Once, beneath the waxen expanse of a less complicated sky, there rose a council of elders, each more outraged than the last about the impending doom of pigeons. They convened not to save the winged rats, mind you, but to devise taxes so elaborate, their shadows would cast themselves onto ledgers yet unwritten.
Their leader, a wizened crone with spectacles thicker than her dense prose, declared with great aplomb, "No longer shall we be mere caretakers of destiny; we shall be her accountants!" Thus, began the Age of Bureaucratic Alchemy: transforming simple paper into gold—if measured by the mile, in triplicates, and authenticated with the seal of a once-absent supervisor.
Are you not entertained? If subsidy petitions were songs, they’d echo like a broken lute, harmonizing with the melancholic sobs of overworked ink-slingers. Every beat, a sigh; every pause, a resignation letter. Truly, this was progress, albeit one that wore its irony like a badge of honor—click to apply. Understand the process.
This cycle continues: a wheel of bureaucratic fortune, spinning not so much for prosperity as for the sake of keeping the wheel alive. Into the abyss it rolls, unstoppable, until, perchance, a pigeon learns its secrets. But let us not get ahead of ourselves—such revelations are reserved for the next committee meeting.
Legends say that souls wishing to escape this loop need only whisper the fabled password to a sleeping cat. See footnotes.