Mick's newspaper: "Belated Peace Treaty Ratified / Symbolic Act by the new Leutorian parliamentary coallition."
It's midwinter.
Jules Camberline has died. The late patriarch of the Camberline family of mongooses, natives of Simha City. Jules was an early aviation pioneer and tycoon. They are involved with the occult. How well does the occult work in RIS? Let's keep it ambiguous and a little lovecraftian.
The Camberline family was formerly, Gambhir-Lam, assimilated by Jules as a business marketing decision. Mongoose seneschals to the Red Lion Clan for thirteen generations.
Jules died of pneumonia superimposed on his chronic lung disease from smoking for years, nothing too exciting, at the age of 89. He was mentally with it up until a few weeks of his demise, and ambulated with an attendant at his arm.
Jules wife Clementine predeceased him (dying of poisoning after a failed alchemy experiment) many years ago. "Grandmother was very adventurous with her alchemy."
Jules and Clementine have two sons, the elder (Pompeius Alexander Gambhir-Lam) has been disowned. The younger is the heir, Karl Magnus Camberline MBBS (~60 years old), and he is usually off adventuring in the New World. Ignatia and her older sister Gwen run the company day-to-day (Karl Magnus is the nominal president, but trusted family friend Kurt Gallant, a rat, is the CEO and Ignatia and Gwen are on the board, with Gwen being Karl Magnus' proxy holder.)
Gwen uses a unique battery-electric wheelchair and has a heavy drape concealing her legs, assuming she has legs, or ever had legs. Although much more demure than her notorious sister, she is a highly intelligent and a shrewd, even ruthless, businessmongoose and stock trader. Gwen is about thirty-four years old. Rumor at the book club is that she's a powerful clairvoyant but she has never made an appearance there and it's uncertain how the rumor started.
Ignatia is an engineer, heavily involved with the family business by day, and was the chief designer of some of their aircraft. She was a child prodigy and graduated with a masters in engineering when she was 19. She is about twenty-six now. By night, Ignatia is also a bisexual libertine with unconventional religious views, and her social activities generate a steady stream of gossip for the tabloids.
Example: Ig: Well, you can't believe everything you read in the papers. Especially the tabloids. The [Obsidian] Sun said that I ate the head of a cobra at my twenty-fifth birthday party. Very misleading. I ate the whole thing. Cooked, not raw. And I was wearing clothes at the time. (Upandina Naagayah, old mongoose tradition...)
Iggy will drive the party herself, but in the heavy snow gets into a fender-bender with local which disables both vehicles. The local (a coal truck driver) will run off in terror when he sees the car he has hit. Iggy's car is a large, streamlined black automobile.
Karl's wife, and the mother to Gwen and Ignatia, is Amita Camberline (~60 years old), nee Niti. Formerly Jules secretary, and then test pilot, finally chief test pilot, she married his son [....] (Karl Magnus is off adventuring for, among other things, a [....]
Amita is kept in a positive pressure room (< 1kPa, so < 350 N pushing out on a window). The room has unusually large "heating" registers on the floor which lead to a pump room in the basement where a huge air pump like for a pipe organ, driven by an electric motor, pressurizes, and there is a battery of oxygen tanks to increase the oxygen level. The room is kept warm and humid for Amita's comfort, and always smells of phenol from the antisepsis procedures. There is a canopy bed in the room, with curtains concealing Amita, It is dark inside and bright outside, so she can see through silk screens but she can't be seen.
Amita has a very quiet and hoarse voice due to [....], but speaks with the aid of an amplifier with a loudspeaker positioned at the side of her bed.
Of course, she shouldn't actually be seen, but if she is, the reason for the unusual environment is [....]
The floor of the room is scrupulously clean marble. An attendant with a mop will mop wherever anyone from outside walks with phenol solution.
---
Anyway, Jules' will was to be mummified and put in the family crypt alongside his beloved Clementine. Agents of Pompeius Alexander Gambhir-Lam took the body from the crypt, where it was being embalmed (a lengthy process). The Camberlines are pretty sure that Pompeius is behind the corpse-napping though they are not absolutely sure. The matter is complicated by the fact that, under Simhalan law, a corpse cannot be property, and therefore corpses cannot, in the eyes of the law, be stolen. So the RIS is hired to get it back, presumably by some stratagem since they can't officially ask that RIS trespass or break and enter against Pompeius to recover the corpse directly. (Amita will suggest that that it's not illegal if you don't get caught, and in point of fact Pompeius' agents trespassed and broke into the family crypt to take his father's body in the first place.)
Pompeius Gambeer Lam (the black sheep of the family, or perhaps the white sheep) is a government official (comptroller of banks) and lives in a art deco townhouse in Catawba Heights with his wife Willie, who is a hamster, and no children. The body of Jules is to be buried at a small private orthodox service attended by Pompeius, a few distant relatives he knows, and Willie. It is currently stashed in the basement of Pompeius' house awaiting the service tomorrow.
Description of the estate:
House: Motto: SERPENTIUM VASATORES. The crest displays a slain snake-monster at the feet of a nude mongoose hero with a bloody sword and a motto on the old language.
It's a large, eclectic mansion, mostly of stone with some brick, very old traditional architecture at its roots with interior courtyards. It is not far from the royal palace museum. Most of the grounds are now a park and open to the public, leased to the city for 100 years for this purpose before Jules' wild financial success made such things unnecessary.
They call it "the [old] courtyard house" to distinguish it from their modern townhouse and their country house in the Yew Valley.
Interior: Opens into a surprisingly restrained foyer, with a marble floor and a decorative theme of bronze statues of mongooses, in a state of nature - red in tooth and claw. Then a three-storey courtyard, currently battened down for the winter and collecting snow.
Amita's chamber: You enter a large room, very white, and intensely brightly lit by bulbs overhead, which look bigger than ordinary electric lamps and seem to have almost a sunlight-like color. The room is bare except for a few modern stainless-steel chairs and wheeled cabinets, and its most outstanding feature: a large canopy bed, with black drapes hanging from the ceiling. There is something that looks like a radio with a loudspeaker next to the bed. Two rats in all-white outfits with labcoats and latex gloves up to their elbows are already in the room, standing near the one small window, but they don't speak as you enter, standing at attention.
Butler: The detectives, sahiba.
A whispery and hoarse, but quite loud, voice comes, not from the bed and whatever person it might conceal, but from the radio-like machine. "You're mister Belka's detectives, then? Very good."
Lamps are metal halide lamps. Attendants wear sunglasses and white labcoats.
Family crypt: Motto MORTEM EXPECTO MORI "Mortem expecto mori."
It is marble with a colonnade, behind the mansion. There is an embalming room with is tiled etc. Clementine and a child who died young are interred here, but there are many more spaces. They are already marked with the names of the intended occupants. The one for Amita is strangely large.
Plural of mongoose: munkuskal, munkus. (Tamil.) (mamgus, sinhalese)
If exposed, Ghambir-Lam will resign from his government position and a future newspaper headline will be "Banking secrecy reforms back on the table, CNP spokesman says."
Gwen's office
New Camberline building is a white art deco obelisk downtown, with the lobby (and the exterior cladding of the ground floor) done in Spider Marble.
Gwen's office in the pyramidion is decorated with tropical plants and animals, including an albino raven, Pamola, and a palm cockatoo, Stentor. She has some of those metal halide lamps seen in Mother's room for her plants, and the humidity might remind you of it too.
There is a water feature in the lobby, with a statue of Jules and his first production air-mail plane, the JC-3, noted for completing "the first nonstop flight from the Obsidian Penninsula to the Coiné Union (Simha City-New Humberside). So as not to cause humidity, the water feature is brine.