Oliver Sumner (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bonesandskin) wrote2013-02-16 03:27 pm
bonesandskin) wrote2013-02-16 03:27 pm
Entry tags:
[profile|Kore] you're tireless
[Player information]
Player Name: Gene
Age: 28
E-mail: beneaththepeartree [at] gmail.com
Other characters played at Cape Kore: N/A
[Character information]
Name: Oliver Sumner
Canon: Whitechapel Gods by S. M. Peters
Canon Point: Pre-epilogue, very end of book-proper
Age: 30
Appearance:
Oliver is all height - tall, thin, and gangly limbs - which was an especially notable feature in the Victorian times from which he hails. The average height of a man being 5'6" back then, he's described as standing a good head taller than most, which would put him at about 6'. Needless to say, this forced him to put no small effort into learning how to look unimportant and uninteresting, and has therefore resulted in a habit of slouching and stooping and looking generally haggard and worn down to avoid notice. It's also caused him to favor caps of various cheaply-procured styles, the brims of which work well to shade and obscure the face, as well as slightly ill-fitting and generally non-descript (in Victorian times) clothing common amongst the lower classes. He has a head of wild, dark, poorly managed, and generally untended curls - grown a bit longer than usual, come end of the novel, so that he could tie it back into a small tail, if he so wished - and his eyes are bright and striking, even when they aren't emitting a literal light.
In order to describe, more specifically, how he looks by the end of the story proper, and therefore how he would look upon his arrival, I'll take the following from a previous go at playing him:
Inventory:
the clothing mentioned in the above description, an empty double-barrel derringer, various examples of Victorian-era English coinage
Abilities:
On the normal level, Oliver was once a thief by trade, though he doesn't particularly like to use those skills but so much anymore. As a result of the business, however, he's a fairly decent pickpocket and can pick, crack, or jimmy any non-electric lock you put in front of him. Also he's a damn fine sneak and spy.
On the less normal note, he has a preternaturally good sense of character. He's no psychic and, honestly, he'd probably shoot himself if he ever found himself capable of reading anyone's mind, but he has a sort of sixth sense about people. It tells him who he can trust and how far he can trust them as well as when there's something off about a person's words or actions. Whether or not he always listens to the warning bells in his head? Well, he's got some scars to prove that a different story.
It's also worth noting that he was, at one point, possessed by three warring gods all at once and carries a few residual signs of weirdness from that. Due to his possession by what was essentially a clockwork plague god, his healing has been affected, in that he has a much higher likelihood of surviving injuries that should be fatal, which sounds rather more peaches and cream than he's found it to be. While he heals more quickly, as far as wounds sealing and the like, the actual recovery process takes much longer. For instance, if he was shot, the wound would seal itself, either after someone removed the bullet or his body forced it out, but the weakness and pain of the healing process would stick with him for at least twice as long as the typical gunshot survivor. As a result of his possession by the gods known as Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine, he sometimes has an odd way of affecting machines, especially those of the clockwork variety - they tend to fritz a bit if he's around them for too long - and sometimes his eyes glow, basically looking like his pupils have been replaced by small flames. It's not something that he consciously controls and it has its pros and cons. On one hand, it comes in handy when he needs to, say, see in the dark. On the other, it's a bit harder to blend in when gears start grinding to a halt and one has torches for eyes. This will obviously be mentioned in narrative when relavant.
History:
Oliver was born in 1787, in the Whitechapel district of a London that no one from this world he's crashing into would recognize. Well, to be honest and fair, they might recognize London but Whitechapel itself was a world all its own, taken over by its strange, mechanical gods and their servants - the gold cloaks of Grandfather Clock and the black cloaks of Mama Engine - and cut off from the countries and kingdoms all around it. Primarily born and raised there, few residents of any social strata had ever seen, let alone experienced, the world that existed beyond the gods' great wall.
Ollie was no exception. He was born to a black cloak woman and was abandoned as an infant, left in a factory to live or die, however fate would have it. The factory in question belonged to Herbert (Hewey) and Barbara Lewis, spies for the English crown, who took him in and raised him as best they could until he was old enough to fend for himself. So most of his childhood was spent there, in that factory, or escaping to the streets, sleeping under smelting pots and outside alleyway shop doors, listening to stories of a world without the machine gods, and taking on whatever skills would keep him from being beaten by his peers or starving to death like so many others.
His teen years went by rather uneventfully, becoming a thief by trade and generally coming into his own, but his twenties were met with less success. In 1812, on a day like any other, the Chimney gangs came through. It all started with one little girl, as they grabbed her from her mother's arms and cut the both of them when the two struggled against separation. Witnessing this while out on an assignment for Hewey, the story goes that Oliver simply went off and, with nothing but a milk jug on hand, beat in the brain of the cloak who was leading the gang. That might have been the end for him, had it not been for the fact that the people around him suddenly followed his lead and began a full attack. So began the Uprising, a vicious and bloody working man's rebellion, led by a brave, young man named Oliver Sumner, whom few would ever forget.
He was a genius at it, to be honest. A born leader with dreams to charge after, Oliver had the drive, the charisma, and the sense of responsibility that people had been waiting for. Unfortunately, what he lacked, despite the fact that every man, woman, and child of the Whitechapel working class would stand behind him, was the army. No few innocents died when the heartless machines known as the Boiler Men were sent in to squash this growing wave of dissent before it could go from mere rebellion to full on revolution. Gone into hiding, Oliver swore he would never see so many lives lost again, never mind the fact that not a single soul, dead or alive, ever blamed him for any of it.
Five years later, laying low and leading the small crew he'd kept on in assisting Hewey and his English spies, Ollie found himself still dreaming of someday leading a true revolution, rather than simply assisting in covert attempts to tear the Whitechapel gods down. For the time being, however, he couldn't quite get his heart into it and simply followed orders, whether he liked it or not. There was a way to end the gods' tyranny, his English compatriots said, and they were going to see it through or die trying.
Rather than spoil the rest of the novel, I'll simply summarize how well that all went. You see, a few rather large trip-ups in the plan led Oliver on a merry chase with a vengeful gold cloak and ended in him, Oliver that is, catching the great Mama Engine's eye. Now caught up in the plans of the gods' themselves, and their hidden, bastard child, he became the key to their demise - a demise which he successfully brought about, at great personal cost.
Personality:
In defining Oliver Sumner, one could fit him fairly easily, point by point, into the mold of the Robin Hood archetype. He is a born leader, more charismatic than he would ever like to admit, and a criminal revolutionary, stealing from those who have and giving to those who have not. Loyal to and taking care of those whom he sees as his own, which doesn't just mean his direct comrades but also those poorer and generally less fortunate than himself, Ollie has always spent more of his earnings on food, home repairs, doctor bills, and other necessities for his struggling neighbors than he has on anything for himself. He's a polite and honest sort (as his father-figure recounts of Ollie's childhood, "...always brazenly stealing my wife's Bundt cake but never any of my money or valuables.") and trusts those he feels that he can trust to be honest in return. Some call him foolish, as one does not have to earn his trust so much as simply have the proper way about you and no questions are ever asked about one's past unless absolutely necessary, but he argues that it's the person you are that matters and not the person you've been. One way to tell whether or not he trusted a person to the point of truly calling them a comrade, if not a friend, used to be how he introduceed himself. If he offered his real name, then he trusted them. If he called himself "John Bull" (basically meaning "bullshit"), then there was something about them that rubbed him the wrong way or something about the situation that made him wary. Seeing as the false moniker was also primarily a way of hiding back home, the mention of one "Oliver Sumner" always potentially leading to unwanted recognition for his past exploits, he isn't very likely to care who does or does not know his real name anymore.
Dear Oliver is also a rather self-deprecating man. As previously mentioned, he has a degree of charisma far greater than he would admit, and that's not the only good thing about himself that he doesn't see. He has little by way of pride and riles in defense of others, even some total strangers, where he might overlook a strike or insult against himself. This makes him a great candidate for a friend and companion, as well as a surrogate son, it seems, being loyal and protective but needing a certain degree of personal bolstering that one would typically receive from a parent. Canonically, he is known to marvel at his own "near-mystical ability to draw paternal responses from aged men." In a way, perhaps that is also what has led to his own apparent claim to the role of a family man without a family, taking the lost and the broken under his wing as he does and helping them get on their own feet and find their own purpose.
Also he has a few fears and issues that might be somewhat noticeable. For instance, though he's loathe to admit it after the amount of teasing he's taken for it in the past, he's rather afraid of heights. In particular, he's afraid of long drops over which he has a precarious sense of physical stability, which he would argue is a perfectly valid and reasonable fear, never mind he held no such worries when he was a child, rather developing it after seeing people leaping from ledges to avoid steam cannon fire. He also doesn't particularly like guns, though he carries an empty double-barrel derringer that was given to him by the leader of the English spies with whom he used to work, and he's rather uncomfortable with religion. Having lived in a world where most people who praise God do so out of habit or defiance rather than any sense of faith, such things draw from him an odd mixture of pride, longing, and shame. Not to mention the fact that the world he hails from was ruled by two selfish, wrathful deities of an entirely unpleasant and mechanically based sort, which leads nicely into the next issue of note. Oliver is rather twitchy about analog time pieces, especially large or prominent clocks. In this world, it might be viewed as a developing phobia but, back home, clock faces allowed Grandfather Clock and his followers to spy upon all nearby activity.
Lastly, sunlight and plant life are two very new and foreign concepts to Oliver, seeing as he's always lived mostly underground and the world above was always overcast and smog-ridden, so he'll marvel at the expansive entity that is Nature, not to mention the extensive new spectrum of colors to which he'll be introduced, but nobody should be terribly surprised if he finds his way into some dark hole of a place and makes a habit of hiding, if not living, there.
[Samples]
First Person:
[It's obvious for looking at him that Oliver is unaware of the fact that his communicator has turned on. He doesn't like the thing on his wrist any more than he likes what he's been told are called "cameras" and he doesn't like the cameras any more than he does clocks and, well, clocks are the focal point of what one might call Oliver's developing phobia. He knows full well that they aren't the device by which he's being watched - no, the invisible gods behind whatever this place is are far more obvious with their observations than that - but he still can't help the paranoia. Old habits die hard, from avoiding analog time pieces to constantly considering ways in which one might undermine the plans of some powers that be.]
An hour ago I severed my left hand with a hatchet. [Given the fact that his hands are clasped in front of him, arms resting upon his knees, this is not a factual statement. After a pause, his tone may also indicate the air of a quote.] A new one has grown in its place. I now have fingers of brass and iron, fingers strong enough to accomplish my next task-- [He unfolds himself from his position, seated on the floor, and the video echoes that fact, showing his surroundings - an attic space filled with boxes of forgotten items, a dust-coated grandfather clock positioned with its face against the floor - until he stops, arms crossed over his chest, in front of one of those damned cameras.] --my next task, which is the removal of my eyes.
[The quotation stops with a huff and then a hum.] It's one thing to blind a cyclops, now isn't it, but another thing entirely to blind a hydra, when every head removed grows back two more. I've dealt with your kind before - ever vigilent - but even the god of those thrice damned canaries was never as far reaching as you. Besides which, what would you want with this ragged, old corpse of a cove? I've led my revolutions, fought my battles, won my war. Christ Almighty, what's the price an honest man must pay for a good century's rest these days?
[His arms drop to his sides again and he's turning around at the same time as the video feed flickers and shuts off.]
Third Person:
This sleep is pleasantly devoid of dreams, or as much so as any sleep can be. These dreams are the sort that he won't remember them when he wakes and the dreams themselves won't be what wakes him; those two facts alone are a more comforting sort of knowledge than any other that he has processed over these past few days. Oliver Sumner is finally sleeping and it is not made of nightmares yet neither is it what he expected, for he thought that his next would be the sleep of the dead.
He dreams of Tom and Hewey, both gone now but, he hopes, happier wherever they are, finally allowed to truly die and be free, if dead souls go anywhere at all. He dreams of Phineas and Heckler, both back in the Underbelly, maybe living or maybe dead, he has no way of knowing but he knows what he'd wish for either of them. He dreams of Bergen, that strange German he knows would have wanted to go out this way, and of Bailey, ever the loyal Englishman until the day he died. He dreams of Aaron, his spirit free now, and of all the others who have given their lives to make Whitechapel free. And he dreams of Missy-- Michelle-- Miss Plantaget, wherever she may be. That girl, that woman, that peach of a thing, beautiful and honest and--
This is where the nightmares should begin.
What he expects, as his mind wanders over his would-be-murderess, is a recounting of the events that led to having lost her. For once, he wishes that he could simply know things, like Aaron once could - that he could somehow be aware of why she had done it, what had moved her hand. Instead, he dreams of a green field, a thing of his own imagination, with a young woman lying out upon the grass with a basket of laundry resting by her side. He is standing, he notes, by a short wall, wearing a gentleman's coat, a sharp vest, a top hat, and leaning heavily upon something, upon a cane. Looped over the crook of his other arm is a basket, a heavy one, made of wicker and, his dream nose tells him, filled with the freshest baked bread. Ahead of him, the woman stands, lifts her burden from the ground, dressed in the plain dress of a nobleman's laundress, and she makes her way toward him, offers him the politest of nods as she passes by.
"How do you do, sir?"
"As well as can be expected, Miss Plantaget."
Once upon a time, in a life they've left behind, he promised her a picnic. Today, even as she drops her laundry upon the ground and he hushes her tear-filled fears and apologies, he intends to keep that promise. That and many more, in fact. For he has all the time in the world before he wakes.
Anything Else? Not that I can think of at the moment.
Player Name: Gene
Age: 28
E-mail: beneaththepeartree [at] gmail.com
Other characters played at Cape Kore: N/A
[Character information]
Name: Oliver Sumner
Canon: Whitechapel Gods by S. M. Peters
Canon Point: Pre-epilogue, very end of book-proper
Age: 30
Appearance:
Oliver is all height - tall, thin, and gangly limbs - which was an especially notable feature in the Victorian times from which he hails. The average height of a man being 5'6" back then, he's described as standing a good head taller than most, which would put him at about 6'. Needless to say, this forced him to put no small effort into learning how to look unimportant and uninteresting, and has therefore resulted in a habit of slouching and stooping and looking generally haggard and worn down to avoid notice. It's also caused him to favor caps of various cheaply-procured styles, the brims of which work well to shade and obscure the face, as well as slightly ill-fitting and generally non-descript (in Victorian times) clothing common amongst the lower classes. He has a head of wild, dark, poorly managed, and generally untended curls - grown a bit longer than usual, come end of the novel, so that he could tie it back into a small tail, if he so wished - and his eyes are bright and striking, even when they aren't emitting a literal light.
In order to describe, more specifically, how he looks by the end of the story proper, and therefore how he would look upon his arrival, I'll take the following from a previous go at playing him:
At first glance, one might think him an errant zombie. He does appear rather corpse-like from a distance, skin tinged with an unhealthy shade of yellow, almost a sort of sickly green in some places. Creamy, off-white lines and crusted smudges mark healing wounds, the most prominent of which stands out as a thin line across the base of his throat, just above his collarbone. A dirty mass of bandages is wrapped around his right hand, not doing much to cover and conceal the slightly blackened and burn-scarred flesh beneath. His clothing is Victorian in style - boots, wool slacks, once-white shirt, vest, suspenders, an oversized long coat, a flat cap held under his left hand, which rests in his lap. It's all as torn and tattered as he generally appears to be, stained with blood, oil, grease, that same odd off-white substance that covers his wounds and cracks about his dirty fingernails.Additionally, he's got something of a bum leg as further result of his canon escapades and may, at times, allow himself the assistance of a cane, once he's settled that need with his pride.
Inventory:
the clothing mentioned in the above description, an empty double-barrel derringer, various examples of Victorian-era English coinage
Abilities:
On the normal level, Oliver was once a thief by trade, though he doesn't particularly like to use those skills but so much anymore. As a result of the business, however, he's a fairly decent pickpocket and can pick, crack, or jimmy any non-electric lock you put in front of him. Also he's a damn fine sneak and spy.
On the less normal note, he has a preternaturally good sense of character. He's no psychic and, honestly, he'd probably shoot himself if he ever found himself capable of reading anyone's mind, but he has a sort of sixth sense about people. It tells him who he can trust and how far he can trust them as well as when there's something off about a person's words or actions. Whether or not he always listens to the warning bells in his head? Well, he's got some scars to prove that a different story.
It's also worth noting that he was, at one point, possessed by three warring gods all at once and carries a few residual signs of weirdness from that. Due to his possession by what was essentially a clockwork plague god, his healing has been affected, in that he has a much higher likelihood of surviving injuries that should be fatal, which sounds rather more peaches and cream than he's found it to be. While he heals more quickly, as far as wounds sealing and the like, the actual recovery process takes much longer. For instance, if he was shot, the wound would seal itself, either after someone removed the bullet or his body forced it out, but the weakness and pain of the healing process would stick with him for at least twice as long as the typical gunshot survivor. As a result of his possession by the gods known as Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine, he sometimes has an odd way of affecting machines, especially those of the clockwork variety - they tend to fritz a bit if he's around them for too long - and sometimes his eyes glow, basically looking like his pupils have been replaced by small flames. It's not something that he consciously controls and it has its pros and cons. On one hand, it comes in handy when he needs to, say, see in the dark. On the other, it's a bit harder to blend in when gears start grinding to a halt and one has torches for eyes. This will obviously be mentioned in narrative when relavant.
History:
Oliver was born in 1787, in the Whitechapel district of a London that no one from this world he's crashing into would recognize. Well, to be honest and fair, they might recognize London but Whitechapel itself was a world all its own, taken over by its strange, mechanical gods and their servants - the gold cloaks of Grandfather Clock and the black cloaks of Mama Engine - and cut off from the countries and kingdoms all around it. Primarily born and raised there, few residents of any social strata had ever seen, let alone experienced, the world that existed beyond the gods' great wall.
Ollie was no exception. He was born to a black cloak woman and was abandoned as an infant, left in a factory to live or die, however fate would have it. The factory in question belonged to Herbert (Hewey) and Barbara Lewis, spies for the English crown, who took him in and raised him as best they could until he was old enough to fend for himself. So most of his childhood was spent there, in that factory, or escaping to the streets, sleeping under smelting pots and outside alleyway shop doors, listening to stories of a world without the machine gods, and taking on whatever skills would keep him from being beaten by his peers or starving to death like so many others.
His teen years went by rather uneventfully, becoming a thief by trade and generally coming into his own, but his twenties were met with less success. In 1812, on a day like any other, the Chimney gangs came through. It all started with one little girl, as they grabbed her from her mother's arms and cut the both of them when the two struggled against separation. Witnessing this while out on an assignment for Hewey, the story goes that Oliver simply went off and, with nothing but a milk jug on hand, beat in the brain of the cloak who was leading the gang. That might have been the end for him, had it not been for the fact that the people around him suddenly followed his lead and began a full attack. So began the Uprising, a vicious and bloody working man's rebellion, led by a brave, young man named Oliver Sumner, whom few would ever forget.
He was a genius at it, to be honest. A born leader with dreams to charge after, Oliver had the drive, the charisma, and the sense of responsibility that people had been waiting for. Unfortunately, what he lacked, despite the fact that every man, woman, and child of the Whitechapel working class would stand behind him, was the army. No few innocents died when the heartless machines known as the Boiler Men were sent in to squash this growing wave of dissent before it could go from mere rebellion to full on revolution. Gone into hiding, Oliver swore he would never see so many lives lost again, never mind the fact that not a single soul, dead or alive, ever blamed him for any of it.
Five years later, laying low and leading the small crew he'd kept on in assisting Hewey and his English spies, Ollie found himself still dreaming of someday leading a true revolution, rather than simply assisting in covert attempts to tear the Whitechapel gods down. For the time being, however, he couldn't quite get his heart into it and simply followed orders, whether he liked it or not. There was a way to end the gods' tyranny, his English compatriots said, and they were going to see it through or die trying.
Rather than spoil the rest of the novel, I'll simply summarize how well that all went. You see, a few rather large trip-ups in the plan led Oliver on a merry chase with a vengeful gold cloak and ended in him, Oliver that is, catching the great Mama Engine's eye. Now caught up in the plans of the gods' themselves, and their hidden, bastard child, he became the key to their demise - a demise which he successfully brought about, at great personal cost.
Personality:
In defining Oliver Sumner, one could fit him fairly easily, point by point, into the mold of the Robin Hood archetype. He is a born leader, more charismatic than he would ever like to admit, and a criminal revolutionary, stealing from those who have and giving to those who have not. Loyal to and taking care of those whom he sees as his own, which doesn't just mean his direct comrades but also those poorer and generally less fortunate than himself, Ollie has always spent more of his earnings on food, home repairs, doctor bills, and other necessities for his struggling neighbors than he has on anything for himself. He's a polite and honest sort (as his father-figure recounts of Ollie's childhood, "...always brazenly stealing my wife's Bundt cake but never any of my money or valuables.") and trusts those he feels that he can trust to be honest in return. Some call him foolish, as one does not have to earn his trust so much as simply have the proper way about you and no questions are ever asked about one's past unless absolutely necessary, but he argues that it's the person you are that matters and not the person you've been. One way to tell whether or not he trusted a person to the point of truly calling them a comrade, if not a friend, used to be how he introduceed himself. If he offered his real name, then he trusted them. If he called himself "John Bull" (basically meaning "bullshit"), then there was something about them that rubbed him the wrong way or something about the situation that made him wary. Seeing as the false moniker was also primarily a way of hiding back home, the mention of one "Oliver Sumner" always potentially leading to unwanted recognition for his past exploits, he isn't very likely to care who does or does not know his real name anymore.
Dear Oliver is also a rather self-deprecating man. As previously mentioned, he has a degree of charisma far greater than he would admit, and that's not the only good thing about himself that he doesn't see. He has little by way of pride and riles in defense of others, even some total strangers, where he might overlook a strike or insult against himself. This makes him a great candidate for a friend and companion, as well as a surrogate son, it seems, being loyal and protective but needing a certain degree of personal bolstering that one would typically receive from a parent. Canonically, he is known to marvel at his own "near-mystical ability to draw paternal responses from aged men." In a way, perhaps that is also what has led to his own apparent claim to the role of a family man without a family, taking the lost and the broken under his wing as he does and helping them get on their own feet and find their own purpose.
Also he has a few fears and issues that might be somewhat noticeable. For instance, though he's loathe to admit it after the amount of teasing he's taken for it in the past, he's rather afraid of heights. In particular, he's afraid of long drops over which he has a precarious sense of physical stability, which he would argue is a perfectly valid and reasonable fear, never mind he held no such worries when he was a child, rather developing it after seeing people leaping from ledges to avoid steam cannon fire. He also doesn't particularly like guns, though he carries an empty double-barrel derringer that was given to him by the leader of the English spies with whom he used to work, and he's rather uncomfortable with religion. Having lived in a world where most people who praise God do so out of habit or defiance rather than any sense of faith, such things draw from him an odd mixture of pride, longing, and shame. Not to mention the fact that the world he hails from was ruled by two selfish, wrathful deities of an entirely unpleasant and mechanically based sort, which leads nicely into the next issue of note. Oliver is rather twitchy about analog time pieces, especially large or prominent clocks. In this world, it might be viewed as a developing phobia but, back home, clock faces allowed Grandfather Clock and his followers to spy upon all nearby activity.
Lastly, sunlight and plant life are two very new and foreign concepts to Oliver, seeing as he's always lived mostly underground and the world above was always overcast and smog-ridden, so he'll marvel at the expansive entity that is Nature, not to mention the extensive new spectrum of colors to which he'll be introduced, but nobody should be terribly surprised if he finds his way into some dark hole of a place and makes a habit of hiding, if not living, there.
[Samples]
First Person:
[It's obvious for looking at him that Oliver is unaware of the fact that his communicator has turned on. He doesn't like the thing on his wrist any more than he likes what he's been told are called "cameras" and he doesn't like the cameras any more than he does clocks and, well, clocks are the focal point of what one might call Oliver's developing phobia. He knows full well that they aren't the device by which he's being watched - no, the invisible gods behind whatever this place is are far more obvious with their observations than that - but he still can't help the paranoia. Old habits die hard, from avoiding analog time pieces to constantly considering ways in which one might undermine the plans of some powers that be.]
An hour ago I severed my left hand with a hatchet. [Given the fact that his hands are clasped in front of him, arms resting upon his knees, this is not a factual statement. After a pause, his tone may also indicate the air of a quote.] A new one has grown in its place. I now have fingers of brass and iron, fingers strong enough to accomplish my next task-- [He unfolds himself from his position, seated on the floor, and the video echoes that fact, showing his surroundings - an attic space filled with boxes of forgotten items, a dust-coated grandfather clock positioned with its face against the floor - until he stops, arms crossed over his chest, in front of one of those damned cameras.] --my next task, which is the removal of my eyes.
[The quotation stops with a huff and then a hum.] It's one thing to blind a cyclops, now isn't it, but another thing entirely to blind a hydra, when every head removed grows back two more. I've dealt with your kind before - ever vigilent - but even the god of those thrice damned canaries was never as far reaching as you. Besides which, what would you want with this ragged, old corpse of a cove? I've led my revolutions, fought my battles, won my war. Christ Almighty, what's the price an honest man must pay for a good century's rest these days?
[His arms drop to his sides again and he's turning around at the same time as the video feed flickers and shuts off.]
Third Person:
This sleep is pleasantly devoid of dreams, or as much so as any sleep can be. These dreams are the sort that he won't remember them when he wakes and the dreams themselves won't be what wakes him; those two facts alone are a more comforting sort of knowledge than any other that he has processed over these past few days. Oliver Sumner is finally sleeping and it is not made of nightmares yet neither is it what he expected, for he thought that his next would be the sleep of the dead.
He dreams of Tom and Hewey, both gone now but, he hopes, happier wherever they are, finally allowed to truly die and be free, if dead souls go anywhere at all. He dreams of Phineas and Heckler, both back in the Underbelly, maybe living or maybe dead, he has no way of knowing but he knows what he'd wish for either of them. He dreams of Bergen, that strange German he knows would have wanted to go out this way, and of Bailey, ever the loyal Englishman until the day he died. He dreams of Aaron, his spirit free now, and of all the others who have given their lives to make Whitechapel free. And he dreams of Missy-- Michelle-- Miss Plantaget, wherever she may be. That girl, that woman, that peach of a thing, beautiful and honest and--
This is where the nightmares should begin.
What he expects, as his mind wanders over his would-be-murderess, is a recounting of the events that led to having lost her. For once, he wishes that he could simply know things, like Aaron once could - that he could somehow be aware of why she had done it, what had moved her hand. Instead, he dreams of a green field, a thing of his own imagination, with a young woman lying out upon the grass with a basket of laundry resting by her side. He is standing, he notes, by a short wall, wearing a gentleman's coat, a sharp vest, a top hat, and leaning heavily upon something, upon a cane. Looped over the crook of his other arm is a basket, a heavy one, made of wicker and, his dream nose tells him, filled with the freshest baked bread. Ahead of him, the woman stands, lifts her burden from the ground, dressed in the plain dress of a nobleman's laundress, and she makes her way toward him, offers him the politest of nods as she passes by.
"How do you do, sir?"
"As well as can be expected, Miss Plantaget."
Once upon a time, in a life they've left behind, he promised her a picnic. Today, even as she drops her laundry upon the ground and he hushes her tear-filled fears and apologies, he intends to keep that promise. That and many more, in fact. For he has all the time in the world before he wakes.
Anything Else? Not that I can think of at the moment.