The stone sat grimly in his office, stamping wicked red tongues on some documents and smiling blue buttocks on others, as each deserved, but inside it felt that something was dreadfully wrong. It knew it had made a wrong turn somewhere, but it couldn't really figure out where. But that wasn't the worst part - it had a persistent scratching in the back of its mind that told it, in a quiet but firm voice, that none of this will have happened, eventually.

Outside, in the village, today's enactment was taking place. Hedgehogs and other vermin dressed in strange uniforms never seen in this world were herding imaginary people into imaginary gas chambers, pretending that they were pretending that they were showers. The stone was particularly puzzled by this enactment, one of the most frequent. It had asked the Committee Man about it, and the Committee Man had said cryptically, "For some omelets, you need a large number of eggs," and laughed in a way that disturbed the stone greatly.

The stone, however, didn't see any harm in the enactments, nor did it see any point, really. And the Committee Man was keeping it well fed with all kinds of exotic scones, and nobody seemed to be getting hurt. So it sat grimly in its office, stamping documents and minding its own business, having of course realized long ago that it could never open a tattooing parlor in Amsterdam and just once in its life be really hip, that was just a childish fantasy it was better off without.