Teacups & Tentacles | ONC 2022

20. Take Your Seats For Act 3

Hercules Finch, in striped pyjamas and with bunny slippers on his dainty feet, finished off the last of the tray of cream buns he'd snatched on his recent foray to the surface with a healthy appetite. 

It was rather a painstaking challenge to make one's usual tea inside the octopus when it was resting, as none of the pistons or belts generated enough heat to boil as much as a tiny pot of water. Hercules found himself obliged to make due with a flask of stone cold tea, which was far from ideal and quite possibly a design mistake. 

He made a mental note to incorporate continually operational tea making options into the next mechanical monster he constructed. That would certainly increase its value. To English customers, at any rate. He wasn't sure about the Continental market.

What was ideal, was how splendidly the plan was taking form that he had lovingly crafted through all the bitter years that fanned out behind him.

London was terrified.

The police were clueless. Their dogs had found nothing and never would. The Air Patrol Unit? Useless.

Any random dock rat who had seen the octopus rise from the gentle, lapping waves of the Thames assigned the apparition to the five empty bottles of cheap gin at their side than to reality. The screams and cries of future promised sobriety he'd heard on occasion confirmed it.

Hercules snickered and took another bite of cream bun.

Idiots all.

He'd more than proven in the last month that he was not a man to be underestimated. And while all the publicity, the fooling, the mystery-spinning, the hysteria, the vandalising – not to mention the mass confusing of cats finding themselves deposited in a completely different part of town than where they lived, the fat moochers-- had been terribly invigorating, and largely quite profitable, it was time to move on.

It was time for his piece de resistance.

For his magnum opus.

For ... Hercules took a sip of cold tea and winced. Yes, clearly a design gaffe... for the feat that would write his name in the history books as one of the greatest criminal minds of his time. 

Poppycock, of all time!

The feat no other mastermind had ever pulled off. And the one those buffoons at the so-called Mastermind Society had frowned so disapprovingly at and chucked his application in the bin for. They had labelled him a time waster. A dreamer. A man who did not understand the limitations, and the asinine responsibilities, of masterful eccentricity.

Well, they were about to be proven wrong.

Dramatically and publicly wrong.

Hercules cleaned his hands and his teeth, then said his prayers before moving the three steps from the chair in the cockpit, full of levers and gears that controlled everything from the movement of the arms to the two large optical lenses that served as eyes, to his bed nestled into the cosy interior lining of the octopus' giant head.

"Sleep tight, my pretty, and sweet dreams. And just think, only two more days," he whispered, petting the soft fabric and yawning. "Two more days before infamy is ours."