The Memoirs of Success

Fallen London
1

Well, the time has come for me to pen my memoirs. I never thought that I would be able to do this now, when I’m still young, but the particular nature of the Neath makes it very important to get all the secrets I carry around in my head down on paper.

I wish to make it clear; I spare no one in this recitation of my life. If someone is mentioned by name, then they did it. It is not a euphemism; I have changed no names because no one is innocent. Besides, there may be a time in the future that others could use blackmail material.

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First, I include a print of a watercolor that was recently made of me, so you have a context as to who is speaking.

I find this particular painting a work of art. It captures my essence so well. Many consider me to be a sinister lady, someone to be reckoned with, and I will admit that I am dangerous, but that is not all I am.

I suppose I should start this with what of my young age I can remember. I don’t recollect much before I was about 6 years old, and I am lucky to remember that much. Most of my memories are scattered as it is unimportant to me. But there are things I remember.

I do not remember parents, or any siblings, or any other relatives, and that is a good thing I suppose as there is no one to try to help themselves to my good fortune. What I have I earned through my efforts and my own actions, betrayals, and deals. I scrabbled with the worst scum, and rubbed elbows with devils and demons, as well as human saints to be where I am. Allowing someone to come into my life simply because they claim to share blood with me, is, in a word, presumptuous.

Instead I remember being cold and hungry, I remember the alleys and the gutters that I slept in. I remember the rooftops that I watched from, the way the sky looked at night, through the haze of ash from all the coal fires. I remember tasting blood from fights I had no choice but to participate in, and I remember some of the people I had to defeat in order to live.

I want you to understand, I had no noble birth, I had no kind of glorious ancestry, in fact, I was a street urchin, abandoned to a workhouse (or so I am told) as soon as I was born. I spent years working as one of those small children who tread on a wheel to move water from one location to another, or climbing under looms while they are working in order to clear a snagged thread. I was in terror of getting killed; I had seen many others of my acquaintance be mangled by these machines.

So I understand the plight of these children far better than they could possibly know, even though I’m a gr’up. I’ve been there and experienced it all, and I’ve worked now that I am prosperous in helping these children even though they don’t know I’m helping them.[li]

TO BE CONTINUED…
edited by Joy Phillip on 5/22/2013[/li][li][/li]
edited by Joy Phillip on 5/28/2013

2

But that would come later.

I was sold one day to someone who was cloaked all in a black cloak. We never saw beneath the cloak, and the person had a very high voice when they spoke. I don’t know who they were. I was one of about forty children that were sold at the same time. We were told that we were going to a better place and that we would be taken care of. Most of us were excited to be leaving the workhouse. I figured that I could work in the workhouse or work wherever we were going. It was all the same to me.

We embarked on a boat, and I thought that was it. Leaving England and going to wind up in another country. But apparently something was going to intervene in my favor.

We had boarded the boat to leave. The Thames stunk as usual, and it was night time again. This would be the last time I would see the stars.

Bats came out of nowhere, a LOT of them. The person in the cloak stood up in the boat and raised its arms and yelled at the sky. The next thing I knew, the entire world was turning and spinning, and I was falling. I screamed and I wasn’t the only one.

Next time I woke, it was on a bank of the river near Ladybones road. At least that is what it was renamed to.

Over the next week, there was a huge amount of work. Thousands of people were suddenly underground somewhere, with all of London as well. Everything was literally turned upside down. The toffs were now as homeless as I was, and all the constables and more were also out of a job. It took years to recover from that sinking of the city. But the Neath was where we were at, and it was something that we all had to adjust to.

For a person who was raised on the streets, it was a land of opportunity. I did odd jobs, ran errands, held boards while people nailed them in place and more. Anything I could do I did, sometimes for pence, sometimes for glim and sometimes just for a meal. As many know, a whole new economy started in the Neath. Things that were worthless were suddenly worth a lot of money.

TO BE CONTINUED…[li]
edited by Joy Phillip on 5/28/2013

3

I got together with other kids and we started one of the first urchin gangs. We stayed together and helped each other, and didn’t care if they were worth it or not, they were people and we were people and we stood by each other.

The Rooftop Gang, what we wound up calling ourselves, was a family. We didn’t let many in the group, but those we did we took care of. We shared what we had, we thought about each other. Yes, it is hard when your stomach is growling to think of another, but after we would nic enough for ourselves, we took some more for those of us who didn’t have the ability to take, like the babbies.

Yes, there were true toddlers among us. It happened because there were many who died in the fall of London. Some of them who died left children behind. We took them in. It’s not fair that those who can’t care for themselves are the ones who suffer the most.

But this is my story.

I learned. Jumping from roof to roof, always very carefully since it was possible to fall through the roof due to damage from the Fall. I learned how to move from one home to another, in and out of those houses in my quest for scrap to sell or to make into things like knives and so on. I didn’t care what I wore, pants, tunic, skirt, scarf, it was all the same to me. Sex only mattered to those who were making child whores out of us.

It’s really odd, but people don’t learn to look up. They never think about those who are above them. It was easy to get secrets by listening to those who were gossiping over the fence with their neighbor, or when they were washing clothing. Twisting up paper to a cone to hear better made it very easy to hear those kinds of things, and there were many who would pay a lot of glim for some of them.

I never really understood why the fact that a footman was seen tupping one of the undermaids was something worth paying money for, but who knows what might be of use. If they want to give me glim for that, I’ll take it.

Don’t think I was totally altruistic either. I wasn’t. I took advantage of people when I could, and I held back some of my largesse at times to get myself extra treats, it made no nevermind. All I wanted at that point was a full belly. I didn’t care about shelter from the rain, since we were underground and it only rained occasionally, and that gave me a chance to lift certain items. Didn’t need shelter from the sun, either, since there wasn’t any. But I do miss the moonlight. Bat guano, glim from the beetles, water from being underground were all things that it was easy to put up with.

I lost track of the days. It didn’t matter when you went to sleep and when you woke since the city was awake all the time. With nothing to measure the time with other than a watch or a couple clocks, the days of the week and ever the month didn’t matter. Time became relative and a thing of guess and opinion, and not absolute.

There was a code of honor of sorts. “When a body’s sleepin, you don’t take from them. When they are wake, they can fight you off.” That was the unbreakable rule. If someone was caught liftin from one of the others while they were sleepin, they were hit with lots of bricks and tossed off the clocktower. If they lived, they didn’t come back and all their stuff was thrown down after them. Mostly they died.[li]

TO BE CONTINUED
edited by Joy Phillip on 5/30/2013

4

It became a faux-pas to talk about the surface at all. It wasn’t a horrible mistake, but invariably someone would mention something from the surface and another person would punch them. It was one of those things you didn’t do.

Sometimes one of us would disappear. Just up and go. Sometimes people would adopt us (it didn’t matter about having babbies anymore, and family was who you surrounded yourself with and said was your kin) and sometimes we would get et by others. Yeah, I didn’t like the thought of being digested either, but who knows what those rubbery men do, or what is hiding under those bandages.

Which brings me to the next thing, all the new groups. Rubbery, the Devils, the Mummies, the Spies. People who hadn’t ever seen before suddenly hobnobbing with the society people and the Church people. I couldn’t ken it, but if that’s what they wanted to do, well, more people to grab things from.

It was really hard the first time I died. I had just nicked some amber from one of those guys with the face things, and I was running along a gutter to get away. I only had to jump to a ledge on another building, shimmy up the drain to the roof, go down through a chimbley I knew about to an empty room and I was safe. What I didn’t know was that there was someone squattin in that room and they had started a fire.

Halfway down, the smoke is too much and I choke. And I found myself on a boat and this guy offering to play some games. I do cuz there’s nothing else to do, and I win. He points back to where the boat is commin from, snaps his fingers and I wake up in the street, still in my same clothes and all my stuff that I had on me still. No one had stripped me or my stuff. Which was weird.

I dragged myself off to a tavern I knew of, came in through the window and cleaned up in their pump sink. The lady of the house caught me, and once I looked right, she put me to work servin drinks and food. Which was okay since it also included one meal on them for nothing, and it was a good one too, a bit o’ tha char, but that was all.

I stayed there for a while. Sometimes they had me mudlark to find some of the staples like wine and scrap. I gived them my best since they was takin care of me and feedin me. Didn’t nic a thing from them but I would lift stuff occasionally from the custom. ‘Specially when they would feel my bum or whatever was handy. I guess the skirt made everyone think I was a girl. Whatever.

It was really creepy, rats somehow learned to talk, and I started making friends with some of them, as well as with the bats, and the cats, both of whom were also talkin. I couldn’t understand what was goin on till this one lady with the most beautiful orange eyes told me that it was just a side effect of the same thing keeping everyone from dyin and keepin them walkin round when their souls got took. So every now and again, I had one of the rats or bats take a note to me mates on the rooftops, just to let them know I was still around.

It wasn’t like I was a leader of the Rooftop Gang or anything, but I was one of the oldest there. I had 10 years when the city wound up in the ground, and best as I could reckon I had been down here another couple years. Livin in the tavern helped me get growed and I got bigger in lots of ways. Some of the perverts were also trying to get in my pants or up my skirt (depending on what I was wearin that day) and I kneed them in the balls every time. I knew who would hurt and who would be kind. But I wanted my friend the beautiful Deviless back.
TO BE CONTINUED
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5

Ahem. Well, apparently just writing about these experiences is enough to put me back into that mindset and erase more than thirty years of training and deportment. But, I have found in my experiences, that most everyone has something similar to these experiences. So I don’t think it is that much of a problem to fall back into the speech patterns and the slang of youth.

I remember being very confused by all this when I was young, the fact that death wasn’t permanent and that the bandaged men and women from the Tomb Colonies were there simply because they refused to lay down. If death wasn’t permanent, then why were the Tomb Colonists considered dead? And where did the Rubbery Men come into the picture? Why were the Devils running around and why were the Clergy consorting with them?

I spent many days and nights thinking about these questions, but I finally decided that even if I didn’t find the answers to those questions, that I would treat them all correctly and with courtesy simply because they were walking around on two legs. They treated me with respect of an intellect in a body, so I decided it did no harm to do the same.

The Constables and the Criminals and the Dock People never really bothered me. The Revolutionaries amused me and the Society people just made me roll my eyes. I was afraid of the Masters as I think everyone was at some point. Simply seeing a cloak and robe walking around on its own with only shining eyes looking out, and the deference that the armed guards gave them made me very cautious; especially since I recognized that the man in the boat who brought me here was a Master.

I guess I should have been a little more insane and possibly I wouldn’t have made the decisions I did, but I tried to curry favor with the Devils any time I could. I’d willingly run favors for them, talk and trick others into giving up their souls. It was creepy to see that little fork pull something that has no substance out of their mouths, and then to watch the body keep running around later.

It was more odd to me to see someone who was killed get up and keep going.

I kept working in the tavern and I made a lot of contacts with various groups. Just about everyone liked me, although I think that my tendency to dress in both boys and girls clothing kept everyone off balance. Honestly, I didn’t care what I had on my body just so long as I was not naked. What was in my knickers was no one’s business but my own.

Getting Riki was a high point of my life till then. I had watched some weasel seller come into the tavern and drink up the profits of what seemed to be a very impressive sales trip. I never seen anyone put away ten bottles of the ’82 in one sitting. I was impressed that he didn’t die.

The owner had me help him get the guy out to the gutter, and I can’t say that I was reluctant to do so. Mushroom wine isn’t for everyone, and apparently this batch didn’t agree with him so soon my shirt was soaked with his vomit. In retaliation I lifted a bundle off him and while changing opened it up to see a Fighting Weasel.

Riki and I started talking and it turns out that he and I had a lot in common. We both were separated from the areas we felt comfortable in. We both liked the same thing and so we made a deal. He would help keep me safe and be someone for me to talk to, and I would feed him and give him a place to sleep that was safe. So he climbed up on me and we started our partnership.

I took him to some weasel fights, and used the winnings to make sure he healed right and that we both had enough to eat. Sometimes he would be hired to take a note to someone that it wasn’t good to be seen around.

TO BE CONTINUED (and if you want to make an ooc comment, feel free. )
[li]

6

He is still my greatest friend to today. No matter that I have an exotic menagerie today, with a Salt Weasel, an Obsidian Horse, a Hound of Heaven and more, Riki will still be with me no matter what.

I did get some notoriety in that time period. I got a reputation for doing anything I needed to do. If I took money for something, by the Masters it got done. Fire, flood, messages, poison and more, nothing was too amoral for me. I think that’s probably why I got approached to be a spriffer.

I had never thought about pulling out people’s souls, but I understood that most of them were very loosely tethered in the body, as shown by the fact that the Theosophicals would talk about “out of body” experiences. To them, the soul would get up and walk around without a body regularly, so by that reason, the soul must not be tied into the body very tight.

When I was first offered the fork, I turned it down. I thought that there was no way that it could bring any good to anyone. But like all things, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed to the temptation of using it.

However, until then I worked for anyone. I’d take information for Criminals down to the Docks and then tell tales to the Constables about what I just did. I made life for me harder, but the one group I never betrayed were the Devils. I always came back to them and they understood betraying them to the Church when necessary, and mostly they passed the problems over. There were a few instances where I had a penalty to pay, and that’s how I lost my soul the first time.

I had been buying and selling souls all over London. There wasn’t anything wrong with trading souls, it was the taking them that made me feel as though it was wrong. But because I was buying and selling so much, I attracted the attention of other devils. My Quiet Deviless was one of those who were now attracted to me because of all this dealing. She and I became more intimate. I shared secrets with her, I was invited into her boudoir on a regular basis. She and I shared clothing, and we would do each other’s cosmetics as well. I helped her with her beloved bat and she made sure that my green plant had plenty of rats to eat. She even good naturedly accepted a smiting when I was working on some expensive and rare animals to curry favor with the Bishop.

Unfortunately, I turned her down when she offered me an Abstraction. To be honest I am upset that I did now. I think my soul could have been content to reside on her dresser.

But when I turned her down, she was very upset with me. She slapped me and I can still feel the burn of her fingers. Two days later a devil came by my house and I listened to him as to what he had to say. The next thing I knew there was a contract on my dresser with my name on it, and since then I have not seen my bosom friend since.

TO BE CONTINUED
[li]

7

Maybe one day I will be able to relate the terror I went through to get my soul back, but I cannot right now. It was too traumatic, and each time it gets removed I find that it’s even more terrifying to reclaim. Perhaps one day I will refuse to make that journey, but until then I shall keep what is mine.

As just a comment here, I have to say out of all the factions of the Neath, the Devils are by far the easiest to work with. The Constables, the Dockworkers, the Revolutionaries and Criminals all hold grudges too long. You wrong them and they just go on and on and on about it. The Masters have incredibly long memories as well, but I’ve worked very hard to make sure that I’m not on their wrong side. The Church has too many rules and the Tomb Colonies, the Rubbery Men, the Orientals and Society are so tied up in their own intrigues that you can’t do much with them, except get in their way. But the Devils, ah, there are some interesting folk. If you cross a Devil, and they find out, there will be consequences to pay, make no mistake about it. But once you have paid your “penance” to them, taken their punishment, they are quite willing to work with you again, even if you cross them again. It’s almost as though they understand that you have to strike a balance with all the groups to keep yourself going, and even though they punish you for betraying them, they will allow that it is human nature to do that and keep on.

But we are back to me being a young urchin and what happened. Yes, I realize that Riki shouldn’t have lived past a couple years, but then I’ve had Sorrow Spiders and Rats live the entire 30 years with me as well. Like Billie the Former Rat Chieftain.

I don’t understand why, but apparently despite my best efforts to treat them well, the rats decided that they didn’t like me one day. Or, in their tiny gangster ways, they decided that I needed to leave the Attic I had been living in to that point. I was helping the Devils, but I wasn’t hunting them, until that night.

They stole quietly into my bedroom and tried to smother me. Their little furry bodies pressed against my nose and mouth to try to kill me. Imagine that… Well, of course that meant it was war.

I have come to the conclusion that I was incredibly lucky in this fight. It was mostly me using my size, a few frockcoats and a watch I happened to have on hand to bash the little bodies to pulp. The feeling of those little bodies in my knickerbockers with their little scraps of glass and shards of metal is not something I want to go through again. Thankfully I saw their chief and attacked him directly. That got most of them to clear out enough that I was able to give a good accounting, and even capture Billie and force him to work for me, well, him and his minions.

We came to an understanding Billie and I. I wouldn’t pop his head off, and he would cease the attacks on me. He was even willing to help me out when the man with the rat-face came at me, which eventually led to me gaining my beloved Karen, who worked with the Clockmaker’s Daughter. But I had more minions now, animal ones that couldn’t really be traced easily. And with some of the rats able to handle things made for humans, I was now able to spriff the souls out of those who thought they were protected by locked doors and stopped up chimneys and so on.

I had lodgings all over. The Soul Trade is extremely lucrative and I made most of my money through that. I mean, when the Bazaar sells souls for 4 pence and buys souls for 2 pence, finding someone who will buy your souls for 3 pence becomes a big deal. You don’t lose as much money, and you can trick people into giving you their souls.

I still do odd jobs for anyone. I still go around and investigate things for the Constables, the Detectives and more. I still traffic in information for the Spies and the Revolutionaries, and I curry favor anyplace I can. One never knows when the connections in the University will pay off, but they have for me occasionally. People come to me with rumors and notes and I pay well for them. I’m willing to buy anything from anyone if the price for my trouble is high enough.

You have to understand that here where we are at now, IS the reality. You must forget that there was a surface to go to. It’s gone. Oh, sure there are whispers sometimes from the people in the street who swear they found a passage out to the air, but I ask you if it is really there, and they really got outside, why did they come back? So the passage out is just another one of those fantasy things like the giant beast of the Neath that is coming to eat us all during the summoning of the Rubberys. It’s a myth.

The practical matters here are that we are in this cavern. There is more than enough intrigue to keep us going for centuries. There are factions that fight each other, and it’s a good skill to have balancing them against each other, staying friends with all of them. But it’s one of those skills that you must have to stay alive. Well, as alive as anyone gets.

I’ve lost my soul so many times I can’t count, and I hope that without it I will find my Deviless again. I’ve married twice, both fine ladies of breeding from the Foreign Office, but I pine for my lady Deviless.

Perhaps if she finds my soul out there, she will come back to me with it. I’m hoping that by retrieving it so often that she will find it and become curious. So I keep sending it out.

Now to distract myself, I’m doing more traveling to the Foreign Office and across the Zee. I’ve met a trio of ladies over there who should be here in London with the Society types, but they are apparently trapped by the Devils on their island. I’ve been to the Iron Republic, although I don’t remember much of it except what is in my diary, and I’ve been to where the Rubberies live and seen them in their own world. It’s fascinating and I’m getting more and more excited to explore the Forgotten Quarter. Is it like what the oldsters say that the Devils and the Church confronted each other, and that is why we are all here now? Or was the congress between an Overgoat and a Hound of Heaven really that much of a horror to watch? Maybe the Revolutionaries actually were able to kill one of the Masters, or perhaps someone who had drank the Cider was killed?

I’m hoping that I can root out these secrets soon. Perhaps if I can, I can use that uber secret to blackmail the Masters into accepting me as one of them, and I can become Ms. Secrets.

TO BE CONTINUED
[li]

8

Back to this distraction, however. I guess that’s something that needs to be addressed for others, the absolute WORST thing about being down here is boredom. I understand that you can travel to distant places and meet far off people when you are on the surface. I understand it’s something of an occupation. But down here in the Neath, you can’t do that. There is London, with its areas and inhabitants, but that’s about it. There are places on the other side of the Utterzee, and I understand the people who dwell there are exotic as any could want, but you have to be rich to go there. There are very few tickets to be had.

I don’t wonder if this boredom is why the Honey Sipping has gotten such a following. I mean, you sip this drop of a sweet substance that I’m not even sure is honey (since there are no bees or flowers down here), and you slip into a dream that becomes real around you. You physically go to the place you are dreaming about and have adventures there. Given the perilous nature of many people’s dreams, I wonder why more people have not gone mad. Or maybe they are mad, and then when they become mad they are wrapped in bandages and shipped off to the colonies where the Tomb Colonists live. I mean, I don’t know, but it could be possible.

I know that the boredom is responsible for the attention paid to trivial things, like the University’s studies of death. I mean, there’s this whole group of people, supposedly scientists and scholars, who are debating whether or not we have souls down here. I mean, really? When they can buy them by the cartload and hold the souls up to their monocles and look at them with the microscopes, they are going to question if we have souls? Yet there are a huge amount of people dedicated to finding out the answer to this question. If you want to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and angels are souls without a body, then buy a cartload of souls and see, dump them all out on your pins and have done with it. I mean, honestly…

But talk seems to be the primary pastime here. I have spent my life acquiring talk, writing it down, selling it and trading it, changing it into even more valuable secrets and even a few times finding that the most valuable secret can be combined with others to show you who is behind the wall controlling everything, and at times it has been terrifying.

I can’t understand why someone would want to spend time in a drugged stupor having visions that terrify when just sleeping, the normal every day thing where you MUST get rest, can bring nightmares the likes of which can literally kill you from fear. And when no one actually dies down here, to find out that there is a beast in the dream world who can kill is terrifying in and of itself.

It’s sad, really. The people here are so starving for stimulus that nearly anything can cause a sensation. I remember a time a few years ago when someone took some mouldy cheese and decided to put it on their pets’ heads. So it was common to see a Sorrow Spider with a wedge of cheese on its head and thorax, or a rat trying to do its work while some Stilton (or at least, what passes for Stilton down here) rotting on its helmet, or to be randomly splatted with some odiferous Brie or some truly blue Blue Cheese from it falling off Ravens or bats. So of course, EVERYONE had to have pets wearing fermented curds that were even more rotted.

What’s worse is that sometimes the falling cheese was eaten by some of the Urchins.

I would send money and things that could be sold for food to my old gang, until I found that the last one had either died off, been taken into another group or had come to one of a thousand ends for the roof kids. I mourned as any would do, and I worked very hard to keep my contacts in the gangs intact. Mostly I took them rats for food, actual foodstuffs, and some material to help them read, but it was obvious that they considered me to be &quotother&quot and no longer a member of the group. I think I’m the only person who has cast off the chains of childhood to set up a salon with the same urchins, trying to help them. No, I think the Widow in the Oriental section does it as well.

TO BE CONTINUED
[li]

9

Now I’m going to relate some things that will seem fantastic, but I assure you they are true. Or, at least, as true as anything down here is.

All of us down here must be insane. And our insanity is in that we don’t remember much.

I state this because this is my fifth time trying to write all this down. I would spend a night writing, put up my writing desk, go to bed and the next time I would sit down to write some more, I would find that the effort I put into the previous day’s endevour would be gone, burnt pages would be all I could find. So I would go and get a new set of paper, write some more, and the next day the same thing would happen.

I say “next day” but I really mean what I would consider a day. With no sun, no moon, no accurate timepieces of any kind, what day it is becomes relevant only. I’ve tested this with many other people, slipping references to “when is it” to them and no two have come up with the same time, or even a time that agrees with mine.

I would also find myself forgetting to write in this journal/diary for posterity for days at a time. And when I would remember again, I would find that anything I wrote previously had been fictitious or inaccurate. Or, once again, destroyed. So I can only assume that Mr. Pages is going out of his way to keep censorship going in this city. Perhaps that is why secrets and information are so valuable.

See, this is a perfect example… this is the third copy of previously penned memoirs that I have found hidden in some nook. This time I was keeping the Laudanum out of the reach of some of the urchins I see here. Apparently I stuck it behind all the Laudanum and forgot about it, again.

So, I discovered a way, quite by accident, of how to get around this automatic censoring and forgetting, and that’s by using Honey.

Now, I want to be clear here, I’m not talking about taking an entire dose. That will move you into a dream which can help or really harm you. I met one of my personal monsters there, and it gave me the suggestion of how to keep from forgetting, and that is through Honey. I suspect that it wanted me to become a honey addict and spend most of my time dreaming and thus in its power. I took it at its word and tried some experiments.

It was only when I just licked the stopper to the honey bottle that I got the effect I wished for, a state of mazedness that was not truly a honey dream. I was drugged but not drugged. I got the idea from some of the books that survived the Fall, in some library or other, that keep getting collected by Mr. Pages. I’m glad that others apparently wrote down their discoveries, or I wouldn’t have known that a lot of a substance could be poisonous, while a little can be beneficial.

That prompted me to try my experiment.

When I realized I was not going into a full dream, but that I could concentrate and focus, as well as remember other times, it was a godsend. I could understand now why much of the information floating around the Neath was so dangerous, and I could remember horrors I had seen, not to traumatize myself again, but to understand why I was reacting this way or that.

For instance, one of the Ladies I married was a member of the Foreign Office on the Teeth side. I didn’t wonder much about my attraction to her, her looks were enough. Anne had a sparkling personality and loved to touch. Not cuddle you understand, but to touch. She would touch my neck, my hand, my face and many other parts of my body. Never in a sexual way, but more in an “I own you” way. I never remembered all that happened when she and I were together in private, until I found this trick with the Honey.

From then on, I was careful in my interactions with her. Some of the intimacies we had led to my having a seizure of some kind. In it I would lay on the floor in a state of rigor, and she would kiss me. Not on the lips, but in various portions of my anatomy. I would feel a lethargy quite soon that frightened me, and if I was looking at my vanity mirror, I would see my flesh become red at the point where she was kissing. Her stroking soon removed the mark and she would carry me to the bed or fainting couch to recover. I began fearing for my face.

She soon became restless with me and left. I divorced her and found the ladies of the Face group were a lot more energetic. At least they only ate my candles, but it was okay, I had a large supply.

TO BE CONTIUED
[li]

10

While it may come at the disapproval of some, to comment here, and break this chain of narrative. I feel I must remark on it and subsequently impart a ray of acknowledgment, on an otherwise wholly shrouded piece of fan based literature.The nature of its obscurity bemuses me and almost prevents me from commenting out of caution. But, whether it be intentional or accidental, respect or selectivity. The reasoning for it is not pertinent, only that you have my regards in knowing that your tale thus far is skillfully written and interesting to peruse.

While it does not align with my personal interest in the Fallen realm, it does an exceptional job at highlighting the possible psyche of London’s many citizens. To give example, your casual manner of describing one’s death, I would imagine, is a not so uncommon occurrence outside of the Tomb-Colonies. [quote=][color=#990066]My! How unfortunate. That reminds me. An acquaintance died here recently, and their tale was ab-solutely atrocious![/color][/quote] I can picture, is one of many possible dialogues between madams on life and liberty over warm tea. As well as the status of one’s soul, an ethereal and heavily coveted object to mere mortals as ourselves, but a thing of circumstance to the liberty of Fallen London’s residents.

Another example to speak of is the lead madam, or sir, and their sustained character. While one may think that due to the amount of eccentric personalities roaming the streets that it’s a wonder not everyone is considered mad or flip flops weekly. Yet, despite leaving the urchin gang and making a name for his or herself, the lead expresses their content with merely surviving among the chaos. Keeping relations sound or otherwise neutral, aside from the Devils, who appeal to his or her desire for affection and overall painless interaction.

I fear at this point I may be in danger of convoluting my original intention in all of this so I will end in saying that the two examples above I feel are the highlights of this work, and the rest is adequate in conveying the setting and occurrences of Fallen London. The fashioned hollowness of the Neath’s denizens you displayed here is something I will remember and use as fodder with my own writings in the future to come. Well done.