Let's Make a Partwork Encyclopedia: The Guillotine

[Core Room]

"Master, Rāja. Because this Library-City Dungeon stands independent of the Daikan's system, it cannot rely on anyone else to carry out executions. From here on, whenever a criminal appears, we will have to execute them ourselves."

As Marie said, outsourcing punishment to an outside party leads to political subordination.

"The penal code of this dungeon is, in essence, death for murder, corporal punishment for assault, fines for theft. Since we cannot perform acts of state and cannot enact laws, I am drafting a substitute 'pseudo' legal system. In this region the standard method of execution is beheading, which they call geshunin, but a clean decapitation requires great skill, and it is beyond the Knight Commander. That is where things stand."

"Rāja-san, beheading is difficult?"

"Cutting cleanly takes long practice. You won't improve without practice, but we have no criminals to practice on, so we can't."

"What about methods other than beheading?"

"With hanging, too, if you get the length or strength of the rope wrong, the condemned ends up dancing the pirate's jig on the end of it. Crucifixion and burning are for capital crimes and need no such consideration, but in this Library-City Dungeon arson is impossible, which makes burning an impossible offense."

She was not actually mistaken; hanging was simply thought of as "that sort of cruel punishment," fit only for pirates. As an aside, the Edo shogunate's penal code for samurai and commoners alike did not include hanging.

"As for methods not practiced in this region, lethal injection is out, since naturally we cannot obtain the drugs."

There was no way a magazine came with a thing like that as an appendix.

"The electric chair, what Edison would call 'getting Westinghoused,' would be easy enough in this dungeon, but botch the settings and it inflicts immense suffering on top of leaving a charred corpse no one can bear to look at."

"Ahh, the cleanup's no problem. When Marie-san burned those pirates to a crisp with the electric fence the other day, the dungeon's functions absorbed everything."

"Um, all I did was give the signal. The Master summoned the materials and Mint flipped the switch."

"Furthermore, electricity is far too unfamiliar to the residents, so the electric chair would likely never be accepted."

"We use electricity all the time for lighting and cooking, but they think of it as magic, huh…"

"And that is where the 'guillotine' comes in."

"Ah, the one that made its name in the French Revolution. It chopped off the head of a Marie spelled differently from yours."

"Master, the etymology of Rosemary is the Latin Rosmarinus ('sea dew'); it is not Rose plus Mary, and it has nothing to do with Marie either. Besides, even if Named monsters can be revived, a guillotine looks painful, so no thank you."

"There's no need to actually test it on your neck, Marie-san."

"If you collect the appendices that come with the partwork encyclopedia The Complete Works of Goethe, you can build a toy guillotine. Use that as a model and scale it up to life size."

said Rāja.

"Why a guillotine with Goethe?"

"Master, it most likely stems from the story that Goethe wanted to buy his child a toy guillotine, but the country town didn't sell one, so he wrote a letter asking the boy's mother in the city to buy it for him. The newspaper company that publishes it is going to get sued by Goethe's descendants."

By some accounts Goethe has over three hundred children.

"The same newspaper's The History of France also comes with a guillotine, but it's a 1/12-scale dollhouse-format model; 'movable' or not, it has no actual ability to cut anything. The whole point is that lining it up with the TGV, the Eiffel Tower, the Lascaux cave paintings and so on gives you a good grasp of French history."

"A newspaper that sure does love its guillotines. Sounds like the type to have been awarded the Legion of Honour."

"Master, the number of recipients is rather large, so something on the order of a Chevalier is probably lying around in any old house."

Because they were scattered about in droves with every war, far from being a France-only souvenir, they could be bought easily even in Japan. Of course, wearing one you'd merely purchased was not allowed.

[Core Room]

"Library Director, this is the guillotine."

Mint gestured at the guillotine on the table.

"Cucumber would be ideal, they say, but we can't harvest any yet, so we'll use komatsuna instead…"

When Mint set the komatsuna in place and worked the guillotine, there was a thwack and the komatsuna was cut clean through.

"A kitchen knife would be faster."

"Before that, we're Asura, so we don't really need to eat vegetables in the first place, do we."

Since Asura do not cook and the residents do not commit murders, the toy guillotine ended up abandoned on a shelf in the Core Room. That said, so long as the residents are ordinary humans, statistically its turn will come sooner or later.

In fact, the guillotine was created with humane intentions. Right up until it got overused, on the grounds that executions no longer took any skill, that is.