Madame Tea

Of mites and men

It's strange. My encounters with the mysterious Madame Tea seem to be getting more frequent. This time I stumbled onto her making a killing in the banking sector, giving members of it a slow and pointless death using the Wessex fruit tree mite: A fascinating little creature that can eat up to twice its weight in Dinoflagellate every day, reducing the amount of damage the little pests do in the Inverted Tea Forest of the Arabian sand caves (apparently a story to tell on its own) to an absolute minimum. This is helped by the fact that Dinoflagellate (from the Latin for terrible wiggly things) do not live in these caves, so most of the tree mites do not survive long enough to do anything but reproduce. However, introduce both creatures to a location together and the mite becomes mightier.

When the mites are brought into contact with boiling hot water, the perfect temperature for making tea, they glow a faint red colour and remain perfectly safe to drink. If the water is hot but not boiling, they remain invisible to the naked eye and whatever it is that causes the glow kind of builds up in them instead, making them lowly toxic: Put a teaspoon of them in the lukewarm office tea or coffee you normally get from the common room or flimsy dispensing machine and the poison activates.

The effect is subtle: after about 2 days the target develops a sudden urge to commune with nature, then spends the next 20 years eating fruits of the forest, becoming beardier and beardier, while a lack of nutrition leads to thin arms, low legs, brittle ears and a weak neck, so the next time the beard becomes caught on a bramble, the target's head gets pulled off.

When I asked her why she thought it was a pointless death, she said it was because she didn't get to stab anybody. I was about to ask why did she want to stab a banker, but that would have been a stupid question.

This time she seemed to have a littler girl with her, but I had no time to ask who she was. They were on the run from the Portuguese police, who had identified her from the CCTV videos of the associated Tai Chi and Assaultive Line Dancing emporium. She just had time to tell me that last week's hit had gone well thanks to the intelligence I had helped gather, but there had been unforeseen consequences to it: something about a proposal of marriage from a guy in a vacuum cleaner, and an indecent proposal from a girl in a pizza, spelt out in pineapple chunks, with a spelt and rye crust. 

She then escaped via a Hole in the Wall, activated by her credit card, leaving behind nothing more than a single glow in the dark mite stuck to the marble floor, in a drip of melted cheese. 

I'm sure that's not the last we'll see of her.

At least I hope not.