The prompts for this story were two tweets from the Magic Realism Bot. It's hard to stop at just one. They're too entertaining. Besides, the best story ideas are multiple. Interesting things happen where they intersect.
The first one was, "A necromancer owns a Renaissance painting which depicts every sin by a software developer." And the second was, "A chameleon sits on a diamond supermarket." Neither quite made a spark on its own, but put them together and they form fascinating causal possibilities.
I regret the loss of the painting. I was going to make it a tapestry, actually, one that chronicled the reasons for the current shape of the world. A museum tour guide would be talking about it with the afternoon's visitors. But in the course of writing the story, everything about that conversation changed, including the characters having it.
Cover art incorporates and modifies "Caucasian Salamander" by Giorgimailo, own work (CC BY-SA 4.0) and "Diamonds" by TVZ Design (CC BY 2.0).
