RinthCon Day 5 - Anisha

“Godamnit, Anisha. It’s just like you to fall into a wormhole properly dressed out. I got snatched in my pajamas.”

Anisha tried to fix him with a gaze of frozen hatred, but she couldn’t resist a small smile. He looked like the stage director from a burlesque show. Clover’s steampunk costume fit him too small all over, especially the shoulders and chest. The fabric was cheap and glossy. Threads of satin lining poked through in various places. A gray knapsack was slung over his shoulder.

“What do you mean, snatched?” she asked, and then realized that both Glen and Clover were standing behind her, their eyes bulged and swiveling back and forth between her and the Lupin imposter. The orange cords had slipped off Clover’s wrists.

Major Remand addressed all three of them. “Fell into a wormhole, whatever. Time travel or alternate worlds or something. It’s not 1895 here. It’s 2323. A lunatic named Ahbet explained the whole debacle to me.”

“How long have you been here–in 2323?” Anisha asked.

“Almost a week, unfortunately. They hadn’t even set up the con until a few days ago. I’d been wandering around this accursed hotel looking like an asylum inmate until I had the good luck of meeting Mademoiselle Clover here.” She glowered at him, but he winked at her with a radiant grin.

“According to Ed, a whole host of individuals have wormholed here, so to speak, out of the distant past.”

“Did this Ed explain who’s been robbing the Exhibitor Hall?” Glen stepped up. His voice grated with malice. He tipped his tinted glasses further up his pate, as if preparing for a fight.

Anisha held out her palm, blocking him. Assuming Remand had a modicum of flexibility in that awful suit, she doubted that Glen would survive the match.

“My reticule was stolen,” she said as an explanation to Remand. Of course, he would already know that, if he had tied up Clover to manipulate the gaslights. She didn’t trust Glen to get her pocketwatch back as he’d promised.

But wait. A realization, cold as steel, drove into Anisha’s stomach. She turned on her heel to face Remand and said, “Why were you making her turn the lights on and off?”

“For the past week, this Lupin character has been terrorizing the whole–con.” He said it with a slick English n, contorting his mouth as if biting a banana. “He stole a wedding ring off one of the organizers and swiped a signed illustration, which was worth thousands. Every time, he planted a note: Lupin will return, or some piece of rubbish like that. I hate it when criminals try to act original. There’s no such thing as an original criminal. Which led me to use the lights.”

Anisha had forgotten how verbose Remand could be when he was feeling good about himself. She crossed her arms.

He went on, “Every criminal steals when the sun sets. Even Lupin. This place doesn’t have a sun, however, just these infernal electric bulbs. In order to draw the gent out, I had to manufacture the cover of darkness.”

By kidnapping a girl. Anisha clenched her teeth. Remand would never change. He possessed the casual cruelty of a family cat, sometimes feral, sometimes tame.

“You must have been very bored indeed here in 2323,” she said. “I, for one, would like to go back to the bazaar and search for my reticule.”

Clover refused to accompany them. She said she hadn’t come all the way to RinthCon to be seen in the halls wearing saggy pajama pants. Under Anisha’s urging, Remand sullenly passed Clover the key to Mac Guffin’s electrical office.

As the three walked back to what Remand called the Merch Hall, Anisha slid next to Glen and gave him a wide smile. “Being new to this century,” she said, “I’m quite curious what this YouTube is which you keep mentioning.”

Glen’s explanation, which was strong in enthusiasm and weak in clarity, seemed to imply that YouTube was a series of photographs strung along a canister, which spun to music accompaniment from a phonograph. By some means or other, Glen had used this invention to learn lockpicking, hand-to-hand combat, disguise makeup, and the German language.

Anisha thought, “Probably learned a bit about the Saturn Topaz too.”

In the bazaar, she strode behind the table at Glen’s stall. The table was covered with a black tablecloth which hung to the floor. She flung it up so that it draped across his wares and jerked out a few bins onto the floor of the stall. They were overfull, and small pasteboard boxes tumbled out. Anisha opened one, shook shredded packing paper out of it, and opened another.

“What are you doing?” Glen snapped.

“Lupin is clever enough,” Anisha said, tossing the discarded boxes behind her. “But you were wrong. He can’t resist petty cash. Ah, here it is!”

She shook out the next box. Rectangular bills, pale green like faded leaves, floated through the air. Major Remand started to laugh, but he clamped a hand around Glen’s upper arm.

“You promised me you would find my pocketwatch,” Anisha said. “But I never told you what was in my reticule. You had no way of knowing what I was missing. Unless you stole it yourself.”

Glen’s face was pale. “This is a setup. I just read what was in your purse. You wrote down your missing items on Rivers’ form.”

“In fact, I did not. Where is it?”

“I don’t know! It was Lupin. He was–was really here,” Glen burst out, squirming now in Remand’s grasp, but unable to break free. “I think he worm-holed out of the 1800s, just like you. Lupin was really here.”

Anisha ignored him and kept shaking out boxes. There. The gleam of her beaded reticule. She unlatched it and spied her pillbox, gold watch, and shillings nestled in the satin lining.

Glen kept babbling, “He was going to find it, you know. The Saturn Topaz. No one would be able to stop Lupin from getting what he wants. No one could even recognize him! He’s the man of a thousand disguises.”

“Whatever he looks like, he doesn’t look like you,” Anisha said. “You can’t learn how to be Lupin from your YouTube pictures, Glen. Just dress up like him next time. I’m sure Clover can help you.”

Remand and Anisha delivered Glen over to Mr. Rivers and an uncertain fate. Rivers was just glad to find the missing items accounted for. He still refused to log the incident as a theft.

Her reticule over her arm, Anisha strolled with Major Remand along Artist’s Alley, sipping at a bright blue drink. Crushed ice rustled against the paper cup.

“Do you think we’ll ever get back to 1895?” Anisha asked.

“I hope so,” Major Remand said. “What do you suppose that topaz is worth in francs?”

Anisha stopped so quickly that some of the noxious-looking liquid sloshed onto her blouse. She narrowed her eyes at Remand until he sighed, slid the knapsack off his shoulder, and tugged it open. Anisha rose on her tiptoes to peek inside.

The topaz tossed a yellow gleam, reflecting the electric bulbs overhead. It was the size of two fists, pressed together.

Remand made an apologetic grimace. “I told you I was stuck in this place for a week. I spent half of it working the combinations on the most complicated safe I’ve ever seen in my life. Now that’s a piece of technology I’d gladly bring back through a wormhole to 1895.”