Re: MORITURI TE SALUTANT!! [S!4]
05-31-2012, 04:41 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
It was a cold night - with dawn and the warming sun seemingly never to come.
Every dry surface radiated moonlight, shining forth the illusion that it was otherwise, and every wet facade glistened like silver in the lunar glow. The clouds roiled angrily: not with the red-hot male anger of action and destruction, but with blue, biding, biting anger, the sort that waits forever. Be it for a beginning, an end, a climax or a denouement - or all four - they waited and lingered, spitting in the face of meteorology like so much rain of fish. They were going to roil, and roil well, unsettled cold front predicting a complete dispersal of the summer storm be damned.
Sam’s thoughts roiled with the sky, the little eddies and swirls in her mind formed from Sir Gregory’s memories, mannerisms, personality, identity..
Perhaps a little analogy is in order, to pass the time whereupon Chasewell and Wün navigate the dark service corridors of the manor - the maze of twisty passages, all alike.
Imagine an ocean, of water clear as day and pure as glass. Then, with an eyedropper, let a single drop of black ink fall in. At first there is a clear boundary where the two are separate, but it diffuses, smears itself out, insinuating itself in the mass. Let another drop fall, and another, and another, and watch the water darken. Sir Gregory in Sam’s mind was a trickle of ink in her ocean, but it would take her in time, turn her waters murky and her identity unclear. Enough ink, and you could write with the ocean...
The mansion was in fact not as large as its interior portrayed. Shrewdish Manor had been built by the master architects of the eighteenth century, the sweeping halls and gothic arches bearing the fingerprints of Chambers and Kent. The building was a subtle repression of spatial geometries, splendor held back and fed to the spectator’s eyes one tableau at a time. It was the architectural equivalent of légèrement retenu, music in wood and stone and masonry. Even in years of disrepair and neglect, the stonework stood barely ruffled by the ravages of time and the elements, the manor standing tall and proud in its stripped-down finery.
But under its proud exterior, its little passages fared less well:
once lit by oil lamps, that burned down and fell and scorched the wood and stained the stone,
once waxed and scrubbed as well as their main-thoroughfare cousins, now worn away and rotting,
once cleaned by contingents of maids and housekeepers, some of which fled, some of which stayed, all of them now dead; now carpeted with undisturbed dust centimeters thick in places.
The little passages had been the by-ways of the servants, who utilized them to go about business without intruding on their masters’. Now they stood as old and dead as those who had once walked them. Yet as Sir Gregory strode through them, she felt a familiarity to their structure - but of course! She’d pored over the designs for the manor, hadn’t she?
No, she hadn’t!
Sam clutched her head with a hand - a hand, she noted, was slightly lighter in shade than it had been a minute ago - and wondered what had possessed her to wear so much of Sir Gregory’s clothes. Perhaps it had been her instinct to hide, to take on another identity in the hope that she would go unnoticed in this mad battle. It hadn’t worked, not on James.
And then there was James. Apollon. ‘Apollon’. Even the name sounded fake; he didn’t fit the vision that it commanded. Sam thought - no, she knew he wasn’t saying all he knew, and the look in his eyes had said he’d known a lot. He’d said (and Sir Gregory had been the type of person to think in italics)...
<font color="#080080">“Cut the crap. I know why you’re here in an empty mansion; the Haruspex has you too, doesn’t she?”
A pause that lasted for a fraction of a second too long.
“I think we ought to join forces. Team up. Ally ourselves. That’d be the best course of action, wouldn’t it...Sam?”
...he’d bent right down near her ear, his breath caressing it softly, the undertone saying volumes more than the words he whispered in that perfect, rich tenor. He was more to her he was more to her he was more...
That was about the way Sir Gregory’s thoughts went, the echoes of passions and desires long dead, preserved in the fabrics that Sam now wore. She couldn’t concentrate, not with them banging about.
A loud stomp from Sam’s boots shook plaster from the ceiling, bringing Chad irritably around to glare at her. “Good lord, could you stop banging about? By now everyone and their great-great-grandmother knows we’re here!”</font>
”Yes.”
”We do.”
It was a cold night - with dawn and the warming sun seemingly never to come.
Every dry surface radiated moonlight, shining forth the illusion that it was otherwise, and every wet facade glistened like silver in the lunar glow. The clouds roiled angrily: not with the red-hot male anger of action and destruction, but with blue, biding, biting anger, the sort that waits forever. Be it for a beginning, an end, a climax or a denouement - or all four - they waited and lingered, spitting in the face of meteorology like so much rain of fish. They were going to roil, and roil well, unsettled cold front predicting a complete dispersal of the summer storm be damned.
Sam’s thoughts roiled with the sky, the little eddies and swirls in her mind formed from Sir Gregory’s memories, mannerisms, personality, identity..
Perhaps a little analogy is in order, to pass the time whereupon Chasewell and Wün navigate the dark service corridors of the manor - the maze of twisty passages, all alike.
Imagine an ocean, of water clear as day and pure as glass. Then, with an eyedropper, let a single drop of black ink fall in. At first there is a clear boundary where the two are separate, but it diffuses, smears itself out, insinuating itself in the mass. Let another drop fall, and another, and another, and watch the water darken. Sir Gregory in Sam’s mind was a trickle of ink in her ocean, but it would take her in time, turn her waters murky and her identity unclear. Enough ink, and you could write with the ocean...
The mansion was in fact not as large as its interior portrayed. Shrewdish Manor had been built by the master architects of the eighteenth century, the sweeping halls and gothic arches bearing the fingerprints of Chambers and Kent. The building was a subtle repression of spatial geometries, splendor held back and fed to the spectator’s eyes one tableau at a time. It was the architectural equivalent of légèrement retenu, music in wood and stone and masonry. Even in years of disrepair and neglect, the stonework stood barely ruffled by the ravages of time and the elements, the manor standing tall and proud in its stripped-down finery.
But under its proud exterior, its little passages fared less well:
once lit by oil lamps, that burned down and fell and scorched the wood and stained the stone,
once waxed and scrubbed as well as their main-thoroughfare cousins, now worn away and rotting,
once cleaned by contingents of maids and housekeepers, some of which fled, some of which stayed, all of them now dead; now carpeted with undisturbed dust centimeters thick in places.
The little passages had been the by-ways of the servants, who utilized them to go about business without intruding on their masters’. Now they stood as old and dead as those who had once walked them. Yet as Sir Gregory strode through them, she felt a familiarity to their structure - but of course! She’d pored over the designs for the manor, hadn’t she?
No, she hadn’t!
Sam clutched her head with a hand - a hand, she noted, was slightly lighter in shade than it had been a minute ago - and wondered what had possessed her to wear so much of Sir Gregory’s clothes. Perhaps it had been her instinct to hide, to take on another identity in the hope that she would go unnoticed in this mad battle. It hadn’t worked, not on James.
And then there was James. Apollon. ‘Apollon’. Even the name sounded fake; he didn’t fit the vision that it commanded. Sam thought - no, she knew he wasn’t saying all he knew, and the look in his eyes had said he’d known a lot. He’d said (and Sir Gregory had been the type of person to think in italics)...
<font color="#080080">“Cut the crap. I know why you’re here in an empty mansion; the Haruspex has you too, doesn’t she?”
A pause that lasted for a fraction of a second too long.
“I think we ought to join forces. Team up. Ally ourselves. That’d be the best course of action, wouldn’t it...Sam?”
...he’d bent right down near her ear, his breath caressing it softly, the undertone saying volumes more than the words he whispered in that perfect, rich tenor. He was more to her he was more to her he was more...
That was about the way Sir Gregory’s thoughts went, the echoes of passions and desires long dead, preserved in the fabrics that Sam now wore. She couldn’t concentrate, not with them banging about.
A loud stomp from Sam’s boots shook plaster from the ceiling, bringing Chad irritably around to glare at her. “Good lord, could you stop banging about? By now everyone and their great-great-grandmother knows we’re here!”</font>
”Yes.”
”We do.”
----
So very British / But then again | People are machines Machines are people | Oh hai there | There's no time
----
Superhero 1920s noir | Multigenre Half-Life | Changing the future | Command line interface
Tu ventire felix? | Clockwork for eternity | Explosions in spacetime