Last week proved there are other duos out there like Huey and Dalian, but this week we get back to their exploits, which begin innocently enough with a bun-acquiring mission. She certainly shares traits with Index – being a repository of magic knowledge, being small and cute and sweet-toothed – but her interaction with Huey is of such higher quality, it isn’t even worth comparing them beyond those superficial traits.
This week the two are thrust into the middle of a conflict between a cosmetics company and its most gifter perfumer, Madam Fiona Famenias, and the company’s and its shady underworld partners’ desire for maximum profits. Fiona is a very interesting character, called “unruly” by her father, but also eccentric, getting into peoples’ personal space to sniff them, garnering her the nickname “inu musume” – dog woman – from Dalian. She even has a civet up her skirt (don’t ask)! She also has a phantom book in her possession, the contents of which aid her work.
Her ultimate goal isn’t profits, but to develop a scent that will make everyone happy. My first reaction to this was, uh, she’s trying to make drugs. It turns out, the byproduct of one of her perfumes is indeed a drug called Relic that the Padauk Firm intends to replace opium. The Firm, getting high on its own supply, massacres the Famenia’s office and Fiona’s father, and leads to a great standoff in which Huey has to fight a drug addict who doesn’t feel pain, Fiona cleverly throws various vials perfume at the foes to incapacitate them. You definitely want a potions master on your side.
The sequence where huey unlocks dalian and pulls out a book is abridged. They use the book to save her life, but she knocks Huey out and ties up Dalian, then proceeds to take out the entire Pandauk firm herself, to “atone” for what she perceives as greed on her part. They cannot save her again, and she dies. They return to find her house burning, and the scent wafting from the billowing smoke is the very ideal scene she had sought all along. Not a particularly necessary twist, but I didn’t mind it, and it was ironic.
Rating: 3.5
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