"It is March 15, 2010. The Morania has dropped anchor near the site of our last mission. The river is calm, and the equipment is functioning normally. Tomorrow, we will carry out the Bronze Plan. I am Captain Manstein, and this is my eleventh captain's log of this voyage." Professor Manstein glanced at his watch. "It is now six thirty in the evening. Chen Motong, a member of underwater operations team A, proposed holding a morale rally before the operation. I approved."
"Where's Nono?" Manstein asked Selma beside him. "Didn't she say she wanted a morale rally? Why haven't I seen her anywhere?"
"It's already started. Look." Selma pointed toward a faint flicker of fire halfway up a nearby mountain. "Nono found an abandoned wooden house and took Lu Mingfei, Zero, and Caesar there for a barbecue."
"At dawn I left White Emperor City amid the colored clouds," the big blond fellow recited quietly as he gazed at the gorge in the dusk. "I looked it up before coming here. Apparently, White Emperor City used to be very famous."
"That's a poem by Li Bai," Lu Mingfei said. "But he passed through on a boat. He didn't grill skewers here."
"I thought there would be monkeys here. 'The cries of apes on either bank never cease,'" Caesar said regretfully.
"You look like a monkey to me. There haven't been monkeys here for centuries," Nono said irritably.
"The environment was damaged. This isn't those monkeys' home anymore," Lu Mingfei said.
"Last year, the Yangtze River Three Gorges Tourism Development Company brought in over eighty monkeys from Wushan County and the Tongjing Scenic Area in Chongqing, hoping to recreate the old scene where 'the cries of apes on either bank never cease,'" Zero said flatly.
"You even know news like that?" Lu