February 10, 2410
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, New Snowdonia
Crown Colonies, Rigel sector

Geoff Depew woke up, sat up, and briefly wondered where the hell he was.

He was warm, dry, and dressed, the first two being an upgrade to his previous status. It took him a moment to remember what he'd been doing before, but it came back easily enough: He'd been working a scheme with Logan, trying to track down some gunrunners, when he'd caught a big baton round in the chest, tossing him out a window into the river as he lost consciousness.

Now he found himself sitting up on a divan in what appeared to be a tastefully-appointed library. There was a lot of dark-stained wood paneling, the fireplace roaring, and books of all kinds lined the walls. The divan itself was leather, but older, with the sense of being well-worn from use. Two chairs faced the fireplace. As Geoff woke, the shape of a man rose from one and turned to face him.

The gentleman - that was the word that automatically came to Geoff's mind, looking at him - was very tall and broad-shouldered, with a heavy fall of almost-golden hair, clubbed navy-fashion and tied at the base of his neck with a bow-knotted black ribbon. He wore the clothing of a Victorian gentleman-about-town, including a ruffed white shirt and fastidiously knotted neckcloth under a suit of deep orange, nearly crimson, broadcloth. Geoff reflected that such a color combination ought to be a fashion disaster, but this fellow managed to pull it off. He had a leonine face with neatly trimmed sidewhiskers, and little round blue-tinted spectacles kept Geoff from making out the color of his eyes.

"Good evening, sir," said Geoff's apparent host with a small, contained, but hospitable smile. "Welcome to my humble home. No, pray don't get up," he added with a gesture as Geoff made to rise. "Permit me to introduce myself: Sir Victor Creed, first Baronet Creedmanse." He drew himself up and bowed elegantly. "Your servant."

Geoff blinked. He felt as if he'd awakened in a BBC costume drama. Only the thoroughly unaffected ease with which Creed spoke and moved prevented his mannerisms from coming off as comical, or worse, camp; but he was neither.

"Uh... thank you," said Geoff, gathering himself.

Creed turned his chair to face the divan and sat again. "May I compliment you on your resiliency, sir? You were rather worse than half-dead when Braddock and I pulled you from the river."

"Thank you for that, as well," said Geoff.

"Oh, you're most welcome, though I must confess it wasn't plain benevolence. May I offer you a glass of claret?" the baronet added, picking up a decanter from the low table between them. "It has no pretentions to greatness, I find, but it is surprisingly accessible."

Geoff blinked a few more times, then managed to get out, "Uh... yes, please." Creed poured him a glass; Geoff sipped. "I don't know much about wine," he agreed, "but that's good." Setting it down, his wits more collected now, he asked, "If my rescue wasn't pure benevolence, what was the rest of it?"

Creed removed his tinted spectacles, revealing vertically-slit golden eyes that twinkled merrily in the firelight. "Ah, now we come to the meat of the matter, if you'll excuse the expression," he said with evident satisfaction. "You came to my attention some days ago, Mr. Depew, when you arrived in what I might stretch a point and call my demesne. Not on your own merits, I hasten to add, but because of the man you travel with. This man called Logan. He intrigues me.

"You see, in my misspent youth I spent some time in the company of one Thomas Logan; a man who looked remarkably like your friend. Mr. Thomas Logan was, as Mr. Hobbes put it, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The troubling thing is, he is also long dead. I know; I put him down myself." Geoff looked taken slightly aback by this blandly bald revelation, but Creed went on, unconcerned. "Now here he is, appearing in town years after his death, tearing through the local underworld in a most indecorous fashion and causing no end of fuss. Logically, he cannot be Thomas Logan. Which leads us inexorably to the question: Who is he?"

Creed let the question hang in the air while he took a sip of claret. Then he smiled again, a slightly wider smile that revealed markedly (though not freakishly) pronounced canine teeth, and said, "Pray speak, sir. My appetite for this information is frightfully sharp-set."

Geoff took a moment to process this. He wondered briefly whether this guy were some kind of vampire who was subtly threatening to torture this intel out of him, but his instincts said no; he had dealt with torturers and freaks as a matter of daily routine for so long that he could practically smell them. Though Victor Creed was undoubtedly a hard man, and quite probably a ruthless one, he didn't have that stench clinging figuratively to his old-fashioned clothes. Besides, the information he was asking for wasn't secret.

"Well," he said, "I've only known Logan for a few months, so I can't really help you with the wider implications of the question. I can tell you that he's an Expert of Justice, an IPO Lensman, and he hasn't got a first name."

Creed raised an eyebrow. "A Lensman, you say. Hm! That's reassuring. No, Thomas could never have passed the test for entrance into that august company. But what is Lensman Logan doing here?"

"We're tracking Big Fire gunrunners. More than that I can't say. Sorry."

Geoff wondered whether Creed would press the point, but he only nodded and rose from his chair. "Ah. Well, that's enough. Excuse me a moment, I beg." Repeating his short bow from before, Creed left the room, leaving Geoff sitting on the divan.

He rose and used the opportunity to take stock of his situation. His guns were missing, which wasn't that surprising; for all he knew, they were at the bottom of the river. He still had his wrist unit with its three ready vials of Miraculon, and the rest of his compact equipment. He looked toward the other end of the room, noting a pair of French doors leading to what looked like a garden. By those doors stood the tall, blond figure of a liveried manservant he'd previously overlooked, as taken up as his attention was with the singular figure of Sir Victor Creed. The butler - presumably the "Braddock" Creed had mentioned before - looked blankly back at him with a properly butlerly expressionlessness.

A few moments later, Creed reappeared in the doorway. He'd donned a dark overcoat and a top hat that further accentuated his great height, and carried in one hand a gold-topped cane.

"Shall we go in search of your lost Lensman, sir? If he has fallen into the hands of the local criminal element, I have a very good idea where they might be keeping him. Braddock! Mr. Depew's weapons, if you please, and then pray be so good as to bring around the car."

Logan snarled, partly because he was chained to a concrete wall and partly because it was just that kind of a day. The head of the gunrunning team had become almost incoherent with rage when Logan didn't die from being shot in the chest and gut, and when one of his own men was injured when a bullet ricocheted off of Logan's skull, he nearly had a stroke from the rage.

"What does it take to kill you, eh, mate? What?!" he screamed into Logan's face, yanking his head back by the hair.

Logan smirked through the blood on his face. "More than you got, bub."

One of the gunrunner's underlings hustled in from another room, a bulky piece of equipment under his arm. "Oi, boss. Got the plasmacaster."

Logan considered. That might be enough; even if it wasn't, it was a sure way to make a lousy day even worse. He started to tense his muscles to try and break the handcuffs... when the outside door was abruptly kicked in.

The voice that followed the crash was deep, rich, and to Logan unmistakeable, even as the words it spoke boggled him.

"Gentlemen!" Victor Creed declared as he strode into the room with Geoff Depew, guns at the ready, right behind him. Logan blinked, then stared, at the sight of his oldest - and generally grubbiest - foe from the Old Country (as he sometimes wryly called his long-lost native dimension) dressed like a nineteenth-century Englishman of substance.

The shock was made even more reverberating by the realization that Creed also spoke like one. "I believe you know who I am," he announced to the gunrunners. "If so, you also know that you are trespassing upon my property. As baronet of Creedmanse, I demand your surrender in the name of the law."

The leader of the gunrunners looked oddly indulgent, even a trifle sentimental, as he leveled a handgun at Creed's chest. "I don't think so, my lord," he said. "Don't you move, now, and tell yer man there t'drop the hardware." The eight other members of the gang all drew their own weapons and covered the baronet as well.

Sir Victor seemed unmoved by the weapons. Removing his spectacles, he tucked them away in his coat and regarded the gunrunner with a penetrating stare from his unnervingly feline eyes.

"Jacob Castleford, you know better than this," he said in a tone of faint disappointment. "I've turned a blind eye to your lesser criminalities for years, deeming you the lesser of two evils. Why throw that away for the sake of some ill-considered dealings with Big Fire? Come, put up your pistol and let us discuss the matter like civilized men."

"I'm afraid not, my lord. We're in too deep for that now. We might's well be hanged for a peer o' the realm as the hairy gent from the Sphere," Castleford added, jerking his head toward Logan.

Creed's face went white with rage. "Your soul to the Devil, sir!" he cried. "I show you mercy for years, aye decades - I offer you a greater mercy now - and you throw it in my face at the point of a gun? Notorious mongrel! Do you have the courage to fight me fair? Or will you hide behind arms like some Popish fop of a Frenchman? Jackanapes! Whoreson beetle-headed flap-eared knave!"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Jake, kill this crazy pouf," said one of the gunrunners in the back of the room.

Creed seemed to expand somehow, becoming even taller and broader, as he said in the tone of a man barely controlling himself, "I am ordinarily loath to use the weapons with which Nature has equipped me, but by God, you tempt me, sir!"

Geoff, slack-jawed, glanced at Logan and was obscurely gratified to see the very same expression on his normally unflappable mentor's face. Just from the sight of Logan, Geoff knew they were both thinking the same thing: How did we get to 1880?

Jake, quailing slightly in the face of the baronet's almost palpable wrath, took a half-step back and extended his weapon slightly, saying, "L-last warning, my lord."

From parchment-white, Creed's face was now rapidly going crimson. Dropping his walking stick, he raised his hands, fingers bent into claws - and to the gunrunners' horror, his fingernails thickened and lengthened, becoming distinctly talon-like in their own rights. "Drop that weapon, sir!" Creed roared. "Drop it or by God I shall stick you like a hog!"

Jake, his nerves frayed beyond all recovery by this bizarre behavior, shot Sir Victor square in the chest with his DL-44 heavy blaster: a point-blank shot that would have felled a bantha. His already-shocked mind was not prepared for the unintuitive fact that this marked the start of the fight, not the end, but he didn't have long to contemplate it. With a bellow that made his previous tone of voice sound conversational, the baronet lunged forward and nearly disemboweled the gangster with a single thrust of his talons.

Things got very hectic in the little warehouse after that. Every remaining bad guy who had a gun started shooting. Geoff throttled up the Daodan and returned fire, trusting in the patterns of the Ignatine gun kata to keep him out of the enemy's line of fire. With a roar to rival Creed's, Logan broke his bonds and plunged into the fray, the shocking surreality of his old foe's appearance wiped away by the immediacy of battle.

For a few moments, when the gunfire ended, Geoff thought that the fight might not quite be over. Creed and Logan, their claws bloodied and no one left to fight, circled each other like rival lions, respectful but wary, each sniffing thoughtfully at the air.

Creed recovered his composure first. His posture straightening, he withdrew his talons, reached into his somewhat damaged coat, and produced a gunfire-holed handkerchief. With a tsk for its (and his coat's) disreputable condition, he fastidiously wiped his hands, folded the handkerchief so the smears of blood were on the inside, and tucked it away again. Then he took out his spectacles, noting with a pleased look that they were unharmed, put them on, and regarded Logan, who still stood, shoulders hunched, eyeing him cautiously.

"Well, sir," Creed said after a moment. "You're very similar to my late nemesis, but there are differences. All these men were alive when I arrived, and some of them still are. Were you the Thomas Logan I once knew, I would have entered this place to find them not only dead but partially eaten."

Logan relaxed, retracting his claws, and gave Creed a faintly disgusted scowl. "I once ate part o' my own arm to survive, but that's the most I've ever done o' that. And my name ain't Thomas."

Geoff raised a hand. "Can we turn the survivors over to the cops and report in, and you guys can have your confrontation later?"

Creed turned and gave him a big, toothy smile, as if dismissing any possibility that he might be having any sort of "confrontation" with Logan. "My dear chap, the police are already here." Addressing a discreet commtab attached to his collar, he said, "Braddock? You may send in Chief Inspector Sharpe now."

"Right away, sir," Braddock replied, and within moments the warehouse was full of uniformed Llanfairpwllgwyngyll constables and a tall, trenchcoated man with a long, heavily mustached face. This man - Chief Inspector Sharpe, apparently - greeted Creed with a familiar deference, not only as befit his station, but also as a colleague, however unofficial, who had helped him break countless cases and face many dangers in the past.

Logan, still looking skeptically disconcerted, accepted a towel from one of the cops, wiped his hands, and handed it back. He found his jacket, discarded in the corner of the room, and was shrugging it on as he sidled up next to Geoff.

"Where'd you find this guy, bub?" he asked out of the side of his mouth.

"He found me," Geoff replied, but before he could continue, Creed clasped Inspector Sharpe's upper arm briefly in parting and then crossed to them.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I think our business here is concluded. May I offer you the hospitality of Creedmanse for the evening? Baths first, of course, and I'm sure Braddock can find you some suitable attire, sir," this last directed at Logan, who wore only his battered biker jacket and the remains of his jeans. He looked around at the wreckage of the room, with the constables indexing crates of weapons and the medics sorting the wounded from the dead, and shook his head. "A bloody evening's work. By God, we've earned our dinner. Roast chicken, I think; Elizabeth, my confidential secretary, is also a very fine cook. Cigars in the smoking room, and some excellent cognac I recently procured; and finally a good night's sleep in a warm bed."

Logan eyed Creed for a few moments, then relaxed entirely and even grinned. "That sounds pretty darn civilized to me, right there," he said.

"Like Civilized Men" - a mini-story by Geoff Depew and Benjamin D. Hutchins
Special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2009 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

"Elizabeth," said Sir Victor Creed suddenly from the depths of his favorite armchair, "pray be so good as to find an address for Mr. Logan. We shall send him some of the remaindered furniture." He considered for a moment, puffing thoughtfully at his pipe, then added, "And a ham, I think, from Telschmann's. Thomas always enjoyed a good ham. I think we may chance that Lensman Logan shares at least that much with him."

At her desk in the corner of the study, Elizabeth nodded, smiling a little indulgently. "Very good, Sir Victor."

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
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