all_inclusive | Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

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Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

Here it is. Everything.

His own words come back to haunt Victor when he closes the door to his workshop behind him, his subject's body cooling in the bath of ice that will be her new home until he can harvest healthier parts to replace the diseased and decayed ones that plagued her in life, ones that he knows intimately well from his past. When he lifts his eyes to search his rough and abused quarters, he finds himself struck by the impossible. Though morphine is in his blood, it merely dulls the pain and not the awareness. Still, by all accounts, he has managed to find himself in the approximation of Sir Malcolm's library.

Chilled, he thinks of the weeks he had spent in this library, trapped while a demon held them hostage upstairs and another demon lurked outside his door. It takes Victor only a brief moment to realise that this is not Malcolm's home and Victor has found himself transported as if on the wings of some temporal being into a place of such wonder and such advancement that he can hardly say.

The lights, the lights, they burn with electricity unlike any he has ever seen and he wonders if this is how Proteus felt, if this is how his creations looked upon the world with such wonder, at seeing things for the first time and discovering in them the newness and potential of being.

"Fairy lights," he echoes to himself with bitter remorse, reaching out towards their luminescent glow before he retracts his fingers tight to his chest and thinks of all the heartbreak and the happiness that Proteus had not experienced because of his past sins and shames and mistakes.

Swallowing back that regret, Victor turns towards the door to summon forth courage of being, knowing there must be more to this world than a mere echo of a library he has come to know so intimately and with such despair. Still he searches each crevasse and corner, beholding wonders hidden in plain sight that he cannot rightly account for. Eventually, he strays far enough until he finds himself gaping upwards at the most wondrous chandelier powered by such electricity that he could power his laboratory a dozen times over with the power it seemingly contains.

"Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile," he murmurs Shakespeare's words to himself as he cranes his neck and turns his gaze upward, having already decided he must learn everything of this strange world that lurks behind the door of his laboratory. He very stubbornly does not think of the lines that come next.

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At his left, Cameron sits tucked right up against the wall of one of the alcoves lining the span of the lobby, perched on the back of an overstuffed leather sofa, combat boots unabashedly planted on the seat cushions. Hunched over her new cellular phone, she glances up, the cool glow of the screen lighting pale green eyes half-hidden behind her platinum fringe.

This guy, he looks more at home with the paneled walls and antiques than anyone she's seen yet, but he's got such an expression of wonder on his face that he can't have been here before. It's probably the only thing they two have in common, that look of shock and awe. She'd been wearing it three days ago, the first time she'd found herself here.

"Hey," she calls with a jerk of her chin his way. "What year are you from?"

Edited 2014-07-05 04:06 (UTC)

Victor's first glance renders little in the way of information. His eyes skim over her briefly, drawn back to the light, but his visual receptors pick up on more cues than he can process a moment later as he affords a double-take, eyes flickering over her form as the shocked awe manages to lose the awe and wallow in mere shock. She's certainly not one of London's girls, not even by the port. Not even in the darkest alleyways.

She looks almost like she belongs in the theatre, in the Tempest and Victor thinks wryly that this is a sprite, like Ariel, come to meet him after a storm has left him without a compass. "1891," is his automatic response, his gaze now successfully torn from the light, though he gestures to it loosely with one finger. "That, up there. I haven't seen electrical currents burn that brightly outside of one disastrous experiment," he says, thinking that in this case, at least it had not been his own. "What sort of conduction materials does it use, I wonder," he says, addressing the room more than his spirit acquaintance.

"Uh… copper, probably," Cameron answers, still hunched but following the drift of the guy's gaze with keen and critical eyes. "Sometimes aluminum or an alloy, but usually copper. I don't think the materials have changed that much, just the amount of power that can push through them."

In theory, she should know this. She's not that long out of school, and history of science had been required for her major. She just hadn't much cared how the hardware worked, only that it did.

In retrospect, what with the whole vacuum cleaner meltdown incident, she probably should rethink that stance.

"You just got here," she says.

"Yes, sharp eyes, those," is Victor's wry response, given that he's certain to look out of time and place, what with his fascination with the lighting fixtures in a new place and his general aura, which he's sure has displaced him quite thoroughly. He's still more caught on the lights than his new companion and is sure it shows. The trouble is, he's spent so long amongst the dead that he often forgets how to treat the living.

More power, it was always part of his intention, but short of lightning storms, he hadn't the faintest how to do it. "You're not from a time I can put a name to, and if you are, then it's certainly not a world I'm accustomed to." Though, he's beginning to see the lines of his worlds blurred, that odd demimonde creeping out from the shadows. "Do I dare ask where we are? Or will I regret a question like that?"

"I'm from 1983," Cameron replied as she stood upright on the sofa cushions and then hopped to the floor. Head tilted, she afforded the guy a considering once-over. "It's possible that we're from different worlds, that's a thing this place does apparently, but since you're enraptured by lighting, I'm thinking that 1983 is going to seem like another world regardless."

With a final glance at the screen, she shoved her phone into the back pocket of her pants and then made a sweeping, game show hostess gesture toward the room around them.

"You're in the Nexus Hotel. It defies all logic, so I don't know, a dude like you might regret asking, yeah."

Victor's ensuing laugh is rather rough as he thinks of all the things that have defied logic in recent days. His head turns sharply to the side in a curious tic he has, the one that remarks upon his ability to process the lack of logic far better in recent days than ever before. Then again, in recent days he has been asked to believe that a demon can take up residence within a woman's soul and were it not for the physical proof, he might have yet remained a doubting saint.

"My mind is open," he assures the woman. "While I cannot lie and would never turn away from science and logic, I'm also a man who enjoys poetry and the old Romantics. The turn of phrase and the world of metaphors is not curious to me, nor that of the demimonde, a world I only half know."

"I… have no idea what any of that means," Cameron said, managing to make the admission sound as if she weren't the one deficient between the two of them. She had all due respect for history—Ada Lovelace was one of her idols—but she recognized and then accepted almost instantaneously that she had little patience for whatever flowery bullshit language came along with being from 1891.

"But it's good that you've got an open mind," she continued. "It's going to be blown. A lot." Particularly if the lighting alone could amaze him so much.

"So, what's your name?"

"Victor Frankenstein," he introduces himself with a rather off-hand tone, given that his attention is currently cycling through the various numbers of uses that this new modern wiring might have if he were able to procure some for his lab. He thinks even his Creature would not fault him for lingering so long if it meant expediting his work.

He turns to her, though, a bit struck by the turn of phrase, sifting through it and coming up with her meaning. "And if you were to describe the future, this mind-blowing time, so to speak, how would you summarize it to me?"

Eyebrows skeptically arched, Cameron scoffed. "Yeah, okay," she replied, shifting her weight back onto her heels as she regarded him from feet upwards in an attempt to ascertain if there was any truth to his claim. They'd told her when she arrived that meeting fictional figures was a possibility, but she remained unconvinced. This guy did not look like a medical genius; he looked like he needed a shower and a minimum of 16 hours of sleep.

"We know more. A lot more. And care less about stupid shit," she answered. "That sum it up well enough for you?"

"It depends upon your definition of what is, by your accounts, stupid," Victor challenges, given that he has his own held beliefs as to what is and what isn't valuable, but he only allows for such opinions to be shared when pushed, enough. "For instance, the stupid shit, as you so call it, to me would be the less than valuable search for scientific pursuit less than the most pursued, most determined, most glorious of all things -- the veil that pierces life and death and the discovery of such things beyond it."

Cameron reared her head slowly back, incredulous. "Wow, dude, you're really committed," she replied, and then frowned. "Not sure I agree that we should chuck all other science out the window, but congrats on that."

What if, though... What if this guy legitimately was Dr. Frankenstein? How could she even tell, in a place like this? He could just be really committed to his crazy ...just like Frankenstein was.

No. There was just no way.

"Anyway, there's a pretty big library that way," Cameron continued with a vague motion toward the gallery corridor. "I wouldn't be surprised if there are modern medical texts in there. Might want to check in and get a room before you start grave robbing, though." She flicked an index finger toward the front desk.

His brow furrows with confusion and he wonders if perhaps this isn't a causal effect of sliding between past and future with ease, not understanding the people around him as precisely as he'd wish to. "I don't think it should be thrown out, but I also disbelief that it should be given the weight of importance," he says, slightly irritable to think that all science should stop.

Certainly not. However, those scientists and explorers should find themselves accustomed to being inferior. He gives her a startled look, as if he would do such a thing (as if she could know of such a thing) and finds himself yet wary. "I assure you, once I find the texts, they will be the first thing I read." He tries to shake off her comment, but finds it difficult. "And I would hardly steal from a grave, that's devilish behaviour."

No, his subjects come to him on stark tables.

"Is it," Cameron replied, the words soft and drawn out, caught somewhere between question and sardonic statement. Her skeptically arched eyebrows said as much as her voice, but she made no further comment on Frankenstein's current or possible future proclivities. The guy had enough to deal with without being confronted with his status as either fictional character or delusional wannabe.

"Seriously, though," she began again, and pointed more clearly toward the front desk. "You'll want to check in. I know it's kind of weird–Like, are they trying to track us or what? But the rooms are free, they can answer pretty much all your questions, and so far nobody's screwed with me. They've got little fliers about trans-dimensional safety and everything, it's crazy."

Victor takes the information in as though he's collecting rainwater. He's cautious and careful about it, not wanting to get too deep into a situation he's not accustomed to, having had a great deal of experience already with the consequences of such a thing. "Is there a guest book somewhere that they require me to sign?"

"Perhaps a place where they expect compensation?"

"I didn't sign anything," Cameron answered with a dubiously flicked glance toward the crisply efficient figures behind the front desk. "They just knew who I was. Which was weird, but when you've just hopped across time and space, I guess everything is relative." At the time she'd been so overwhelmed, it hadn't occurred to her that the check-in process was odd.

"And everything's free. Well," she reconsidered with a tilt of her head to one side, "almost everything. Your room is free, and the buffet is free. You have to pay for drinks and cigarettes."

Alcohol does seem a lovely beacon in a world filled with infuriating confusion and madness. Victor glances towards the desk and the strange fibrous clothing the people wear, wondering if he ought to trust what's before him for what it appears to be. He supposes he also doesn't have many options, currently. "What would happen to be the going rate for a drink, then?" he wonders. "In a place like this?"

"Same rate as wherever you came from," Cameron replied, and then shook her head, reconsidering. "Okay, technically it's not the same rate because it's inflated, but your money is worth more here, so it's effectively the same rate."

When she'd discovered this little quirk, it had immediately become her favorite aspect of the hotel. It was as if they were all programs, and stepping through a door prompted an algorithm that affected their known value so that no one was left with an advantage.

"Seriously," she continued, and motioned Frankenstein's way. "Check your wallet."

Victor pulls out his billfold to inspect it, having had precious few coins before and now he draws out strange dollars he doesn't recognize, coins having become paper, though it's still a pitiful sum, totally less than five pounds all together. "Still poor," Victor remarks, given that his money is either funnelled to his experiments, his morphine, or to his rent.

Even Malcolm Murray cannot fund him enough for all his hobbies.

"Where are you from that they talk like that?" Ed asks the moment he overhears the stranger talking, unable to help the grin that splits his face as he takes in the sight of the newcomer -- or well, Ed's pretty sure he's a newcomer anyway. Not that he's exactly kept track of everyone who's in the hotel or anything, but he's pretty sure he's never seen this guy who's standing in front of him. Looking pretty weird too, if Ed does say so himself. (And yet, strangely, more like home than most of the people he's seen in the hotel.)

Ed's got his hands planted on his hips, taking no care to hide that he's examining the stranger. His automail arm is also on full display -- it's much too warm to be wearing his full get-up, and he's found that here, his clothes tend to get as much staring as his arm, so Ed's sort of given up on hiding it. Inevitably, he has to explain it anyway.

He's heard that there are entire groups of people here from the same world. But no one else has passed through that belongs to his -- or that even knows of alchemy or automail, for that matter. Ed can't exactly say he's made peace with it -- because he's not really the peace-making sort. But he deals.

Victor's curiosity is lighted anew at the question, turning to regard the young man with a small degree of critical judgment, given that he speaks English well enough and certainly looks capable of education, so how is it that he doesn't know Shakespeare? "It's from Love's Labours Lost," Victor informs him, with a hearty degree of condescension lying in those words as his brows provide the rest, raising upwards as he wonders how primitive the culture he's experiencing is.

His eyes scan the figure before him and soon his condescension is removed and curiosity is all that remains as he regards the arm, flickering up and down. "How is that affixed?" he asks immediately. "Was it grafted on? Sewn in some way?"

Ed blinks at the comeback. The name doesn't mean much to him. Sure, he considers himself well-educated. If the subject is alchemy. He knows that his knowledge is fleeting on almost any other subject. But he's gotten along well enough on that. His response reflects that: He shrugs.

This level of curiosity about his arm is a bit off-putting and only having gotten here before keeps him from retreating altogether. He doesn't come any closer, but he does pull his sleeve out of the way entirely, revealing where the metal meets the thick chunk of scar tissue that covers his shoulder.

"Connects to the nerves," Ed says. His knowledge of his automail limbs leave a lot to be desired. But that's what he has Winry for. (Being here weeks without his mechanic has made him tetchy though, aware that if anything goes wrong, he's in trouble.) But the nerves he does know all too well -- feels that jolt each time his arm or leg is put back on.

Victor is already drifting closer without invitation, aware that the presumption might come across as rude, but he hardly gives a damn. When there is something before him that is promising in his field, he would hardly hesitate. His eyes scan the scar tissue and he wishes that this sort of thing might yield some samples. "And your arm? Your flesh and blood arm," he clarifies. "Where is that?"

It would have been quite helpful to run samples on the severed nerve ends to give him a chance to understand how the replacement had come about. "What year are you from?" he wonders, awed. "And how did they do it? Connect it, I mean."

Where is his flesh and blood arm? The question fills Ed with a familiar ache. I traded it to some guy who guards a gate that exists in between worlds so that I could seal my brother's soul to a suit of armor. He knows it's no use trying to explain where it is to this man -- not that he would bother with a stranger anyway. As it is, the notion's usually too much for people who know alchemy, let alone those who don't know how the exchanges work.

"Gone," Ed settles for. Doesn't see why it matters anyway.

"1905," Ed supplies, knowing that's earlier than when most of the others come from. "And I don't really know all the specifics," he shrugs, "There's ports in my arm and leg and it connects into there."

Victor's brow furrows and he feels as if he's been assaulted in the stomach with the ferocity of a shock unexpected, pushing the air from his windpipe and out in the form of a confused exhalation, tinged with a babble or two. "That's ... you're ..." He shakes his head, running his fingers through his hair. "That's only fourteen years from now and there's no indication that technology is going to leap like that." Perhaps the Americans have been sitting on this and hiding it, but that seems unlikely, given that he's yet to meet any of them smart enough to create such a thrust forward.

"I'm a scientist, myself, more of a doctor, really, and I'm very interested in knowing how on earth someone managed to do that in 1905."

"It's probably not," Ed answers, shrugging. "Most worlds don't seem to have automail."

He doesn't know if it's somehow linked in with them not having alchemy, but he does wonder why they don't. Most of the people who have seen his arm and leg have been intrigued by it, seem to think it's a wonderful use of technology. But he's only heard a few people who have seen something comparable.

"I can't really explain it," Ed says. "My mechanic is the one who built it. She knows it."

"Automail," he echoes, fascinated and wanting to touch. He thinks, perhaps, that beautiful things of scientific purpose shouldn't be so appealing if they didn't want scientists touching them, but Victor is drawn as if a magpie to a silver plate. "Could you hazard an explanation as to what that is?" Since the mechanic doesn't appear to be there and Victor thinks that the boy can't be entirely useless, seeing as he's wearing the stuff.

"What automail is?" Ed blinks, because he's never had such a request before. It's weird, this place, to constantly be explaining things he's always just known -- things in his world are taken for absolute granted.

"Uh, well," Ed starts, gesturing to his metal arm with his flesh. "It's metal prosthetics, usually steel. Connects to the nervous system, so it's powered by, you know, the body and stuff. Some people really upgrade them for more weaponized versions," he tacks on. Of course, his is easy to manipulate with his alchemy, but it's not like he's got a gun or chainsaw on his like some people.

It's a crude thought, but Victor's immediate desire is to fully take the boy apart and see how it connects. Unblinking, his gaze descends over him as he thinks about how he would go about it. Certainly it would require a great deal of anesthetic, though crudely, he supposes anything might do in a pinch. It takes a shake of his head to bring him out of the reverie, thinking that it doesn't do to have such thoughts about strangers. "And you?" he finally speaks, when he thinks he's got the sense for it. "Why not militarize yourself? It seems as though it might carry a benefit."

Victor's inner scientist is chanting with hope for change, to want to be a part of the new process, but he barely knows the man.

Ed felt a prickle of warning along the back of his neck as Victor looked him over again. Not exactly danger, but something alongside it. A sense that, finally, Ed had learned not to ignore.

He scoffs when Victor asks, as if the answer is obvious. He crosses his arms almost defensively in front of his chest.

He might be labeled as a dog of the military, but well. He's not. He's different. He might officially work for them, but he's never been one to remake himself into something else just to please his superiors. Hates that word even. Superior. As if there's anything superior about Mustang.

"I don't need to," is what Ed settles for as an answer. Winry's work has always been clean and efficient, and that's always been what's suited Ed.

Victor furrows his brow, thinking perhaps he only doesn't understand because his mind is currently weak with the lack of drugs, is unable to understand the situation at hand. Still, it's an utterly helpless feeling he possesses and he wants to understand it, he truly does. "And why not?" he asks, shaking his head.

He feels a tug that's become familiar since he's arrived here. He shouldn't show off his alchemy. There are a thousand and one responsible reasons in the hotel. He doesn't know these people. He doesn't know what they can do. He doesn't know why they would be interested in his alchemy.

Unfortunately, it's not like his humble side has ever won out much. Especially not here.

He claps his hands and a familiar blue glow crackles around his automail arm. He slides his flesh hand over the metal and the familiar jut of a blade appears over his wrist.

"I don't need to," Ed repeats.

Victor's awestruck look could likely be captured by a photographer and set down in the books to point to a definition of shock, delight, wonder, and curiosity. He leans in, with very little regard for what the blade might do to him, his eyes growing ever wider as he runs his fingers two inches above it. "That's magnificent," he says softly. "Was it fused in? By your friend?"

He still can't get used to the reactions his alchemy and automail inspire here. Sure, he's used to people being surprised at seeing it. But those reactions were always more surprise at seeing something rare. Here, it was shock at seeing something that was considered impossible.

And this is even something a little more than that. It isn't danger sparking up his spine, but maybe ... wariness? Certainly not a feeling Ed is used to. He keeps the arm blade out in any case.

"No," Ed answers bluntly. It's maybe even stranger to hear him reference Winry so casually. She's never seemed so far away. Amusing, he admits, for anyone to think the alchemy is Winry's work if only because of how irritated she would be.

"It's called alchemy," Ed tacks on, but without any explanation.

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Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

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