Tale of the Troika

The sequel to Monday Begins on Saturday by the Strugatsky Brothers. In this novel, the enthusiastic mage-scientists from Monday have to tackle the impenetrable Soviet bureaucracy, represented by a group of rogue administrators who lord it over a Secret Government Warehouse. The Brothers created two complementary versions of the novel, one more idealistic, and the other more cynical. This is reflected throughout both works, and their endings. The settings, characters, and the overall plot in each story are all very similar in some ways, and very different in others.

Tropes used in Tale of the Troika include:

• Artifact of Doom: Vunyukov's Great Round Seal.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Angry Fyodor Simeonovich is just as scary as Cristobal Junta.
• Cool Old Guy: The Great Ancient Squid Spyridon combines this trope with Everything's Squishier with Cephalopods.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: In one of the versions of the novel, Lavr Vunyukov originally was a petty inspector who was inspecting the Extranormal Institute. He was lost in a Pocket Universe and took it over, becoming one big father of all Obstructive Bureaucrats.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Troika of Rationalization and Utilization of Unexplained Phenomena, all three (or four) of them.
• Secret Government Warehouse: And very poorly organized at that...
• Small Name, Big Ego: Gabby the talking bedbug takes this trope Up to Eleven.