“Mina, dear, I only want to help. Just come along, dear, and join the union!” Elizabeth, or the shell of her at least, burst through the door, revolver held right in front of her as she scanned the room, soon finding Mina. “The final event will be happening, and soon! The first two of a new race, the first to enter a world of light, and light, and light!” she trained the revolver on Mina, stepping closer and backing her against the wall.
Victor had gotten caught. Foolish, he should have never agreed to helping that damned woman in the first place! but still, there was no going back now. “Hello there, Doctor, Nurse. Are you looking for someone?”
The carriage ride was long. Anna couldn’t help but pass the time by asking some questions.
“So, why did you kill him?”
“Who?”
“Carew. Don’t tell me you’ve murdered more than just one?”
“Sorry, just a little joke. Yeh, no, he’s the only one I killed. He… found out my secret. Jekyll’s Truth, as I call it. Blacker’n the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat and more sinister too, I’d reckon. Anyways, he threatened to tell, so I did what I had to do to protect us.”
A strangled gasp came from Mina's throat as Elizabeth entered, and she backed away as the shell stepped closer. She didn't understand what Elizabeth was talking about, but she figured it would be useful later on. If she made it out of this alive, that is. She went into hysterical woman mode, which wasn't difficult. Tears sprang in her eyes.
"W-what? I just want my husband back. He left– he left, and I don't where he went. Do you know where he went? Why… why are you pointing that at me?"
She could only hope that she could keep Elizabeth talking before she got a bullet to the chest. Or maybe, by some crazy luck, the revolver was unloaded. Besides, they wouldn't bring a loaded weapon into a mental institution, right? Wasn't this just psychological manipulation?
The conversation drew Robert from his thoughts. A flash of confusion and annoyance came over him.
"What's with the two of you anyway? You say you want to get away from him, and yet you killed someone to protect you both. I mean, if it has something to do with the secret, you don't have to tell me, but do you hate him or not?"
“Come now, Mina, we both know you aren’t really insane.” A smooth, calm voice emitted from Elizabeth’s mouth, much unlike the manic, deranged one earlier. It sounded like a different person entirely. “Now, all I want is to talk, but I don’t trust you not to ruin everything so I’m going to kill you when this is done. Understand me?”
“Oh, I see where ye’d be confused. Yeah, I sound like I wantae strangle the man at times, but truth be told I’d rather someone else did the deed. Jekyll was and… still is, awful generous to a wee bastard like me. I hate him, but I need him, understand? That’s where the duality lies. The two sides to the thing. But when I leave this place I won’t need him anymore, a that’s where he’ll be floundering.”
Mina scowled, dropping the act. No point in keeping it up. She was trapped. Had Frankenstein been the one to tell Elizabeth where she was? Perhaps she could ask, but he didn't show up with her, and if he really didn't betray her, then she didn't want him to die after her.
She narrowed her eyes. Could she trust Elizabeth to not just kill her here and now?
"Fine. Talk."
Some of the annoyance faded. "Ah, I see," Robert said. "And how does leaving free you from being dependant on him, exactly?"
“All I wanted was an understanding with you. But you went and ran away, and took with you one of our most valuable assets. Only he can tell us where the Pure Ones are, unless by some stroke of luck he told you and then I’ll have to extract that information out of you. Oh, Mina, you really don’t see the big picture yet, do you?” ‘Elizabeth’ said, polishing the gun with a corner of the white robes nearly everyone here but the staff wore. “Mina, darling, you know that I have eyes everywhere. Victor has been captured, and is currently being held for questioning. These puppets won’t be useful for long, he’ll soon see his Henry and Elizabeth are not what he thinks they are. Now, tell me everything you know. It’ll make this less painful.”
“Well, that’s a complicated question with an even more complicated answer. I’ll have to find a way to kill him first, but when that’s done all that will be left to do is find my own life, and that isn’t too hard when you’re me, ye ken?” Hyde said, kicking his feet up on the seats opposite him. Anna glared, but said nothing.
"Kill him?" Robert cried in alarm. Then he remembered the raisin was a murderer. "Oh."
He sighed, feeling his lip curl as the raisin kicked his feet up. "Are we there yet? Apologies for my impatience."
Oh, so he was captured. That made much more sense. Mina took a breath to calm herself.
"Pure Ones? I know nothing, much less the big picture, thank you very much. Now if you'll excuse me."
While Elizabeth's shell was still polishing the gun, Mina threw La Morte d'Aurthur at her, aiming for her head. She attempted to dash around her.
“Well yes, kill him. And we should be there in just about… now.” Hyde sniffed the air, Robert wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong but both Edward and Anna noticed it instantly. It was foul, and crackled in your lungs and stayed. There was something tainted about this place, and even Robert would have been able to sense that.
The carriage door opened, all by itself; Hyde stepped out to find the driver dead with a metal rod through his skull and a bit of brain and blood leaking around the edges. “This normally happens. Wouldn’t want it to be me, now haul yer asses over to the creepy looking chapel ahead.” It was strange, architecture unlike any you’d find anywhere on earth, it looked more like a hive than anything. There were a few people standing outside, and a few more standing by the doors who seemed to have been chatting- at least, until they had spotted the group.
Elizabeth caught Mina in a strong, bony hand, pressing the gun to her head. The book had hit her and had made a massive dent in the flesh, but Elizabeth, or whatever was puppeting her, wasn’t fazed. “Mina, you know more than you think. Now, tell me what that little self-obsessed dandy told you, all of it, and I may just let you go.” an obvious lie, but if Mina could stall for time there might just be someone coming for her…
She made a sharp intake of breath as she felt bone against her arm. “Don’t touch me!” she hissed, but didn’t dare to try and pull away. Well, it was worth a shot.
She was breathing hard now with the adrenaline from her attempted escape, and with the gun pressed to her temple.
“Sure you would,” she gasped. “And give me a nice warm dinner and bath to go along with it. Believe me, he knew about as much as I did. You said it yourself, he was self obsessed; he mostly talked about himself. Just- just please get off of me.”
“Oh.” Robert glanced out the window, and even before his eyes beheld the almost alien structure before him a nagging sense of warped wrongness invaded his mind. Hesitantly stepping out of the carriage, he saw the dead driver and that’s when the alarm bells really started going off. Nothing like this has ever happened before on his travels.
“Anna,” he murmured nauseously, “what have we gotten ourselves into?”
Anna shook her head. "I don't know. I don't know, and I don't like it, but we'd better follow this short weasel before we get shot through the skull, too." she didn't like the look of the people in the distance, even from here she could see that most of them were basically emaciated, beyond what should be humanly survivable.
"Tell me what he said, anyways. It may prove useful, in the long run." The shell said, gripping tighter around her arm and grinning with the half of her face still on.
(I thought it would be cool if Mina was a sort of psychic like Esme so…)
Mina’s expression twisted into a wild snarl as she gripped tighter. She absolutely did not want to give the shell what she wanted, but at the same time she absolutely did not want to be touched by her. Being touched by a sort of living corpse was bad enough, but she was starting to get faint flashes of what had happened to it, how it got this way, and that just made it all the worse.
She shut her eyes tight, looking away from Elizabeth. “He said something about you, that body, I think. How it was his fault that someone he loved had died. And he said that… oh- oh no-“ tears began streaming down her cheeks. One of the flashbacks had shown Elizabeth when she was alive. “Please get off of me, please, just this one mercy before I meet my end.”
Robert nodded, trying not think about the dead driver, or the mutilated people ahead of them, or what might have happened to Victor if this was the type of place they were dealing with, trying not to think in general.
He followed after Hyde, but stayed close to Anna.
Elizabeth stared, tilting her head. She gripped tighter, crushing Mina's arm with a great amount of force that her skeleton shouldn't have been capable of. More images would come to Mina's mind, the scene of her body breaking by a huge, disgusting figure, hideous beyond what even made sense, looking just as dead as Mina was now save for most of the rot. A scene of Elizabeth smiling, hugging William and looking to Justine Moritz with content in her eyes, the wedding day, where she looked to the same woman with a sense of loneliness in her eyes she couldn't explain… and then when she was young, running with the poor village children, then being taken away from the only home she had really known abruptly with no idea where she was going. Being told that she couldn't play in the house, couldn't speak without being spoken to, couldn't "disobey", had to wear uncomfortable dresses and go to big events with too many people. It seemed that whatever was controlling Elizabeth could see all this too, and it was too much for them. Elizabeth collapsed, not quite alive but not quite dead, seeming in a sort of stasis. For now, Mina could run away, find somewhere new to hide before Elizabeth came back and hurt her more. The revolver had clattered to the side, and a close inspection would show it to be loaded with two rounds.
Edward led the group to the front gates, they were let in without question. "Don't look or feel guilt, fear, any of that. They'll only come after you." he said. "I barely escaped last time. Now, this way." Anna swallowed, and moved forward, pushing down all her feelings in favor of a careful numbness.
Robert did not need to question the raisin's credibility. He took deep breaths, replacing the mounting sense of dread with mild indifference. The way he stayed close to Anna may betray him, but it would be best if they stayed close anyway. He felt his feet move him on.
Mina let out a strangled cry as her arm was crushed, feeling the bone dig into her arm as the pain seemed to mesh with the memories that were not her own. Elizabeth would've been a good friend, in another life. Just when it seemed that the pain and the memories would never end, Mina felt the grip on her arm release and the flashbacks with it. She saw the shell collapse just on the edge of her vision. Her arm went limp, and a spasm of pain went through her. Taking shuddering breaths, she straightened and tried to get her wits about her. Then she felt tears flowing again, not only from the pain but in mourning for the person the fallen body once was. She wanted to make sure that the body would never rise again, crush it beneath her foot, but she knew it would do no good. Besides, this body had been broken far too many times.
She glanced over at the gun, and only then did she realize that her glasses had clattered to the floor. They had fallen near the gun. She picked them up, cleaned them with her dress, and put them on, staring at the weapon with clearer vision. Taking it and finding the two rounds, she carefully unloaded the gun and hid them behind some of the books on the bookshelf. Then she ran.
Faces turned towards them, arms grasped but never touched. A man even shorter and hairier than Hyde opened up a door to the facility, staring at the group with hungry eyes. Hyde growled at the man, baring sharp, too sharp, teeth, the most human thing about his strange, dwarfish figure. Anna held him back, but she felt a wolfish growl build up in her throat too that she quickly swallowed. This place was so… off. Anna turned to Robert and Edward. "You two find Victor. I'll scope out the place, see if there's anything I can do to help the people here."
(Am back if you want to continue this. If not, just say the word, I’ll stop being annoying.)
(I would absolutely love to continue this my dude, I’m glad you’re back! ^^)
Robert kept himself as stiff and unnoticeable as he could manage, with his arms close to his sides and gaze to the ground. His lip curled with distaste at the sight of the dwarf who opened the door, but he stayed still and kept his eyes forward.
He then looked between Anna and Hyde in dismay. He didn’t want to be alone with the raisin, but he also wasn’t in the mood to argue.
“Just be careful Anna,” he said. “We’ll find him.”
Hyde grasped Robert by the arm, dragging him with strength that shouldn’t have been possible for a man his stature down the halls. “We’ll have to pretend we’re here for the people, ye ken? Not yer little lad. I can smell the stink of death here, he must be closer that we thought.” Hyde snarled, seeming like finding Victor was the last thing on his mind at the moment. He stopped, stumbled some, then regained his balance, weakly trudging over to a door where twenty-some patients sat in a small, crowded room, all alone with nobody to save them, not even Robert no matter how hard he would try. Hyde shook his head, and moved on to the next room, then the next, and so on, shaking his head with every door.
Meanwhile, Anna had found something, or rather, a someone. She stunk of disgusting science and even more disgusting something or other she couldn’t quite place, but not of death, no, she smelled exactly as Victor’s creature did. Something was wrong here, and she was going to get to the bottom of it. She seemed incapacitated, but whatever incapacitated her must still be around, probably a patient in need of help, so Anna did what she did best-she followed her nose. Soon, she was able to find a woman, unfamiliar, but seeming quite shaken. The tag on the back of her asylum clothes spelled out “Mina Harker”, and she looked like she was lost, so Anna approached. “Miss Harker? I’m sorry, if that is your name- my name is Anna Saville. Are you in need of assistance?”
Mina had managed to find a back room where she could stop and reassess the situation. Unfortunately, the pain spasming in her arm made it hard to think. She’d brought out her piece of parchment and tried to review her sketch and observations, but her mind kept returning to Elizabeth’s memories and the shell’s words. The final event… Pure Ones… puppets… Elizabeth’s broken body, the looming shadow of the beastly figure washing over it, the young girl being taken from her home- and the words and sketches became simple, unknowable markings on a page. Mina sighed, and put the parchment away.
It wasn’t long before the strange woman found her. Mina almost kicked her in the shins, but looking closer, realized the woman may not be an enemy. A civilian? Why was she here?
“Y-yes, that’s my name,” she confirmed, her voice soft and wary. After a pause, she decided not to answer, asking her own question instead. “Anna Saville… who are you?”
Robert almost yelped out loud when Hyde jerked him down the hall. He managed to get free from his grip when the raisin stumbled, and tried to protest, but Hyde was too fast and didn’t have good listening skills. Robert could only follow, wishing he could something, anything, for the people here. It was them, not the dwarfish man from earlier, that caused rage to surge in Robert’s heart. Just how twisted was this place?
Anna sighed. "Mother, sister, and healer, but right now, I'm scared. Really, truly, very scared. I… this is an evil place. And it smells wrong. But you seemed hurt, so I stopped. Is your arm alright? I can tend to it, I'm a doctor as surprising as it might be to you." she said quickly, wanting to speed through gaining this Mina's trust and get the information she needed, then get out of here. "Look, we don't have much time until they find us. Who's in charge here? I need to find them."
Hyde stopped, slowing down and panting, hard. He seemed more misshapen than ever now, but in almost an opposite way, like he was undergoing some sort of metamorphosis. He cracked open a door, then stopped. "I found yer lad, but he dinna look too good. I suggest you hold in your lunch, and watch the door. Ye can fight better than I, now." he said, drops of sweat dripping from his brow.
After a split second, Mina decided to take her chances. Perhaps because she getting slightly desperate, or maybe because Anna truly didn’t seem from this place. Probably both.
“A doctor? A miracle, more like.” She chuckled, but it was short-lived. “No, my arm’s not alright. And I’ve only heard rumors, but the staff kept mentioning someone they call Father. That may be who you- and I- am looking for.”
She made a sharp intake of breath as another wave of pain went through her arm, and gingerly tried to get it into a less uncomfortable position.
Robert raised an eyebrow. “Fight? Mr. Hyde, you look like you need to lie down somewhere.” He shook his head, mentally preparing himself for what he might see, regardless if Victor really was there or not.
He took the door knob, looking in over the raisin’s head.
Anna gently took Mina's arm, examining it. "I don't have the supplies here with me to set it and tend to it, but here." she removed her coat, then her shirt, taking the cloth of the shirt and fashioning it into a makeshift sling for Mina's arm. She then slung her coat over her shoulders, shimmying back into the sleeves. "That should hold it. I suppose we'll have to find this "Father" ourselves." she suggested, looking down the hall. "Can you still run if things get bad?"
"I'll be fine, lad." he said, looking as if he was about to hurl. Meanwhile, Victor was… not in good shape, to say the least. There he was, sitting over Henry's body, or what was left of the body at least, as he'd somehow gathered the strength to rip it in two. His hands were bloody and missing a thumb on each hand, and the forefinger on the right, and his back was covered in lash marks. "Robert? Is that really you? I thought you weren't alive anymore. I would have brought you back to life, you know. But I doubt you'd still have your memories, I mean, I don't know." he stood up, tracing the man's face with a still bleeding hand. "Hmm. You'd look good dead, but you look even more lovely alive. Now, who is this?" he looked to Hyde, and promptly fainted, falling right on top of Robert. Hyde shook his head. "I'm nae that hideous to make a man faint." the shorter shook his head.
Robert was about to make a retort to Hyde, but seeing Victor shut him up quick. What was he talking about? What had happened in this room? At first he couldn’t say anything except murmuring the man’s name, tears filling his eyes. It might’ve been a bad idea to cry, but Robert couldn’t help himself. Rage, sorrow, confusion, relief all rose up at once inside of him, it was too much.
He felt blood smear along his jaw where Victor brushed against it with his hand. Lovely? A grunt of surprise came out of him as Victor collapse on top of him, but Robert quickly caught him around the waist and held him steady.
He found his voice, wiping away at his eyes. “Are you sure about that? I’m surprised I haven’t fainted yet.” His voice sounded breathy, a little far away. Putting Victor over his shoulder, he moved away from the room and shut the door, just in case, and dragged Hyde with him for a moment before letting go. “Come on. We need to find Anna.”
She bit her lip in slight pain as Anna fashioned the sling, but her touch was soft and tender. “Thank you. Truly,” she said, managing a smile. Then nodding, “Yes, I can.”
She readjusted her glasses, peering into the hall. “Mm, I suppose we’ll have to.”
Hyde grunted angrily, but followed. Slowly, slower still, like an old man hobbling to his destination. “Are ye sure that you’re making the right choice, lad? It dinnae seem to me like all is well here, I say we scram and leave the lady to her doom.” he shrugged, saying “lady” particularly resentfully, as if he didn’t fully see Anna as human, more a threat to be taken care of.
Anna nodded to Mina. “I can smell something. This way.” she hurried down the corridor, then stopped to go back and help Mina in case of trouble, walking more slowly this time.
Robert stopped, took a deep breath. He turned and grabbed the raisin by the collar of his shirt, seething.
”She is my sister,” he said quietly, dangerously. Didn’t really bother to add ‘in-law.’ “And I’m going to find her. If you want to scram, go right ahead. Be a coward. But I will not follow.”
He let Hyde go and continued onward.
Mina tilted her head, wondering why she couldn’t smell anything, but followed after. It was a bit difficult to keep up with the other woman at first, but soon she was able to keep pace, as long as she made sure the sling didn’t move around too much.
