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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Golden Bee" data-source="post: 9568543" data-attributes="member: 7041055">THE 500 FINGERS OF DR. P!The Russian stood in front of Karl Marx’s grave. To think, the revolution, the war, her entire life had been shaped by this one man, whose bust resembled Santa Claus in the snow…JP, Captain Ivanova, and Aldous Bingen stared at the structure. Three stories tall, wrapped in piano keyboards. In front of them were, whirling mechanical dancers, with razor sharp limbs. Truly one of the weirdest death traps they'd ever encountered. That was before the clockwork assassin dropped into view…It had started almost normally. Gia CM, New Jersey's funniest magician, was playing a command performance in foggy London towne. Unfortunately, the disappearance at the end of her act was real. But it turned out she had been pinched by mistake; the real target was an audience volunteer who was a concert pianist.Who was taking these people? The trio checked East End pubs, snowy graveyards, interviewed burn victims, had their brake lines cut… crawled under stages, and pissed off hotel pianists. They had a rude dinner with Aldous’s sister Bea. (Bea monopolized the conversation talking about how hard it was to run a fashion house;  the captain kept interrupting about how she had grown up a peasant, and various depredations of the Russian Civil War, until Bea excused herself. Then the rest of the group talked business.)They visited the grave of Karl Marx; the captain exfiltrated a long-suffering burn victim to Science City Eight. All tracking a bald, horrifying-looking man and a supposed vampire. The captain and JP even had a heart to heart.There was a break in the case as the villain grew more audacious.  He faked an elaborate, SAW-like trap, to waste the group's time and distract them from a hidden bomb. By the time they caught up to him, he had turned a technology display at the Crystal Palace into a musical hellscape!It was a hard fight battle, but the trio played to their strengths. After Dr. P’s monologue about his goal (musically open a gate to hell so he could drag his daughter out of perdition), the captain paused a moment… And then started laughing. Butler Aldous danced his way past the whirling dervishes, his Hollywood expertise helping him navigate the facsimile of a gala. JP, meanwhile absorbed the brunt of the man's traps, and fended off his self-winding mechanical assassin.  Tall, slender, with hypnotic pulsing eyes, it was clear why bystanders had described her as a vampire.The captain continued her verbal assault, getting close to the mad conductor and whistling the Internationale into his ears. Aldous managed to free magician Gia CM… who snatched the key from the self-winding bot’s hip. JP grabbed the maniac doctor in a chokehold,  proving the power of brawn over brains. After a thorough beating,  the group tried to disrupt the symphony of destruction… and accidentally triggered the gate to hell.  Massive fires erupted. The captain was pinned under a burning metal column. Aldous used all of his butlering skill to keep the panicked musicians safe, but almost died in the smoke until Gia saved him in return. Gallant Josiah Diamond used all of his strength to lift the column and free his beloved, allowing them to bust down a wall and save the day. RIP to the Crystal Palace. On the plus side, it was the one place in London that was warm.</blockquote>

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