Topic: Societal Pathology

Paulette Monot

Date: 2009-10-10 20:39 EST
She did not fully understand the methods they'd used to send her here, replete with all of the varous gear requred for field research (including her beloved Horace-Wilkershire Coilcycle), and that lack of comprehension made her uneasy, vaguely guilty. A Technology that one did not understand was, of course, the equivalant of Magic. And as a Modern Victorian Woman of Science, she prided herself on her knowledge and diligence. She could, for example, perform all of the maintenance required to keep her Coilcycle running, from winding its terrible manspring to adjusting the line of its frame. She determined, with a naive and single-minded ferocity, that she would come to know the workings of this more complicated mode of transport, as well.

But first to the Project at Hand. A trained Societal Anthro-Pathologist, Paulette Monot (for such was the name she rejoiced in) was trained to document the death of cultures, the moment when the overwhelming inertial force of mundanity and mediocrity dragged all down to its level, with the attendant loss of diversity and wonder. This place, all of the signs said, was already hip deep in that swamp, as oblivious to its danger as a frog slowly boiled.

There was variety enough in RhyDin still that her costume—a coatdress replete with pockets, straps and D-rings, bloomers for modesty when astride her Horace-Wilkershire, high button boots and matching gloves, and the ubiquitous goggles—drew no undue attention as she arranged for quarters in a nondescript WestEnd warehouse. The apartment was little more than a single large room, with a yellowed sink and toilet in one corner, a shower with a circular curtain and a busily dripping head in another, a simple iron-beam bedframe, and a small, smokey fireplace complete with cooking hobs and cast iron pans. It lacked the practical amenities of her London home, most of them recent achievements of the March of Science, but she'd endured worse in the field.

Settled there, and with her pockets carefully loaded with the tools of her trade (the Tessier-Ashpool Recording Device, the Cawly-Lemay Image Maker, and an exquisite brass and ivory four-shot pepperpot pistol by Mr. Gibbs of Bristol) she tugged her goggles over her eyes (the blond curls that had been beneath that clumsy headband crushed and matted), drew back the heavy lever that freed her Cycle's mainspring, and whispered onto the streets of her Project Site, only the grumbling of tyres on pavement marking her passing. She felt alive with curiousity, the first venture into the field as full of promise as the night before Christmas.

Unfolding around her as she sped along, in buildings and roads, and in all of the wonders of its populace, the patient was not yet dead; but she was here to perform its necropsy.

Paulette Monot

Date: 2009-10-14 23:22 EST
Fieldwork was always like this; the eager anticipation, the sense of urgency, the belief that irretrievable data was slipping away like fine sand through a gape-throated hourglass; and then the sudden stone wall or reality, which can never be sped through but needs be slowly and meticulously scaled.

Of the few she had met and convinced to allow a recording or Image Capture, only the redheaded Tara, last name pronounced "Rinny-in," was clearly of superhuman nature, and Paultette was reminded of the underlying challenges in her line of work: Say too much and you contaminate the documentation; say too much too soon to the wrong nonhuman and you risk violence and, at best, a tactical extraction back to London.

So though her every instinct urged her to haste, whispered that the walls of this society could come down around her without her capturing any slice of it to inform the future, she stepped cautiously.

When her presence in the Inn is as unremarkable as an evening's lust and violence, when no one turns their head when she enters the room, her real work will begin.