maskormenace | #001; text

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#001; text

In light of recent events it seems apt that I make an advertisement offering my services to the general public. I am Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, amply acquainted with the solution of murders, thefts, arsons, and the generally unsavoury, etc. Inquiries of a general nature may be directed to me at any time, though I take cases at my own discretion, and will generally request an interview to establish both the particulars and the legitimacy of the case. The suspicious may refer to Dr. John Watson for a no-doubt superfluously effusive list of my general accomplishments, and when he proves unconvincing I should be delighted to provide a demonstration of my capabilities. In what will no doubt be vastly more appealing than any of the previous to some of you, I shall add that all services will be rendered entirely gratis.

((ooc: Permissions post/opt-out here, for anything you'd rather Sherlock not pick up on. Additionally, there may be some threadjacking here and there by the aforementioned Dr. Watson since it is his lot in life to babysit this gigantic infant, and if anyone would like to address him instead of Sherlock they can note as much in their subject lines.))

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I'm hardly most people.
SH

Well...That might be true, or it might not. We've only got your word to go on, after all, and most of us haven't got any reason to trust that. I don't intend to offend you, to be certain. It's just...Cases like that, if pursued by the wrong person, could certainly cause a spot of bother for those involved in them.

Edited 2015-03-11 02:05 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly agree with you, which is why I wouldn't suggest relying on the police to solve anything more singular than the most stunningly average murder. I certainly wouldn't rely on you, given your clear attempt to manufacture an opportunity to question my competency, either as an attempt to get a rise out of me or in a thoroughly ineffectual stab at broaching the subject with some tact, which ultimately is, quite frankly, roughly as subtle as a sledgehammer.

In fact, I hardly see why we need to stop there. Your irregular use of punctuation along with your word choice, while not infallible indicators of age, suggest to me that you're in your mid-twenties at the latest, probably female. Certainly English; 'spot of bother' isn't common parlance in North American dialects. You're disinclined to trust; you've stated as much outright and yet you're either disinclined to approach others critically or you require more data to do so, which I am helpfully providing you by rising to the implicit challenge and demonstrating what I can do. Only a handful of words and I already have a sense of you; do you imagine I couldn't do more if given more?

Spots of bother are to be expected; I count on it and provision myself accordingly. The only thing that remains remotely obscure is why you care, though one may make a number of reasonable guesses as to that, too.
SH

[ Kitty's hackles go up. She can't help herself. Her days of lying about her identity and intentions are behind her, and nothing he's said is anything she wouldn't admit readily to others. But she doesn't like having someone turn an eye on her like that. She's from a place where when someone presents the facts of your identity and biography like that, it's probably because they're sitting across from you at an interrogation table, trying to prove how much they know about you to make it seem inevitable that they'll find out more so why not just talk now and spare the bother of torture? She can't read that and not feel hostile - or maybe afraid.

But she reins in her emotions. She answers with brittle politeness. ]

Nothing you have said is incorrect, Mr Holmes - with the exception of one thing.

Always something; dangerous to theorize without data but sometimes the effect is worth the risk.
SH

Well, here you had the data, but you didn't interpret it right. I'm not suspicious of whether or not you're clever enough. I'm quite sure you are. What I'm suspicious of are your reasons for wanting in on investigations. I don't think you'll muck it up. It's not that. Rather, it's that these sorts of things could lead to you having something to hold over people's heads. Maybe to turn a profit, or to scare them. I don't necessarily think that IS the case, but lots of people here are naive and trusting and perfectly happy to hand over details about their personal lives, and someone clever could easily make a profit off that.

I was inclined to give you enough credit to realise that if I had any intention of doing anything of the sort I could just as easily have done so already, and without ever taking the risk of revealing my identity to the network. Correct: I did make a mistake. I was over-hasty in assuming you were marginally clever.

You needn't be marginally clever to mistrust what I say out of hand, of course, but all the same I should add that I have no taste for blackmail and less fondness still for blackmailers.
SH

[ oh she does not like you
and that's why this next response takes about an hour to come ]

Maybe not. Maybe you're being completely honest when you say you're simply doing it from boredom. After all, you're OBVIOUSLY ridiculously posh - your accent just about SCREAMS poshness. Not that you even need to hear your accent to tell. After all, only someone used to people bowing and scraping and cooing would get so spiky when anyone is bold enough to challenge him. And it's posh men like you who always assume you're the cleverest person in the room - not because you are, but just because no one's going to speak up to contradict you. And then there's the bit with you turning up your nose at the police not being so clever as you - so you're the sort of person who isn't either afraid of the police or aware of the necessity of them, meaning you've doubtless never had to either rely on or run from them. So, yeah. Posh. And since it's only rich idiots who'd give away work for free when they could charge for it, I guess maybe you really are being honest.

But you know - just for your consideration - there are other sorts of cleverness aside from yours. I'll bet you I can outwit you in three different ways, but you'd be too stuck in your own definition of cleverness to even recognize it.

[ look she's trying hard to be mean and smart in the same way you are
and doing...okay...at it
also hahaha the part where she's all "only posh people get all mad at being challenged" ]

[The purpose of the switch to video isn't immediately apparent, given that for the space of a few seconds Sherlock seems content to simply watch the screen, cool but not icy, certainly not expressing any particular ire, a state he maintains even once he does begin to speak. The purpose at first, though, is to be seen. He hardly needs to convince her, but he is curious as to how much of her desire to find reasons to dislike him can be maintained once he has a face and a voice to attach to the name.]

I'd advise you to watch that inferiority complex except it takes a truly astonishing amount of arrogance to suggest that I require your personal approval to save lives. It hardly matters where you're wrong about me; if I were you I'd be more careful about where you're wrong about you.

[He pauses, considering.]

What really astonishes me, though, is that in spite of all your invective you seem to be labouring under the impression that I've never been told to piss off before.

[ And Kitty answers by switching to video herself. She's very young - eighteen, no more - but a little careworn for all that. Very thin. She's a Londoner herself, too, but from a very different sort of neighborhood: her accent is from Balham, lower-middle-class at best - and yet the tilt of her chin is prideful, almost aristocratic. Her eyebrows are arched pugnaciously. ]

You haven't. Not really. When someone like you gets told to piss off, it's deferential. I know how your sort gets treated.

[ And then, with a sardonic sort of smile: ]

But now it's about saving lives, is it? If it's about saving lives, I'll apologize. But you said it was boredom.

And you would of course have believed me implicitly if I had only bled enough. Whatever concern I may or may not hold for the victims of crime is irrelevant next to the result, and the result is that I save lives. But it isn't really that you take offence to, is it?

My sort.

[The words are spoken with careful emphasis and accompanied by a small smile.]

If you mean the wealthy I'm afraid I only have the benefit of a good birth; before I came here I live in a modest flat I could only afford as the landlady owed me a favour and cut the rates, and even then only with a flatshare. I might just as easily have slept on park benches; the circumstances are largely irrelevant as long as I have the work, so perhaps that's what you mean, my sort. The neurologically atypical. Madmen. Or maybe you mean addicts; I'm begging for work I'm willing to accept without pay; obviously I'm looking to distract myself from something. People don't defer to madmen; the police don't defer to anyone they'd just as soon arrest as hire. I am permitted because I have made myself both insufferable and invaluable. I get results. What happens to go through my head while I'm in the process of getting them only matters to someone looking for excuses to deride me because I don't think the way they do.

[ Her aristocratic, haughty, holier-than-thou anger fades into something less noble as he speaks; by the time he reaches the end of that diatribe, she just looks a bit crabby. And she runs her hand through her hair when he's done, mussing it. Kitty Jones, officially a marshmallow; give her a bit of something that might make you seem remotely pitiable and it stirs the softness in her tender spiky little heart. ]

I meant rude people, actually. Because you were ridiculously rude to me with no reason. So please don't do that again.

[ And then a little sigh. ]

Look - if you really do save lives, then yeah, okay. That's what matters. But you know that it almost never happens that people offer something for nothing. You know that it's logical to be suspicious.

Of course it is. I'd hardly have bothered to continue engaging you if you were entirely wrong.

[There a crooked smile, which even seems genuine, though it doesn't look quite right, as though he's not used to smiling when he actually means to.]

You're not wrong about me either. I have a poor metric for rude. I am abrasive, unappreciative, ignorant, arrogant, and overeducated. Given that poor metric for rudeness, I could be wrong, but I wouldn't call the implication that I'm being exploitative no reason.

[A pause, a toss of the head akin to a shrug.]

Though I am.

[ Her brows come together a little bit. ]

Being exploitative?

I use other people's misfortune to my own benefit, of course I'm being exploitative. I just have no intention of harming them. As I said, not entirely wrong.

[ She purses her lips at him. ]

Well, then it's a little funny to get angry with me for accusing you of it, isn't it? Even if I was suspecting you of worse motives than you have.

[ But even so, a moment later, she shakes her head and says: ]

I am sorry for accusing you right out. I ought to have been more tactful. I'm sorry.

[Now that is offensive. Sherlock wrinkles his nose.]

Please. Tact is a waste of time and apologies are nearly as bad. I object to the comparison because the most reprehensible creatures I've ever known were blackmailers, and as one of the best was a garroter I suppose it's fair to say my standards aren't high.

[ She gives an incredulous, uncertain little smile. ]

Sorry. The worst were blackmailers? I should think there's quite a lot of things people can do that are much worse than blackmail.

The world is rarely as straightforward as people would like to believe. Clearly you aren't familiar with Charles Augustus Magnussen. Newspaper magnate. Also very much in the business of acquiring the secrets of the wealthy and powerful, by which he pulled the strings of dozens of highly-ranked officials worldwide. Notoriously difficult to catch because his choice of victims ensured his own protection by virtue of their power, when they didn't kill themselves outright. Billy Kincaid the garroter might have strangled a few people to death but he never made them feel so hopeless as to encourage them to do themselves in. That and the massive and entirely undisclosed donations to charity made him rather a better person than the strangling deaths might otherwise incline you to believe. Very charming also. Perfectly polite.

[He presses his lips together and raises his eyebrows, shrugging. What can you do?]

I would estimate that Magnussen's body count was in the hundreds, speaking conservatively, due to his tendency to meddle in international affairs alone. He found it funny, being able to do whatever he liked to whomever he liked, and he knew that he could because he knew that regardless of the facts, whatever he chose to publish would be read and absorbed and believed by millions. Newspapers are good as gospel.

Edited (what are words? we just don't know) 2015-03-13 02:57 (UTC)

[ She gives a little shrug. ]

I've known plenty with much higher body counts than that. The average army recruiter, for one. Or the head of police. Or our Prime Minister. I don't see much wrong with the sort of man who'd target those sorts of people. Nothing wrong with making the wealthy and powerful afraid.

[ But that's...glib. She gives a little sigh, shakes her head: ]

I see your point, I guess. Blackmail can be awful. All right.

One of his favourite games was played more often with his secretary than the rich and powerful. He liked to force her to try to keep her eyes open while he flicked them. Wealth and power were a means to an end, not a motive. He kept, he told me, a list of pressure points for everyone he met, to be used in the circumstance he should need something... or want something, or find himself sufficiently bored. I never did find out what all of mine were.

[There the point of divergence and there the reason he objects -- Sherlock works at avoiding cruelty when he's bored, however often he fails. Magnussen had embraced it, elevated it to machinery, an art form. His achievement was impressive; no denying that. All the same, Sherlock has spent enough of his time trying to be a person to know what it's like to be forced to be something one is not. There has been enough isolation, enough hopelessness that he recoils at the willing and gleeful imposition of it upon others.]

I'm intimately acquainted with the failings of the police and of governments. Rarely do the individuals comprising them present the same knowing sadism; theirs are mostly crimes of ignorance.

[ Kitty scoffs the scoff of a girl whose first act of high treason came before her first kiss. ...which is a comment on the treason, not a comment on her ability to find a boy to kiss thank you very much. ]

If you think that, you must not know them that well, then.

As well as anyone knows his brother. He, incidentally, is the exception. Not an idiot. Actively malicious? If you feel like being overly dramatic, yes. I generally do.

You generally do...feel like being dramatic?

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video until stated otherwise; private

video likewise; private

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