“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

―William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Then let me fill it.”

—The Princess, musing to herself

Von Schmidt rang a knife against a goblet several times, bringing the gathering to attentive silence. One Jean sat by the fountain, seemingly more interested in idly stabbing the crimson pool with an oversized spoon than in witnessing the worst instance of lèse-majesté since an ancestor of the Princess thirty-four times removed (or was it forty-three?) was pelted with rocks and darts by Spanish agitators and his own treasonous subjects. The other Jean was smiling mysteriously at the Princess, as if either about to share a hilarious anecdote or else eat her face. Calzoni, never moving from his massive chair, looked like he was definitely about to eat her, unless Madam Chang got to him first, which given her attempts to murder him with her gaze alone was a distinct possibility. Ivanov was reading the comic section of the Novaya Pravda on his flexipad with a kind of grim resolution that made the Princess giggle despite herself. It was difficult to judge the professor’s expression on account of dinosaurs not having facial expressions. Tanaka, sitting cross-legged in the far end of the room, was unreadable for much the same reason, except that he was a samurai, not a dinosaur, and thus even further removed from humanity, at least in his own eyes. The floating fat man just floated above the small gathering, fatly.

Von Schmidt waited for a few seconds before starting to speak. “Honored ladies and esteemed gentlemen, do I have an offer for this universally famed heiress to one of the foremost superpowers of Terra? Her face can launch a thousand ships, but her name can launch a million. Now, dear friends, please don’t offend me with offers of wealth and power, as I’m sure you know that my tastes are more refined than that. You have 24 hours to make offers and counteroffers. Feel free to start presently. I will announce the winner at this time tomorrow.”

“What?!” the Princess shouted indignantly, as if waking up from a fever dream to a real nightmare. “This is an outrage! Oh, the audacity! The nerve! You ill-minded, coldhearted, poor-mannered rapscallion! You’re a disgrace to the German race … the human species, the spatial, eh, galactic … to … bloody atoms and molecules!”

“One does his best in this morally ambiguous universe,” Von Schmidt concurred with a polite smile. “Of course, this is a free market, as your father is fond of saying. You stand an equal chance of winning as everyone else, a victory that is certain to give new meaning to the expression ‘self-possessed lady.’ Would you like to make an offer now, my dear lady?”

“I most certainly would!” the Princess nearly shrieked. “If you release me now, I would offer that my royal father merely exile you to some asteroid colony in the Kuiper Belt and not skin you alive as he’s wont to do.”

“Ah, such spirit! Such zeal! I must have this morsel in my dungeon of damsels in distress!” Don Calzoni shouted and stood up so abruptly that his companions dropped most unladylike to the floor, along with the ashed tip of his cigar. “I offer you a year of your deepest, most shameful pleasures in my ASSteroid Club!”

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“Why is everyone so keen on sending me to distant asteroids today?” asked Von Schmidt. “I rather enjoy the position of being able to remove my hat without having my head explode. In any case, anything that can be achieved through neural stimulation is of no interest to me. May we hear some serious offers, if you don’t mind?”

Calzoni blushed like a lobster in a kettle and looked at Von Schmidt through narrowed eyes, before dropping back to his cushion, angrily swatting at the black girl as if she were a fly crawling up his powerful arm.

The next offer came from the learned dinosaur. “I say! Eternal life! Inhuman strength! Sixth sense! In just seven days, I can make you a superman!” he shouted with maniacal elation. “My genetic laboratory on Jupiter is second to none and my genetically superior supermen ensure its secrets are never leaked! It’s quite the juicy offer, won’t you agree?”

This time Von Schmidt looked thoughtful. However, before he had an opportunity to reply, Madam Chang produced from the folds of her dress a small device reminiscent of a squirming squid made of metal and plastic. She squeezed it and a large bird of paradise flew into the room, seemingly forming out of thin air. As it flew across the room, droplets of lava rained from its mighty wings, turning to basalt before hitting floor and plates.

The device purred hungrily and shot from the old lady’s hand toward the magnificent bird. When the two connected, the avian dissipated into a shower of blood and feathers, which disappeared before reaching the ground. The device then returned to Madam Chang’s hand, appearing slightly bloated and oddly content. The basalt was nowhere to be seen, though a glass cracked by its impact remained cracked.

“This creature eat dreams! You sleep, it make dream real! Then eat! But! You chain it up, dream real as long as sleep last! Very rare! Worth twenty ships! I give for princess!”

“Zis is absurd!” Von Ludendorf protested. “No von in zis room is sleeping! Do you expect Von Schmidt to fall to primitive hologram tricks? Wizout any effort I could—”

“I no lie! If you here! I cut you a thousand times!” Madam Chang shouted in a shrill voice. “This real! Who sleep? Woman of Calzoni! She full of opium! Dream of Tharsis where exotic animals! Great jungles! Majestic volcanoes! He monkey without fur to treat woman of Mars like that!”

“My dear lady, my esteemed friend,” Von Schmidt interjected, “please, let us not be reduced to the level of a common bazaar mob. The manifestation of dreams is a scientifically verified fact, first mentioned in the journal of the great British spiritualist Howard Carter, with whom I held an extended correspondence prior to his mysterious disappearance nearly a decade ago. I have no doubt that the madam’s apparatus is genuine and that her offer is sincere, as an alien organism of similar nature was indeed described in detail in later publications, including a paper by Russia’s greatest cosmonaut, Count Kir Strugatsky. If you wish to outbid Madam Chang, Von Ludendorf, you will have to do so by producing a better offer, not by attempting to belittle hers and consequentially a great body of learned and talented men who’ve done so much to advance the cause of science.”

“I still think I made the best offer so far, not skinning all of you,” the Princess told the table she was leaning on with both elbows, aware that no one else was going to pay any attention to whatever she had to say or offer.

Unable to think of anything more productive to do, the Princess picked up a clean plate and walked to the buffet in search of any dishes she could recognize. Failing to spot even a single dish that remotely reminded her of anything she’d ever seen, the Princess settled for some sort of salad that glowed festively but at least didn’t have any ingredients that crawled, hopped, or tried to eat you even as you ate them. However, the fact that a dish appeared safe did not make it so. Even freedom fries and ketchup could easily pounce on you when you least expected.