>>5693787You heave the bulky hollow metal torus and sphere container before Thelemy - it clangs against wood and rattles the spinning zoetropes, lanterns and kinematographs arrayed upon his stall.
>>5686360Thelemy Maskelyne peruses the battered shell with deep curiosity - he actually bends down to smell and inhale its scent, his aquiline and moustachioed nose twitching with analytical interest - as he exclaims:
- Why, wherever did you find this! What a peculiar apparatus! It almost looks as if it were the wreckage of some frightful battlefield, before the Old Armistice! I think you are right when you say it is perhaps a gas container of some sort. Perhaps... Perhaps it is a marvellous flying machine! Though it is rather heavy and cumbersome, hmmm. Really, these savage relics and accoutrements of warfare are more of Ezsekael Tranter's specialty. Oh, Madame Blackwood advised you to visit him?! To use her name as a commendation?? (Thelemy suppresses a spasm of raucous laughter) Aha, ha! Why he would have shot you, that very instant! What a very naughty trick for Madame Blackwood to cast upon you! Tranter hates the old hag! In fact, I do believe he despises any practitioner of the Art, of any persuasion. Myself excepted, of course, I am always delightful. His daughter, she... she was once enthralled by... anyway, Tranter - He... he is a peculiar one. I do suspect some tragedy haunts him. But these days he has his hands full, with the Syndicalist riots and the Grueller Gang fighting and knifing each other in his own backyard. I think he wants to shoot the whole lot of them. But they have learnt to stay away from his territory. Oh, and Tranter is terribly bigoted. Intolerably so. Hates all the foreigners. And he believes some very peculiar things. For instance, I have heard that he rants against the Hecatomb - he claims it never even happened. That we actually lost the war against the Great Powers, and that the strange obelisk is not a war monument at all, but some sort of ward, watching over us! Ah, Tranter. Mark him well: he is what becomes of a man who loves guns more than he does women -
