It's early winter of the year 627.
One of Mick's old friends asks the RIS to provide some security for a business transaction.
In his office, Mick has been tinkering with his superheterodyne radio. He has messed it up so that it is generating a high pitched wail when he gets near it. He has a chess problem set up on his board
A scientist, Amster Reeves, ScD, a friend of Mick, is meeting with potential buyers for an invention at The Aerodyne Club. He is worried that people have been trying to steal his invention, which Mick thinks is possible, if not terribly likely. Reeves also likes to compose chess problems and trolled the local chess problem community with an upside down board. ("You bastard, it was upside down! The c pawn can't capture the knight because it'd be moving backwards! You clever bastard, Reeves!")
Reeves' house is art nouveau and run down. ("The sort of swirly organic forms in wrought iron and stained glass that was all the rage with Money before the war.")
The invention is the equivalent of the Williams Tube, a computer memory. It has a box with tube and electronics, and a panel with switches and buttons, and some neon lights.
It would be explained, if asked, in terms of a "cathode-ray oscillograph."
They need to escort Dr. Reeves from his home near the campus of Dandulena Royal University to the Aerodyne club. Party should go home to change and meet him there at 1800.
Reeves is an absentminded professor type. His house is full of electronics experiments and he has a full case of vacuum tubes in a delivery crate. He is from overseas, from one of victorious the Southern Alliance Nations, Meridional Calidoria, which broke off from the Greater Calidorian State just prior to the war. GCS fought on the side of the Combine. Reeves lost his family except for his son, who is away at boarding school now.
The Combine was fighting the Alliance over mercantilism in the colonies. "Four brothers and a cousin died to fight for free trade and self determination, supposedly."
Reeves has mild socialist sympathies and a bust of Transmontane physicist Lubsang in a socialist-realist style. He is a gerbil, about forty years old.
The Aerodyne club has vertical lucite columns providing light; the incandescent lights are shining down through them. It overlooks an airfield.
Ignatia Camberline, the famous aircraft designer whose family owns the building RIS rents space in, formerly their headquarters, is also at the club. She is a mongoose. She is there with her test pilot, Yino Tera, a flying fox, to celebrate the breaking of a speed record earlier in the day. The media are there to cover it. "Iggy" is also part of Garnet's "Book Club." She is wearing a black satin evening dress with triangular silver decorations that match her earrings. She is also a confirmed occultist and wears an ouroboros broach.
The people who are maybe buying the invention, Mr. (John Henry) Finkley (capitalist), Dr. (Increase) Feckman (entrepenuerial mathemetician), and Dr. (Shimon) Gluck (physicist/ engineer), engineers - businessmice investors and the principle shareholders of the Opal Electronic Tabulator Company.
Spying for the Transmontane Alliance, disguised as a waiter, a dwarf hamster Cordelia Boole. However, she is not there to steal the invention - which the TMP have already experimented with at Reeves' invitation and found to be too finicky - she is rather also here to protect Reeves from:
Walter Bouiller, fennec fox, a commercial spy who Boole thinks wants to steal the invention, but who is actually here to assassinate Reeves and Gluck in one go to benefit the Société Informatique Delacroix, a rival from the North, who fear that the expensive selectron-like memory tube they are working on will be outcompeted by this technology based on off-the-shelf CRTs.