The fog hung heavy over the Dmytrov district, masking the sort of filth that the honest citizen prefers to forget. But beneath that grey shroud, in a cellar smelling of caustic salts and desperation, a dark alchemy was at work. Four men from the Baltic shores of Latvia had turned their hands to a most wretched trade, concocting a mountain of poison—some two hundred and thirty-four kilograms of that wretched substance known as methadone.

It was a proper 'malina' for the chemists of the underworld, a hidden sanctuary where they plotted their illicit gains. But the law’s long arm is never far. The constabulary descended upon them like a thunderclap, ending the hiss of the beakers and the whispered greed of the conspirators. Now, the Ostankino Court has seen to it that these foreign rogues are cast into the damp gloom of a cell, charged under the full weight of the Imperial statutes for their conspiracy to poison the masses on a grand scale.

Yet, this is but one thread in a wider web of iniquity. The city's inspectors have been tirelessly scouring the alleys for such filth. Only recently, another band of scoundrels was nabbed, having smuggled potent chemicals from the far-flung ports of Turkey, China, and Kazakhstan. These vultures peddled their contraband as harmless health tonics, though the police managed to seize some thirty kilograms of sibutramine before it could vanish into the veins of the city's wretched souls.