A few months ago, the government contracted “Plink,” a small-time garage scientist to build a giant mechanized spider for covert (probably evil and corrupt) purposes.

As you can see, progress was being made, and the project was finally beginning to take shape… until a random inspector They had sent for a routine optimization check up suddenly and inexplicably exploded while examining the spider’s rear end. The situation was so gruesome that Plink hasn’t been able to move since witnessing it, and so now he’s just standing there on the porch of his workshop covered in hours-old blood.

Something like this obviously doesn’t go unnoticed, so now (considering how secretive and under-the-radar the whole operation was intended to be) the government has swept Plink’s workshop and the entire surrounding area (an industrial neighborhood comprised of like 25,000 pedestrian inhabitants) and cleared everyone out under the falsified threat of a formulaic major airborne deadly toxin leakage accident. Commerce to and from the area was halted entirely—trains stopped in their tracks, highways shut down, etc—and entire battalions of armed operatives were sent to ensure nobody got within eyeshot of the scene of the accident, which would also obviously mean they had a clear view of the secret in-progress spider weapon. If a pedestrian were to glimpse Plink’s project, that would mean the government would have to “pacify” them (“pacify” being of course government slang for  “murder”).

The poor dead inspector's family has been notified of his death but are under the impression that he got sucked headlong into a giant AC unit during a routine inspection of  the district’s leading thermostat manufacturer, Air People. The notice was delivered on a postcard with a picture of an obviously air-conditioned kitchen captioned: “We Make Good Thermostats.” 

In this city, being an Inspector for the government is dangerous work, and barely any Inspectors have a career longer than like a few weeks. That said, this is a particularly nasty case of Inspector Death (Inspector Death happening so frequently that it’s an acknowledged and capitalized, properly titled Event).