seymour – The Arendelle Guardian

Featured image art by PURY (@puryartist)

The story so far: With the Ravager dead and the Necropolis Rail safe, Vi turns her attention to flushing out Thomas Hunt and his remaining minion, the Eviscerator. With Fullerton and Skinner finally stopping the trafficking of young women into Whitechapel, Vi has the Eviscerator in her grasp. Yet the stakes are higher than ever as she confronts the prospect of facing down the exiled British member of the Exalted while protecting Tess Gaunt’s life. One wrong move could mean not just an innocent’s death, but someone close or even herself. Countess Vi must stop Hunt’s cult, once and for all.

Dr. Seymour Lane, the pre-eminent surgeon of the human body in Britain, shook his head in wonder in his vast experimental room, with at least a dozen corpses laid out on benches before him. The stench of rot and open flesh was overwhelming. All of the bodies were stitched together from different parts one way or another, and all of them were once seen wandering the alleyways of Tess’s home, Whitechapel. Standing in the room with Lane, Vi held her nose in revulsion, as did the newspaper editor Skinner, who cowered behind the MP Fullerton. He fainted easily at the sight of blood.

“What can you tell us about the bodies the Countess has collected, good doctor?” asked Fullerton.

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The story so far: Countess Vi and Tess have struck up a bond, with the Arendellian prime minister needing a local pair of eyes and ears and Tess needing a protector. Vi has identified three people that will prove crucial to her forcing the Ravager and Eviscerator into the light: David Fullerton, Britain’s Home Secretary, Boyle Skinner, editor of the London Age, and Dr. Seymour Lane, the Chief Surgeon. But even with these men, the forces behind the unnatural horrors wandering London and disappearing bodies of the well-to-do may well outpace the Countess…

Midnight

The train that arrived at the station a few yards from Brookwood Cemetery looked like something from a feverish nightmare. Shrouded in shadow, it hissed and groaned, its carriages full of coffins that carried the rich and powerful to what was dubbed “the London Necropolis.” The undertaker, an imposing, pale man that towered over the graves he tended to, was waiting at the head of the train, staring up at its ominous, Cyclopean front. Like a great mechanical psychopomp, a messenger from another world to this one. He waited for several minutes, then began pacing back and forth, wondering what was taking so long. Then a young man of stepped out one of the carriage’s doors, his clothes grimy from hard work and exposure to unclean matter. “We’re in trouble!” he called, jumping down the steps and running to the undertaker, his eyes nervous. “There’s several bodies of lords, ladies, and other respectable names missing. At least four cadavers.”

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