Shoutout / Mort

• To the Bard:
  • It is mentioned that Mort's honesty would never make him a poet, because if he ever compared someone to a summer's day, it would be followed by an explanation of the specific day and whether or not it was raining: a reference to the opening line of Sonnet 18.
  • Ysabell's description of the events in one of the auto-autobiographies in her father's library ('-and then she thought he was dead, and she killed herself and then he woke up and he did kill himself-'), describes a gender-inverted version of the very specific fate which the titular characters of Romeo and Juliet meet.
• To Hans Christian Andersen's The Princess and the Pea:
  • The narration says that through natural selection, the royal families which lasted the longest were those who could recognize an assassin in the dark from the noises they were clever enough not to make- forget peas and mattresses: an obvious shout-out to the tale. In both cases, royalty is portrayed as royally sensitive.
  • While reminiscing on the good old days, Albert said that the princess used to be '...as beautiful as the day was long and could pee through a dozen mattresses- or something like that.'.