’re real fast guys, too, these monsters.

And you can brick the thing up, too. That’s what the Pattersons did. That’s the reason no one’s bothered to remove that sign, besides the fact that it’s useful as a landmark. Completely bricked in. That agitated the thing real quick. So quick that when they found the bodies, well… they were much closer to mummies than something you’d find at your local cemetery. Not a good way to die. 

And that’s about it. If what I have said hasn’t convinced you to get rid of the thing, then you can go around asking others, or just check the local network. Pretty much everyone will back me up. That’s why they were giving you all those weird looks when you were putting the thing up. Why they didn’t talk to you… well, you know how people are nowadays. Especially old people. Those are folks who lived through the Shadow War, mind you. They’re not going to be talking to much of anyone, let alone someone they think is being flagrantly stupid. 

Oh, the mayor’s house? Everything I’ve described about the Linforz suggests that the mayor committed great folly in following this latest architectural trend, no? Well…

The mayor has multiple homes. Three, in fact. That’s the kind of thing you can do when your salary takes up three percent of the city’s budget. Just, you know, make an entire house that you own uninhabitable to rub it in everyone else’s face that they don’t make as much as you. All that jazz. So no, I do not recommend visiting the other house in town with an intact chimney. The infestation has grown to a total of thirty of them hanging about. Thirty. In one chimney. And those things are about the size of a small dog.

Well, I think that about covers it. Destroy your chimney, or bad things will happen to you. Oh, and if I do find out that you were so stubborn on this subject that you died, I will be fining you then. Turns out, you can actually do that in this jurisdiction. Give out tickets to dead people. That income source alone is about what pays for the mayor’s salary, so the stupidity of it all kind of evens out. 

Hope to see you breathing,

Your unknown neighborhood watchdog and city marshal, Teryn Smith.