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imjustthemechanic · 6 years ago

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Natalie Jones and the Golden Ship

Part 1/? - A Meeting at the Palace Part 2/? - Curry Talk Part 3/? - Princess Sitamun Part 4/? - Not At Rest Part 5/? - Dead Men Tell no Tales Part 6/? - Sitamun Rises Again Part 7/? - The Curse of Madame Desrosiers Part 8/? - Sabotage at Guedelon Part 9/? - A Miracle Part 10/? - Desrosiers’ Elixir Part 11/? - Athens in October Part 12/? - The Man in Black Part 13/? - Mr. Neustadt Part 14/? - The Other Side of the Story Part 15/? - A Favour Part 16/? - A Knock on the Window Part 17/? - Sir Stephen and Buckeye Part 18/? - Books of Alchemy Part 19/? - The Answers Part 20/? - A Gift Left Behind Part 21/? - Santorini Part 22/? - What the Doves Found Part 23/? - A Thief in the Night Part 24/? - Healing Part 25/? - Newton’s Code Part 26/? - Montenegro Part 27/? - The Lost Relic Part 28/? - The Homunculinus Part 29/? - The End is Near Part 30/? - The Face of Evil Part 31/? - The Morning After Part 32/? - Next Stop Part 33/? - A Sighting in Messina Part 34/? - Taormina Part 35/? - Burning Part 36/? - Recovery Part 37/? - Pilgrimage to Vesuvius Part 38/? - The Scent of Hell Part 39/? - She’ll be Coming Down the Mountain Part 40/? - Stowaways Part 41/? - Bon Voyage Part 42/? - Turnabout Part 43/? - The Apple Part 44/? - Vesuvius Wakes Part 45/? - Fire At Sea Part 46/? - The Real Jim Part 47/? - Return to Naples Part 48/? - La Mela

Okay, back to the plot. At last, the Philosopher’s Stone!

The pigeons flew off in a chorus of squeaky fluttering feathers that was almost loud enough, with so many of them, to count as a thunder. They swirled over the city like a slow-motion tornado of birds, and then, slowly at first but soon by the hundreds, they all flew to land on and around a particular building on the outskirts of the city.

“I feel like I should be doing some evil laughter,” said Sam. “Declaring myself the Pigeon Master or something.”

“Or you could be the Pigeon Man from Hey Arnold,” Nat told him.

“Who’s that?” asked Sam.

“It’s not a compliment,” she promised.

The pigeons had taken the direct route but the humans, of course, didn’t have that option. They had to pile into two abandoned vehicles and find their way through the winding streets, now all but empty as the Neapolitans had fled the volcano. They found the flock of pigeons perched all over a little palazzo that had once been the home of a wealthy family, but was now home to the Coral Palace, a museum and workshop of coral jewelry and shell cameos.

The Palazzo would have been quite a pretty building if it hadn’t been entirely covered with pigeons. Instead, it made for a very strange sight indeed. From a distance it looked almost as if the entire building and the empty car park outside were covered in a fluffy gray snow, with the close presence of the volcano suggesting ash, but as they got closer they began to see the birds moving. There must have been thousands of them. Iridescent heads popped up out of the mass, looked around, and then vanished again.

“That is probably about the creepiest thing I ever saw,” Sharon decided.

They pulled into the car park. As they did, the birds moved out of the way ahead of them as if they were the Red Sea parting for Moses. Sam brought the lead vehicle to a halt, then rolled down the window and leaned out.

“We made it!” he announced. “You guys can go!”

The pigeons all took off at once, and for a moment nothing was visible except for thousand upon thousand of smoky gray feathers passing by. Then they were gone, leaving behind a three-storey building with a pink and white columned façade. Above the colonnade were the words Manifattura Corallo. Everything, from the roof to the decorative architecture to the pavement in the car park, was coated with evidence of the pigeons.

“Nice,” said Nat, not bothering to hide a snicker. She was imagining the faces of the Palazzo employees when they returned and found this.

“I’ll tell them to hold it next time,” Sam said.

They got out of the vehicles, and tried not to think about why it was slippery underfoot as they climbed the steps to the porch, where there was a row of windows. Nat rubbed a place clean and peeked in – all the merchandise in the cameo factory showroom appeared to have been taken away, leaving empty glass-topped tables in a grand columned room with gray stone floors and peach-coloured walls. There was nobody there.

This was a public building, Natasha thought. How could anybody work here unseen? Unless there was something else… something hidden.

They made their way around the back, and there they found a door with a Solo Dipendenti sign on it. It was propped open, and beyond it was a hallway that joined the loading dock that took deliveries. In the other direction was an employee washroom and a blank wall.

The latter showed a deep, flaking crack in the whitewash. Nat got her fingers into it and pried it open. Sure enough, there was a secret door there… one that had been forgotten long enough to be plastered over, but which had been recently opened. She turned on a flashlight and found the door opened on a flight of steps. When she turned the light off again, she could just barely see a blue light shining around the corner at the bottom.

They started down.

The wall on their left, as they descended cautiously into the dark, was smooth. The one on the right was rougher, and when Nat shone the light on it, she saw markings where decorative architectural features, half-columns and rosettes, had once been attached. This had once been the front of a building, before the new palazzo was built on top of it facing the other way. In one spot, there were even some letters.

She traced them with her fingers – La Mela, they said. The Apple. That must be the original name of the villa. Nat was betting she knew who had built it.

At the bottom of the steps they turned right, and found themselves in a tiny little room, almost a dungeon. The walls were stone blocks – not modern cinder blocks but actual cut lumps of limestone – and the floor was big stone slabs. In the middle of this was a huge bubbling cauldron, overflowing with what Natasha would have taken for dry ice smoke if it hadn’t been softly purple-blue. Inside the cauldron itself was the source of the purple-blue light, which was not exactly bright, but it was difficult to look at, as if it would give a person a migraine if they let their eyes linger on it too long.

The cauldron itself was made of gold, glinting by the glow of Nat’s flashlight. It stood on three legs, and between each a pipe, also made of gold, emerged from its belly. Nat followed these across the floor into a corner, and then stopped. There was a big crack in the floor there, as if an earthquake had broken it open, easily big enough for a person to climb into. The golden pipes fed into that.

A ladder was also propped within the crack. There didn’t seem to be any question where Newton had gone.

Natasha gripped the flashlight in her teeth and started climbing down. When she put her weight on the rungs of the ladder, she felt them sag under her weight. The ladder, too, was made of gold.

At the bottom of the ladder, twenty or thirty feet down, Nat found herself in a rough tunnel about six feet in diameter, with an arched roof and a flat bottom. A lava tube. Behind the ladder, it came to an end where a big boulder was blocking it. In the other direction, it continued on at a slight upward slope. The golden pipes continued off in that direction. They should have been opaque, but they were glowing softly, in the same uncomfortable shade of purple.

“Do you still have your sunscreen, Sam?” asked Sharon.

“No,” he replied. “I didn’t think I’d need it after sunset in the middle of the night.”

“If we’re all burned tomorrow we’ll blame your lack of foresight,” Nat told him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I know this isn’t the time,” Jim observed, “but I gotta say, I enjoy the part where you guys are all giving each other shit as you’re saving the world. It makes me feel like I’m in action movie.”

“Keep feeling it,” Nat advised him. “In the movies the good guys always win.”

“You don’t think we’re gonna win?” Jim asked, honestly surprised.

“I’m definitely planning on winning, but it’s not a given,” Nat said.

They started following the pipes uphill. The floor of the tunnel was crushed rock and sharp sand that would have been unpleasant to walk on had Nat still been in high heels, but much worse in just pantyhose. At first, it just looked like stone, but as they continued up the slope, she began to catch glimpses of things glittering in it. Eventually she stopped and reached down to pick up one of the stones. It was no different in shape or texture from the others around it, but it was very, very heavy.

“It’s gold,” Desrosiers said.

Nat tossed the nugget away again. “He said he didn’t want to make gold,” she said.

“The cauldron and the pipes must be gold, because it is chemically inert,” Desrosiers explained. “Because the Philosopher’s Stone is in contact with this equipment, as long as it has no other template…”

“… the reactor will make gold,” Nat finished for her. That must be how alchemy had come o be so closely associated with precious metals.

They kept going. The tunnel snaked back and forth a little, it got narrower and wider, but it was definitely going east and uphill. The further they went the more gold they found, until the stones under their feet were clinking instead of crunching, and people’s shoes began getting heavy. Nat wondered if it were dangerous for them to be exposed to this. Would their very bodies begin to transmute if they stayed in here too long?

They couldn’t turn back though, not now – they were here to save the world, after all. After narrowing until they almost had to crawl, taking great care not to touch the glowing pipes, it widened out again and joined a larger channel. The air was starting to get warm, and Natasha reached to wipe sweat from her brow. It glinted golden as it dripped into the dirt at her feet, and she wondered if that were just a trick of the light. In here, maybe she was literally sweating gold.

Finally, after what felt like hours walking in the increasing heat, the dust and the painful glow of the pipes, the tube opened out into a huge chamber. Steam was rising from the ground all around them, mixing with the purplish fog and rising up to where the rocks arched above them, forming a space the size of a cathedral nave. There might have been a couple of holes in the top to let it all escape, but Natasha couldn’t tell, because there was a huge thing hanging in the middle of the cavern. A network of the golden pipes, arranged in hexagons and pentagons like a geodesic dome, surrounded it and fed the purple smoke into it, and in the middle was…

It was difficult to describe. It looked like a huge round crystal, twenty-five feet in diameter, glittering with millions of tiny facets. Inside that was a thing she could only have compared to photographs she’d seen in National Geographic, of the surface of the sun as seen through a special filter. It was glowing dull purple, and seemed to be made of millions of tiny, squirming grains that appeared and disappeared and occasionally erupted, spewing little geysers of purple steam. Where these touched the walls, the rocks turned from dark basalt to glossy yellow. Gold.

“Well, hello!” said a voice.

They all turned. Walking towards them from underneath the hovering monstrosity was Newton.

He was still wearing a t-shirt and frayed denim shorts, crocs and that beat-up green hat. It didn’t look much like an outfit to make the philosopher’s stone in, and when Natasha compared it in her head to the image of the man in the wig and frock coat in the famous portrait by Kneller, she almost wanted to laugh. She thought better of it when she remembered that she and her companions were all still dressed in their evening clothes, which was if anything even more ridiculous.

“You people are remarkably persistent,” Newton observed.

“We know,” said Natasha.

“We make a habit of it,” Sir Stephen agreed.

“Well, as you can see, you’re too late,” he told them. “I have the Stone now, and I intend to use it. ‘Nelle,” he added with a smile at her, “your advice was invaluable. I need to use it before I can let it blow, obviously.”

Desrosiers nodded, her face calm but her fists clenched. She caught Nat’s eye, then looked at Newton again. “Since we’re all about to die anyway, perhaps we could give the Committee a demonstration of its powers,” she said.

#fanfic #natasha romanov #steve rogers #sam wilson #clint barton #sharon carter #bucky barnes

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newsintodays-blog · 6 years ago

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Malaysia says no to foreign homeowners in Forest City project

New Post has been published on http://newsintoday.info/2018/08/27/malaysia-says-no-to-foreign-homeowners-in-forest-city-project/

Malaysia says no to foreign homeowners in Forest City project

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Monday he wanted to prevent foreigners from buying residential units in the $100 billion Forest City project, a setback for the Chinese developer as it tries to revive faltering demand for the site.

FILE PHOTO: A view of construction next to villa unit showrooms at the Country Gardens’ Forest City project in Johor Bahru, Malaysia February 21, 2017. REUTERS/Edgar Su/File Photo

The project by developer Country Garden Holdings Co Ltd to build a city for 700,000 people in the state of Johor bordering Singapore has faced uncertainty since Mahathir’s coalition won a shock victory at a May general election.

“One thing is certain, that city that is going to be built cannot be sold to foreigners,” Mahathir told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, the capital.

“We are not going to give visas for people to come and live here,” he added. “Our objection is because it was built for foreigners, not built for Malaysians. Most Malaysians are unable to buy those flats.”

Chinese buyers account for about two-thirds of the owners of Forest City units sold so far, with 20 percent from Malaysia and the rest from 22 other countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam and South Korea.

Country Garden Pacificview Sdn Bhd, a joint venture between Country Garden and the Johor state government to develop Forest City, said it has complied with all necessary regulations in developing the project.

It said Mahathir’s statement “may have been taken out of context” and his comments did not correspond with the content of a meeting two weeks ago between the prime minister and Country Garden’s chairman, Yeung Kwok Keung.

FILE PHOTO: Prospective buyers look at a model of the development at the Country Gardens’ Forest City showroom in Johor Bahru, Malaysia February 21, 2017. REUTERS/Edgar Su/File Photo

“During the meeting, Tun Mahathir reiterated that he welcomes foreign investment which could create employment opportunities, promote technology transfer and innovations that could benefit Malaysia’s economic growth and job creation,” the company said in a statement.

Shares in Hong Kong-listed Country Garden, which rose as much as 3.9 percent on Monday morning, trimmed their gains to 2.5 percent after Mahathir’s comments.

Mahathir had been a staunch critic of Forest City and other infrastructure mega-projects backed by Chinese money, accusing his predecessor and former protege, Najib Razak, of selling the country to China.

Mahathir tapped into public displeasure over a perceived over-dependence on Chinese capital, saying that it was Najib’s way of covering up for shortfalls caused by his administration’s fiscal mismanagement and corruption, especially at scandal-tainted 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

Malaysians living in Johor have complained of large numbers of Chinese people snapping up properties in Forest City, besides concerns of environmental damage, a glut in the property market, and the impact of land reclamation on fisheries.

Prior to the general election, Chinese demand for Forest City apartments had already slowed down over the past couple of years as Beijing moved to stem capital outflows.

Mahathir’s latest comments are not expected to put a dent in Country Garden’s overall financial performance, said DBS analyst Carol Wu.

“The impact won’t be significant as year to date it only accounts for 0.5 percent of its sales. This could be easily made up by sales in other region,” Wu said.

Reporting by Joseph Sipalan in KUALA LUMPUR and Clare Jim in HONG KONG; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Darren Schuettler

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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