Seeds tied to Trees

She followed him down the short hall into the painting gallery, where carefully hung portraits of dead relatives clung to dignity with artful strokes on shoddy canvas, set in magnificent frames.  A wizard's hat sits in the lap of a creepy distant Greatuncle Chestertown Crowley III.  Not competent to be submitted as evidence of the finer points of their family's overall psychic makeup.  Swaddled in the absurd, he sits betwixt new volumes of pressed butterflies, in fact our first Dojo fell into war with a crew of wererat swashbuckler ninjas from the more crapulent regions of the city between the river and the mountain, which is itself indicative of the overall elemental course prescribed in more recent reasons for primal fallen-matter work schematics our family involves itself in, derived from the foregone conclusions of distributive derivatives we are presented with, day to day.  The others arrived, wearing animal masks and little else.  She asked us to be gentle, but her eyes asked something else entirely.  This is the human condition, mystery explained. Go home and cry about it, big whoop.