i was talking to @fruitpeels about their adorable isekai sherlock & watson drawings, and they mentioned imagining watson as a decorated veteran just like the original stories, and a fully formed image appeared in my mind's eye
It's been quite some time since I was so inspired by both this post and the post before it but at long last, I've finally finished a chapter of a book born in my mind from these fantastic ideas. No idea how much I'll end up writing in the end but at least I'm having fun. Anywho...
-The Scarlet Study-
Chapter 1
(A fantastic theft took place in a noblewoman’s study, a theft that changed the study into a single, solid color of scarlet red)
Like a great many others, I enlisted to fight in the Great War to avenge home and kin. I had a talent for healing magic and was trained to specializing in the healing of internal injuries and the cleansing of poisons. When it became apparent that the Dark Daemon Army had no mercy to show for those without combat prowess, I was also made to become quite sufficient with both the spear and the crossbow. My body bears many scars from those eight long years of war, most notably across my nose, but the scars and the wounds of heart and mind inevitably bore us the fruit of victory.
With my honorable discharge came a stipend of 2 Nuggets per month and a sudden great chasm in my soul. Without any enemy to fight, any evil to subdue, I could no longer distract myself from the fact that the Kingdom of London no longer held any place I could return to and thus, like a great many other souls, found myself drawn to the nation’s capital city of Merrilbone.
Age and modernity paradoxically both clashed and coexisted in the city. Buildings older than the country itself housed shops that sold the latest fashions. Dilapidated ruins were surrounded by brand new complexes for housing that I am told are being called ‘apartments’. Horseless carriages, developed during the Great War to compensate for dwindling animal populations, traveled along roads that had been cobbled together from stones polished by hand to perfect smoothness over 150 years ago. Nothing truly seemed to belong together and perhaps that was why I found myself so drawn.
Gainful employment would be necessary if I wished to stay as my stipend was designed to enrich those who had lives and homes and family businesses to return to and run. It was not, I found out all too quickly, created with a decent standard of living for a soldier existing on their own. I had hoped my years of military experience would grant a swift resolution to my problem but I was far from the only veteran of combat who had come to Merrilbone after the war had ended. The pool of talent was far too large to do naught but drown in it, thus I turned to my skill with healing magic.
As luck would have it, I found an old comrade-in-arms while searching the various clinics and hospitals of Merrilbone. His name was Stampfoot, an elderly dwarf who stood out amongst his kind for turning his naturally skilled hands towards medical surgery instead of the mining and smithing arts that dwarves were so commonly associated with.
“To think I’d know an elf crazy enough to try and make her home so far from any forest,” he said with the teasing mirth I had come to associate him with during our time together in service.
“Elves live a great many places. That we all try to live in woods and trees is nothing more than an outdated caricature, one I will not dignify with any further response.”
“Fair enough, I suppose but I’m afraid indignity is all I can afford to give at the moment. The rent in this blasted city is so high that my surgical clinic can barely break even most months. Only my stipend keeps food in my belly and occasionally even it must bend in order to keep this overpriced roof over my head. I’ll not be hiring anybody, no matter how good a friend they may be, until I’ve settled somewhere I can live with some pride.”
“Disappointing but… quite understandable,” I admitted.
He seemed to take my chagrin as a personal affront and grumbled loudly. I could see he was mulling something over, something he was clearly conflicted about and thus was my curiosity aroused.
“You’ve got something in mind, my friend. Would you share it with me?”
“Well…” Stampfoot mumbled wordlessly for a few more moments before he finally relented- “If you cannot find work, the other obvious solution would be to find a way to spend less on your housing, Jocaryn. A housemate could help with that.”
“Do you know anybody? Everyone in this city aside from you is stranger to me.”
“Aye and the man I have in mind is stranger still than strangers in even this city.”
“Strange in what manner?” I inquired, wondering how someone could strike a man as war-traveled as Stampfoot as exceedingly strange.
He answered me with the tale of how he had first met the man. How the man had practically barged into his clinic with a cadaver hoisted over one shoulder, how he had demanded Stampfoot’s skill in applying a multitude of different cuts to a body already desecrated with far too many of them and insisted it was part of an experiment that could prove someone’s innocence. By the time Stampfoot finished recalling the hours of toil and strange mutterings the man had put him through, I had decided that ‘strange’ was not a powerful enough adjective to describe this odd fellow. Still, I was fascinated by the story and curious as to what possible purpose such an exercise could serve.
I decided that even if I ended up not wanting to live together with this man that I simply had to meet him and hear the story again from his point of view.
We had checked several other clinics together and each of them had a similarly strange story to tell about the man. At one clinic he had spent hours writing down the differences between wounds healed with magic and wounds healed by more natural means and at another he spent an entire day watching the head healer cure cases of food poisoning. They all described the man, both his physical features and the fervor with which he poured himself into these seemingly random studies. The sheer amount of knowledge the man had crammed into his head by this point staggered me to contemplate and further still when I tried to come up with a reason to gather such a variety of knowledge when one clearly had no intention of joining the medical profession.
“Sherlock Holmes?” I asked the man when Stampfoot and I finally located him in, of all places, a necromancer’s mortuary.
He wasn’t quite so tall as some of the spoken descriptions made him seem but he was certainly as lithe, if not even leaner, with a sharp nose and cold eyes that sparkled with as much ice as intelligence. Never before had I thought a human’s eyes could lack emotion to such a degree and yet, as if flicked to life by a switch, warmth and excitement surged into those same eyes.
“Excellent timing! Come, come!” he insisted as he ran over and dragged Stampfoot and I over to the skeleton he’d been examining.
He’d set up a large magnifying glass and held it steadily over the elbow. What precisely I was meant to be seeing, I wasn’t sure.
“The most fascinating thing about necromancy I’ve just learned today. Can you see the bones there? See how they’ve become connected, practically fused together with some strange, soft growth? That is how those who practice necromantic arts puppet the bodies of the deceased, even when the body has no more tendons or ligaments to keep the skeleton held together any longer! I bet they never taught you that during your military training, eh?” Mister Holmes explained excitedly.
“Well, no. I-“ I froze then whipped around to face him fully. “How in the world did you know I took military training?!”
“Never mind that for the time being. Now that I have confirmed the evidence of my eyes with yours, I simply must write down these findings while they’re still fresh in my mind.”
“Now see here, Holmes…” Stampfoot said, only to be ignored as Holmes wrote down something in a very crowded notebook.
My old companion gave up trying to pull the man’s attention away from his writings surprisingly quickly and simply stood there with his arms folded as he glared at the man’s back. With far less experience dealing with this individual and no better ideas besides, I joined Stampfoot in his wait for this Holmes character to turn his attention to us again. Our wait was blessedly and surprisingly short.
“Is it frowned upon in this London for unmarried, unrelated men and women to cohabitate together? I myself am unbothered by the idea but societal norms do have a way of making themselves a bother if you do not adhere to them without good reason,” he asked without turning away from his notes.
“Are you reading our minds?”
“Does such an ability exist in this world?”
His question was asked earnestly, that much was obvious but I couldn’t fathom any other explanation for how he seemed to know as much as he did about both my history and my reason for coming to see him with no prior knowledge of me.
“So far as I am aware, no such magic exists. If it had, I doubt the Great War would have lasted nearly as long as it did and yet you seem to be using such a power on me, Mister Holmes. I would like an explanation,” I sternly demanded.
“I will be delighted to furnish you with one tomorrow but if we are to take lodgings together, I believe our time would be better spent learning now if we will be able to tolerate each other. Do you have an aversion to strong tobacco? I tend to use my pipe quite often to quell my restlessness and will sometimes puff for hours just to prevent myself from pacing the floor.”
“Well, no. My father used to smoke quite often but-“
“I will also be using up a lot of our free space to hold chemicals and perform experiments. Would that bother you?”
“Mister Holmes-!” Stampfoot tried to interrupt to sadly little effect.
“Possibly the worst thing about me would be my mood. I get quite sullen at times. Won’t open my mouth for days on end. Don’t be concerned when it happens, I’ll be right again soon enough. Now, what have you to confess?”
I couldn’t help but to laugh at the absurdity of the man, even in spite of my concerns. My instincts warned me of no danger from this Sherlock Holmes and he was entertaining, if odd. More than that though, I was powerfully curious about him. I wanted to know more and it wasn’t like I couldn’t simply walk away if things turned sour.
“I’m stubborn and I don’t sleep well. I’ll be up and down at the unholiest of hours and I will attack anyone who tries to enter my private quarters uninvited. I suppose I also bathe for far longer than I ought,” I answered after some small consideration.
“Then I suppose that settles matters then so long as you find the accommodations as agreeable as I have. Please meet me tomorrow around noon at the street with five bakeries in close proximity to one another. You’ll find it northeast of our current location. I’ll see you then but for now I’m afraid I have another appointment I simply can’t afford to cancel. Good day.”
Holmes rushed off with his writing supplies and notebooks tucked hurriedly underarm, leaving Stampfoot and myself staring off at the doorway he’d just exited.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Jocaryn. I wouldn’t trust that fellow so far as I could throw him,” Stampfoot said with a shake of his head.
“Then why bring me to him?” I wondered.
“Because, old friend… you can throw him much further than my old bones could.”
