Kyoto

Kyoto has been keeping a promise for twelve centuries.

Nobody currently working for the Office remembers making it.

This is usually how the expensive problems begin.

Beneath the city waits something that was there before the city was finished: an absence that received everything Kyoto excluded, forgot, displaced or declined to recognize.

Over centuries, the absence acquired a name.

Then a claim.

Then company.

The Office would strongly prefer to classify the matter as historical.

History objects.

Soon forms made of ash, clay, water, road dust and broken roof tile begin climbing out beneath the city because the Office requires claimants to possess bodies and the claimants, being diligent, have complied.

The sensible solution is obvious.

Count them.

The Office explains that this would create twelve centuries of direct responsibility.

Yes.

That is what everybody is upset about.

Included free: a complete Reality Services story, where the liabilities are younger but the meetings are somehow longer.