The Cook, The Crook, and the Chemist (Patreon)

[X]Plan: Birds and Bacon

-[X] Why not put out an ad?

-[X] Taming of the Fowl: Training doves and pigeons to act as "assistants" landing on shoulders, picking cards, appearing from a hat, flying in a pattern, etc.

-[X] Practice an Act

--[X] Taming of the Fowl

-[X] Renovate the St. Majesté

--[X] Kitchen

-[X] Diversify Spirits

--[X] Herbal tinctures and a small amount of exotic ones. Maybe a bottle of absinthe to show off.

-[X] Scout New Talent

--[X] A cook capable of doing simple, cheap dishes people will eat alongside their drinks (garlic toast, sausages, scrambled eggs, maybe something fried)

!!GOTHAM!!

Food! Fright! Spirits and Sustenance alike upon the St. Majeste! Current home of the mad, the marvelous, and the mysterious PROFESSOR ARKHAM and his MAGIC BIRDS, in a display that critics have referred to as ‘uncanny’, ‘stupifying’, and ‘impossible’! Watch the Dissappearing Pidgeon Act! Listen as the caged dove sings the secrets of the audience! Be amazed, be amused, and be surprised, all while enjoying exotic tintures created by expert chemists and meals at affordable price! All while enjoying the scenic Gotham River!

Every evening at Pier 15! Don’t miss on visiting one of the finest establishments in Gotham!

!!!GOTHAM!!!

Our friend Josiah, he decided to start putting his name in the paper, and start incorporating birds into his act. Now, this was the early days of regulation: Theodore Roosevelt had not yet been president, Upton Sinclair had not wrote the Jungle, and people didn’t really care about things like truth in advertising and food sanitation, not to the degree that would make the things he had prepared to do against the law.

Now, Josiah wasn’t afraid to risk the wellbeing of his customers, dear reader, but he wasn’t an amateur or an idiot. Prior to his first Bird Act, he actually spent a good deal of time preparing. He had to find the creatures first: pigeons were easy, doves, especially white doves in the numbers he needed, were harder, crows were out of the question. Once he had them, he began working on training them.

He had a handful of acts. Each of them called for a degree of coordination, timing, obedience, and skill that you wouldn’t get from a normal, untrained member of Columba Livia. Here, reader, we must digress to a discussion about said species, known as the rock dove, or, as you or I might call them, the Pigeon. Now, pretty much every city has these birds, and Gotham is no exception even if the carnivorous bat population helps keep them in check, but did you ever wonder where they came from? You see, dear reader, those ‘rats with wings’ you’ve learned to hate were once a domestic species: introduced to the Americas by pet owners who found that their fancy birds weren’t what they wanted, forced to survive in the harsh and unforgiving urban wasteland that is America, where they would eventually form what today we recognize as the common feral pigeon, an ignoble fate for a bird of its stature. They went from the pampered pet of pigeon fanciers to an invasive species that eats out of your garbage and shits on your car. Back in the day, these birds had all sorts of uses, but the one most salient to this story is the fact that pigeons were smart enough to be used not just as fancy status signifiers, but for practical purposes as well.

You see, the pigeon despite its wall-eyed, slightly concussed look has the ability to find its way home no matter how far away it was taken. This, combined with the ease of breeding and training the bird, made them extremely useful messengers: you’d ship a pigeon to the person you were chatting with, and they’d tie some paper to the birds leg. They’d release the bird, letting it ferry the message back. Sure, it took some logistics to pull off, and would eventually find itself obsoleted with the invention of the telegraph, but I feel this serves as a good example of the intelligence of the animals our manager had decided to work with.

Josiah spent weeks working with the birds, using his own private cabin on the St. Majeste to house them. In the end, he couldn’t get everything before it was time to pull off his act, but time he had spent practicing had paid off. Firstly, the birds wouldn’t be going around, shitting in the customers food during acts. Sure, feathers would fly and fall, but customers wouldn’t be getting any nasty surprises by the standards of the era when they ate.

What was the second thing he managed to master? Keep in mind, these are smarter birds than average, but they’re still birds that you’ve only spent one action training.

[ ] Obedience: Josiah trained them, had em perform all kinds of tricks on command. They didn’t exactly have a long memory, so they couldn’t do anything complex, but that was okay: getting a dozen birds to do dozens upon dozens of tricks was impressive in its own right.

[ ] Coordination: Josiah trained em, had em perform all kinds of routine. He used birdseed and hypnosis to get them to do all kinds of elaborate displays, the kinds of stuff that would require the sort of coordination you couldn’t achieve with an un-trained bird.

[ ] Cleverness: Who said a bird couldn’t be smart? Josiah trained em, gave em all sorts of brain teasers and puzzles. He hadn’t been an ornithologist, but the man knew that the best way to increase intelligence was by solving problems, and smarter birds meant they were more likely to learn tricks without his input, and better able to absorb basic lessons.

[ ] Write In. If you have a particular trait you wish to train, quality you wish to cultivate, etc, feel free to try it, though note anything advanced is gonna require more ornithology equipment than you got.

!!!GOTHAM!!!

Of course, while Josiah worked with his birds, he also decided to branch out. Next to the lounge, he’d renovate a space to use as a ship kitchen. A wood burning stove, a sink for cleaning dishes, an oven, and a pantry. No fridge yet: unfortunately, at the time electrical refrigeration wasn’t commonly available, especially if you were working on a boat. Thankfully, this was the era before the FDA or health inspectors, and though Teddy Roosevelt and the Poison Party were just around the corner, no one really cared if their meat was kept preserved through poison or stored and served improperly, and if his customers didn’t care, neither did Josiah, not immediately at least.

The idea behind the kitchen was to provide guests something a little extra to go with their drinks and the show. Sure, the concept of food with your alcohol went back further, and the idea of entertainment while being fed was likewise older than the stage magician, but Josiah’s idea, best as I can put together, was that the Lounge was the only place where you could have it all. Sure, the food wasn’t as good as some of the places in the Heights, but it was cheaper, and came with booze and a show. And sure, the booze was mostly Stout and some exotic, expensive brews created by the Lounges chemist, but it came with cheap food and a show. And sure, the shows might have just been the Lounges singer and its owner, but…

You gather my point. Now, the thing about having a kitchen is, you need somebody to work it.

Before we continue, dear reader, we need to make another small digression. I can’t promise it’ll be the last, but we can’t continue this story without addressing the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to tales set before the civil rights movement (or at least shouldn’t): dear reader, I’m talking about race.

I know, an ugly subject. Most likely, a few of you are tuning out already, some for valid reasons and others no doubt for less valid reasons. No shame towards either group, we all have our tastes and preferences. But it would be fundamentally dishonest of this story to gloss over the fact that throughout much of American history it has been less than kind to people who aren’t white, to put it very mildly. Segregation, jim crow, the Klan: by ignoring these things and leaving them unaddressed, we leave the door open for history to be revised, sanitized, and propagandized, and you don’t learn anything worth learning about history when you revise it to be more palatable or sand off the edges. And you know what they say about those who don’t learn history, dear reader.

Which brings us to Gotham’s history. Gotham, located a bit north of Washington DC, had prior to the civil war been a hotbed of slavery: the city itself founded by slave traders who helped furnish men like Cyrus Gold and Burton Crowne with the labour required to make their fortunes. Sure, when Abe was elected and the nation split, they fell on the side of the Union, but that was mostly simple geography, a quirk of Gotham being more firmly in the territory of the north and the unusual pragmatism of the First Families in deciding to not fight a battle they couldn’t win. But just because they banned slavery on paper didn’t mean they were willing to let non-whites be treated as equals once the war was over.

Much like much of 20th century america, Gotham was rife with discrimination. Now, Josiah in many ways was better than most of his peers: unlike his father or grandfather, each of them notoriously racist members of the Arkham clan, he had no real prejudice: a side effect of his mentors influence and his mothers upbringing. Black and white were irrelevent to our friend Josiah, what mattered to Professor Arkham was green.

It was why he was willing to hire the Lounges first cook, Mark Jacobs, an impoverished african american gentleman, nineteen years of age. A resident of the east end, not a lot about the man was in the history books. At the time he had been hired, he apparently lived in his uncles attic. His parents were out of the picture: historians quibble over the reason, but the most common theory is that they died in one of Gothams many floods. They didn’t have any seawalls back then, no levys or floodbreaks: every few years, several parts of the city would find themselves drowned under several feet of water. Not everybody made it.

Of course, while Josiah was better than his peers of the era when it comes to discrimination, as an employer he was very much a man of the times. He was above racism (for the most part), but he wasn’t above exploiting his workers, not when he thought he could get away with it.

I’ll leave this question to you, dear reader: how exactly did Josiah exploit Mark Jacobs?

[ ] Exhaustive Hours: Josiah was willing to pay a living wage, but what qualifies as a living wage is something an an unscrupulous employer can define a number of ways. Mark Jacobs was paid enough to pay his uncle rent and still have a little left over to stockpile and accrue, his own small source of capital: but only by working himself so ragged that some nights, he’d only get six hours of sleep, very rarely less. The cook would likely accrue quite the savings for retirement if he didn’t work himself to death before then.

[ ] Wage Theft: Josiah was willing to pay a living wage, but of course he’d skim a little off the top more than is legally advisable. He didn’t take the entirety of the tip jar, but Mark Jacobs would end each night to find it a little lighter than it should be, and on occasion his employer would ‘forget’ to pay the cook his wage. Still, Mark Jacobs made enough to afford rent and had good enough hours he was able to do various odd jobs whenever he needed more.

[ ] Write In. Just keep in mind that while he’s not a saint, our man Josiah isn’t a monster either. Unethical, scuzzy perhaps, but he isn’t evil.

He had the act, he had the food, the only thing Josiah had left was the drinks. Now, most of what Josiah had on offer was a brand known as Stout, named for the brewery, Habeus Stout Beers. They were cheap and local: ever bar in Gotham stocked some of the ironically named Stout Beers. Of course, you get what you pay for: stout was drinkable, but it wasn’t good. It was the stuff you buy when you wanna get hammered but can’t afford it. So obviously Josiah needed something higher quality if he wanted his bar to maintain a classy atmosphere.

Once more, dear reader, I note that we are in an era before such pesky things as regulation. So when our man Josiah went looking for booze, he didn’t go looking for anything conventional like whiskey, wine, or beer. No, he went looking for something a little more homemade.

This was the era of snake oil, of amateur chemists and do-it-yourself pharmacists shoving whatever drugs they could into a bottle. A lot of it started with that most grand of edifices, the american railroad network. To help build it, America brought in chinese labourers from overseas. And with chinese immigrants and workers came chinese culture and, most saliently to our story, chinese medicine, which included ingredients such as oil made from water snakes, used for things like arthritis and joint pain: y’know, the sort of aches and pains as one might get from heavy labour.

Now, before I continue this exploration of history, dear reader, allow me to pause and note that despite the historical connotations of snake oil and ‘traditional medicine’, some of these remedies did in fact work, because while most hadn’t been chemists, the chinese weren’t idiots. They didn’t need to know the oil they were making and prescribing had more omega-3 fatty acids than a whole damn salmon to know that people who consumed it were healthier and had less joint pain. Of course, for the same reason the greedy western medicine-quacks didn’t need to know that either to know they had a money maker. Here’s an interesting historical tid-bit, dear reader: contrary to what fiction may have told you, the typically decried snake oil con of the era wasn’t selling some piece of nonsense as a valid piece of medicine, no, it was selling bottles of stuff that had no actual snake oil.

Of course, this reputation was only one in hindsight, and for every fraudster, you had a much more genuine kind of quack, the kind who really believes their non-sense brews and misunderstood folk-remedies actually worked. Man doesn’t like to be a liar: a lot of these people really did think the various bottles they sold contained medical elixirs, they just exaggerated it’s effects to help land a sale. Same principle as a lot of nonsense surrounding nutritional supplements, really. And like the nutritional supplements of today, a lot of these brews did have properties that might be in the correct context useful, mixed with a bunch of stuff we’d probably consider poison, illegal narcotics, or, more generously, hokem. Cocaine, alcohol, cough drop formula, cloroform, sedatives and accelerants like you couldn’t believe.

See, much like the chinese labourers, these people weren’t stupid: they were just reckless and money hungry. Once they had figured out their miracle cure, they’d hock it like it were jesus hands in a bottle, but first they needed to get to the point where they were confident enough it would sell. So the true believers, they studied which drugs would have what effects, what poisons could pass for cures, how much nonsense you could put down someones throats before it had an effect, and once they had their canned miracle, they’d sell it for everything they can convince some desperate schmuck it was worth, pocketing the money while assuaging themselves for the guilt by telling their conscience that they were doing good in the world by providing medicine.

Again, these people weren’t stupid: they knew what they were doing when they marketed their cocktails as miracle cures for the desperate, and if they weren’t aware of the ethical ramifications for handing off addictive drugs or straight up poison to the desperate sick who thought they might be purchasing the next best thing to jesus in a bottle, they weren’t paying enough attention.

Our friend Josiah had been looking for somebody willing to use their talents for chemistry to create fancy elixirs and tinctures his guests could drink, and it was into this community he delved to find a chemist worthy of the job. Thing is, while he had just been looking for someone who could make a drink that wouldn’t kill his customers and had a good enough pitch he could sell his customers to convince they were drinking a genuine mystics brew, but Josiah had been born too early to know this wasn’t a half bad idea. 7 Up, Dr Pepper, and good old Coca Cola: one mans failed drug, it turned one mans failed medication was another mans beverage.

Who exactly did Josiah find to supply him with alcohol?

[ ] The Zheng Family: He had found them in Gothams Chinatown. Pa Zheng was a pharmacist, one who specialized in traditional medicines. His son, young Liao Zheng, was studying at Gotham University as a pharmacist as well, one more versed in modern chemistry. The young man was willing to use his knowledge of chemical processes and some of the knowledge passed down from his father on various herbs to brew all manner of beverage for the Lounge, such as licorice flavored beer: all he wanted was enough money to continue to afford his studies.

[ ] Barnabus Frinkle: Man down from Metropolis, Frinkle considered himself a genuine chemist, one whose actual speciality lie in adhesives and synthetic tallows for candles. He was also a man smart enough to know that chemistry cost money. His drinks hadn’t been particularly interesting on their own: just some absinthe, beer, and moonshine. What Frinkle may have lacked in exiting drinks, he made up for with various syrups: concentrated extracts mixed with sugar and small amounts of water, distilled in his laboratory, as well as various waxy candies made from laboratory byproduct.

[ ] Zelda Crane: A young woman who had successfully obtained a degree at Gotham University, only to find no place in the world of serious pharmacology for a woman of her talents, not in Gotham. What she promised Josiah was a collection of drinks utilizing mild but expertly crafted neurotoxins just as potent as the strongest of absinthes or most gargleblasting of whiskeys, but with mild, pleasing flavors. All she required in turn was that Josiah help fund her research and do her a handful of favors.

!!!GOTHAM!!!

Alright, dear reader, we have begun the first turn. You’ve sent out the actions, and now you have to either deal with the fallout, make a final decision in regards to those actions, or decide what you’re going to focus on. Remember, you don’t need to make good decisions: just interesting ones. If you have a write in you feel would be more interesting, feel free to post it: just keep in mind the QM isn’t going to entertain every idea, and anything that isn’t sufficiently interesting or thought provoking to warrant the effort isn’t gonna be considered.