All Inclusive

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.