Chuck brought gumbo! Huzzah! We are all joyous and happy, except for Mike (Jack Smith), who is forced to admit that he is horribly allergic to the ingredients. Chris (Michael Sangaree), Bruce (Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs), Tim (Serpentine!) and Paul (Kumar Singh) all express their great debt of gratitude to Chuck for his generosity in ways that hopefully don't make him horribly twitchy.
Kumar Singh looks for sources on old Tsarist Russian coins. His best choice is out of town, but has written a reference work on the subject. Fortunately, the Paragon Club library has a copy of this book. Unfortunately, all the book contains is information on when the coins were minted and what their value is. He learns that the coins are not particularly rare, except for the fact that they came from a Russian battleship that was sunk at the Battle of Tsishima Strait. The book estimates that there was a total of $1 million in gold coins on the sunken ship, which amounts to quite a bit in 1932.
Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs listens to this and is totally convinced that he can do better. He tells the others, "Well, I spend all my time reading books, except for the time I spend making guns or chasing the Dragon." Kumar Singh listens to this comment and offers, "Strange. I've never seen you chase a dragon, though I have seen you streak down a hallway stark naked howling about giant lizards." That may be so, but Pulfrey-Downs is true to his word. He manages to learn that the coins were on board the Peter the Great. It was not actually sunk in the battle proper: it left the battle severely damaged, but then vanished with all hands before it could reach a friendly port. The approximate area where it vanished covers a 400-mile radius. Pulfrey-Downs gets a large map of the sea between Russia and Japan and starts sketching out a spiral search pattern, ignoring any small voices of disapproval ("Professor, why are you wasting your time with that?") that pop up in his ears. He even manages to ignore the loud shrieks of disapproval ("Professor, you are writing on a rare manuscript! Stop that immediately!") that come from the Paragon Club's librarian.
Kumar Singh becomes interested in the recent history of the coins. He examines the ledger taken from Wu Sang's coin shop to see if it contains any clues on how Wu Sang got them. His Bureaucracy serves him well, and he learns that Wu Sang bought the coins two days ago from a man named Chin Li. Unfortunately, Chin Li is quite a common name in Chinatown, and finding the right one is not easy.
From this unpromising start, Kumar Singh plays his network of Contacts. He finds nothing. But he does learn that Wu Sang was engaging in some light tax evasion and was paying protection money to the local tongs.
Michael Sangaree is sitting in the Paragon Club bar reloading clips, Last Man Standing-style. The bartender MacGill reminds Sangaree that he could get a private room to reload his guns. Michael Sangaree shoots back that the bartender comes from a very strange place if he thinks you get a private room just to reload guns.
The chances that this exchange might turn violent are spoiled by the arrival of a mysterious American walks in. Michael Sangaree is quite surprised, as while he's seen lots of Americans he has never before seen a mysterious one. He calls out to the newcomer, "Hey, you're not Chinese! You want a drink? They're practically free!"
All Jack Smith knows is that some guy named Sangaree is looking for people to crew a dirigible. He examines Michael Sangaree's bomber jacket, long scarf and flier's leather helmet and deduces that the guy offering him alcohol is the guy he wants to talk to. So he does.
Smith explains that he was asked to join the Paragon Club because he has seen the world. He also happens to be the strongest man to ever leave the French Foreign Legion. This starts the two of them on a contest of interminable war stories. In the process, it becomes very clear that Smith doesn't know a lot about Russian coins or Chinese Tongs, but he has spent a lot of time in Northern Africa. Sangaree explains the characters' current problems, and lets Smith know that he's quite welcome to come along. He might even have a chance to shoot maybe ten or twenty people. Smith can't wait to sign up.
By this time, Pulfrey-Downs has covered a huge area of table space in the library with maps of obscure parts of Russia and Japan. Phelina O'Rourke is screaming at him because he continues to try to mark up various antique maps with a grease pencil. None of the maps have anything to do with lost Russian battleships.
By this time, Michael Sangaree is becoming desperate to find useful information, as both Pulfrey-Downs and Kumar Singh are striking out in their own special ways. He looks up Margaret Lang and asks her for help. He offers to tell her all the facts he knows about mysterious old Russian coins if she can help him find Chen Li.
She tells him, "I'm a reporter. Facts do not concern me." Michael Sangaree responds, "Well, lack of sobriety never stopped me either." She smiles and agrees to help.
Deducing that she is certain to be kidnapped soon, Serpentine places a mark upon her (with his Marked Man knack). He will be able to follow her whereabouts for the next two weeks.
Margaret sets out, but Michael Sangaree is unconvinced that she will be able to provide any help to the characters. Recalling that the Blue Dragon Tong operates out of San Francisco, he suggests that the characters go there to snuff a lot of Tong guys. About the same time, Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs realizes that everyone who has touched the coins so far has died. He calls out, "Oh, Gobey! I need you to carry something for me!" Kumar Singh doesn't pay him a lick of attention.
Some of the characters have not yet recovered from the wounds they sustained in the last session, so the expedition has to be put off for a couple of days. To use up the time, Kumar Singh spends a few days on the phone calling pawnbrokers and coming up with nothing.
It is at 4:00 in the morning that Serpentine notices that Margaret Lang is in distress. He wakes the others and they pile into the car. Along the way, he tells them that she is in Chinatown. The clarion try goes out: "To Chinatown!" Jack Smith is briefly concerned that though the characters are heroes, they are in Chinatown and are massively outnumbered. Kumar Singh jogs his elbow and grins, "You haven't done this before, have you?" Michael Sangaree drives with his typical aplomb, with Serpentine hanging on the running board to provide directions.
Serpentine is able to determine that Margaret Lang is somewhere in a tenement building. The characters pull up in front of the building in a cloud of burnt rubber and a squeal of mistreated brakes. Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs muses that he should really do some work on this car to "punch it up" a bit.
The characters quickly spot Margaret Lang out on the fire escape, being menaced by two Blue Dragon Tong enforcers. Serpentine and Jack Smith clamber up the fire escape directly, while the others head up through the interior of the building. Dramatic fisticuffs ensue, with the characters generally more on the delivering than the receiving side.
Inside the building, Pulfrey-Downs rushes into the room to see a Blue Dragon Tong enforcer glaring at him. He shoots the man, then takes a Blue Dragon Death Kick in response. The room has obviously been tossed quite aggressively. A dead Chinaman is slumped in one corner. Pulfrey-Downs continues to fill the Blue Dragon Tong man with holes until he stops moving. Then a second enforcer enters from the fire escape and throws Margaret Lang into him.
Kumar Singh enters the room to find a typical scene: Pulfrey-Downs with a dead body on the floor, a hysterical woman in his arms, and a live martial artist threatening his life. The little Sikh quickly prioritizes, and decides to fix the last problem first, incapacitating the man with a few well-placed kicks.
The characters quickly find themselves with three captured enforcers. Having already learned that Blue Dragon Tong enforcers are equipped with poisonous false teeth, Michael Sangaree restrains one of them and asks, "Doctor, do you have a pair of pliers? Do you have any idea which of his teeth is poisonous?" Pulfrey-Downs examines the man, makes a spectacularly poor Medicine roll, and decides that the fellow's front tooth has to go. Sangaree wrestles with it for a while, then concludes that it's probably a real tooth, though not one that will ever bite down again. He gets it right on the second try. The extraction process works much better on the other two enforcers.
By the time Pulfrey-Downs has finished with his impromptu dentistry, Margaret Lang has calmed down enough to tell the characters that the dead Chinaman is Chen Li. She claims that she had been talking to him when the three Blue Dragons came in and killed him. Serpentine determines that Chen Li had a Blue Dragon Tattoo on him: he was one of them. Kumar Singh is quite happy, because the characters now have suspects they can deliver to the police and clear Apu's name.
Margaret Lang determines that the characters sound happy, then tells them, "Okay guys, I'm gonna go now. Bye!" The characters swiftly deduce that she has a clue that she wants to follow up. They also deduce that she doesn't want to tell them. When pressed, she explains, "It's my story, I can follow it up if I want!" Serpentine tries to figure out a way to sleep it out of her with his Appearance of 5. The other characters mock him because he normally uses his Appearance to terrify people. His attempt turns out to be moot, as it quickly develops that Margaret has enough Willpower to make her essentially immune to Serpentine's charms.
While Serpentine is off trying to seduce Margaret Lang, Kumar Singh does his best to interrogate the three captured Blue Dragons. He enhances his persuasive appeal by making sure that Pulfrey-Downs is standing in the background with his tooth-extracting pliers. He gets nothing from the first guy. He gets nothing from the second guy. And he gets nothing from the third guy. He is just a bit put out by this experience.
He is even more put out when one of the Blue Dragons manages to get free of his bonds and leap out of the window. Pulfrey-Downs lunges to catch the fellow, but comes away with nothing more than a bit of his shirt. He turns and comments, "Does anybody need a bit of shirt?" Kumar Singh just grimaces.
Serpentine watches this performance, then tells Pulfrey Downs, "The next time you're out inventing, you should come up with something that can take a dead person's brain and pump it for information." Pulfrey-Downs responds, "That's quite an interesting idea. But I'll need a supply of dead people for the experiments." Serpentine responds, "And how is this a problem for us?"
Remembering Michael Sangaree's earlier suggestions, Pulfrey-Downs suggests, "Why don't we go to San Francisco? You can kill Blue Dragons, and we can go to that great little Chinese place we went to the last time we were out there." Kumar Singh, still bitter from the loss of the prisoner, asks, "The restaurant, or the opium den?" A flash of recollection strikes pulfrey-Downs: "Oh yes, the restaurant! That would be the place where we lost Sammy Li to the Small Fleshy Fragment Gun…" Kumar Singh sighs and shrugs.
Sangaree calls up the Detective to let him know that the characters have captured some Blue Dragons, and that they're the guys who really killed Sir Richard Whitley Fentenman. He goes through a long and involved explanation of how a series of dead guys were involved in this whole plot that revolved around a handful of old gold coins. O'Reily doesn't seem to buy the story, but he does have retain respect for the characters' ability to inflict staggering violence. He agrees to let Apu go and take the Chinamen instead. Serpentine urges Pulfrey-Downs to bribe the cop, even though the cop is already doing what the characters want him to. Kumar Singh indicates that this would be a bad idea. Pulfrey-Downs follows Kumar Singh's recommendation.
Serpentine approaches Margaret Lang and acts nice to her. She is so surprised that she tells him that Chen Li did tell her something (in English) before he died: "Maku Island!" This is, as both Pulfrey-Downs and Margaret Lang know, an obscure island near the Tsishima Straits. It is very small, barely a mile across. At one time there was a Buddhist monastery built there. Jack Smith puts in a research request on the subject with Phelina O'Rourke, a request that Pulfrey-Downs takes a personal affront.
In exchange for this information, Serpentine agrees that Margaret can come along on the characters' expedition to San Francisco and beyond. He complains that she still won't sleep with him. She joins them on the dirigible.
The characters arrive in San Francisco aboard the Flying Dutchman. Moments after touching town, Pulfrey-Downs tells Kumar Singh, "Gobey, go rent us a car. Here are some banknotes." Kumar Singh, who hadn't been paying attention, asks him, "Why were you handing me money?" Michael Sangaree chimes in, "I think he wanted you to get a car." Kumar Singh heads out to rent a cheesy sedan.
The characters embark on a trip to Chinatown, with Pulfrey-Downs playing the role of an eccentric collector of rare coins. His plan is to tell every Chinese coin dealer in sight, "I need a hundred of these as party favors for my guests," with one of the old Russian coins in hand. He and Kumar Singh drive along in their big sedan. Sangaree simply buys himself another sedan to follow them. Jack Smith rents a rickshaw. Serpentine is just omnipresent. Ain't Cipher grand.
The characters run into problems immediately. At the first coin shop, the proprietor is only barely willing to even acknowledge their existence. He shakes his head at them and spits out, "We closed. No coins. All sold. We closed. You go. Go now." Pulfrey-Downs leaves with Kumar Singh in tow, heading for the next coin shop. Kumar Singh asks his boss, "Do you think that accent was real?" Pulfrey-Downs answers, "Yes, he reminded me of Buddy Chang. You know, the one who ate one too many puffer fish." Kumar Singh shivers and responds, "Isn't one too many?"
Unfortunately, they get the same response at the second coin shop. Kumar Singh starts to speculate that some Tong member might have gone around and intimidated all the local coin shop owners. Pulfrey-Downs comments, "That seems so unlikely. I think the odds of that are the same as the odds that this briefcase I'm carrying is actually a firearm! <ka-chk>."
It is at this point that some of the other characters notice that the local Chinese people are shunning all of the Westerners, not just Pulfrey-Downs and Kumar Singh. It is clear that something is up. Michael Sangaree offers, "Here's what I think. There's a French criminal mastermind running Chinatown, and his standard orders include being rude to Americans. There you go." The other characters don't necessarily buy this theory, but they do agree that it fits the available facts surprisingly well.
Serpentine tries getting information from one shopkeeper, an old apothecary, by locking him into a staredown and breaking his will. He crushes the man's psyche like a bug, then demands, "Who told you not to talk to us?" The old fellow stammers out, "Blue Dragon Tong! They say we not talk to Americans or bad things happen!" Serpentine shoplifts a dose of endangered Rhino horn then leaves the shop.
The characters engage in a bit of Dramatic Editing to place an open-air café with dead pigs, ducks and chickens in the window on the other side of the street from the coin shop. The place isn't busy, so there are lots of empty tables available for the characters to sit at. Serpentine sits next to Margaret Lang and tries to slip her his stolen Rhino horn, unaware that he's supposed to be the one consuming it. She spots him right away, making him feel like even more of a simp than before.
The characters have all sorts of trouble getting the staff to serve them, but find that threats and glowering stares eventually work. They sample several local delicacies, including boiled pastries containing stewed rat and other, less-recognizable things. Kumar Singh sticks with green vegetables. The characters sit there for quite a while.
The characters send Serpentine off to find some opium dens. He looks around, then tells them that there's one in the kitchen of the café. He tells the others, "You realize that there's opium smoke coming out of the chimney over there…" He goes to the kitchen, then comes back with some fried rice and some opium for Pulfrey-Downs. As an added bonus, he tells Pulfrey-Downs, "Oh, and there are also some underage hookers down there." Pulfrey-Downs acts sophisticated and replies, "Ah, so you'll have something to do while you wait, Gobey." The characters stay at the restaurant until after nightfall, ignoring the restaurateur's efforts to persuade the characters to leave. He ends up practically in tears by the time they do.
While the characters cool their heels at the café, Margaret Lang goes off to do useful things. She returns after a couple of hours to tell the characters that the cops s out that the tongs have been really quiet recently. They're not collecting protection money. They're not even letting Westerners into opium dens. This has been going on for a couple of days. Michael Sangaree is incredulous, "We haven't killed that many, have we?"
Determined to show up Margaret and prove that they can do their own investigations if they have to, the characters head to the morgue to look for Chinamen who have come up dead in the last couple of days. They find three: one was a longshoreman who had a crate fall on him, one was found dead in an alley, and one died of pneumonia. By the end of the visit, Michael Sangaree is forced to tell Pulfrey-Downs, "Doc, I don't think you're supposed to cut them open like that. I think that's for the coroner to do. You know, that guy who's weeping in the corner."
Having learned nothing useful at the morgue, the characters head down to the harbor. They look for ships that came into port in the last couple of days, particularly ships from Singapore or Hong Kong. They find a couple that match this profile. Arthur Michael Vincent Pulfrey-Downs cheerily tells Kumar Singh, "Gobey! Why don't you go onto those two ships and get a passenger manifest from them! And please try to avoid being keel-hauled like Sparks McHenry did out in the Moluccas!"
The first Captain is none too interested in helping, even when Kumar Singh explains that this information might be very helpful in solving the murders of several (well, two) Englishmen. He claims that his ship is a cargo ship, and isn't carrying any unusual cargoes or any passengers. The second one calls his crew and tries to have Kumar Singh physically removed from the ship.
The characters decide that the second captain's behavior is very suspicious. They send Serpentine to sneak on board. He prowls around the ship. He finds out that the ship owner is smuggling and doing other moderately illegal things, but has nothing at all to do with the Blue Dragons.
On his way off the ship, Serpentine runs into the famed San Francisco vigilante The Feathered Boa, who complains that Serpentine is muscling in on his turf.
The characters are finally forced to admit that they are none too likely to find any more useful information on this side of the Pacific. They load up the Flying Dutchman with fuel and supplies for the trip to Maku Island. Serpentine urges Pulfrey-Downs to equip the dirigible with huge dredge nets, the better to fight crime and haul up waterborne Blue Dragon Tong members. Pulfrey-Downs decides that he would rather not do this.
Michael Sangaree takes the helm, scribbles some notes on his charts, and takes off on a journey to the Land of the Rising Sun.
The curtain closes with the characters floating over the Pacific, heading towards Maku Island. Each character gains three experience points.