As we pull out from Esau's face, it should be obvious why he performs under the name "The Winged Monkey." To draw crowd's to his mother's temperance rallies, Esau goes a mile into the sky in a balloon then leaps. Instead of a parachute, he relies on a folding mechanical glider that he opens in mid-leap. Esau designed and built his wings himself, but is currently being sued by the estate of Otto Lilienthal, one of the first developers of a glider, for patent infringement. Esau's defense is that his device only resembles Lilienthal's to the extent that both are based on the wings of raptors. Still, his legal problems are one reason that Esau, a committed pacifist, winds up agreeing to work for Oscar Diggs, the Secretary of War, who promises to make the lawsuits against Esau go away if he'll help train an aerial navy in the use of the folding glider.
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