Multiversal: application

[scotlandyardjackinoffice]

TW: mentions of drug use in history and personality sections.

In Character Information

Basics

Character Name: Sherlock Holmes

Username: defenestrations

Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle modern-day AU)

Played By: Sendhil Ramamurthy

Icon: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/2308039/1485577

Canon Character Section

Physical Description: Sherlock Holmes is 35 years old. He stands five feet, ten inches with a slender build. He has a dark complexion, a mop of unruly dark curls, and warm brown eyes that somehow manage to lend themselves to an icy stare. He is almost too delicately featured to be conventionally attractive, but he's striking and expressive. He has lovely, long-fingered hands, perfect for playing the violin, but they're often cut/bandaged/mottled/stained from some experiment or other.

He seems to be made of restless energy. Even when he’s still there’s a sense that he might spring into activity and motion at any moment. He tends toward businesslike but not at all formal in his dress: nicely-kept jeans and button downs or a suit minus the tie, in darker hues. He’s not a flashy dresser but a close inspection of his clothes would show they’re a bit above your chain-store offerings—not the finest Saville Row has to offer, as his brother favors, but either designer labels or offerings from higher-end retailers.


Sexuality: Sexuality and the pursuit of sexual intimacy aren’t strong drives with Sherlock. It’s not that sex can’t interest him; it has in the past and it may do so again, but the majority of the time he just can't be bothered. There are far more important things, to his thinking, to devote his interest and energy to. The rare times it does interest him, it's never more than a quick fling or a one-night stand, a brief involvement that meets his needs (and his partner's, he's an ass but he's not a total asshole) and then he moves on.

He could enter into a long-term sexual relationship with someone after forming a long-term romantic relationship with them; such a romantic relationship could develop after a long-term emotional relationship with them. He can be and is fond of some people, genuinely, but he has yet to find himself in a place where fondness has grown into something deeper, let alone where that deeper connection could further develop into romantic attachment. It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but neither is it a likely thing to have happen; he likes some people, and feels loyalty to and even affection for them, but he doesn’t love them deeply. If he was made to consider his sexuality he would identify as heterosexual; his brief sexual involvements in the past have all been with women. But it’s far more likely that it will be some particular quality or set of traits that would draw and hold his attention over time, rather than any gender over another, since he doesn’t enter into relationships with people with romance or sex in mind. It's far more likely that sex will continue to be an occasional indulgence or need for release than any exercise in bonding or a component of a longer-term relationship.


History: Sherlock Holmes was born January 6, 1977, in London. He is the second son of Sherrinford Clarke Holmes, a photographer and photojournalist, and Divya Ramkumar, a botanist Sherrinford met while on assignment in Chennai in 1966. He has one brother, Mycroft, seven years his senior.

Sherrinford Holmes was a restless, mercurial man, always seeking adventure and excitement. In his youth he was as likely to be in the papers for his exploits as he was for his photography. He traveled the world several times over, he photographed fashion models and partied with them, and he was entirely uninterested in the well-off, country-squire life his family had enjoyed for many generations. His parents sort of distantly tolerated his antics because he was the spare; with his elder brother the responsible heir they didn't think they needed to fear for the family's future (though Dr. Holmes did nearly entirely disown Sherrinford when he brought home his Indian bride, racist and classist jackass that he was; his wife initially backed him but softened her stance once there were grandchildren).

And then the heir and his wife died in a car accident. They were childless, so the spare became the heir. Sherrinford was a sensible enough man to understand that a certain amount of toeing the family line would be expected and would also be helpful for providing for his family, about to include his first son; he and Divya bought a house in London and he made some effort at being a suitable heir. He stopped partying, he gave his sons good, solid, and very English names cribbed from his family tree, and took on only serious assignments.

He made some effort, but he was still too restless a man to be soothed by domestic bliss and familial duty. He continued to take assignments in far-flung parts of the world, making him a largely absent father. Divya was left to raise Mycroft on her own and was not quite prepared to deal with the remarkably brilliant boy her son was growing up to be.

When it became apparent that their second son (likely an unintentional addition to the family due to the number of years after the first, or perhaps even a last-ditch effort to save what was by then a tempestuous marriage, but this was simply not something one discussed in families such as these) was just as relentlessly brilliant but also possessed of ferocious drive and energy, the Holmeses decided they could only cope with help. Sherlock was raised with the assistance of a small army of tutors (much as is brother was) but with most of the work put in by his mother, who doted on both her sons and wanted only the best for them, and with assistance from his brother, who was the only one in the family who seemed to understand him and have any talent for directing his restlessness. His father was in and out of his life, a whirlwind of activity and stories and adventures when he was home but then he would leave again. But while Divya was largely overwhelmed by the challenges of raising two remarkable sons and Sherrinford was largely absent from their lives, they both were loving parents who did what they felt was their best for them—Divya oversaw their homeschooling with their tutors and Sherrinford toed the family line as much as he could until his parents were both deceased so he could first continue to collect his family income, then to inherit so he could continue to provide for his family and also to pass the estate along to his sons someday.

Sherlock was a rebellious child, acting without thought for consequence and challenging everything, but at the same time, he lived a lot within his own head. He was a voracious reader and fearless experimenter, and he found a creative outlet in the violin. He was very physical, spending a lot of time exploring outdoors, often taking botany lessons with his mother; team sports didn’t interest him but he excelled at boxing, fencing, and jujitsu (pursuits he took up with his brother’s guidance and the blessing of his exhausted mother and tutors).

When Sherlock was eleven, Divya died after half a year's protracted battle with cancer. Sherrinford was ill-equipped to deal with her death or with being a full-time parent. He'd inherited the estate by then and had the means to send his awkward, overly energetic younger child with few social graces to boarding school. It went about as well as one would expect. He loathed it there; the teachers disappointed him or couldn’t keep up and his classmates tormented him. He’d never much cared for learning proper conduct or how to get along with people to begin with, and these experiences just drove him further toward intellectual pursuits over emotional ones. He’d only ever felt comfortable and accepted at home with his mother and brother, but his mother was gone and his brother had gone off to university (and even that felt like another desertion at the hands of yet another family member, even though intellectually he understood why it was necessary).

Once he was at school and away from his rather insular life in London, and partly through some of the harsher taunts his schoolmates lobbed at him, Sherlock began to question his identity. His father was white and upper-class and had given him a name and the resources and experiences that sort of background could afford, but his similiarly-privileged classmates didn't accept him; as much as he sounded and acted like them and had the material things they did, he didn't look like them, he wasn't one of them. Later, at university, he had classmates and acquaintances who looked like him, who had Indian mothers as he did, but he never really fit in with them, either—he knew nothing of what he began to feel should have been a shared culture, and he grew confused and resentful of what he felt was being deprived of that part of his life and heritage. Needing someone to pin his growing resentment on, and being unwilling to sully the memory of his doting mother, Sherlock blamed his absent father for kissing up to what his conservative grandparents ostensibly wanted, which complicated what little relationship the two men had left.

Sherlock became fascinated with science in school because it had rigid rules and facts and was a dispassionate practice. People were a disappointment and never a constant but reality and facts never let him down. He learned as much as he could take in about every subject he could lay hands on, cataloguing vast libraries of detail, trivia, and patterns in his vast mind, and he learned how to make swift connections out of the smallest bits of information, which were the foundation for his inductive and deductive reasoning skills.

He wanted to be a scientist but even as much as they were often a disappointment, other people still fascinated him. He entered into the Natural Sciences Program at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he eventually eked out a Bachelor of Arts degree; he was one of those gifted students who got poor grades because they felt things like class assignments and papers beneath them. He was too busy studying his own experiments and seeking out as much information and stimulation as he could get to be bothered with doing what was required of him, and some classes had to be repeated. When intellectual stimulation wasn’t always enough he began using stimulant drugs to try to keep his brain running at the speed he desired and to self-medicate against the depression he fell into when his intellect was left unchallenged or unoccupied, and this also created some stumbling blocks for his academic career.

In his final term as an undergraduate, a chance encounter with a classmate’s father would set the course for the rest of his life. The man was a DCI with the Manchester police force, and Sherlock realized that was a line of work that would satisfy his fascinations with both science and the behavior of people around him. He slogged through, graduated, and took a year off to travel to India (and cause more family drama by stealing his mother's ashes on the way out of London so he could scatter them in the Ganges), and to start formulating a plan for becoming a unique kind of detective (because God forbid he be mundane and go work in a police lab or something, he couldn’t have that). He re-enrolled in university, ostensibly to pursue a master’s degree in chemistry, but he really just wanted continued access to laboratories and supplies while he perfected his methods and built his knowledge base up further.

His second stint at Sussex College lasted four years, during which time he worked his first cases, brought to him by fellow students. By this time he had built up enough of a network and done enough work to secure access to the labs and resources at St. Bartholomew’s hospital, and he left Sussex without finishing his degree. By the time he met Dr. John Watson, a black Army veteran wounded in action in Afghanistan, he had been working as a consulting detective for nearly six years; he was seeking a flat mate because while there was money coming in from his consulting work, it wasn't enough to sustain his living expenses. The irony here is that his income from his family’s holdings would be enough were he to actually spend them on living expenses, but that and a good deal of his consulting earnings go into his many experiments and dabblings, and sharing living expenses had become an unavoidable necessity.

Sherlock and Dr. Watson became a formidable team, Watson a capable man of action at Sherlock's side as they investigated cases together. Watson has shared the stories of a few of their more remarkable cases on his blog, mostly out of irritation and outrage that all the credit for solving the crimes originally went to the police; this exposure has steadily led to Sherlock becoming more well-known among the public, who have begun to consult him.

My headcanon is that he has already been through modern-day versions of A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, and all of the stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; I'm fudging the years a little, I'm sure, but when he enters the game he has just wound up the events of The Adventure of the Copper Beeches and he and Watson have been working together for just under four years.

Powers: Supernatural capacity for being an insufferable know-it-all jerkface and spoiler of criminal plans. N/A.


Talents/Abilities:: Sherlock possesses a ferocious intellect and off-the-charts capacity for observation, deduction and induction, memory and recall, analysis, and swiftly making connections between facts presented to him. He is a genius, bested only by his brother in terms of intelligence and talent. He has encyclopedic knowledge of and unmatched skill in vast fields of study, particularly chemistry, physics, mathematics, toxicology, law, cryptography, forensic science, and pathology (though generally no intellectual pursuit to which he chooses to apply himself presents him any difficulty).

He is skilled in the use of firearms, fencing, jujitsu, and boxing (he received formal training with the proper equipment but he has a greater love for bare-knuckle boxing). He is fluent in a number of languages, including Hindi (which he taught himself while traveling in India). He is a virtuoso violin player; he has taken up the sitar and he is not bad as a singer.


Personality: To all outward appearances, Sherlock Holmes is a Grade-A Class-1 jerkface. He’s arrogant, brusque, often lacking in social graces, snotty, distant, tactless, pushy, unfeeling, calculating, and weird. He’s like some alien being, watching people from afar and occasionally dropping in, but he generally stands apart from them—and you get the feeling he wants it that way. You may find yourself relying on and in awe of his intellect and his talents, but once he’s solved your problems you don’t necessarily want him still hanging around.

The impressions people come away with aren’t far off the mark. He really does think himself superior to most people, especially intellectually. He prefers to be an observer rather than a participant in most human interaction. He doesn’t always tend to see people as much beyond the problems they bring him to solve. He really does not grasp the intricacies of polite interaction, nor does he care to—they’re distractions, things that aren’t necessary to his work.

He lives for his work, taking a transcendent joy in having a problem to solve. His failure to relate to people in natural, accepted ways means sometimes his unbounded enthusiasm for a good, complicated murder or some other sordid affair winds up making him seem even more alien than he already does. When the game is on there is nothing else; nothing more worthy of his time and attention, nothing like the rush, nothing else he’d put first.

He may call it a game, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for him taking his work lightly. These mysteries fully engage him, and he takes each problem as seriously as it were his own—provided it was interesting enough to draw him in in the first place. He needs the stimulation, and he needs the triumph, but only the triumph of his will and intellect over a problem, not the ego boost of public recognition or honors. He’s usually happy to let the police take credit for his work, or to see things resolved quietly without the intervention of the police or the press. And when he brings his mind to bear on a problem, he is tenacious, working on it to the exclusion of most else and refusing to stand down until there is a solution.

He sees himself as standing apart from the rest of society. The first way is the most obvious, that his intellect sets him above the rest. His profession is unique, and he sees himself as the only person many people can turn to when they need more than the standard, unimaginative help the police can give. He simply isn’t like other people. He doesn’t act like them, he doesn’t think like them, he doesn’t want the same things as them, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, that sits just fine with him. He doesn’t care what people think of him.

…Except for the rare cases where he does. Generally he has no need for other people; he’s not a man one easily befriends and he certainly doesn’t make an effort to befriend anyone. But he can and does grow fond of people, over time. So when someone comes along, and wants to stay, and he becomes attached to them, he’s fiercely loyal out of a sense of gratitude—he’s perceptive enough to realize how hard being his friend and having him around can be on a person.

The problem here is he doesn’t exactly have the tools or experience to show that properly. He’s as trying with the people he likes as he is with the people he couldn’t care less about. He can be charming when he wants to be—with everyone, when it gets him something—but when it comes to strong emotion he’s at something of a loss. He’s pretty much a failure at things like empathy, affection, or encouragement. He shows his strong feelings for people through protectiveness and through the occasional apology for his out-of-line behavior. But because he doesn’t grasp the mechanics of feelings and how to show them, he tends to mimic what he sees others do or what he understands as “normal” behavior, and because he suddenly has strong feelings he doesn’t know how to express, he winds up going overboard with his demonstrations. When Watson is injured once in canon, and briefly loses consciousness, he wakes to find a tearful Holmes standing over him.

Why doesn’t he bother with people? He learned, from his earliest days, that they tend to disappoint you. Many of his teachers, throughout his life, couldn’t keep pace with him. His peers at best regarded him with distant curiosity or at worst tormented him. Even his parents didn’t live up to his hopes or meet his needs; his father never took an interest in his sons and his mother never had enough energy or time to properly devote to him in the way he wanted. But even worse than the ways people let him down was the realization that he in turn was an apparent disappointment: he was clearly not the grandson his grandfather wanted, not the son his mother had all the time in the world for or who could make his father stay home, not the friend people wanted, not even always the student he was expected to be.

The common quality that the people he grows fond of seem to have is an unconditional acceptance of him. Mrs. Hudson is sometimes startled by his unseemly behavior, but with an obvious underlying affection. John isn’t afraid to call him out and correct him when he feels Sherlock’s gone too far, but he doesn’t change his opinion of Sherlock as a person and friend, nor does he waver in his loyalty despite this. And neither of them needs to be convinced of his genius or his abilities. Sherlock is therefore fond of and protective of both of them.

Mycroft Holmes hasn't yet made an "onscreen" appearance in the stories at the canon point where I'm pulling him from, but it bears exploration in this application because it's a huge part of his life and who he is today. His relationship with his brother is a complex one where all of these attributes come into play, to a much deeper degree than in the rest of his life. Children are incredibly aware of their bonds with their families and tend to have a good sense of who likes them, who has time for them, who looks after them. Any child in the Holmes brothers’ place would have felt their relationship with their parents lacking; but with children so completely observant, perceptive, and intelligent, their father's distance and their mothe being so often overwhelmed must have been devastating. The brothers internalized those failings on their parents’ part, but their personality differences made them deal with these things differently. Mycroft is an introvert, the older child, the responsible one, and he fully internalized things, accepting a lot of blame that was not necessarily his own. Sherlock was (comparatively) more of an extrovert, boundless in his energy and his need to engage his intellect and challenge everything and he turned outward, taking things out on everyone around him through testing them, through rebelling.

The brothers were the only ones in the household who could understand each other, and their shared situation, and this created an “us vs. them” mentality between the two. Sherlock was aware he was being farmed out to tutors and his brother; Mycroft was aware that his mother was overwhelmed; both boys were keenly aware of their father's absences. Because they were similar in so many ways, Mycroft had more success entertaining and directing his younger brother; Sherlock in turn looked up to and respected Mycroft when he was young. He still does now, but caring, as his brother has told him, is not an advantage, and he will not show weakness to his brother by admitting any of this.

The Holmes brothers share similar intellects, minds, and capacities for the most astounding feats of observation, perception, and deduction, but in temperament, life goals, and conduct, they could not be more different. If I could sum up these differences with of Plurk emotes: Mycroft Holmes is like this: while Sherlock Holmes is like this: and as adults they tend to relate to each other like this: .

Sherlock is by turns grateful for and resentful of his brother’s success, position, and interference in his life. He’s a bit proud of what his brother has managed to achieve and impressed with the power he wields, but he’s also aware it’s nothing he can ever have himself and something Mycroft was only able to gain by playing strictly within the rules (which he loathes), so he teases him and resists his overtures at every opportunity.

And on some deeper level, he understands that Mycroft takes looking after him so seriously, feels that’s part of his place in the world, and he’s childish and fussy with him in some misguided attempt to mirror their childhood relationship. He feels Mycroft needs to feel that he still is the big brother, the good example, the one who needs to look after him, so he’s childish and challenging to give his brother the opportunity to carry that out. But as much as he gives Mycroft a hard time, he still does turn to him for help, and still does help him once the big show of being a jerkface to his brother is gotten out of the way.

The brothers' relationship is also colored by Sherlock's issues with his racial identity. He's angry about feeling like he has no place in either of the worlds that produced him, that he doesn't belong with either his mother's or father's people. He's traveled to India, he's learned Hindi and taken up the sitar, and he's tried his best to embrace his mother's culture, but he's resentful that everything he knows he learned from books and not from his mother directly. He blames his father for stifling that. And seeing his brother turn out to be a dutiful responsible person, a civil servant, a refined and successful man, it's hard for him not to feel like his brother is selling out just like he feels his father did. Deep down he feels his brother is turning his back on their mother's heritage, and maybe by extension, their mother herself. He sees his brother as aspiring to be the respectable British gentleman he knows they can't fully be, and he's bothered that Mycroft is trying to pretend to be something he's not, erasing part of who he is. And possibly his affection for Mrs. Hudson is rooted in his mother's loss, too—she's an older lady who takes care of him sometimes, and that probably fills some yearning he has deep down.

His resentment of his brother's motivations may or may not be well founded. And in some deeper part of himself than he can admit or perhaps even access, they may actually be rooted in his devastation at his mother's death. As much as she just didn't know what to do with him most of the time, she was the one person who, in his mind, always tried, and his relationship with her was the one unconditionally warm and loving one in his life. Her death sort of pulled the rug out from under him and made him even more reluctant to grow attached to other people. He perceives himself as abandoned by both his brother and father after her death, and sees them both toeing the "good white English gentleman" line as rejecting who she was and what she brought to their lives. And because all these men are failures at connecting to people (especially each other) or expressing anything, he mistakenly believes himself the only one devastated by Divya's death, because he saw no signs of it in his father or brother.

Sherlock’s relationship with John means so much to him not just because of John’s acceptance of him and their obvious affection for each other, but because it reminds Sherlock a bit of his childhood relationship with Mycroft. They’re co-conspirators at times, they have that definite “you and me against the world” vibe together, they spend a lot of time together, and John does his best to try to guide Sherlock into better behavior when he feels it’s needed. He may not even realize this on any conscious level, but the similarity does comfort him.

He has no relationship to speak of with his father, who is still alive. He was always conflicted about his father as a boy; he knew Sherrinford loved him but didn't understand why he wouldn't just stay home with the family, he looked forward to his father's returns home with stories of faraway lands and pictures he'd taken but then he'd be gone again. And then when his mother died and he was hopeful this would make his father come home for him, he was packed off to boarding school, which is an insult he hasn't forgiven his father for. On top of this is his struggles with his racial identity and the growing resentment he needed to pin on someone—he chose his father and that eroded what little remained between them. There is a civil but icy distance between the two of them, and no amount of interference or scheming on Mycroft's part has been able to bring them back together. And it probably annoys Sherlock no end to realize how very much like his father he is—restless, moody, in constant need of excitement.

Sherlock dresses as well as he does not out of any need for status or to impress, but because of his attention to detail: designer or higher-end garments tend to be constructed better, made with better materials that feel and hang better on the body and that last longer. He is, in fact, rather embarrassed that he comes from as well-off a background as he does, and is keenly aware he was afforded opportunities many other people will never have. He tends to increase his fees for wealthy clients, people who have the means to pay exorbitant fees; he does this not just to stick it to The Man but because he knows people with lots of resources don’t tend to properly value things unless you make them pay enough to make them sit up and take notice. Likewise, he often reduces his fees, or dismisses them outright, for those without means.

He used to be embarrassed to be a brown dude with a painfully upper-crust white-guy name, but these days he trolls with it—he enjoys the looks on people's faces when it's clear they expected a white man to show up based on his name and posh accent. (Less enjoyable are the times when people clearly dismiss him or Dr. Watson upon first glance, until he opens his mouth; this kind of treatment infuriates him.) He's still trying to come to peace with who he is and who he is not. He's absorbed all kinds of knowledge about his mother's cultural background but is aware that he's an expert by books only, that he hasn't lived it—he's respectful of that even if he's inwardly sad and resentful.

Sherlock has poor impulse control. He’s given to acting without thinking much beyond the deductions he makes; usually his perception of a situation and the likely outcome is what saves his ass but there are times when it goes wrong. He’s particularly blind to the emotional tolls/outcomes of his actions, especially long-term consequences. His living environment appears to be a disorganized mess, but the chaos is actually an outward reflection of his inner self—when your mind is a completely ordered place, your environment need not be, because you can find anything at a moment’s notice. He is always neat and clean when working, but he can let himself get disheveled when he’s between cases and feeling low. He forgets to eat when he’s working, relying on the mental stimulation or even nicotine patches to sustain him.

And Sherlock is very likely afflicted with recurrent depression. He manages to hold it at bay when his mind is engaged, and this is why he loses himself in his work and demands only the toughest, most interesting and challenging cases. He needs the distraction, he needs to occupy his racing, always active mind with these challenges, because when it doesn’t have other distractions, he has nothing else to think about, and he slips into depression. All the stimulation he seeks out is his way of battling back those black moods. In keeping with book canon, he does still resort to drug use when he is particularly lacking in mental stimulation and occupation; I am imagining there will be enough to keep him busy in Baedal that this will not be something he has to resort to regularly, and I intend to make sure other players are forewarned adequately should it come up in play.


Object: His violin and bow.


Reason for playing: I love playing rebooted or updated versions of my childhood media heroes, because I feel like changing things about and around them while also keeping them true to who they are fundamentally is an interesting challenge. Here, I'm taking book canon and shifting it to present-day (NOT playing BBC Sherlock because lol dickbaggery on so many fronts), and making him a man of color. Shifting the setting time-wise presents the challenge of translating things from the original canon to present-day, and figuring out how that changes the story or how Sherlock would use technology or ideas that simply weren't available to him 125 years ago. I also wanted to play with the idea of taking an iconic character and stripping away part of his privilege, figuring out how that would change him, his place in his world, and the way people might react to him—and how to do all these things without shifting the core of who he is.

Sherlock is very different from the other characters I have in play in the game already. While he does strive for justice and work to right wrongs, he’s not a straight-up hero, not a warm person, not even a particularly nice one. I like the idea of that challenge, of playing someone who isn’t like my usual crowd. I’m also keen to take someone who relies so heavily on facts and unemotional contemplation of the world around him, and dump him into a pretty fantastic and crazy place, where so many of the things he grew up believing weren’t real or possible suddenly are. His canon is a pretty gritty place, full of dark motives and terrible circumstances, so that part isn’t a challenge, but things like magic and otherworldly beings present new ideas for him to adapt to. And he’s someone who is tenacious when presented with a mystery to solve; this game is full of them, the biggest ones being why are we here and how do we get back. I want to see how playing someone who tackles mysteries so relentlessly will handle not being able to always have the answer to everything, even something so major. He will set up his consulting practice again ASAP to support himself, which should open him up for meeting and getting involved with a wide range of characters and circumstances.


Gods: Eliandre. Sherlock is a dedicated detective and a striver for truth and justice. He seeks to view situations impartially, focusing on facts and logic and removing emotion and bias from them, which are qualities she favors. Also a lot of his work centers on morbid things, or on solving or avenging death, which might also make him noteworthy to her.


Writing Samples
First-Person Network Post: http://terminal313.dreamwidth.org/886.html


Third-Person Arrival Post:

This is… not his sitting room.

He takes in the room swiftly. Windowless, no load-supporting walls—an interior room. No knob or handle on the door facing him and yet it’s clearly meant to open. Green. Meant to be soothing, perhaps? Or a cultural reference, a “green room”, prepare yourself, you’re about to go on. Nowhere to sit—you’re not meant to linger or be comfortable while you wait. Wait? Wait for what? To be let out. Ah. Not just a “green room”, but a holding tank. Time enough for you to be observed, perhaps.

Don’t panic. He had no plans to but someone felt the need to warn. Or is it a warning? Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic”, sound piece of advice in most situations. Not an official warning or condolence, otherwise it would be conspicuously posted on the door or a wall, no, this is less than official, idle vandalism, some previous temporary tenant of this room had a stay here at least long enough to do this. Why’s it left there? The caretaker didn’t notice? Surely he must have, it’s rather an obvious marking in the floor. It’s not fresh, there aren’t splinters or rough edges, it’s been cleaned over but not blotted out. Too much effort? The establishment doesn’t care? No, the room is clean, not neglected. Sense of humor, then, or they found it a useful and harmless addition.

Table. Pamphlet. Read twice—interesting. Gods, ambition, no return, yes, yes, fine. Meant to comfort and try to control, mm? It’s written to give the impression of being helpful, supportive, and informative whilst actually imparting nothing of significance. Interesting. And that—his violin. His, most assuredly, scuffed here, worn there, the bow tensed just so, the familiar smell of his favored resin. But how? It must have been taken from his flat and brought here, so someone made preparations, this isn’t an accidental abduction and they know who they have.

…Why his violin and not his sitar? Maddening. A deliberate insult?

His phone. No phone, it’s not in his pockets, the rest of his tools are but not his phone, what’s that beside the violin, is that a phone, close—it resembles his iPhone but it’s different. Same general idea, though, video, audio, text, good, good, fine, local network only, interesting, but certainly worth a try.

And so, eighty-nine seconds after feeling the floor beneath his feet and opening his eyes, Sherlock Holmes hefts his CiD and sends a text message:

In green room. Require door opened at once, will be most appreciative.


Third-Person Action Post:

He throws his shoulder against the wooden door once, twice, and it doesn't give.

"Holmes," comes Watson's voice over his shoulder, "move."

Sherlock steps back to let Watson have a try; his friend doesn't throw a shoulder at the door, but a well-placed kick somewhere between dead center of the door and the doorknob plate. The door crashes in, and there's barely an opening before Watson's shouldering it the rest of the way and Sherlock pushes through right behind him. "Go, go, go," he barks urgently as they race up the steps beyond, "the girl's life may depend on us."

There's another door, and Watson doesn't hesitate, barely breaks stride as he raises his leg and makes short work of this one too. They burst into the room, ready to rescue Miss Rucastle from her scheming father…

The room is empty. "Holmes---"

"The window, Watson, the window, look!" The bed's been shoved closer, knotted bedsheets a makeshift way to the ground. "She's gone out the—"

There's a bloodcurdling scream down in the garden below, and it stops both men short. "Good lord, the dog, Rucastle's set the dog upon her, Watson, hurry." Watson turns on his heel to retreat; Sherlock gives the window a brief once-over before deciding it's the expedient way down. Up and over the ledge, two-handed grip on the sheets, and he slides down to the ground, hands burning from friction but it's minor pain, a small price to pay compared to what might have befallen Miss Rucastle.

Miss Rucastle—

No, no, that's Miss Hunter, their client, standing beside a hedge, eyes wide with shock and horror above the hands clapped over her nose and mouth. And Mr. Rucastle, who so cruelly imprisoned his own daughter to try to force her to give him her inheritance, who hired Miss Hunter to keep up appearances and deter those who would look for his daughter, now lies on the grass, the trained attack dog he kept as insurance now his executioner.

"Watson!" The name has barely left his lips when the doctor arrives at his side. Watson takes one look at the scene before him, and he draws his service weapon, discharging a single shot into the air, scaring the dog off its victim.

Sherlock takes the opportunity to cross to their stricken client. "Miss Hunter," he says, the hand gripping her arm as insistent as the tone of his voice. "Into the house, both of you!" he commands as he herds both client and comrade inside.

And once they're safe, the wall between them and the dog outside, Miss Hunter flings herself at Sherlock, sobbing into his shoulder. "There… there…" he murmurs, patting her shoulder awkwardly, ignoring Watson. Particularly, ignoring the raised eyebrows and amused half-smile turning the doctor's lips as he safely reholsters his weapon.

"Do you think she got away, Holmes? Miss Rucastle."

"One hopes." His eyes scan the garden through the window. "We saw no one but her father on the ground, I can only assume that she made good an escape before we rushed in."

"And the dog took her father down. Poor sod, but he had it coming a bit, too. So. It's settled, then?"

He nods, grim, hesitantly giving Miss Hunter's shoulder another pat. "It's settled. Both young ladies are safe, which was our aim."