Mister Monday (Keys to the Kingdom, Book 1) (The Keys to the Kingdom)

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Nothing (that is, Nothing with a capital N - a fictional substance) can do anything needed for the plot - from dissolving stuff, powering machines, or turning you into a mouse for a day. Our Vampires Are Different: Lady Friday can be interpreted in this vein, but draining emotions and memories rather than blood. America, the UK, and Australia are all likely candidates, however. References to bushfires and the Australian emergency lines suggest Australia, but pounds are in use.

Innocent Fanservice Girl: Suzy. She thinks nothing of undressing in front of Arthur, and often wears shredded or sliced-open clothing. But then again, she has the body of a child.... The Architect - God figure. Creator of the House and the Secondary realms. Mother of the Mariner and the Piper. This was wildly original and yet also boring, which takes some doing. Part of the trouble was the writing, which was often clunky and weighed down with unnecessary details. Part of it was the plotting; sometimes the rules and complications were just right, but other times they seemed arbitrary, put into place just to create some suspense. ("The dinosaurs couldn't get in, but now they can, because he's changed the boundaries!" "Can't use it until midnight! What if I don't wake up in time?") The Epicentre of the Universe is a realm known as “The House” — a labyrinth of rooms and halls and fantastical landscapes, that are ruled over by the treacherous Trustees, or as they are more commonly known, the Morrow Days. Their task was to take over the supervision of our world (or ‘The Secondary Realms’) from the creator — the Architect, who left Her instructions written in a Will, to be carried out accordingly. But the Days tore the Will into seven pieces and scattered the scraps across the known worlds to be guarded forever more, and only now — thousands of years later — has one fragment of the Will managed to escape…

This series provides examples of:

A lot of the Denizens belonging to the Trustees come across as this. They're just doing their jobs, because they'll be horribly killed if they aren't. Special mention goes to Saturday's sorcerers, who will be encysted into a bag of their own organs if they disobey her (a process they can actually survive for months). Middle Child Syndrome: Implied with Friday's Dawn, who disapproves of his mistress' practice of experiencing and has never been allowed into her secret fortress in the Secondary Realms, unlike her Noon and Dusk.

Komisář se opět předklonil a přiblížil zbraň k Arturovu zápěstí. Chlapec vykřikl, ale než stačil něco udělat, nebo se ho dotkla čepel, Klíč mu z nenadání vystřelil z ruky jako šíp. Vnořil se komisaři do hrudní kosti, vyletěl mu ze zad a vrátil se Arturovi do ruky. As noted in Too Dumb to Live example above, this is almost as much of a source of problems in the house as the vices, and the deviations from the seven heavenly virtues (most notably the substitution of Judgement for Patience as an opposing virtue to Wrath, but also the use of looser protestant virtues in general rather than their classical counterparts as primary identifiers) are actually clues for the alert reader that something is not quite right with the Will.

Indeed, the reason the Piper created his Children in the first place is that they could actually learn. What's more, he's since created a bunch of New Nithlings with that ability - so much so that they would rather spend their time learning new crafts than being Evil Minions. Arthur spends most of the series making friends with various Denizens. He does the same in the Gardens in Lord Sunday, and his new friend leads him outside. Straight into a trap. It turns out the gardening boy is actually Lord Sunday in disguise. Arthur's world is almost the same as ours, except it was the scene of a devastating plague that prompted the government to take the hard line on any epidemic.