Season 19, Episode 3

Episode 3: Palace of Whispers

Northern China, 1942. Her battle against the city-entity of Carcosa takes Penelope to another point of historical uncertainty in the life of a future, would-be or never-was emperor – the puppet state of Manchukuo. In a palace full of secrets, shadows and spies, she meets the tragic figure of Puyi, last emperor of China and current holder of the Sutra of Pale Leaves…

As the above blurb may imply, this episode enabled me to cannibalize some wonderful ideas from Chaosium's excellent Call of Cthulhu campaign The Sutra of Pale Leaves against a historical backdrop almost entirely drawn from The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece about Puyi, which also provided much of our session's musical soundtrack (one of the great Ryuichi Sakamoto's best works, as iconic and haunting as the movie itself).

Aside from emperor Puyi himself and an opium-addled empress Wanrong, this episode allowed Lady Penelope to encounter two very interesting (and utterly different) historical women: the imperial concubine Tan Yuling and the spy-traitor-adventuress Yoshiko Kawashima. Both played major parts in the story - including a memorable "dinner-for-two" scene with Kawashima, which ended with Penelope using her Venusian aikido nerve-pinch on her host... 

As for Tan Yuling, I followed the now historically contested (but so much more interesting, dramatically speaking) version of her death  - poisoning by a Japanese doctor acting on behalf of Puyi's Nippon puppeteers to prevent her from stirring him against Japan. In the end, Penelope chose to save her from her historically-programmed death, reviving her with a healthy dose of Avalon elixir and whisking her away in the TARDIS - a bit like she did a looong time ago with the Elizabethan playwright-cum-spy Christopher Marlowe (ah, those were the days). Sylvie made Penelope's decision even more dramatic by revealing / foretelling the circumstances of her impending doom to Yuling before giving her the choice: either accept her predestined death or disappear from history and start a new life as a space-time traveller.

On the Carcosan front, this episode allowed Penelope to realize that she was not finished with the City of Nightmares (even though she did cause the final end of its Porphyr population, a few seasons ago: now devoid of its erstwhile inhabitants, Carcosa has revealed itself as a living, semi-sentient entity, a Viral City now hungrily looking for a new reality and a whole new population to symbiose with... a cosmic catastrophe which, without Penelope's timely intervention, could have engulfed 9th century Byzantium, 1879 San Francisco or 1942 Manchuria... As for the Sutra of Pale Leaves, its Manchukuo iteration now rests safely enclosed (and cut out from all space and time!) in a specifically TARDIS-crafted box...