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GM December 24th, 7.27 PM Clinton Hill, New York City, USA The Christmas Eve party had been going great. The music was of especially tolerable, vaguely-Christmas-adjacent jazz lending a pleasant background noise to the roomfuls of light, laughing conversation and sparkling glasses. Tanya had found a nice circle to talk to. Children of her mother's friends, or friends of their childrens' friends, the little cluster managed to keep clear of the occasional verbal dust-ups happening elsewhere in the great house. A million little anecdotes, countless bits of trivia about the rich and powerful, a myriad of horror stories where disaster for this or that business venture was averted barely in the nick of time, the stuff of a lifetime was ground up into a few dozen syllables and tossed into the air, never to be recovered. One of the party, Morty Summers, was just getting into a juicy story about a mixup at his father's copper mine when there came a banging and yelling at the door. "Tanya!" sang out her mother, Aaliyah, "That's old Ferdie Kreller, let him in, there's a dear!" The pounding had gotten really desperate after a few second's pause. The voice on the other side of the door was high, frantic, muddling whatever Ferdinand H. Kreller, aspiring lawyer, was trying to say.