Iron Ink and Sinister Visions

[Omicron]

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The first corpse was found on August 7th​, 1873. The second, on September 4th​. The third only a week later. It continued with ever increasing frequency, until by October, over two dozen mutilated corpses were on file for investigation at Scotland Yard. Every one of them—men, women, and children—had been torn apart, seemingly from within. The morticians described the bodies as looking like human seedpods, having split along the spine, and spewing forth great flows of black, oily gore. One respected doctor commented that these corpses gave the sense of being cast off organic vessels, like that of a butterfly chrysalis, or shed snakeskin.

It was an affair that griped all of London in a vice of fear and confusion, for no group was proved to be safe. The public was in an uproar, calling for the authorities to solve the hellish mystery before more were slaughtered. Yet, for all the herculean efforts of the government, progress was woefully nonexistent. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the killings, and no connection could be found between the victims. No eyewitnesses came forward who could give credible testimony regarding the murders, or the perpetrators. In short, London was at the mercy of whatever vile force was feeding at its belly.

But Scotland Yard was not the only entity working to stop the bloodshed. There was a select population that knew that these acts were not the work of some mortal psychopath, or crazed group of political anarchists. Though the exact nature of the evil eluded even these enlightened few at the outset, it was apparent to them that something ethereal and malevolent had seeded itself into the city, and it would be only through the use of the supernatural that it could be weeded out once more…

 

[Adelaide]

[BCOLOR=#701c1d]Name:[/BCOLOR] Georgiana Westmoore

[BCOLOR=#701c1d]Age:[/BCOLOR] 24

[BCOLOR=#701c1d]Characteristics:[/BCOLOR] Of middling height people are often surprised by Georgiana's lack of stature so rigidly does she hold herself. Always properly dressed and coiffed she exudes enough regality to keep her from being taken as a silly society girl yet she does not have the social standing and connections of a society matron. She is invited to a great many social gatherings, as befits her station, but she attends only those that would it would be remiss for her to miss. She hosts gatherings with the same principles in mind. When in London, the raven-haired young woman (heir to the Westmoore estates now that her older brother passed away while in service) keeps a fine house and is seen about the town. In the off season she retires to her country estates and is rarely heard from outside of required. People often remark that there is on occasion something uncanny to be found in her nearly-black eyes, an awareness, a longing that seems out of place on her serene countenance.

[BCOLOR=#701c1d]History:[/BCOLOR] The Westmoore's are an old family, with a windswept, extensive estate on the north-east coast of England and a very luxurious townhouse in London. The Patriarch of the family Lord Montgomery Westmoore was a bit eccentric with wide interests and a thirst for Travel that was picked up in his youth in the Army. He was prone to collecting things as he traveled, the most exotic of which was an Indian born Wife of (supposedly) British descent and while her name and lineage checked out she never made it to England's shores as Lady Westmoore and so rumors about her persist. Her children, male and female twins arrived along with her coffin at the ripe age of three in the care of an elderly Indian nurse. Unaccompanied by their world-traveling father they were wild, black-eyed things that were a trial to their British nursemaids until they learned the ways of things and settled down.

Young lord Westmoore, Basil seemed to be a carbon copy of his father, but for his dark eyes. With the same travel-hungry temperament and curiosity about the strangest things he enlisted in the army as soon as he could with his father's blessings. With great regularity packages arrived from him on his travels, a strange array of textiles, artifacts, dross and shiny things. His sister, Georgiana took to calling him Magpie but cataloged the lot of it with patience and diligence.

When word arrived of the Tragedy that stuck Basil's regiment deep in India, Lord Westmoore collapsed in a fit and never recovered. He lingered for a few months but a final package, sent just before Basil's passing arrived it seemed to do him in. He passed away and left young Georgiana alone in the world but for distant relatives who had little to do with the eccentric family. After a few years of deep mourning, Georgiana began to make herself known in good society. Though she was welcome and invited along on events, she was never fully accepted and the surface contact with good people seemed to be enough for her.

[BCOLOR=#3366ff]Ayushmati-[/BCOLOR] The mostly mute nursemaid of Georgiana and Basil. Also the nursemaid of their mother.

 

[Muirgen]

[BCOLOR=#666699]Name:[/BCOLOR] Dame Constance Anne Brigham

[BCOLOR=#666699]Age:[/BCOLOR] Born September 19th, 1791, Constance was 20-years old at the time of her passing. Since her liberation from her former estates some five years prior, her passion for learning has continued apace, though of course she does not age in physical form as a mortal woman.

[BCOLOR=#666699]Physical Appearance:[/BCOLOR] In life, Constance was always a slender slip of a girl, quiet and gentle. With golden-brown hair and blue eyes, her father often joked she was his delicate little Fairy Girl, even as a grown woman. After her passing, she can now appear as solid as she was in life (though this is only an illusion), as a diaphanous visage, or completely invisible [to the naked, un-augmented human eye]. She can change the illusion of both hair and clothing, if she concentrates hard enough.

[BCOLOR=#666699]History:[/BCOLOR] The only living child of Sir Edward Brigham, 6th Baronet of Wessex, and Dame Lavinia Talbot-Brigham, Constance's childhood was a happy one on the family's ancestral Five Foxes estates. She grew to be a well-educated lady of many accomplishments, musical, artistic and scholarly. And though she lost her mother to consumption when she was 10-years old, and her father to a fever when she was 16-years old, Constance managed a happy enough life, no matter she had yet to marry.

A wonderful match for any good gentleman, Constance instead found herself swept off her feet by the most handsome of rogues, a traveling huntsman with curling blonde hair and eyes as green as summer forest leaves. No matter her brilliance, her wit and her standing, in this one way she was no more than a young, foolish girl with no one left to ensure she kept her head on straight.

The scandal of the elopement destroyed her social standing entirely, but that did not mean she was not happy - for the first few months of married life at the least. Soon after they returned from their honeymoon in Venice, Constance began to fall ill, slowly at first, having difficulty walking and terrible stomach pains. By the time she lay on her deathbed, she was utterly unable to rise on her own, wracked by near-constant and agonizing pain until finally - mercifully even - she slipped into a coma and passed away.

Though she had been shriven and received all Rites of the Church, Heaven did not wait on the other side of death for Constance. One moment she had been in horrible agony, and then the next? There was no pain, and she could move once more. She was stunned as she stood to her feet, turned to look to see her poor body, not much more than a flesh-covered skeleton anymore. Stunned, horrified and baffled beyond all understanding until one of the chambermaids entered the sick room with her husband.

There were no tears, no horrified cries to fetch the physician or quiet sobbing over a cooling body. There was only laughter, and smug celebration as vile words tripped off the cruel maiden's tongue: she had not only murdered Constance with her own husband's connivance, but for having the temerity to lie with the maid's lover, her once beloved spouse? The vile witch had cursed her very soul - she would never be allowed to pass into Heaven, and was bound to the Five Foxes Estate for all time...

Six months after her murder, the new Sir Brigham married well beneath his station but, like his previous wife, happily enough it seemed - and far more fortunately. The new Dame Brigham was more than lively enough, her expensive tastes indulged, growing plump and contented and providing her sweet husband with six healthy children, all of whom grew to adulthood, filling the halls of Five Foxes with their laughter and screams.

And Constance bore silent witness to it all. With no voice, no body, no way to communicate with anyone and with no way to ever leave Five Foxes, she watched the burgeoning family of her murderers, their happiness and joy the salt to wounds gouged into a gentle, pain-maddened soul. Some five decades passed in this manner, the witch and her murderer-husband slipping into the afterlife, their children growing in Constance's home, followed soon thereafter by grandchildren. They were her only source of joy in her captivity anymore, the sweet, innocent little children she never had herself.

She enjoyed them greatly until they grew to sullen, spoilt teenagers, as seemed inevitable in these more 'modern' days. It was the teenagers who would grow bored, who would explore the tunnels and attics, every nook and cranny - and finally even the rooms of the old Dame Brigham, long dead all these years. It was inevitable really, that one day someone would find the loose floorboard where, like a naughty little child, she had hidden away all the letters between herself and the man who stole her heart. The girl who found them, calling her playmates to come look at her discovery, could not know she was the very image of her grandmother at her age. She found the letters, and settled in to read them, scattering the precious pages across the floor -

- And then, the girl laughed. She read those letters, aloud to her brother and her cousin who both snorted their derision, giggling at the idea that Grandfather could have ever once earned such devotion. They laughed, mocking Constance's love, her pain... At her terrible, unspeakable betrayal...

Rage. The spirit of the gentle woman was wrapped in an unholy rage, the power of her fury teaching her she could, given enough concentration, send her voice screaming and screeching and gibbering through the venerable halls. She could hurl papers, books - even chairs, tables, men and women... There was no more sleep beneath this roof, no more rest to be found, no comfort nor quiet. Five Foxes became uninhabitable, a veritable hellhole of poltergeist rage until a certain strange gentleman could be hired to bring peace once more to the once-bucolic estate.

 

[Omicron]

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[BCOLOR=#ffffff]Name:[/BCOLOR] Callum Vaughn

[BCOLOR=#ffffff]Age:[/BCOLOR] 30

[BCOLOR=#ffffff]Physical Characteristics:[/BCOLOR] Callum is tall, with a muscularly lithe frame. His hair is dark black, almost blue in the right light. The tone of his skin is a light olive, which gives highlight to his ash gray eyes. His flesh is a testament to a life of physical vigor, and is pocked and scarred in areas around his torso, arms and legs. Due to his hand being broken as a young soldier, Callum's right hand often aches, and after prolonged use can become excruciating.

[BCOLOR=#ffffff]History:[/BCOLOR] Callum was raised in the London borough of Lambeth as the third son to a middle-class merchant family. As his older brothers were slated to take over the whole of his father's mercantile business, Callum was expected to grow up and pursue a career independent of his family. This tacit, but de facto, disassociation with the core of his family made Callum grow with a fierce and defiant sense of individualism, and quiet pride—he would make a name for himself with his own sweat and toil, and nothing else. This drive dovetailed perfectly with the expansion of the Victorian era military in various colonial areas around the globe, and Callum found a welcome vehicle to place his ambition.

Following his enlistment at seventeen, Callum was sent to India to join the 4th​ Bengal Light Foot Regiment. Once there, Callum found himself as an actor in some of the most exotic and deadly conflicts faced by English forces during the 1850's and '60's. Due to attrition within the 4th​, and a lack of qualified officers throughout the British Raj, Callum was able to purchase his commission at the young age of twenty-one. He proved himself in short order to be a competent, confident, and tactful officer, earning the trust and respect of the men under his command.

But, all of that was to change. In February of 1864, Callum was ordered to lead a company of Bengalese and British infantrymen against a group of Hindi rebels. The limited information on these rebels claimed them to be few in number, and lacking in organization and firepower. As a result, the regimental command only allocated a meagre amount of materiel for Callum's expedition, despite strong protest from the young officer. What occurred in the jungles of northern India in the following weeks would forever mar the name of the 4th​ Bengal Light Foot Regiment in the annals of British military history.

Though there is no official explanation for the massacre that befell the "ghost company," as Callum's unit would come to be known, what is known is that only one man survived the ordeal. It was in the fall of 1865 when the entirety of the 4th​ marched into the area where the ghost company was believed to have been slaughtered. What they found there was the overgrown ruins of a Hindu monastery, the bones of nearly a hundred men, and a barely recognizable Captain Callum Vaughn.

Wearing a full and bedraggled beard, naked, and covered with strange tattoos of henna, Callum met his former comrades in a trancelike state. Thinking him mad from exposure and torture at the hands of his native captors, the 4th​ returned to New Delhi. After rehabilitating for some months in the home of a British viceroy, Callum was returned to England having no recollection of his ordeal, or what fate had befallen his company. Though some speculated that his amnesia was merely a means to cover his own folly, and spare his pride, what was undisputable was that Callum Vaughn's career in the military he so loved, had come to a tragic end.

And so, having been forced back to a home he barely recognized, Callum faded quickly into obscurity. What had become of the man, none could truly say. Even his own family had no contact with him, and it was quietly believed by his brothers that he had shrunk away into the abyss of suicidal shame, opium and drink, never to be heard from alive again…

 

[Adelaide]

[BCOLOR=#808080]NPC's[/BCOLOR]
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[BCOLOR=#808080]Master Barnsworth Sr.[/BCOLOR] - an elderly, man, spindly of body with a shock of white hair and failing eyesight. He is dutiful and proper and just beginning to let his son, Master Barnsworth Jr. take on some of his duties. (free to use as you will)

[BCOLOR=#808080]Becky (Rebecca) White[/BCOLOR] - a plump blond maidservant with lazy tendencies and an eye for mischief. Serves as Lady Westmoore's lady's maid when she is in residence. Niece to Mrs. Beasley (free to use as you will)

[BCOLOR=#808080]Mrs. Abigail Beasley [/BCOLOR]- A very distant relative of the Westmoores she came to serve them after her husband died and left her childless and penniless. The work suits her though she's taken to drink a bit more than she should have to wile away the long winters. A fine cook she rules the kitchen with an inconsistent hand, strict one moment, oblivious the next. Though no one has made off with the silver yet, it is only a matter of time. (free to use as you will)

[BCOLOR=#808080]Ayushmati[/BCOLOR] - the Indian nursemaid that accompanied the late Mrs. Westmoore and her twins to England. Mostly mute she will speak only in her native tongue but clearly understands at least the basics of English. She does what she likes and is seemingly devoted to her the lady of the house. (a light hand with this one, if you please)