They Have a Fight, Triangle Loses
"Right," I said, grabbing Tony Sierpinski by the collar and hauling him off the floor, and giving him a shake for good measure. "I want to know what's going on here, and you're the one that's going to tell me. So spill it!"
"Lun jian ni jia zhu zhong shi ba dai," he sneered at me, and spat a mouthful of blood onto my necktie. "Gou yang de!"
"I didn't get most of that," I replied, "except for something about my ancestors and dogs. Let's try this again." I grabbed his broken nose and gave it a firm twist. "Who. Are. You. Working for?"
"Yakuza!" he howled. "Shiawase-Mitsuhama!"
"That's better," I said, wiping my hand on his shirt. "And what the hell are you making?"
"The entertainment wave of the future," he snarled, and I detected a sarcastic note in his voice. "I'm not telling you any more! You wouldn't understand it anyway!"
"Probably not," I said, tossing him back to the floor. "But you've already given me all I need to know, so that's okay."
I tied him to his brothers with some plastic cable-ties and poked around his office. There was a crate of the electronic gizmos; I took one out of its silver bag and tried to figure out what I was looking at. It was mostly a circuit board with some fat black chips on it, which looked normal, but it was wired to a plexiglass capsule that was filled with that yellow-green liquid, and something pink and fleshy-looking floating in it. And there were three cables that ended in metal probes -- unusually sharp ones. What in all of the miscellaneous hells?
I rooted around the desks, but all the paperwork was gibberish to me. And then I found another one of the weird electronic gadgets, except this one was wired to a pair of goggles instead of the three probes, and it had an extra cord that ended in a regular-looking plug.
"You won't get away with this," Tony hissed from the floor as I put the device in my pocket. "You're top of the list now! Every gangster in Chinatown'll be looking for you when I get out of here, wang ba dan!"
"That's fine, Tony. I'm planning on being well out of town before that happens anyway." I fished his keys out of his pocket, locked the office door on my way out, and spent a couple very satisfying minutes with a crowbar, trashing the computers, glass tanks, and anything else that looked smashable.
That pretty much settled things -- this morning, I had to get out of Chinatown. Now, I had to get out of Chinatown. I prayed it wouldn't take me longer to tie up the loose ends than it took the Sierpinski brothers to untie their bonds.
| Continue... |
As I hauled myself out of the manhole and back into blessed daylight, the first thing I noticed was the texture of the noise. It was still loud, but now the racket was all parade -- the chaos at the market stalls seemed to have died down. I asked Grandma what had happened, and she told me it just stopped all of a sudden -- all the merchandise went back to normal as quick as snapping your fingers. I asked her for a pack of coffin-nails, and she gave it to me for free, as thanks for helping out earlier. So at least one nice thing happened that day.
As I smoked, I figured that the magic that the Sierpinski brothers were using in their manufacturing process must have been leaking out somehow, and infesting the shops accidentally. I didn't know any more about magic than I knew about computers, but it sounded like a reasonable guess.
The yakuza were going to be after me soon. Since I wasn't exactly inconspicuous, I figured my best bet was to double-down and take the fight to them -- and that meant getting into the Shiawase-Mitsuhama Zaibatsu building
 | You acquire an item: strange goggles |
Occurs at Triad Factory after winning combat against The Sierpinski brothers.
References
- This Adventure's name reference the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song "Particle Man".
