Gazette IV
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29 April 1894 (evening, Friday)
Milton receives a guest at his workshop - knocking loud and multiple times. A tall, top-hatted man happens to be behind the door - "Bonjour, Monsieur Greenblatt. My card, monsieur." The high-quality card names the man Emile d'Esternau, Solicitor. The card he gets in return happens to be Milton's Esquire variation.
- EdE: Ah, I did not know you practiced law. Quite an impressive set of credentials.
- MG: Have a seat; would you like some brandy? (calling) Malcolm!
- EdE: No need to stay on formalities. I'm not going to be here long, just wanted to meet you while I was in town.
- MG: Any reason why? I don't get too many visitors.
- EdE: I was actually curious about your wondrous suit.
- MG: Not for sale.
- EdE: I truly am willing to offer you the handsome sum of 35 thousand pounds for the blueprints to your suit.
- MG: That's, er, a very generous offer, sir. What, may I ask, are you planning on doing with the plans? This thing has the potential to do more damage than your standard electric toaster. For my safety as well as yours.
- EdE: Well, it appears to be, from what I've heard, quite powerful. It could be useful for going into dangerous places, and possible even defense. With a couple of these suits, it would be possible to defend a city from a small battalion!
- MG: I'll tell ya what. First, the blueprints are all in my head. And may I ask who you are soliciting for?
- EdE: I believe I could arrange quite a number of deals. I am still on the open market.
- MG: You have £35k to speculate with? You must get up very early in the morning! Out of curiosity, did you have an appointment I didn't know about? I mean, my secretary sucks.
- EdE: No appointment. I was in town and thought of paying you a visit.
- MG: So you just cruised into P.O.W.E.R.S.? I'm impressed, sir. Well, as you can imagine, this is not for mass consumption. Can you imagine getting this under the tree for Christmas? You'd shoot your eye out! So, I gotta run this up the flagpole and see who salutes. Gotta talk it over with the appropriate people first. So let's make another appointment, say uh, tomorrow 8 o'clock?
- EdE: Well, I'll be leaving London for a while. I'll be back around mid-July. Would July 18th be good? The 14th, of course, I'll be celebrating Bastille Day, so that won't work.
- MG: That sounds reasonable. I apologize I can't move faster, but I couldn't get you the blueprints for at least a couple of days.
- EdE: I understand. Even I travel quite a bit, so things move at the pace of business.
- MG: Yes, soliciting has its challenges. Please leave a card with the date and time at the front, so we can have it on the calendar.
After seeing d'Esternau out of the building, Milton hits up Malcolm and tells all. He looks rather distraught at the idea of Milton's suit going IPO. As it turns out, he really doesn't want British technology leaving British power. As it is, Malcolm is going to look into this... d'Esternau.
30 April 1894 (mid-day-ish, Saturday)
The mayor of London drones on about the fantabulousness of the Tower Bridge, and of London, and of Britain, and of Victoria. The P.O.W.E.R.S. group splits up on opposite sides of the bridge, staying alert. As far as anyone can tell, everyone on the bridge is supposed to be there, and is being... uh, unsuspicious. Nothing else suspicious is happening on or near the bridge itself, though the river seems to have been cleared of boats, naturally. There are also small parties happening just off the bridge on the banks, mostly the "right" side of the bridge.
During the speech, the group notices a steam-ship traveling towards the bridge. Odd, since the river's been cleared of traffic. Milton softly taps the mayor on the shoulder, and asks if the approaching ship is part of the festivities. After a quick glance, he announces that the festivities will be cut short to let the very silly boat (who didn't get the memo) through under the bridge. So, all-in-all, a test of the opening capabilities of the bridge! Yay!
Fei Hung and Sophia notice that the ship seems to be shoddily constructed, and oddly devoid of people. Nobody. Not a single person, as Fei Hung zooms his vision in. In fact, he notices that the ship has a sort of seam going along the whole thing. Along with a number of crates on the deck. Huh... He lets the rest of the group know, utilizing mental speak.
Suddenly, some crates are launched from the ship straight at the bridge, some landing on the span of the bridge. At this point, the steamship breaks apart, revealing a huge, crazy-lookin' river-bed-walking automaton that was the true engine of the ship! The crates break open, with smaller automatons popping out of them. Fei Hung immediately jumps between one of them and the normals, firing a Chi blast at it, breaking it open and scattering gears everywhere!
Cliff happens to also have a 'ton standing next to him, so he manages to split the head of the automaton from its body, flying off into the Thames. Milton steps up to his nearest one and smashes through its right shoulder, crashing it to the asphalt. Momentarily, the big automaton reaches the bridge (traveling at close to 100MPH) and smashes through the upper deck. The smaller ones are trying to crush the bridge itself, except for one who tries (and we emphasize "tries") to hit Milton. Not well-designed enough apparently. Taken aback by everything that's happening, all the normals, interestingly enough including Sophia, take this moment to dash off the bridge away from the craziness that has started taking place.
Fei Hung realizes that the smaller automatons aren't going after the people, so he takes a flying leap towards the big one, latching onto its leg somewhere. Cliff takes his cue from Fei Hung and tries the same thing, quite successfully! Milton cleans the, er, clock of the guy next to him, then Mario-jumps to the slowly-rising other side of the bridge.
The giant automaton, noticing the 1-ton-man hit him, tries to slap at him, but fails. The little 'tons try to hit Milton at the same time, but miss, striking each other instead! Sophia, having made sure the normals are not between her and Big Bad, and that she's away from the possible fallout from the smashing, conjures up a huge mystic sword flying directly at Big Bad's head. The sword pierces the head, slicing through to the other side, momentarily stopping the automaton from moving. Holy crap!
Fei Hung scrambles up the automaton, looking for a place to enter, finding none, and making it to the shoulder. Cliff starts breaking through the armor so that he can get in. At this point, Milton has a bunch of spare parts lying around, so he starts using Science! to invent sticky-bombs to splash on the gears! His hands fly as he puts together the glue-bombs. Sophia fires another sword, which flies into the stratosphere.
Fei Hung crawls into the head through Sofia's sword-hole, then quickly confers with everyone via Telepathy. Momentarily, Cliff successfully tears a hole in the side, crawls in and breaks some gears. Milton Mario-jumps onto the thing next to Fei Hung and drops a bomb in the face-hole, stopping the gears in the head from moving.
Sophia focuses her Mystical energy on moving a fair chunk of the Thames up, through the air, and down into the smokestacks. An incredible amount of steam rushes through the metal monster, singeing our three heroes who are clinging inside of it, and shutting the whole thing down completely! As it starts to fall backwards, the two super-jumpers make it to the bridge, though Cliff barely clings to the side of the bridge. Sofia lifts him up quickly, then Sofia and Fei Hung work together to mentally keep the 'ton from splashing down, carrying it to one of the islands.
Various cleanup crews take care of removing the 'tons from the bridge. Sofia very closely examines some of the 'tons, finding an oak tree maker's mark on several of the pieces of the metal. As it turns out, the bridge engineers actually recognize it - Clive Oaks did it! After pressing the engineers (watch out for that extra-virgin engineer oil!) we find that Oaks offered to help with the bridge after and even though there were enough people working on the project already. He offered the help, and a work force even, several times throughout the course of the project. Sofia's thought is that he was going to pocket the wages for a bunch of automatons, but that there was some crazy amount of money involved in building something that crazy just for retribution.
Both Cliff and Milton put their minds, contacts, and fast-talking together to find out that Clive has a warehouse just west of London, on the river. Also, that over the last month Clive has bought enough metal, scrap, gears, etc, to build... two of these crazy big 'tons. Milton takes a much closer look at the 'tons, and finds that though the bodies are not all that crazy, the heads themselves are... wow. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of cogs, gears, motors, etc exist inside the heads, working together in amazing intricate harmony. It would take a normal person months to put anything like this together. Once. Not two dozen times normal size and twice big size.
... uh, more that didn't get typed in? Help me out here, y'all?
