Michael’s Musings Special: Open Letter To A Certain Stalker…

Featured image art “Your countess” by Inkwhite (@Inkwhite_mo)

By Michael (@of_michel)

After reading my good friend Sir Alan’s article to this mysterious stalker of our prime minister, First Vampire (and close, personal friend) Viola Mundilfari, it’s time I added my 2 schillings worth on this sore subject.

To the cowardly stalker of Viola Mundilfari:

You probably know who I am from my position in in Queen Anna’s Government and my articles in this fine newspaper, nevertheless, I’ll introduce myself.

I’m Michael, Arendelle’s trade minister, uncle to Queen Anna and Snow Queen Elsa, and a fellow minister and personal friend of PM Viola Mundilfari.

For a couple of weeks or so, Viola, myself, her friends and family, have had to put up with your posters and hand bills, slandering and badmouthing Viola. Of course, Princess Danny ripped them down and then made a nice fire to roast marshmallows and stargaze under the night sky with Vi, Danny and myself. You were just like an empty can, rattling and making a lot of noise and no more.

Then, you stepped over the line, my fiend. You invaded the home of Viola, Hilde Von Altheim, and Tess. Painting slurs on the gates of the Grand House and tossing rotten fruit on her doorstep. You went a bridge too far, and now we’re all looking for you. Payback is hell.

I don’t know what is driving at you to do this. Maybe it’s for past sins of the Mundilfari clan. Or what she had to do in London. Whatever it was or why, you just stepped into a deep hole of reindeer shiatsu with us. Alan posted his thoughts, here are mine.

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Chapter Six: The Countess’s Christmas Curse

WARNING: Extreme violence, profanity

The story so far: The Countess has been captured. The wounded and exhausted Mundilfari head now finds herself at Thomas Hunt’s mercy as she’s taken by carriage to a secret location in London. Here, Hunt’s cultists are preparing to consign Vi and the kidnapped Tess to the same fate as the other murdered women of the East End. A hideous ritual, in which they’ll be killed and their bodies merged as one, is underway.

Will Vi and Tess escape in time and defeat Hunt? Does Vi have a hope of returning to Arendelle and to Anna’s side? Or is this going to be their last Christmas?

“Wake up.”

Brunette hair matted and messy, Vi stirred, her eyelids fluttering groggily as she moaned, her wounded leg still throbbing with pain. She could hear faint, murmuring noises all around her.

“Wake up!”

Vi snarled in surprised outrage as a cultist’s rough hand clapped her across the cheek, forcing her from her stupor. She swore at the sting spreading across her face as she focused her gaze in the dimly lit hall. She quickly assessed her physical position – arms and legs spread out, tied with rough and coarse rope. She resisted the impulse to break free, stilling her frantically beating heart, and looked down. As she suspected, she was suspended vertically on some kind of large wooden board, her purple dress torn and shredded. She’d been manhandled – she’d probably resisted as they brought her off the carriage, but she didn’t remember. She’d been knocked unconscious. Her arms stretched at an angle above her, and her bare legs spread with high heels long gone, she couldn’t move, so contented herself with allowing her crimson eyes to adjust to the dimness.

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Chapter Five: Hell in the East End

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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Chapter Four: The Necropolis Railway

The story so far: With all her political pieces in place to draw out the Eviscerator, Vi moves to confront the Ravager first, preparing to board the Necropolis Rail with Tess Gaunt in tow. She has little idea of the horror, however, that awaits her on this train, which is bound for Brookwood Cemetery, the resting place of many of London’s MPs, captains of industry, and other figures of note.

Will she finally be able to confront the Ravager, one of two criminals she’s determined to find? And will they find any clues to the mysterious figure of Thomas Hunt?

It was the dead of night at the Waterloo train terminus. The butt of Vi’s sword stick bashed once, twice, then thrice against the window to one of the carriages, rupturing the glass and sending dangerous shards tinkling all over the train floor. Despite her fragile dark purple dress, she smoothly found a foothold and, in one coordinated move, vaulted and slipped into the carriage without so much as nicking herself from any shattered pieces of glass. Her high heels landed quietly on the creaking floor. She raised her head, looking up at the train’s ornate ceiling. The entire room was suffused in eerie red light. The lacquered walls were festooned with elaborately carved heads depicting Cyclopean, horned, and demonic monstrosities. She wrinkled her nose. How utterly tasteless, typical of cultists trying to impress whatever dark god they’d sold their souls to. She could relate.

She could hear a tooting far up front, and the floor creaked. She swore quietly to herself. The Necropolis Rail was setting off to Brookwood Cemetery, where no doubt more bodies that had been loaded onto the Rail would be somehow acquired by whoever was fusing body parts and reanimating them into horrific monstrosities. Vi, Tess, and their allies in the press and parliament, Skinner and Fullerton, deduced that the Ravager was stealing the corpses of illustrious, recently deceased men and women that could afford to be buried in Brookwood. For their part, the Eviscerator was murdering young women of much less fortunate social standing and economic circumstances in the East End. The four theorized, unpalatable and sinister though it seemed, that it was increasingly likely the reanimated, misshapen lumbering creatures wandering East London were composed of the body parts from both the Ravager’s stolen bodies and the Eviscerator’s victims.

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Chapter Three: The Nightmare Intensifies

Featured image art by PURY (@puryartist)

The story so far: Countess Vi has made her move. She has recruited the assistance of Home Secretary David Fullerton and London Age editor Boyle Skinner to pass a bill that would forbid the trafficking of women under eighteen into the East End, disrupting the “supply chain” of human bodies for the Eviscerator and forcing the criminal to strike at her directly. Yet three big questions remain.

How are the Eviscerator and the Ravager, the body snatcher aboard the Necropolis Express, related?

Who is behind them?

And how are they related to the Exalted?

It had become a regular kind of thing. That was, killing demonic creatures sewn together from the body parts of commoners and the illustrious alike.

For the past few weeks, every night at the strike of twelve sharp, Vi would stand guard among the brothels and “fallen houses” of the East End, and somehow they always appeared at the same time, lurching from the shadows of back alleys or emerging from behind decrepit walls. It was the same story for these horrors every evening: slice them apart, ensuring the heads were severed from the bodies. They moved fairly slowly, so unless Vi was careless enough to get caught in their crushing grip, there was little chance they could even touch her. Ever elegant and calm, she always swung her sword stick with gusto, flair, and energy, spilling open the innards of the composite beasts and severing their deformed limbs from their bodies. She painted the streets, brick walls, and alleyways red and green with their gore, but after more than a fortnight of protecting the East End from this never-ending night army, she began to feel her own body straining from eve after eve of combat.

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