El Gato Picante looks up from his beer.

"This isn't the place or the time..." he mumbles to himself.

Six miles away, he hears the sound of the Babbage Engine sputtering to life.

He's out of the door and zooming through the verdant expanse of the forest before the withered man at his table has a chance to ask him to repeat himself.

The smile of The Tinkerer is wide and mostly toothles.

"Hopefully you are pleased, Adolfo. This is your doing, you know," he creaks.

Adolfo is horrified at the scene before him, gagging, tears running down his fur-covered cheeks.

In Krakov, there is a woman, whose voice is almost impossible to hear. Broken and squeaky. This is because she found four of the victims of Vasiliy, The Bloody Russian, and she did not stop screaming for six days.

They hung him, ran him through, crushed him against the rocks and severed his limbs from his body. Finally they threw the pieces in the ocean, to be nibbled at by the fishes and rotted by the salty water.

He washed ashore in Lustria, at the feet of a necromancer, not yet quite dead. His final word to the man beside him:

"MORE!"

Benigno used to be a respected and beloved priest of his community, confident in himself and in his goddess, Verena.

Then, one day he's walking across the street with his head in the clouds and BAM! A goat-driven cart crashes into him at high speed: brain damage.

A drooling vegetable, all that used to be his slipped through his fingers. Only one option remained: the lucha libre circuit. A broken, hulking brute, he took to the ring in the tattered, bloodstained remains of his priest's robe and became known as El Padre Misterioso! He was accidentally killed in his second match.

"Here's a secret: back-alley lucha libre wrestling in run-down bars a million miles from anything that doesn't make you cry pays very little.

I've been so hungry, I couldn't wait for the rocks to boil before I drank the soup. Then I was left with just the rocks. Then I ate them. Modular rock soup: not very delicious at all.

This one time, I took a tiny little bite out of my arm. I was pretty delicious!

Here's another secret: when someone dies, and noone cares about them, luckily, they get thrown in the trash. Dead people are food. Delicious food."

On her deathbed, grievously wounded, the star thrower of the Mürgelheim Mighty has but one request of her loving husband. He has been by her side many times when a match got out of hand, and he knows this will be the last.

"Promise me... a viking funeral... set me on... fire... and set me... adrift... don't let... my enemies... find me..."

Her husband nods, kisses her hand, and sheds a single tear.

Six days later, the inheritance is gone. He carefully counts the gold pieces, as the whistling necromancer has his zombies pull the cart with her rotting body away.

It is good to be the king. With the fool Feliciano out of the way, Godofredo will soon have it all. He is already wealthy beyond belief, owns most of the region, and has the village of Juarez firmly under his thumb.

And soon the supple young Carmen will warm the bed he is just now lying in! From pure glee, he pulls the nightcap down over his eyes.

When he pushes it back again, six sunburnt men have surrounded his bed. Their machetes gleam and twinkle in the dark.

"You lied about my son."

The machetes fall like a hailstorm.

How could his father have left it all to that insipid moron he had the misfortune of calling his brother?! This was an outrage! It was rightfully his! Rightfully!

This will not stand. They say the old woman in the woods have knowledge of poisons that can painfully kill a man in an instant...

Four days later, Hermenegildo's brother dies painfully in an instant. In a surprising revelation, the land goes to their father's lieutenant, Juanito (the ink of that addendum is not yet dry), but Hermenegildo has eyes only for the gold. Grinning, he lets the coins run through his fingers.

Urbano rearranges his spit-shining curls for the hundredth time before leaning over the table his timid companion is seated at. His hair has always been his vanity, and fortunately so, since the rest of his sun-parched features are nothing to be proud of. His cheeks were marred by scars incurred at an early age from the ravages of smallpox, his chin was perilously close to non-existing and seemed attached directly to his collarbone. His nose was a strange, acne-ridden bulb with pin-prick nostrils. His eyes were tiny and constantly nervously twitching. His hair, however, was thick and curly, a lavish waterfall tumbling to his shoulders, and impressive, in spite of his nasty habit of making it shine with whatever greasy or wet substance was closest at hand.

“How bad would it really by,” he asked his doubtful cohort.

Of course, that was back when he had hair. Now, as he lurched into lucha libre ring, he shivered with the well-known rage of what he had lost. After his first trial as a heretic and subsequent immolation, some of it had grown back in thin, wiry tufts. The second time he was found heresiologically culpable, nothing had been left. Now, after having been latched to the stake and set ablaze no less than 27 times, (breaking the previous record by a substantial amount, according to the almanacs of the inquisition) his skin had been bleached a ghastly white from the scarring, and nothing was willing to grow anywhere on his body. It was after the 22nd incineration attempt that he somehow reached the conclusion that being fire-proof would secure him as unprecedented success on the lucha libre circuit as it had breaking records as the least flammable man in the Empire.

It didn’t, of course. Only 0.7% of lucha libre deaths are even tangentially related to fire, and as he hurtled to the floor shortly after the beginning of his first match, he discovered that the unbreakability of his neck was inversely proportional to his inflammability.

It had been so easy! He had played them like dominoes! Juanito couldn't keep himself from laughing out loud at the thought. Manipulating the old man's lust, the pride of those rural fools!

The son had been a pig with money, and oh, the painful fire in the eyes of his lover when Juanito showed him the debauchery that night! He would have walked the sun for a chance at revenge, so tampering with a will hadn't even made him blink.

It had all played out exactly as the necromancer had predicted.

The twenty pieces of silver had been a bargain.

"Gualterio's soul", after William Weston Patton:

Old Gualterio's soul has been damned all to hell,
Not a damn was given, save one complaint about the smell;
But while his life in the ring had not been that swell,
His corpse is marching on.

The swine was a bastard, unloved, cruel and mean,
In the ring, Gualterio lost every fight that was clean;
He was the lousiest wrestler you'd seen,
And his corpse is marching on.

A sharp knife in an alley became the end if him,
Too bad for him, he was found by a necromancer grim;
He was added to the Sugar Skulls on a whim,
But his corpse is marching on.

The kill was his. Dinner was served.

Using the long, vicious claw on his right index finger, he carefully removed a strip of flesh from the bicep, without touching the muscle.

He placed it on his tongue, rolled up, felt the little drops of blood run over it, and pulled it into his mouth. He sank his teeth into it, slowly, feeling the texture, letting the savory flavor explode in his mouth.

It was too much. He lost control, furiously swallowing the piece of meat, opening his jaws wide and sinking his fangs into pectoralis major.

Soon only bones were left.