New Toulouse

Mr. Jack Mondieu suggested that I explain the visit of Dr. Augustus Boffin and his crates, and address the unfounded and foolish concerns of some of our more gullible citizens.

Dr. Boffin is a well-known purveyor of scientific supplies to the collector and educational communities. His microscopes and slide sets and mineral samples can be found in nearly every school in the country.

Dr. Boffin contacted me some time ago, and I have invited him to visit our fair lands and collect new samples to his heart’s delight. His “mysterious” boxes contain parts to fix the ice plant, except for the empty ones intended to help him transport his collected samples back to his laboratories—certainly not to deliver parts for any nefarious machinery in the upstairs back room of the New Toulouse City Hall That Has Always Been There.

If you should see Dr. Boffin about town, please extend to him the courtesy for which our fair city is known. If he asks to collect samples from your homes and farms, please allow him to do so. And if you have any scientific curiosities, show them to him—he may be interested in purchasing them!

Henri Godenot
Mayor
City of New Toulouse

Being connected directly to the pulsing heart of New Toulouse by virtue of my many contacts, of various states of learnedness, at the myriad delightful watering-holes throughout our fair city (where there is never so much as a slight overcast to the sky, and where beautiful birds untainted by feather-rot warble sweetly from every branch), there have come to me wild rumors, gossip, and outright fabrications of the most upsetting sort.

Dr. Augustus Boffin, recently arrived in this town, is a current subject of such spurious speculation. Some say he is the mayor’s “mind man,” here to assist City Hall in its efforts to keep the locals happy and uninformed. That is, of course, pure poppycock. Dr. Boffin is the Boffin of Boffin Scientific Inc. (BSI), a perfectly benign concern mainly involved in outfitting the amateur science enthusiast. Any bright eight-year-old with a healthy interest in beetle collection or wireless technology knows this.

But some local scandalmongers have even been painting poor Boffin as a sort of mad-scientist figure out of the fevered imagination of H. G. Wells, darkly muttering about the shipment of crates from BSI to City Hall, as though they held parts for some evil mind-control device and not the insect vivaria and radio parts they probably contain in actuality.

Clearly these whisperers and ranters could use a dose of cold, hard reality with a side order of common sense. To this end, I call upon the mayor to stand up and tell the people of New Toulouse why exactly he has been conferring with Dr. Boffin. Mr. Mayor, please find the time to speak and allay our concerns! I will be waiting, pencil in hand, ready to record for the Tattler the substance of your address.

Jack Mondieu, Ace Reporter, exhibits a love of chemistry. His favorite molecule is CH₃CH₂OH.