Kind of an idea that popped into my mind after reading about the Shinjuku event in FGO, reading the Jekyll short story, and watching Penny Dreadful for the first time (one thing is not like the others). I figured I’d see what other people thought and how they could tear down what I am doing wrong.
This may have been mentioned before, but I find the idea of a crossover between Fate/ and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen appealing (the comic-book series, of course, although some elements from the movie aren’t totally worthless). Not all of the comic’s “all fiction is/was real” premise, which would just bloat the crossover, but instead focusing on the first two volumes’ “Victoriana” setting and 19th century literature.
Alan Moore wanted to have the theme of the League being made up of “monsters” to the Victorian way of life, either criminals, traditionally villains, or drug addicts, hence why he had Mina Murray, a headstrong, divorced and ‘soiled' woman, lead it. However, since she would be irrelevant in a Fate world (she kind of was, a little, in the comics) and I don’t feel like making her a vampire/Dead Apostle like in the movie, Sherlock Holmes would be its leader instead.
Adding things from the original novels, in 1890, after Waston’s wedding to Mary Morstan made the two close friends a bit more distant from each other, Sherlock Holmes decided to devote himself body and soul in pursuit of the “deep, organizing power” he knows has been acting as a power behind the throne for the criminal world of London and throughout Europe. Short on ideas, and having relapsed into heavy cocaine use out of frustration, Sherlock goes to his brother Mycroft so he can help him with government resources. Mycroft agrees, as the British government believes (or so they claim) that this criminal mastermind is fostering seeds of war throughout Europe, but on one condition: to assist him, Sherlock has to agree to make use of certain “assets” the British government has had in its possession for years, and wishes to make use of them in a mission “for Queen and country” as a test run:
- Dr. Henry Jekyll/Mr. Edward Hyde: an old friend of Sherlock who he thought dead, a former member of the Royal Society and doctor of renown who created a serum separating his good side (actually ordinary side) from his evil side, resulting in said evil side taking over and committing atrocities before they killed themselves in 1886 to escape the gallows for their crimes. In reality, the government captured them before they could commit suicide, and has since kept them imprisoned in an underground prison under the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (the infamous Bedlam Hospital having been made to serve the middle class since the 1860s).
- Erik, the Phantom of the Opera: another prisoner of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, he was a deformed genius who lived under the Paris Opera, in France, before he turned into a killer and kidnapped Opera singer Christine Daaé in 1881. He let her go and planned to die, but was secretly captured by the British, who kept him in custody ever since.
- Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo: a French criminal genius mastermind also kept in Broadmoor. After having been unjustly imprisoned for over a decade for a crime he didn’t commit, he escaped an inescapable prison, found a hidden treasure, and used his newfound riches to change identities and take revenge on the ones who betrayed him. Repenting for his crimes, the Count later disappeared with his lover in 1844, before suddenly reappearing in the last decade of the 19th century, which puzzle his jailors since, having been born in 1796,he should be 95 by now, yet doesn’t seem to have aged a day. That, and the fact that his hallucinations of his dead wife don’t quite seem to be completely fictious, will be a driving plot point (I’m also using his Chaldea Ace design over his FGO one because it is more appealing to me).
- Nursery Rhyme (insists on being called “Alice”): a strange, nonhuman being, in the form of a book who can change shapes, and who is apparently the anthropomorphic personification of children's stories. From what her watchers can tell, she suddenly came into being inside the British Museum Library (the future British Library) in 1744, the year the first ever publications of collections of nursery rhymes, Tommy Thumb's Song Book and Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, were published, and has lived in the Library ever since. They couldn’t really guard her or anything, so they let her roam free, since she came back to the Library every time. However, a few years ago, she became very attached to a little girl, Alice Liddell, following her everywhere and adopting her appearance. Said girl was presumed abducted in 1865, on the River Thames's banks somewhere between Godstow and Folly Bridge, but she had actually traveled to a fantastic world underneath/parallel to England called ‘Wonderland’, presumably with Nursery Rhyme’s help, before she was returned safely. However, Alice died following her second travel there, which had the effect of 'reversing' her organs' symmetry, making her incapable of digesting anything and causing her to starve and die in November 1871. Her journey to Wonderland would later be followed by an expedition led by Reverend Dr. Eric Bellman the same year, which also shared a similar tragic fate as Alice's. Since then, Nursery Rhyme has taken on her friend’s name and body in her memory and has refused to set foot outside the Library ever since.
- Frankenstein’s Monster: As in the London singularity in FGO, Frankenstein's Monster became a family heirloom of the Frankensteins rather than perishing in the Arctic Sea. Ernest Frankenstein, the only Frankenstein to survive the novel after the creature killed everyone else in revenge of her negligent creator, was given the creature’s body by Captain Robert Walton, who thought it dead. Later, he would move to Britain with his wife and children to leave his family’s tragedy and a revolutionary France-occupied Switzerland behind. The British government let the family keep this “useless automaton” until such a time they would need it.
Sherlock quickly realizes he is to lead a team of insane killers and criminals, which he would usually refuses because of his principles, but he is at his wits’ ends and this whole obsession, further fueled by his cocaine addiction, possesses him to accept a lesser evil in order to catch a greater one. So begin a game of cat-and-mouse between this League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk and Professor James Moriarty (which is not really a spoiler), who is himself aided by supernatural help in the forms of
- both versions of Jacks the Rippers, as Moriarty helped the original Jack plan and accomplish his murders, but got his hands on those interesting “side effects” of the affair, getting them to serve him as spies/hired killers under the promise he will reveal to them Jack’s true identity.
- the Headless Horseman, whose bones and skull Moriarty retrieved from America and bound the phantom to him as a familiar and bodyguard, promising the entity to deliver him from his service and have him buried in his native land of Germany so he can finally rest in peace.
- a self-proclaimed demon named Mephistopheles, who Moriarty summoned on the summit of the Brocken, Germany. Said demon helping Moriarty but having its own agenda.
- And finally a girl looking exactly like Frankenstein’s Monster, like in Fran’s Interlude.
Other things would include the presence of a third faction led by Dracula and Carmilla with a similar plan to what Dracula wanted to do in the novel (i.e. raising an army of vampires and invading England), a plot point about Boudica’s bones being buried beneath King's Cross Platform 10, appearances of Lobo the King of Currumpaw as a wild card, Helena Blavatsky and Florence Nightingale as helpers of the League, as well as the appearance of some of Holmes’ cast.
And the plot would come to a head on May 4, 1891, the date Holmes and Moriarty had their final battle on Reichenbach Falls and fell to their deaths (at least until Doyle ran out of money and retconned Sherlock’s).
More than that, I am interested in covering the start of modernity in the Nasuverse, and how it affected the supernatural. How it was the last years before reaching the Throne of Heroes became nigh impossible for individual modern humans due to the reliance on guns and technology. On one hand, the end of an age of supernatural wonders and miracles, with heroes and magic, but also monsters preying on humanity and constant fight for survival on a world hostile to it. On the other, the start of an age of technological wonders, with the disappearance of the beasts preying on mankind, the use of technology to make society prosper and ease lives, and an overall stronger Common Sense of Man, but also the weakening of miracles, tons of excesses, societies built upon the suffering of others (class struggles, colonialism, etc.), the rigidity of the regressive Victorian Britain’s society, and, with the absence of external threats, mankind as its own enemy, notably by the seeds of a global conflict being planted.
In the midst of all that, the last people to become Heroic Spirits, and even then, not all of them. Heroes, anti-heroes, villains, and monsters, all unable to fit into regular society and connect with the rest of mankind due to their natures. Some of them alienated due to thinking differently (Sherlock Holmes, Helena Blavatsky), some of them insane but abandoned and not helped (Erik), others being the result of modern society’s excesses it pretends don’t exist (Edmond, Moriarty, Lobo, the Jacks the Rippers). They can’t even join up with the secretive Moonlit World, due to many of them straddling the line between science and occult, but not quite being either (Jekyll/Hyde, Frankenstein’s Monster). And finally, the monsters who were never humans to begin with, and can either try to emulate humanity to enter it (Nursery Rhyme), or lash out at human society (Lobo).
At least that’s the idea, which I hope I managed to convey correctly.
Originally Posted by All fictions
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