"Inspector Elm! It has been far too long."
	"But as always, Inspector Ash, perfidy is the root cause."
	"Hm."
	"The only witness is a babbling wreck. What do you think, Inspector Yew?"
	"Inarticulacy in the young disgusts me."
	"Here, the symbols of an antique religion our victims recently abjured."
	"There, a birth certificate recently discovered."
	"Perhaps a father turned against his kin upon learning they were too 
numerous, and infidels at that. What do you think, Inspector Elm?"
	"Inconstancy in the old disgusts me."
	"We have no strong evidence."
	"Incontrovertible evidence always implicates the father anyway."
	"Killed out of incestuous rage, you think?"
	"Inspector, hand me the glass."
	"Oak was accused of worse, you know."
	"INSPECTOR Oak. You are faithless, Inspector Ash."
	"Someone has lowered the chair rail in this room by one inch."
	"I shall ask if Central has any carpenters under interrogation."
	"Hm."
	"One of the religious totems is faked, if not more."
	"They were not merely rumors."
	"The glass!"
	"Inspector Yew, I have inadvertently damaged the scene."
	"You MAY have..."
	"This document certifies a birth in vitro, both mother and father absent."
	"Elm, would you care for Indian food afterward?"
	"The child went unnamed until the age of ten!"
	"Afterward, certainly, if a conclusion can even be effected."
	"I shall make a reservation for three."
	"The ink is smudged. Perhaps the child was unnamed until 16? 20?"
	"Insubordination! Only Inspector Oak may plan dinner."
	"Central, do you read? We need information on an obscure ritual..."
	"When we last parted you had finally given up on Oak."
	"Hm."
	"His return is inevitable."
	"Ash, tell me, how long is it safe to feed a newborn intravenously?"
	"Any length of time, though certain sects would stop at a few months."
	"In fact I find the babbling of deranged witnesses comforting at times."
	"We seek solace where we can."

written by Aaron for Tiffany known as Passiflora * eVille, Wednesday, 2002

When I opened Tiffany's order form I was thrilled right away to see that she'd found something playful to do with the process. And, more than that, a nice job of picking words within the "in-" constraint; they aren't all words where it stands as a prefix meaning "not", which I think is where I might have gotten stuck were I in that position.

Here's the questionable decision: I decided to make this one a full-blown sequel to #29. If that's not coasting, I don't know what is. But let me ask the important questions about coasting: Is it fun? Is it working? Should the original story have been twice as long in the first place? My answers to those are yes, maybe and yes, and thus I have few regrets about heading down this road.

I didn't entirely recapture the primness of the Inspectors as I first wrote them, which is their essential charm. The biggest problem is that it is (I realized afterward) totally wrong for Inspectors to have that argument about Oak. If one of them is particularly fixated on Inspector Oak's return, fine, but explicitly dealing with it as a disagreement conflicts with the intentional ambiguity about who says what. On the other hand, I sense a third installment coming, when the time is right, and Oak will have to play a part in it.

There are several additional "in-" words in the story, since as mentioned I was having more fun than usual writing. (For all my lip-pursing, I love writing; I just need to remind myself of that sometimes, and for some reason doing dialogue does the trick.) So the sense of interaction was stronger than usual and I got a kick out of that. Tiffany was also totally fucking cool as a person; I saw her briefly a few more times during the week but, sadly, we never exactly hung out.

By the way, in the first story Oak's mystique was lifted from the King Arthur legends; here, I was thinking of Finnegans Wake instead. (I've only read about 80 pages of FW; if you got farther and want to call me a poser, my email address is on the main page.)

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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