User:ScatheMote/Pascal's Triangle

{|width=60% The year was 1865. The place was Paris. It was the height of Napoleon III's reign. Hoop skirt accidents were the leading cause of death of young women. Dreadful Orientalist art adorned the walls of museum galleries. Social rank was differentiated by quality of manicured moustache. It was the golden age for human society, where a shining City of Lights could keep the civilized world safe from the barbarism of the Yankees and the Decadence of the East.

There and then, in a tiny corner of the beauty city, past the countless jardins, courtesans, fashionistas, and boulangeries, past the brothels, the morgues, the chiffonniers, and urchins, on the second floor of the tiny apartment located on 16 Rue de Pensées, lived a self-proclaimed mathematician, who, despite professing to be a genius without measure, had a very measurable contribution to high society, low society, middle society, upper middle society, academia, the literary arts, the culinary arts, the art arts, astrology, astronomy, vexillology, theology, theogonies, dendrochronology, and alethiology: none whatsoever. That mathematician had long since been banned from most public establishments, either due to the physical danger that his unscientific experiment caused to the general populace, which was still recovering from the jaguar incident several years prior, or due to the financial danger that his pop-up gambling dens posed to Frenchmen predisposed to gauche munificence. After such decrees, times had become tough for that mathematician, especially since he was used to living in courtly wealth under the auspices of King, who had been deposed (again). He even feared that his most prized experiment, the Long Sichuan Noodle Experiment, would go unperformed in his lifetime. He thought for many passing moons about how to rectify this problem, although he did not come to a final conclusion until after he ran out of duck confit and his grumbling stomach kept him awake at night. At last, after watching yet another street urchin run past his apartment clutching somebody else's purse, a symbol of the ill-gotten filthy lucre inside it, did he come up with a plan to remake his squandered fortune. Yes, the mathematician smiled, my plan will both help me and help society. I shall utilize my incredible intelligence to its advantage and become a traveling detective, who will solve the unsolvable far and wide through this city. Of course, this brilliant idea could not be done alone. He recruited the help of his three greatest traveling companions, a lovestruck Mexican, a streetsmart refugee and an ordinary lobster, to form a detective agency that could rival the best in Paris. Together, they are Pascal's Triange the unstoppable crime solving trio. These are their stories.

Contents

 * Case 1: In Which There Is a Murder That 9 out of 10 Parisians Agree Is Most Foul
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