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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Golden Bee" data-source="post: 9846382" data-attributes="member: 7041055">Puppets of MoscowGone! Vanished! The largest assemblage of puppets in the world, seemingly plundered from the State Central Puppet Theatre in Moscow! The collection is considered priceless, attracting the attention of international press…but marionettes aren’t the only thing vanishing these days! Ace Australian investigative journalist Trudy C. Truman was on the beat…but never checked in after touching down in The Third Rome! With her beloved missing for over 24 hours, the nearest ZSS operatives has been dispatched by Miss Ziegler herself! Their mission: find Trudy and get her out of whatever strings of fate she’s tangled up in this time!May 1, 1936.Inspirational Russian explorer Captain Semya Ivanova, her husband Josiah Patrick Diamond, her cousin (19-year-old hillbilly Clara Tate), and smuggler Ivan "Ivo" Kochev (not-related) arrive in the Russian Capital. Semya, wearing a jungle-trekking outfit, is mobbed by fans. The group searches Trudy's hotel room, and discover she wasn't kidnapped from there: She took her notebook and camera.The front desk said she called a cab to the State Central Puppet Theatre 48 hours prior, so the group rents a car and heads over. There, they meet the young curator of the theater, who had to bring a puppet from home. He gives the nickel tour when there's a minor earthquake.Turns out 4,000 puppets are missing, and the only one there looks savagely...beaten? There's no sign of lock picking. Trudy, when she was here two days ago, found a dead security guard. Semya's a master of contacts, so she reaches out to the coroner. The guard's key ring is missing, and his wounds are similar to those of the destroyed puppet. Strange. JP presses the curator for more details. The theatre acquired a new Perushka marionette a day before the theft. It was willed to the theatre from a small estate sale, an elderly collector who recently passed. The donor was the son of the craftsman and performer who created the marionette: A man named Iakov Baranov.The dead guard also did some shifts at the ZIL car factory. It's closed for May Day, but for someone as prestigious as Captain Ivanova, it can be opened.The factory has few clues: The watchman's locker has his uniform and some spare gum wrappers. Our heroes are about to call it a bust when they hear a scream from another room!Trudy's tied up on a conveyor belt, moving towards a metal press. Lights go off except a spotlight on her; from above, a cloaked and hatted figure begins taunting the assembled! JP puts a pry bar into the conveyor belt, slowing it down, but when Clara rescues Trudy, it's actually a living puppet!?!From the darkness emerge dozens of feral nevrospastos. They're overmatched though: puppets follow orders, and there is no one so demanding as the Captain. As she cracks her whip, many of the creatures lie down and stop fighting.  Clara and JP are more direct. The West Virginian does extra damage when she shoots to kill and destroy, and the swarming cultural artifacts are no match for her rifle. Diamond grabs a tire iron and battles the biting badniks. Kochev sticks to the shadows, tricking and deceiving his foes. He pulls the trench coat off the cloaked figure, who's revealed to be three marionettes in a stack! Also helping the group are The Ballerina and The Moor, two good-aligned Múa rối nước. They reveal that Trudy was captured by the mastermind Petrushka. Western audiences might know him as Punch.The group intends to keep investigating, when a massive earthquake shakes the city. The western half of Moscow grows tank treads and proceeds west at 40 kilometers per hour! The group tries to catch up in the rental car. So does the army. A cannon from the moving city hits a nearby tank, turning it into an automated threat. Luckily, it can only fire once (since it's crew-loaded), but it can still try and run over the party! And if the city crashes into another country, it would be a truly embarrassing international incident.The group retreats and convenes with the Red Army. Ivo's knowledge of mysticism is essential; there's a famous Roma whose spells can counteract such strange magic. (Ivanova takes some time to call her brother, who confirms that Soviet spy Alexander Bauer is in the Rogue City.) The Captain requisitions a plane, and soon enough, the group is at a circle of wagons near the Belarusian border.This is when the group realizes they are much better liars than they are charmers. They pretend to be a Tulane anthropology team, until they are recognized by one of the singers from Captain Ivanova's wedding! He makes introductions, and Baba Rizzavoy (a 90-year-old who appears 14?) asks if they're willing to bend reality to their will. The camp starts singing, and Clara starts dancing, starting a straight up hootenanny. Kochev manipulates the spell by lying.Suddenly, the campus fills with Red Army soldiers, led by a NKVD operative from Science City 0! Major of State Security Agent Zadov pulls rank on the Captain, demanding that she stop her "anti-scientific activity." The captain quotes Trotsky:Zadov's intimidated by the captain's fiery rhetoric. Having been praised all day, she carries the conviction of the Muscovites, and in fact elicits help from the NKVD heavy.Zadov has an experimental rocket plane, and the group successfully parachutes into the city. There, they meet Alexander Bauer, will reports that the resistance is stymied. Since the puppet can turn cars into its minions, mass action is difficult. He's also done some research: Iakov Baranov  was a social agitator and puppet performer who was killed in 1922 at the end of the Russian Revolution. A Diogenes-like figure critical of the Empire and the revolutionaries, it is widely rumored that he was an avid practitioner of Hermetic magicks... including animation. His greatest creation was punishing Russia in his absence.Luckily, Ivo Kochev is a master smuggler. While Bauer leads the people in mass distraction (fireworks, banging pots and pans, running on rooftops), he's able to sneak the group into the trash tower Punch is occupying. The puppet king is surrounded by dozens of skilled cloth and wood warriors, but that doesn't much matter. Ivanova draws their attention, JP rescues real-Trudy, and Clara begins dancing the spell. Ivan applies sophistry to the situation, and with the help of the Ballet Dancer and Moor, argues the puppet back into torpor. Consequently, all the magic begins to leave the city. First the trash tower (which the group swiftly flees), then the giant tank treads that keep it moving. The city’s saved!Getting West Moscow back to its original location? That's a task for the eggheads of Science City 0...***Back in New York, the group is on its way to the ZSS office. There's a strange man in the lobby though, and as he asks them about the mission, T*R*U*S*T* officers swarm the block. They're under arrest. Someone get their lawyer!</blockquote>

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