As toy boys go, Mr. Edison “Sonny” Tsai ranked rather high in Dr. Jing Qian’s estimation. He was far too Westernized to ever please her very traditional family back home (who strained to find ways to tolerate the doctor’s progressive life choices) but he was more than suitable in all other respects: a man of some means, a decent conversationalist, rakishly handsome and conveniently stupid. However, in spite of his normally guileless nature, Mr. Tsai was, on occasion, capable of delivering uncannily prescient flashes of insight that one ignored at one’s own peril. For example:
Sonny: I should go to Ravila with you.
Jing: No need to trouble yourself. It’s a town full of winemakers. How treacherous could it be?
And so, after loading her tram-sized, gravity-defying Gyro-Flyer, Jing headed off to Ravila unaccompanied.
It is wrong to say Ravila is depressing. Ravila is depression — a fully realized materialization of the concept expressed as architecture, clothes, shops, food, lighting, hairstyles, posture… almost as if it were an entire town and culture designed to provide visitors with a brief taste of their ultimate future as a decaying corpse stiff with rigor. In this bastion of gloom, where even the children only seem to express joy when reminiscing about what fun they had at the last mass execution of prisoners, there is one bright spot: The Wine. Ravilan wine. Jing’s third day in Ravila began with her tied to a barrel of the stuff.
It was a particularly surprising development given how well the investigation had been going until that point. Since the doctor’s arrival in Ravila two days earlier, the mystery of Vehement Marrow’s presence there had been unfolding in a most accommodating fashion. She immediately discovered the curious case of the conspicuously absent bar patrons in the Gallonna district, which in turn led her to the new religious craze involving the Church of Akyooterat. Sneaking into the wine bottling facility where the all-male congregation congregated, Jing spotted her quarry. Marrow, in the guise of a phony preacher, was in full religious regalia, shouting at his followers through an oddly designed speaking-trumpet, exhorting them to fulfill the will of “the one true power of the universe!”
Dr. Qian’s good fortune continued when, as she was trying to sneak away from the bottling plant, she encountered a fellow sneak. It was another doctor, Dr. Carmen Von Royce, a Ravilan local who was also investigating the strange goings-on in the Gallonna neighborhood. Taking Jing to a mansion near the center of the district, Dr. Von Royce introduced Dr. Qian to her patron, Antonia Bloch: wealthy, gorgeous, fascinated by all things scientific, and married to an alderman who was completely in thrall to the new religious mania. Working in the Bloch mansion’s macabre but extremely well-equipped laboratory, the doctors Qian and Von Royce soon focused on some odd tasting wine that had suddenly become a favorite of Madame Bloch’s husband.
Analysis revealed the wine, which was widely available, had been dosed with a variety of alchemical agents that could easily weaken a drinker’s will. But a further question remained: What about the women? It was puzzling to note that women who drank the wine never seemed to remain suggestible for very long. But Jing’s lucky streak continued when Madame Bloch’s servant brought in the Guilliti Tea, a wildly popular beverage amongst the women of Ravila. On a hunch, Dr. Qian mixed some of the tea with the tainted wine and discovered the mind control chemicals immediately broke down into harmless components. Vaporize enough of the brewed tea in the presence of the mesmerized men, she concluded, and they would almost instantly be released from Mr. Marrow’s hold.
“Brilliant!” cried Dr. Von Royce.
“Outstanding!” exclaimed Madame Bloch.
“This is all too easy,” thought Dr. Qian. “Why do my fellow Temporal Leaguers make this hero thing look so hard?”
“We need a way to expose the men to the tea mist,” said Dr. Von Royce.
“My flyer,” offered Dr. Qian. “My flyer has a volatizer. It could spread a large cloud of mist quite efficiently, but we’d need to attach a large enough tank full of tea.”
“We probably have what we need right here,” said Madame Bloch. “I’m sure if you took us to your vehicle, we’d be able to install the necessary equipment… don’t you agree, Carmen?”
Dr. Von Royce did agree. After a few minutes of madly dashing about to assemble the needed materials, including several oil lamps, the three ladies were on a loaded horse-drawn cart speeding toward the edge of town where Jing’s Gyro-Flyer sat half-hidden by a stand of trees. It was just before sundown when they arrived and Jing noticed, for the first time, how close she had parked her flyer to the bottling facility where the Church of Akyooterat held its meetings. Even more noteworthy, Jing and company were near enough to see the seven airships that Mr. Marrow had acquired. They were armed for battle and preparing to depart for New Babbage.
“Let’s start unloading the equipment,” said Madame Bloch.
“I’ll prep my flyer,” Jing said… and did. But as she was preparing, she was also contacting the Temporal League to request some assistance in implementing a “Plan B” to make doubly sure her new home town didn’t end up a pile of rubble.
In less than two hours, the modifications to the oversized tea vaporizer were nearly complete. Jing was impressed by the mechanical aptitude of her Ravilan companions (it was, perhaps, due to the urgency of the situation that she didn’t think to ask how the medical researcher and the alderman’s wife came to be so handy with wiring and wrenches). “We’ll need to fill the tanks,” said Madame Bloch. “Carmen and I will do that while you get us the tea, Dr. Qian.”
“Me? Surely you’d know better where to find…”
“If I’m not mistaken, one of the main aqueducts is near here. We can draw the water we need from there,” said Dr. Von Royce. “You can take the cart back to the quarter, Dr. Qian. I’m sure you know the way.”
“Keep the cart,” said Jing. “You’ll need it to move the tanks to the aqueduct and back here. I have a faster way to fetch the tea.”
Jing opened a compartment at the rear of her flyer and pulled out her two-wheeled motorized auto-cycle with it’s oil-fueled pressure driver that made the vehicle faster than a thoroughbred race horse.
As Jing adjusted her goggles and fired up her cycle, Madame Bloch handed her a note. “Here’s the address for the Rambling Lotus Tea House. Show the proprietress the stamp on the note so she knows it’s from me. She’ll give you what’s required.”
The auto-cycle was as remarkably fast as it was remarkably loud. Jing attracted quite a lot of attention when she roared into the heart of the Gallonna district and skidded to a stop by a street light in front of the tea house. She paused long enough to wonder if the carrier bags on her auto-cycle were big enough to carry the amount of Guilliti Tea necessary to stop an invading army.
The hour being so late, Jing expected the tea house to be closed, it’s genteel lady patrons having long since gone home to have tasteless, uncomfortable dinners with their tasteless, uncomfortable families. She expected to have to call the proprietress down from the apartment above the shop where she probably lived in tasteless, uncomfortable squalor. But expectations are exactly the sort of dangerous and wobbly things one is unwise to rely on. When Jing entered and lifted her goggles, she saw a tea house unlike any she had ever known. The place had the look and feel of the roughest of frontier saloons. It was packed full of formidable-looking women, each with an ornate, porcelain teacup. Well-dressed, well-scrubbed, well-to-do society ladies wore glittering jewelry and smoked cigars while other women sported grime-stained chore-wear and looked as if they had been scrubbing the floor not five minutes earlier (an illusion that was immediately shattered by looking down at the noticeably unscrubbed state of the tea room floor). The atmosphere was amazingly jovial: oblivious to divisions of social class, women of all sorts were chatting and laughing and playing games…
… until they noticed Jing and fell disturbingly silent. “Is the proprietress around?” asked the doctor in an innocently awkward/awkwardly innocent manner.
“Over here,” said the sort of friendly-sounding voice one naturally gravitates toward when one is surrounded by vaguely hostile tea drinkers. Keenly aware that many of the tea house patrons were now talking about her in low voices, Jing moved in the direction of the one voice that didn’t sound as if it were upset by her presence.
Imagine her surprise at discovering the voice belonged to Madame Bloch’s maid who just hours earlier had served her Guilliti Tea. Imagine further the doctor’s surprise at being struck with unmannerly force on the back of the head and falling unconscious to the noticeably unscrubbed floor of a tea room.
Thank you brother. It is always good to get news of Home.