Victor Frankenstein (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lifeskills) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
entrancelogs2014-11-01 11:19 pm
lifeskills) wrote in entrancelogs2014-11-01 11:19 pm
OPEN | and the moon gazed on my midnight labours
Who: Victor Frankenstein (lifeskills) and whoever!
Where: Basement, caverns, and the library.
When: Oct. 30th, 31st, and Nov. 1st.
Rating: Let's go with PG-13 just to be safe, IDK.
Summary: He's no explorer, but he is a chronic insomniac with time to kill and he can't hide in his room forever, strangeness or no strangeness. Poking around is better than nothing.
The Story:
Basement/Caverns
[It doesn't take Victor long to start feeling the loss of hearth and home. It's more than just existing in a land dredged up from the depths of the human imagination, it's the loss of smaller, mundane things. A familiar workspace. His clothes. His books, his notes, his materials... Unadventurous and unfulfilled though it may seem to some, those bits of flotsam had made up the whole of his life. His hands don't know what to do with themselves without something familiar to touch, to do. He is his work and has been for a long while. As far as abductions go, this one is particularly hard to fathom for all the freedom it grants without the one ultimate liberty: being able to leave. He misses Caliban least of all, but even the task he'd assigned himself in his monster's name had been his choice. A purpose.
Here his sole purpose seems to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's not a fan of this waiting game, aimless as it is.
While Vanessa takes her rest, Victor is restless. His senses are too raw for him to eat or sleep, and that imbues him with a false courage, enough to propel him out of their room alone. Wandering isn't a habit he's indulged in since boyhood, but it comes naturally, driven by curiosity and a need to do something that isn't just pacing the length of his room. Anything he finds he can report back to Vanessa, and that is of benefit to them both.
Despite his better judgement, he ends up spending time outside their shared lodgings longer than he intends, whiling away the night hours. Before too long, his evaluation of the mansion takes him down floor by floor, to the ballroom, to the kitchen, down halls that never seem to end, and finally down the stairs into the basement.
On the first night, he doesn't stay longer than a minute. On the second, he hunts down the source of the generator hum and adds it to the notes he's already started to compile in a small notebook.
On the third, after danger fails to appear to rip him into shreds and no horde of white-haired blood-eaters swarm him, he returns with the notebook and a lantern to test his luck a little further. Maybe it's simply a desire to reconstitute his notes and have something of comfort around him, but he finds marking down the caverns' first few turns on paper provides a fruitful labor. Tentative at first, Victor doesn't mean to venture very far into the dark maw under the stairs, but it's the same sort of lie he'd told himself when he'd considered giving up his research after the Monster's birth. His need to know overrides good sense. A left turns into another, which turns into another, which turns into the beginnings of a map.]
Library
[The mansion is as lavish as he's ever seen, there can be no denying that, but Victor doesn't come to appreciate much of it until the library. Ah, the library. It puts the "wonder" in Wonderland. Once Victor stumbles across it for the first time, the sharp, metallic edge of tension that characterizes his days softens just a bit.
Books have been some of his only companions over the course of his life; they've filled the roles of friend, colleague, and mentor. They give, not take. If there's a place outside of the surgical room where he's in his element, it's in a place of knowledge. He supposes he has to take what he can get, all else aside. If what he and Vanessa have heard about this new land is to be believed, the discomfort of being in it is of the pervasive and long-lasting variety.
One needs small comforts where one can find them.
During the days, people may find this well-dressed lad making a concentrated effort to hunt down the library so he can walk the aisles, running his fingers along book spines. It's not just for the aesthetic pleasure; he finds the publication dates of material more bewildering the more items he finds from centuries not his own. Amazing how all life in the universe had seemed to stop at the year 1891.]
lifeskills) and whoever!Where: Basement, caverns, and the library.
When: Oct. 30th, 31st, and Nov. 1st.
Rating: Let's go with PG-13 just to be safe, IDK.
Summary: He's no explorer, but he is a chronic insomniac with time to kill and he can't hide in his room forever, strangeness or no strangeness. Poking around is better than nothing.
The Story:
Basement/Caverns
[It doesn't take Victor long to start feeling the loss of hearth and home. It's more than just existing in a land dredged up from the depths of the human imagination, it's the loss of smaller, mundane things. A familiar workspace. His clothes. His books, his notes, his materials... Unadventurous and unfulfilled though it may seem to some, those bits of flotsam had made up the whole of his life. His hands don't know what to do with themselves without something familiar to touch, to do. He is his work and has been for a long while. As far as abductions go, this one is particularly hard to fathom for all the freedom it grants without the one ultimate liberty: being able to leave. He misses Caliban least of all, but even the task he'd assigned himself in his monster's name had been his choice. A purpose.
Here his sole purpose seems to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's not a fan of this waiting game, aimless as it is.
While Vanessa takes her rest, Victor is restless. His senses are too raw for him to eat or sleep, and that imbues him with a false courage, enough to propel him out of their room alone. Wandering isn't a habit he's indulged in since boyhood, but it comes naturally, driven by curiosity and a need to do something that isn't just pacing the length of his room. Anything he finds he can report back to Vanessa, and that is of benefit to them both.
Despite his better judgement, he ends up spending time outside their shared lodgings longer than he intends, whiling away the night hours. Before too long, his evaluation of the mansion takes him down floor by floor, to the ballroom, to the kitchen, down halls that never seem to end, and finally down the stairs into the basement.
On the first night, he doesn't stay longer than a minute. On the second, he hunts down the source of the generator hum and adds it to the notes he's already started to compile in a small notebook.
On the third, after danger fails to appear to rip him into shreds and no horde of white-haired blood-eaters swarm him, he returns with the notebook and a lantern to test his luck a little further. Maybe it's simply a desire to reconstitute his notes and have something of comfort around him, but he finds marking down the caverns' first few turns on paper provides a fruitful labor. Tentative at first, Victor doesn't mean to venture very far into the dark maw under the stairs, but it's the same sort of lie he'd told himself when he'd considered giving up his research after the Monster's birth. His need to know overrides good sense. A left turns into another, which turns into another, which turns into the beginnings of a map.]
Library
[The mansion is as lavish as he's ever seen, there can be no denying that, but Victor doesn't come to appreciate much of it until the library. Ah, the library. It puts the "wonder" in Wonderland. Once Victor stumbles across it for the first time, the sharp, metallic edge of tension that characterizes his days softens just a bit.
Books have been some of his only companions over the course of his life; they've filled the roles of friend, colleague, and mentor. They give, not take. If there's a place outside of the surgical room where he's in his element, it's in a place of knowledge. He supposes he has to take what he can get, all else aside. If what he and Vanessa have heard about this new land is to be believed, the discomfort of being in it is of the pervasive and long-lasting variety.
One needs small comforts where one can find them.
During the days, people may find this well-dressed lad making a concentrated effort to hunt down the library so he can walk the aisles, running his fingers along book spines. It's not just for the aesthetic pleasure; he finds the publication dates of material more bewildering the more items he finds from centuries not his own. Amazing how all life in the universe had seemed to stop at the year 1891.]
no subject
[As for Bela herself she found friends and someone she had fallen for. She understood that not everyone here would be happy with the situation, but she knows how she felt about it, and that was all that mattered to her.]
Although, I don't blame you for wanting to return to where you're from.
no subject
His world? His world and his life in it have their share of awful aspects, but they're his. If he doesn't admit how ineffectual it is to run from those things now, when will he? Not even imagining an escape to a new world can set right all of the wrongs he'd leave behind.]
A pleasant daydream. Who among us hasn't thought about starting new somewhere the past can't reach. [Victor glances at the woman.] But if there's no rhyme or reason to who arrives here, who's to say those awful things won't follow?
[And what's the point, then? It's not much of a sanctuary in that light.]
no subject
[She doesn't know his circumstances nor much about the world where he came from; Bela just knows her own situation and maybe that was all that mattered.]
I was sent home once and then I came back, realising that a month had passed here since I left. Which was odd because I only experienced a few hours myself. I can't explain it.
no subject
He frowns with some confusion.]
Sent home? Is the thread that ties us here really so capricious?
no subject
[Bela knows how it sounds but it was the truth.]
Don't ask me to explain it because I can't.
no subject
[He turns away from the shelf to fully regard her. He doesn't ask for answers he doubts she has.]
And you just returned here one day without any memory of time passing?
no subject
[She wonders where the Cheshire Cat has been, given that she hasn't seen the animal for a while.]
Only with what I experienced back home. I had no idea how much time had passed in Wonderland when I left.
no subject
Wonderland is a cause for concern for everyone involved, and it has nothing to do with Frankenstein, or most thankfully of all, Caliban.]
I've been warned memory can be... selective. So it's true then, you're one of the residents who recalls returning to your life with no recollection of what transpired here? Nothing else? A loss of consciousness? Disorientation?
[Even if one believes these phenomena are unrelated to the mental state of the person in question, it's hard to think supernatural forces don't leave some kind of mark.]
no subject
[The details of which, Bela is keeping to herself. Victor didn't need to know what her circumstances were, only that she was sent back home.]
It's as if I had never experienced Wonderland at all when I was in my world. But those memories returned little by little when this place decided to reel me back in again. For whatever reason.
no subject
His gazes roves back and forth while he thinks. When he tips his head back, it fixes on the ceiling.]
It happened just the once? Not before or since?
[Medically-speaking, nothing he could say would help her, as there's nothing definitive to say.]
no subject
[Once was bad enough. Bela didn't need her memories to be messed with again. And if she did go home, she would experience her death.]
That isn't to say it hasn't happened to other people here- I just have no idea who those people might be.
[If there even are any.]
Have you got a theory?
no subject
[There's enough here to make one sincerely doubt themselves and their understanding of the world as they know it without this matter of inexplicably coming and going.
What had Alice called it in the book? Changing. She had changed so often and so frequently under Wonderland's influence that she could not scarcely recognize herself when called to task. Victor didn't envy that feeling. Or look forward to it.
Quickly enough, he denies her question with a small shake of his head.]
I fear it's too early to say. And overly conceited to presume mine has been the only mind set on the problem. [He's prideful, but not that much.] In the time you've been here, do you know who's made the most progress looking into what's happening here?
no subject
[It might be something that Bela has to look into for herself at some point in the future, but she hasn't decided on that just yet. ]
Even if I do ask them about it, they may not be able to give me a proper answer to my query. Could be just an eternal mystery. [A shrug.] I do appreciate you listening to me though. Talking about it helps.
no subject
These are the denizens who have remained here longer than you?
[An unsettling thought, but... helpful. He files the name away for later consideration.]
I should be thanking you. You've been helpful. Unfortunately, I... wouldn't say this is my area of expertise. I can't explain the process of it.
[Hard facts are the most comforting, in Victor's mind. Facts can be understood and manipulated.]
no subject
They are.
And you're welcome for the information, Victor. Don't worry about it though; take what you will from what I've said. Who knows? Maybe you will be able to figure out how it works one day.