Past Nights
or
Worst Tzimisce Ever
The first time Ciaphas Cain met Mira DuPanya it was 1922 - Roaring Twenties as the time period would later be known. He was known among the the city's Kine to be an angel investor and silent partner in many ventures, as well as the sort of Honest Businessman whose every venture maybe wouldn't pass close inspection, but who had enough class for polite company.
And those were the days of great prospects and dreams and the nights of crimes and liberty. The skirts had only hiked up to the mid-shin, blouses were still commonly worn and actually cutting her hair into a bob instead of just pinning it up was considered daring. Cain had known to expect a Tzimisce and her entourage and expected an Elder with a spouse, lover or both as well as several bodyguards and servants. Who called themselves du la anything that day and age? Certainly not anyone young. So when the garçonne walked in with an entourage of five pieces of art his palms immediately begun to itch.
It was supposed to be a bog-standard introduction as per the Fifth Tradition: When thou comest to a foreign city, thou shall present thyself to the one who ruleth there. Without the word of acceptance, thou art nothing. Perlia wasn't Camarilla territory, but Malcador had insisted on knowing his city's populace and this small piece of security would be torn only from Cain's chopped-off, finally dead fingers.
"Greetings, Monsieur le Perlia. I am Mira Du la Panya. I ask for a leave to move into your fair city along with my entorage: Èlea Michel, Capucine Moreau, Joseph Temple, Dion Mignon and Lionel Quincy. We pay our respects to the Baron of Perlia seek to live in your fair city at least for now. If you would show to me hunting grounds of suitable style I would be most obliged," Mira Du la Panya said with a voice nothing short of entitled and there was a terrifying moment where Cain could only hear his own thoughts as though from a great distance away.
Mira Du la Panya looked at Jurgen, wrinkled her nose and looked at Cain in bafflement. Cain didn't notice as he only barely managed to tear his eyes away from her attendants.
Èlea Michel and Capucine Moreau were distressingly beautiful and styled as dryads or so he thought. It was subtle enough with the white wheat in their hair appearing like a headband of sorts on the first glance, their skin was marble white and the very modern dresses appearing vaguely ancient.
They were in fact supposed to be caryatids. Ciaphas Cain was no great appreciator of ancient architecture.
The men were less subtle, their skin outright veined like marble, their white hair oddly unmoving as though it had been glued into a solid block and eyes wholly blank. No iris, no pupils, each of the had a cane and Ciaphas Cain came to the horrified relisation that they had to be blind.
"I trust you only modified them once led upstairs?" he managed to ask, again cursing the ridiculous weakness of his line in his mind. At least Jurgen was present to interfere if the Tzimisce attacked him. "And that your entourage is willing?" The many, many True Brujah in Perlia had opinions about slavery and he had no intention to get caught between them and this woman.
"Of course, don't worry," Du la Panya said, waving her hand. "As for their willingness, I have made a covenant with them. I will pursue beauty with their bodies as my canvases and stone - they are Toreadors, you know they all live for art. They may not choose how long they spend in any certain shape and if or how it inconveniences them, but nothing will be permanent or painful."
"It's true, Mademoiselle Du la Panya is most generous to us," one of the identical men said and the rest of them nodded. Cain had to suppress a shudder. This was, he was certain of it, his fate should the crazy Tzimisce ever learn of his clan: a living, breathing accessory for the modern woman. And he didn't have anything against modern women, the moon had yet to turn red or the country to fall into ruins because they now had a vote. He would just really rather Mira Du la Panya was a modern woman far away from him.
So he mechanically granted the beautiful monster her feeding grounds. It was an easy enough task: the economy was booming and Perlia was growing at a distressing pace. He consoled himself with the knowledge that at least as long as Du la Panya acted with suitable caution when hunting he would have no reason to meet her for years.
"Is she a neonate, sir?" Jurgen asked after the steps and scrapes of the canes had disappeared on the other side of the closed door.
"Might be ancilla on the younger side, but definitely shouldn't be here on her own. She must have been Embraced by an Antitribu," he concluded. The Old Tzimisce kept their families close, often never relinquishing them.
The Tzimisce were a match made for Camarilla; a congregation of control freaks all about tradition the lot of them. His irresponsible sire might have abandoned him to the whimsies of fate in a war-torn land with the most bare-bones explanation of his new existence, but at least he was able to live as an adult and not a particularly stupid child who needed his sire's permission to tie his own shoelaces. And as those poor men's blind eyes had made clear in this regard at least Mira Du la Panya had bred true.
The second meeting came to be no less than four days after the first when the meaning of Du la Panya's entourage hit him in full. The first time they had met a Salubri right after the fool Emperor's last war they had asked for minor help in changing Jurgen's appearance. They had had little to offer, but Małgorzata Zielinski hadn't asked for anything. Cain had cut Jurgen's misshapen, too-long ears into a round shape and a simple touch had healed them into a shape, forced regeneration into completion before it technically speaking was.
But she couldn't do anything about Jurgen's gray pallor or gnarled fingers and slightly hunched figure, nor his sharp teeth, knife-sharp nose and sunken eyes. Mira Du la Panya could, maybe. He surely wasn't the first person to come up with the idea, but he had to at least ask. And yes, technically any Tzimisce would have done, but back then Perlia's vampire populace consisted mostly of Brujah, Toreador and Nosferatu with a swiftly growing Caitiff cohort, some Ventrue, grand total of six Lasombras, four very unnerving Malkavians and one Salubri. They would've had to go out of their way for someone else and there was no guarantee that someone would be any safer.
The second contact was via telephone which the garçonne had immediately purchased and installed into her new home. Many older vampires shunned such new-fanged technology, insisted it was informal to the point of disrespectful, but Cain found it wonderfully useful.
"This has been tried before," Du la Panya's chipper voice informed him. "The bones of his hands and back and the teeth I can help with, but if he ever needs to regrow them or falls into torpor his body will revert into its original state. As for the rest of the face and the skin the change will last a week at most."
"It wouldn't be much of a curse if it could be beaten so easily, I suppose. Very well, even a little help is better than nothing. Now shall we negotiate for your assistance?" he asked, doing his best to sound disappointed.
The service still wasn't cheap precisely, but the ability to pass his most reliable aide and bodyguard off as a particularly ugly human was simply too tempting to really care. He even managed to get Du la Panya to agree to "re-touch" Jurgen's disguise for a much smaller fee if there should ever be need for him to fully pass as long as only small cosmetic changes were needed. The meeting place was chosen, a underground clinic that usually tended to the Kine unfortunates, but its proprietor and single healer had agreed to make an exception for his sake.
"Are you certain you are comfortable with this?" Cain asked Jurgen when a firm knock on the door informed him Miss Du la Panya had arrived.
"As long as you are in the room, Monsieur Cain," Jurgen said stalwartly. Cain didn't point out that Gisco of no real surname, the city's one Salubri would make for much better protection. Officially he was there to check Jurgen's health after the alterations were done, but, well.
Cain didn't precisely distrust Salubri or at least he told himself so. It was oh so convenient to point fingers and scream evil soul-stealer when it turned out that diablerizing a much-beloved Antediluvian (who was probably just a really old Methuselah but never mind that) turned out to have consequences. He would still have been much more wary approaching Małgorzata had he known the full truth of what her abilities entailed back then. Now, he was certain most of them genuinely were that nice and just wanted to reach Golconda, but all it would take was the one exception.
But Gisco at least had already reached Golconda and was busy helping a small coterie of Brujah to do the same. He could be trusted to put a stop to any attempt to fuse Jurgen with a horse to make a centaur or whatever demented idea the city's newest headache might come up with.
Mira Du la Panya was followed by her two alleged dryads. Cain knew better than to look straight at them, leaving that to Jurgen, but Mira Du la Panya didn't make for a safe sight either. She was very generously endowed with plump little mouth and huge eyes, but the bigger problem was the contrast she made. In her pink and black ensemble with a stylish hat she was a modern princess locked in a cell - which was actually very clean, but also very bare room with windowless, unpapered walls, a single bed and a mirror and a small table, as well as a locked cabinet and a steel trolley that were there for appearance's sake.
"It's the berries to see you again, Monsieur le Perlia! What a brilliant idea you had!" she said and Cain nodded with dignity to hide how ridiculous he found that saying. "I can make a fortune selling my services to the Nosferatu. And the touch-ups! I'll have the money for my own établissement in no time. And you are the Salubri, am I right?" She turned to Gisco.
"That I am. My name is Gisco, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance," said Gisco flatly as his eyes kept flicking to the not-dryads.
"Are you interested in a business partnership? Many people would at first demand you be present, people are so distrusting." She seemed baffled in the face of this.
"Perhaps you ought to table that discussion until Jurgen has been seen to," Cain interfered quickly because Gisco looked plenty distrusting himself.
The process itself was painless and not at all like how he had imagined it. Du la Panya only touched him gingerly, but Jurgen's flesh flowed over his bones like river silt, rippling into place as it softened his face and hands. His back seemed to almost sink into itself a little as it was pulled straight by its own muscles. Then she stuck a single finger into his mouth even more gingerly and Cain realised she wasn't only changing his teeth when his jawbone bent into a slightly more human shape like clay, some of it seemingly disappearing into the ether. He didn't allow himself to look away, but though there was no blood or viscera it just wasn't natural. It wasn't a fast process either, yet his aide didn't make a sound.
But eventually it was over. Jurgen looked so rosy, healthy, living again. No-one would call him handsome even now, but definitely living.
"I feel good, sir," Jurgen said without removing his eyes from the mirror. He touched his nose like he had a hard time believing it really belonged to him. "No-one I know can recognise me anymore!"
"Allow me, please," said Gisco and took over. He didn't need more than a palm against the cheek either and the shortest of moments. "All the alterations are beneficial. Congratulations, the operation was a success," he proclaimed.
Cain proceeded to pay Du la Panya her fee and then valiantly abandoned Gisco to her mercenary mercies as she stated chattering about an underground Nosferatu clinic. And really, many people would be willing to pay just to be more beautiful, the plastic surgery market in Perlia was untapped and of course she would take the bigger share of the money, but...
The fourth time they met it was in a charity gala. The years 1927 and she was calling herself DuPanya now, her skirts had hiked all the way up to the knees which she had rouged and she was calling people bees' knees which many of the older generation didn't appreciate at all.
"You are such bees' knees, Madam Eyck, that you host this at your husband's venue! I'm so sick when I even think of all those poor orphans shivering in their beds and eating nothing but porridge!" Mira DuPanya said and she was full of shit.
"We must always think of those less fortunate than ourselves," said Mrs. Amalia Eyck, very much human and equally full of shit, merely in a different way.
Ciaphas Cain ran an orderly, prosperous shadow city despite the best efforts of all too many people - and that wasn't even counting Varan, other Sabbat assassins, the occasional would-be diablerists and human politicians, just the well-meaning morons. An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure and as such Cain preferred to keep an eye on the human unfortunates as well. He only needed to miss that one Baali Infernalist cell funding a local orphanage to decide not having to clean up the aftermath was worth almost any amount of money.
The third time he had met Mira DuPanya just the last year she had been forced to ask him for permission when she had decided to adopt a human child and he had given her a firm no. He knew he couldn't stop her from preying on children or Embracing them or whatever she had planned to do, but she would keep her dirty business out of his orphanages.
He also knew that the orphanage he sponsored and the other three he occasionally donated to fed the children sufficiently nutritious food in sufficient quantities, could afford proper heating, proper clothes and occasionally new books and toys. The local Salvation Army's homeless hostel and food pantries had a greater need, but Mrs Eyck hated Methodists and homeless adults in almost equal measure.
"I can't believe that hoyden," Mrs. Eyck fairly spat when DuPanya had left, believing the young-looking woman to be out of hearing range in the general chatter. "Can you believe she offered for her employers to perform here? When I know she's running a speakeasy? Everybody knows what goes on in those shows! Isn't it bad enough I have to look at her knees and smile because she's one of biggest potential donators? Just look at those... people by her side. The modern woman is the end of all decent sensibilities! In my youth I would have died sooner than shown my legs to strange men."
"There is much to look at," Cain said flatly and didn't look, having almost been caught once already. He couldn't tell which of the now four Toreador men was Mira DuPanya's avec for the night or who the maid was, so altered they were and distressingly alluring. The dark skin and negro features with blonde and cinnabar hair hadn't only drawn his eye since at least one another Toreador had been discreetly slapped out of trance already.
They had also drawn the glare of three Brujah in the audience, but ultimately no more. This was because due to DuPanya's predilections none could tell what their original race even was. This was not made any easier by the fact that she would occasionally give them new "stage names" which Ciaphas Cain had long since ceased to even try to keep track of. Nowadays he just attached a number to a form for simplicity's sake.
But really, the way Mrs. Eyck seemed to think the past had been all about modest clothes was amusing. When he had been young the fashionable evening gown neckline had become very décolleté, almost displaying the nipples in the more extreme cases. Even Victorian era bathing costumes, worn openly on beaches, had been no longer than flapper dresses. The sleeves had been long and the stockings hadn't been rolled down and that had been all the difference.
Ciaphas Cain wandered off to pick another glass of poor champagne substitute and too-small canape when the doors to the pompous, luckily very tacky hall were slammed open and eleven vampires, four of them with faces like starving and death burst in.
"You have taken the name in vain!" screamed a woman, one of the more fleshed-out, and pointed in Cain's direction.
To Cain all the world except him moved so slow as he grabbed an unopened bottle of the pretender-champagne from the table and threw it at the woman. It broke against her forehead with a crack as loud as a gunshot and an explosion of fizz. In terms of damage done he might as well have thrown her with an iron pipe. The woman fell on her ass in a daze, a few shards of glass sticking to her forehead. Then every vampire in the hall lunged.
It was a brief fight and a stupid one, in front of the Kine like that, but all the fiercer for it. The Sabbatites appeared surprised by how many Kindred were present, but recovered fast. Jurgen fairly tore the head off a Ventrue, one of the true Brujah fell to a Cappadocian whom another then finished and Mira DuPanya's Toreadors pinned a mess of pearl gray suit and bloody flesh down for their mistress to do something Cain was grateful he didn't quite see. Two of his Toreadors fell to a low generation Ventrue soon after. All the while he cursed his name, cursed that Malcador hadn't warned him back when he could have still changed it without appearing weak, cursed the smell of blood and his Beast and grabbed one Toreador by the back of his neck when he dived for the neck of a human.
And then it was over already. The humans were still screaming and sobbing and Cain's lips felt like numb, moved on their own accord.
"It's over now!" His voice carried over the entire hall. "We will now gather in small groups and wait for the Sheriff. This will no doubt Dominate the evening, but all will be well!"
The Kindred all stared and a few of the humans managed to break from the panic enough to give him bewildered looks, which Cain was forced to concede was fair. It was a dumb moment to try being subtle.
"Lets' get through the night without Mass Embrace. You two, make sure no more staff comes in halfway through," he ordered Jurgen and a Brujah who just happened to stand close to his aide and then everyone was moving again.
As he had no way of taking part in it Cain kept narrating what came to mind because everybody's stories had to match once the human law finally made it there. It was a less bloody affair now, but definitely an awkward and flailing one. People kept screaming, a few tried to climb out of a window, they had to be pulled from under the tables and one brave woman tried to stab a Brujah in the eye with a salad fork. He looked unreasonably charmed, the maniac for impossible odds that his kind tended to be, and though she was lily white and from an upper-class family he thought she might find herself Embraced soon enough anyway.
"Somebody call for Kasteen, tell her to bring guns, no finger prints. DuPanya, make the corpses whole and make sure they'll bleed when shot," he babbled and for a moment thought the crazy Tzimisce was actually a blessing in disguise.
And maybe there was more blood than there ought to have been on the floor, but it wasn't as though they had the time to mop it up. They were busy pretending they had never been there because police had the entirely unreasonable tendency to call people for questioning during daylight hours if they were connected to an unsolved murder. For shame, police, for shame.
"I'm not one for a handcuff, you know," Mira DuPanya whispered into his ear as they slipped out through a servants' entrance.
"I'm sure a woman like you was born to be out on parole," he answered because he was pretty sure she wasn't being literal. He could hear sirens and he was very glad the mess was now Kasteens's problem to solve. Maybe she would get frustrated enough to finally overthrow him.
"C'est si gentil to meet a man who is so decisive," DuPanya purred, clinging to his shoulder. He was briefly annoyed by the gratuitous French; he knew she did it only to appear more alluring and he was actually French or used to be and...
Oh. Wait. Shit.
"Mister Cain, sir?" Jurgen asked and Cain realised he he ceased to walk just a few paces from the getaway-car's open door. His touched-up, trusty aide was holding the door open, on the balls of his feet ever-so-slightly, ready to lunge.
"It's fine," he said with a strangled whine because there was a very artistic bloodstain just a little under DuPanya's left eye, like a dainty finger had deliberately pressed it there, and blood under her fingernails and his Beast was roaring...
"We could make it a foursome. Do you have some preferences for their looks?" she asked, and oh, yeas, her attendants were there too. "Mermaid stuck on land can make for a fun play you know."
And somehow the madwoman ended up in his bedroom that night.
Without any mermaids.
He wasn't entirely certain she hadn't offered to change the sex of her avec just for fun.
It could be argued that meeting lasted two nights and a day, but flappers really weren't for being tied down. The fifth time they met was during the Great Depression. Gone were the glitz and glamour, but Ciaphas Cain's personal fortunes were almost as strong as ever and Perlia better off than many places. This was because despite his reputation as an angel investor he was actually a very anxious investor and even more cautious with the stock market. He had never been the richest man in Perlia, but now he was one among the few who were still rich.
But times were hard and he had to spend a lot of money to shore up the city's economy as much as possible. This wasn't helped by the fact that it kept growing because people kept hearing there was work. And it would be good in long-term, he knew how money worked unlike all too many other people, but right then it was pain in the ass. He did more good to people as a literal parasite than he had as a human and the irony wasn't lost to him.
This was when Mira DuPanya made an appointment and then pleaded her case. Now she wanted her own orphanage.
"I would even let people adopt them sometimes," she promised. "I know how the masquerade works."
"Absolutely not," Cain said. It would have been an expense off his hands, but no. Just no.
And Cain eventually just stopped counting. DuPanya clearly wasn't going anywhere and she wasn't ultimately that much of an uncontrollable problem, taken by his fradulent reputation just like the rest of Perlia and, to an alarming degree, the rest of US.
But all good things must come to an end and eventually there was a meeting significant enough it made it to the list. Those were the Modern Nights, which were clearly different than all he modern night that had come before this particular point of time and thus deserved the distinction. He was sitting in his office drinking down the huge mug of chifir Jurgen had made for him. It was maybe an acquired taste - or if he was being honest, an atrocious thing to do to perfectly fine tea leaves. But nothing quite kept him alert and comforted him like chifir after the first miserable winter he and Jurgen had spent together.
None of his so-called loyal employees had come to him for anything too horrible that night and it was well past midnight already. He was, dare he even think of it, content.
"Maybe I'll see if Zyvan is online," he mused. He didn't know if the man was a vampire or just lived in a different timezone, but he was always up for a good game of chess.
"Sounds good. What was you score again, sir?" Jurgen took back the empty mug and jumped straighter at the crash and animalistic squawk that sounded from the other side of the door.
He shouldn't have dared to think anything. The doors to his office banged open, the lock breaking with a screech, and Ciaphas Cain barely had the time to leap to his feet when Jurgen already lunged.
"Let go of me, you peasant," Mira DuPanya ordered the Nosferatu a little wetly. Cain couldn't see his secretary's desk from his angle, but somewhere in that direction he could hear QWAAAG!
"Let her go," he said quickly before she could turn Jurgen into anything. "And you are going to turn my secretary back, Ms. DuPanya." He tried to sound stern, really. Everybody knew the Baron of Perlia cared about his staff after all.
But Mira DuPanya had long tear-tracks of mascara running down her porcelain-pale cheeks. Her curls remained wholly unmussed and the spiderweb-thin pantyhose the little black dress revealed weren't even a little bit torn. She was doing this on purpose, wasn't she?
"Tell me honestly!" she wailed. "Am I a bad artist?"
"What?" was all he could manage to say without spluttering.
"Art used to be my passion! Men are the only ones people can bother to remember, but what about Madeleine Françoise Basseporte? She served as the Royal Painter for the King's Garden and Cabinet! What about Pauline Azou? Even Napoleon commissioned her to make paintings of himself and Marie Louise!" DuPanya rambled rambled on, too absorbed in her whatever to notice Cain's darkening mood.
"But I was only ever a passable painter. All my lovely ideas turned so stiff and flat when I tried to put them on canvas. My father said he wouldn't waste money sending me to Tolouse or anywhere else either. And my Sire didn't even have the decency to be a Toreador, but then I realised it was a blessing in disguise. Instead of canvas and paints I would use flesh and bone! Art in three dimensions and in motion!" She looked at him expectantly.
"I'm sorry, but I don't see where this is going and my secretary is still a duck." In the face of that her fairly milquetoast origin story didn't interest him any.
"A cormorant, actually, and a pile of living flesh I can put back into her. I know how you get. I thought I was successful, Toreadors fell to my feet left and right. But you never even blinked." That last sentence fell to the floor like a cannon ball, rolling loudly in his mind.
"How did you find out?" he managed to ask with hoarse voice. That Amberly Vail had guessed wasn't so surprising, but Mira DuPanya of all people?
How many people were close enough to hear? His office was sound-proofed, but that had been made into a thoroughly useless measure and the longer this conversation stretched on the greater the chances someone would come to investigate the noises or even just to ruin his night even further. He couldn't even send Jurgen to keep people away. And was his secretary still coherent enough to retain information in her current form?
"I lost to a piece of welded metal junk," she said glumly, and, yes. That would have done it. What she had been doing in a gallery that had been repurposed from an old slaughterhouse he didn't know, she didn't seem like the sort. And just like always, it was what he didn't know that he had to pay for.
Unlike many of the Kindred Ciaphas Cain had welcomed postmodern art with open arms because finally art stopped being beautiful. The Toreador in him was full of stupid yearning, but his survival instincts always spoke the loudest. He had steered away from the weirdest and ugliest because he still had dignity, but now he could look cultured while hanging what looked like "baby's first finger painting" on his office wall. The whole thing was obviously a scam perpetuated by people of mediocre talent, an abundance of ambition and no shame who knew their paintings or sculptures would never grace the King's Garden and Cabinet or elsewhere notable either unless they redefined what art meant.
Or so he had thought before Yarrow Burke had taught him that there might be a smidge of talent hidden among the trash. She made welding art of scrap metal and he had thought that safe. He had known there would be trouble since he saw the first sculpture, but all had been good until it hadn't. The Tree of Knowledge had been excellent. Growing on a mound of hubcaps, he thing was as tall as he was. The roots crawling over it had been double helices that had twined together into a trunk and separated again into branches. The canopy had been made multi-layered mesh fence, sinking and folding like caught in a breeze.
And from one branch had hung a small pineapple. A pineapple with perfect scaly skin made of little triangles... And then Jurgen had forcibly turned him around.
The worst thing was that he had bought it. It had just taken him by surprise and he couldn't help himself!
"You have brought me close to a trance several times with your skill." He couldn't kill her while Pleun, Ms. Jacobsdochter was still a cormorant or he would lose his reputation forever. "The fleeting, yet never ruined beauty of your living art is an ever-changing delight and challenge. Burke merely took me by surprise; I didn't expect anything beautiful there."
"Really? You aren't just saying that to make me happy?" Mira DuPanya asked over panicked cormorant noises.
"Really, you are most impressive to always re-invent yourself," Ciaphas Cain assured her with all the charm he could muster and it was even partly true. "But I must ask you to keep my clan a secret." He didn't have the time to come up with a reason that wouldn't open him to blatant blackmail when Mira DuPanya already snorted.
"Honeyed words or not, I will never, ever admit to losing to a pile of junk," she declared. "But if you want to bribe me, you could just give me a few children already."
"What do you want the children for anyway and why do you keep asking me?" he asked, hoping he wouldn't regret the answer.
"Well, they wouldn't really be mine if the paperwork isn't in order, I don't know how to get past the CPS. Damn office hours," said a woman who apparently thought she was fit to be a mother? To humans? "Not too young, I want them a little self-sufficient, but absolutely no teenagers."
"You do realise that they would only grow into teenagers regardless, right?" he asked, though surely she couldn't be that daft. Mira DuPanya didn't strike him as the motherly sort, but people could have unexpected depths.
"Don't worry, I will just de-age them as needed," she said and smiled through the inky tears. "And change their appearance so the school doesn't get suspicious."
QWAAAGH QWAA-AG!
"Absolutely not. Now go fix my secretary."
Plastic surgery as a term is older than you might think and originally had nothing to do with plastic. Coined from the Greek word plastikos, which means to shape or mold something, the term was first used in the 1800s to describe the process in which doctors and surgeons reshaped or molded body tissue.
Chifir is an exceptionally strong tea, associated with and brewed in Soviet and post-Soviet detention facilities. It's made with 5–8 tablespoons of loose tea per person poured on top of the boiled water and left to brew until the leaves drop to the bottom. Absolutely tanna.
And now for some flapper slang:
Garçonne: actually what flappers were called in France.
Bees' knees: anything good, the best, the greatest.
Berries: great.
Handcuff: engagement ring.
Out on parole: a person who has been divorced.