Long one this week. But it's GREAT.
New readers may ask:
Who are you people?! Or Where did this start?
Full Color Fury!
The actress began running. Lala revved her motorcycle.
ZSS members came to Hong Kong at the behest of Shao Tong Zhang, better known as Runje Shaw, the eldest of the Shaw brothers and head of the Tianyi Film Company.
In 1934, the company opened a second studio in Hong Kong, to both expand their market and to subvert the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party’s nationalistic directives that all films must be in Mandarin, and their ban on Wuxia and martial arts films for “promoting superstition and violent anarchy”.
Runje Shaw’s latest film, Wuxia epic Blades of Vermillion, starred 20-year old Cheng Xiu as the protagonist. Runje aimed to be the first person to release a full-color feature in Asia.
His company purchased seventy five canisters of experimental “Agfacolor Neu” film stock from Germany
, but when youngest brother Run Run Shaw went to pick them up from the docks, the police were there. They opened the crate and it was filled with smuggled opium. The ZSS was told to find the film stock, and clear Run Run’s name.
This week, the ZSS was:
A returning Kabir Rupert OBE, detective Zelda Saeki, Capt. Semya Ivanova, and stuntwoman Gulia "La La" Santinella. All met Runje on set, when a strange man approached Cheng Xiu with a gun!
Lala grabbed the lighting rig and swung right into the man’s path. The captain grabbed a metal megaphone, and in commanding Cantonese, demanded that the loon drop the weapon and clear the set. Frightened, he complied immediately! Security arrested him, but when Zelda checked his gun… it was full of blanks! The whole crisis was a set up.
The man, Jack Quan, was deeply mentally ill, and said that he had a mission on behalf of the ‘Wo Shing Wo secret society of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity’, aka the local Triad. Hmm.
The mystery was murky, but with the captain’s contacts and Zelda’s investigation skill, a few things became clear. The triad had been pulling strings, and a rival studio was involved. A grateful Cheng Xiu invited the ZSS to a fancy dinner, where local big man Jian Qi Chang, also known as “Johnny Keychain”, strolled over.
But the captain and Kabir are some of the rudest, most cutting people on the planet, and interrupting their dinner plans was a big mistake.
“Johnny Keychain?” Laughed OBE Rupert. “You simply must meet my friend, Jim Wallet.”
Unlike most gangsters, Johnny was psychologically tough. But with Zelda proposing toasts and Lala prattling about Prosecco, he couldn’t keep up the witticisms. He raised his voice, and was absolutely humiliated when the waiter asked him to “dine alfresco.”
Xiu complimented the party on standing up to the guy, and gave them a lead for their investigation. There was a rival director in town named Zhang Shichuan, hoping to poach talent, and she could get them a meeting.
(As a side note, the group had already arranged a meeting with a bureaucrat from that studio… So they could sell them the local licensing rights to REVENGE OF THE BLACK PHARAOH!. They played the trailer for the studio purchaser as Captain Ivanova did all the voices in Mandarin. Despite barely liking any movie since Battleship Potemkin, Semya couldn’t resist some hard nose bargaining, and the group sold the rights.)
Cheng invited the investigators to meet the director, but it was a trap. For a moment, director Shichuan entertained the facade, before the room was flooded with Wo Shing Wo toughs. Finally, masked bodyguard Yao walked in, and gave the signal to black bag the ZSS with ether-soaked hoods.
The foursome came-to aboard a Junkers Ju 52 plane, modified with a bombing door. The party had their hands and feet bound with rope, the ends of which were strapped to a scrapped car engine. The door opened… they were high over the ocean. Yao waved goodbye, and rolled the engine out the hatch, giving the quartet an impromptu flying lesson.
As the JU 52 pulled away, another silver buzzing shadow appeared. It was an old 2-seater seaplane…piloted by Raymond “Jonsey” Jones! He had seen the group smuggled out of the meeting, followed them to the airfield… and assumed the worst. He had a trench knife and four parachutes stuffed into the rear seat. By the time he drew level with the group, they were 60 seconds from the ground.
It was a good thing that Lala was a stunt woman and not an ingénue. After Kabir cut her free, she was able to liberate the group, even “swimming” over to the plane and tossing everyone parachutes! Unfortunately, there was nowhere to land but Victoria Harbor, even if they landed at non-lethal velocities. Rupert used some of his family fortune to get the group new clothing and weaponry, while the others began the process of revenge.
[Another lucky fact: Lala has a stunt called Scalatore, representing her social-climbing ways. It gives her bonuses to suck up to or defend people who can help her movie career…which, because of the sale, was the entire party!]
Back on dry land, there were conspirators to handle. First, the foursome tracked down Xiu, finding her in a dingy flophouse. As a former ballerina, she was extremely acrobatic, dashing through the streets… But that meant little to Lala’s Matchless Silver Hawk. You can Sissonne all you want, you won’t beat a fiery redhead with a motorcycle.
When the group confronted the traitor, they found out that although she was married, she had a girlfriend…who was also Johnny Keychain’s girlfriend!
The blackmailed duo downplayed their involvement in the scheme, promising revenge on Johnny if the group could keep their secret.
Thus began a street campaign that Rupert dubbed ‘bad cop and worst cop’. He provided the Oxford wit; Ivanova cracked the whip, sometimes literally. Zelda searched people‘s homes and offices for the documents to make them flip, while Lala switched between “your only friend” and box-cutter-wielding loony. For people they couldn’t reach, they had tabloid reporter Gong “Gracie” Jie run blind items. Once they had everyone willing to flip, they put out notice to the Dragonhead of the Wo Shing Wo, and waited to meet him at an upscale watering hole.
(In their spare time, the ZSS were able to locate the film in a Wo Shing Wo warehouse, bribe the guards, and have studio stuntmen recover it. Nobody wanted to be carrying hundreds of pounds of film when a rival might drive-by with a Tommy gun!)
As brunch turned into lunch turned into late lunch, the criminal patriarch refused to show.
But Zelda noticed that the elderly waiter was perhaps a bit too talkative...when he went to clear the plates, she spread the incriminating documents on the table. With a little editing, it looked like Johnny had used Triad opium to climb the ladder, making deals with out-of-town studios and attracting too much heat. The boss man cryptically asked if they could invite Johnny out to dinner, and Ivanova suggested “a quiet place on the docks.”
That evening, the ambush was set. Kabir and the captain waited in the open. Quite a few cars pulled up. Johnny Keychain emerged, wearing a fur coat and doused in jewelry.
He asked if this was going to escalate to violence, saying “There are laws for self-defense, even in China.”
The Russian smirked. “Even in China. So you admit your nation is bad.”
He responded to the insult with a smile of his own, pointing his gun at a hostage…his turncoat girlfriend!
Wrong move.
Kabir was the best judoka in the Princely State of Hyderabad. In a blur, he reached the gangster. He bent the gun arm behind the thug's back, then combined Johnny’s face and the pavement.
A block away, the headlights of a Mack truck flashed on. Lala drove right through Johnny’s backup, sending their sedans flying.
From a nearby rooftop, Zelda opened up with a rifle. She might’ve been the most conciliatory member of the party… but her father was a General. With each report of the rifle, more Triads were sent beyond the veil of tears.
Things were going well…until Johnny’s bodyguard Yao entered the fray. A martial arts master, he was focused enough to avoid all provocation, and moved too fast for judo. Even with the numbers advantage, the group barely made headway… fighting fair, that is.
[The bastard had the ability to block people’s chi, preventing them from using fate points. This massively reduced the group’s ability to block his hits or deliver solid ones of their own.]
Of course, no strategy is unbeatable. The group just had to crack his armor.
Captain Ivanova attacked his sense of duty, grabbing the unconscious Johnny and dragging him towards the river. Zelda aimed at Yao’s feet, corralling him towards the roadway…
where Lala hit him with the truck! He slid across the pavement, surrendering, asking only to save his boss’s life.
The group, out of a mixture of respect and fear, allowed the bodyguard to save Johnny. Why?
Because they had done their homework. Everyone who had screwed them over, moved opium or stolen film, was getting a cement-and-iron apartment. The rival director, the arrogant hoodlums, the smugglers who put the deal together…
Of course, the triad would still exist, and the disloyal Cheng Xiu was forgiven instead of punished. In fact, she was still starring in a movie. But what did you expect, a Hollywood ending?
Lala:
