The Poison Pearl

An adventure for Calcutta PCs, working for the Great Detective Chatterjee.

The port of Chittagong.

Ghats along the Karnaphuli River. Chinese junks. Arab dhows. British steamers.

Brightly painted houseboats of the Bengal river gypsies, who live by catching snakes for medicine, and perform eye surgeries using broken glass. Curious monkeys reach into their baskets full of cobras and get a cruel surprise.

Villas of the firingis - descendants of the old Portuguese traders.

Jute and tea godowns. Market boats loaded with fruit. Unemployed lascars. Two-story paddle ferries riding low in the water - crowds of women in saris elbowing each other. The usual assortment of snake charmers, magicians, holy men.

Salim al-Maashani, a wealthy Omani merchant, active in the pearl trade, has disappeared.

Last seen in his jeweller’s office. Scrutinising a strange green pearl that he bought from a Chinese trader, who claimed to have bought it from a sea gypsy in the Mergui Archipelago, off the Burmese coast.

His wife Nadia is frantic. Has turned to you for help.

Salim is now a shoggoth.

Blob of living, hungry ooze. Faint memories of what it used to be. Skull floats inside the mass of translucent, black-green protoplasm. Plus a few spare bones.

Lives among the bales in a cavernous tea warehouse.

Ventures out at night to catch gypsies and sailors. Four people have gone missing in only the last week. The police barely care. Foremen blames all the squelching sounds on rats.

Dissolves their flesh. Turns their brains into more hypnotic pearls.

Peer into a green pearl. You’re underneath the sea. A coral polyp. A jewel in Indra’s net - all life unified into one single gigantic mind.

The feeling’s addictive. You don’t look away without a Sanity check.

Anyone who contemplates a pearl for long enough will turn into a shoggoth. Become subservient to the will of Vaalbara, the Dreaming Continent. First living thing on Earth. Wants only to replicate itself.

Salim loved Nadia. Told her all his business plans.

Bought the pearls from Yang Gaolu. Chinese trader. Operates from Penang. Wouldn’t say where he got the pearls. Mentioned he was going to the Andamans next.

Yang’s junk was found shipwrecked on a Coco Islands reef a few days ago.

Smeared with slime. A few more green pearls rolling around in the hold. Fishermen claimed the pearls and sold them in Port Blair.

Lord Loughborough Island. In the Mergui Archipelago.

Hills covered by thick jungle. Gigantic saltwater crocodiles lurking in mangrove swamps. Huts on stilts. Outrigger canoes.

A fleet of Moken sea gypsies camped in a horseshoe-shaped bay.

Moken are great divers. Enormous lung capacity. Pupils constrict for better underwater vision. Daub their faces with white paste. Swim before they can walk. Dump their food scraps into the holds of their boats, so as to not attract sharks.

Harvest green pearls from the wreckage of a Chinese treasure ship. An enormous five-masted junk. 120 metres long.

Eunuch admiral Zheng He, commander of the Yongle Emperor’s treasure fleets, stole a number of green pearls from a Lemurian temple in the Maldives in 1433.

It was his last voyage. He scuttled the ship on purpose and sent the rest of the fleet back to China with a warning to never explore the seas again.

He’s down there now. As a shoggoth.

The shipwreck is full of treasure. Gathered by Zheng He in every port between Sumatra and Mogadishu. Sailor’s bones. Quasi-shoggothised sea creatures. Huge octopi. Sharks.

Divers bring up golden hippos. Diamond-studded idols. Brass chests full of cowrie shells. Inscribed copper plates from the Maldives temple - warnings about its dangers, written by Ibn Battuta, blithely ignored by Zheng He’s men.

The Moken sort out the pearls and stack the rest of the treasure in the largest stilt hut, where it’s watched by Triad guards. Scarred, humourless men, not easily distracted, who pass the time by throwing knives at birds.

Three Toe Lau oversees the dive from his cabin on the Lucky Bucket, a battered tramp steamer anchored in the bay.

Veteran of the Penang Triad wars. Fat but strong. Gold tooth. Sentimental. Owns a Siamese cat.

Under strict instructions not to look too closely at the pearls. Runs a Penang gambling house. Here to pay off a debt to the legendary criminal mastermind Wu Fang, who he freely admits he is completely terrified of.

Fang wants to create a totalitarian East Asian superstate. Governed by a custom philosophy - Obliteration-Of-The-Self. Hopes to undermine the concept of personal identity by leaking a few pearls onto the international jewel market.

Lau has an experimental radio device that can command shoggoths, 60% of the time. Keeps a copy of a book called The War Before Time, in the captain’s cabin on the Lucky Bucket, between a whiskey bottle and a pack of pornographic playing cards.

The Moken chief is Koshan.

Big lazy man. Gap-toothed grin. Owns a pet orangutan called Puggles who delights the children by smoking a pipe. Has two wives - controversial among the Moken. Guts fish on deck with a foot-long knife. Believes one day the oceans will rise and drown the land, making his people kings.

Once a week Ginger Lancey, veteran of the Australian Flying Corps, brings a supply seaplane out from Penang.

Irreverent. Cruel. Loves to figure out what’s most important to you and ruthlessly belittle it until you try to punch him, at which point he shoots you dead and claims self-defence.

Takes a few green pearls in a velvet sack back with him when he leaves. Sells them to eccentrics in cities across south-east Asia.

Vivek Balachandran, academic and Tamil nationalist.

Serving an eight-year sentence in the Cellular Jail for throwing a bomb through the window of a British customs official in Madras. The bomb, luckily for everyone concerned, failed to go off.

Argues in his book The War Before Time that the Aryan-Dravidian conflict is a proxy for the ancient struggle between hierarchical Atlantis and democratic Lemuria. Hates Brahmins even more than he hates Brits.

Identifies the lost continent of Kumari Kandam as the site of the first Tamil Sangam - a gathering of 4444 poets that lasted for 4444 years, and lulled a primeval leviathan to sleep. Believes he is descended from an ancient family of Lemurian bard-priests, heir to genetic memory fragments of a cosmic proto-language that only he can speak.

Needs a jade flute from the wreckage of Zheng He’s treasure ship. Can stop the pearls self-replicating, converting to shoggoth matter all living things on earth.

Take him and the flute to the Maldives temple. A hivelike black coral structure. Guarded by moray eels. Buried among the reefs of the Huvadhu atoll.

He can play a tune that unweaves Indra’s net. Petrify the shoggoths. Turn the pearls to sand. Put an end to this particular intrusion of Vaalbaran consciousness into the world of men.

Can explain all this. Book mentions the pearls. Talks about them to the other prisoners all the time. They wish he’d shut up.

The Cellular Jail is a political prison.

Sikh and Bengali revolutionaries. Hindutva tough guys who pick fights with the Pathan guards. Jihad-friendly Wahhabi muftis. Communist newspaper editors. Malabar peasant rebels who cut off landlords’ hands.

Spend their days in backbreaking labour. Pressing oil from coconuts. Making rope. Let out on Tuesdays to work in chain gangs on local farms. Guards are pointlessly violent - beat prisoners, steal their food. Punishment for escape attempts is hanging on the spot.

Overseen by Warden David Berry. Sadistic. Paranoid. Obsequious to superiors. Insists he’s running a model prison. Worried about government inspectors in disguise. Keeps a green pearl in his office, confiscated from a fisherman - finds it brings him peace.

You have to break Vivek out.

If he dies it’s just possible that you could find another Lemurian priest descendent somewhere in Ceylon. Unlikely though.