arlenarkenstone | Recent Entries

Night 007
Arlen's arrival
Meeting Abigail Slade

Day 008
In the library
In the parlour regaining his suitcase.

Night 008
Exploring

Day 009
Exploring, sewing room

Night 009
Waking in the open hallway
Returning to the library

The Nexus labs are kind of quieter than they used to be, but back on the old Nexus noticeboard there are still directions here with a weird little handwritten advertisement for a glassworks and alchemy supply. It also says to ask about specialty creations such as prosthetic organs. It's kind of a weird sign and also a little bit old but very pretty. It says to ask for Arlen Arkenstone. At the actual Laboratory complex entrance his name is on the map, and up the halls there is light and heat from where it is supposed to be even if the rooms around it are dusty now. The door is ajar.

Fake Einrich in the Nexus!

With Thorn gone for a few days the furnaces are quiet and cold. Arlen doesn't like it that way, because he likes the heat and there is a kind of life and energy to the lab with his assistant around. It might not just be the furnaces and the glassblowing. It's kind of nice to work with somebody else again, and Arlen had forgotten that.
But he still has Aodhan. The teapot likes it in the lab and likes being used to make tea, and it has gotten very good at keeping out from underfoot. Probably it likes Thorn too.
When he knows Sarah is coming to visit, Arlen clears a space at one end of one of the big tables and sets Aodhan and some cups on tiles there. The cups are kind of chipped from him and Thorn using them around the lab but they are clean, and the tiles are scratched and marked up because they're the heat-resistant kind that they use around the glassworks to set super hot metal and glass on. It is not a pretty table that he has set up but it is the best he can do. The whole lab is one huge room big enough to be an auditorium and the traditional furnace takes up a lot of one end of it and Arlen looks very small sitting alone at one end of a table in the far corner, huddled up and waiting with his hands under his arms to keep warm. Not that it's all that cold but it seems like it is by contrast.

Current Mood: lonely

It is very good that Thorn is a quick student because the project is a big one. First Arlen teaches him the basics of working with glass and that isn't easy because he has not done it for a long time and has to relearn some himself. They start with cheaper glass and remelt things and remake until they both have the hang of it and Arlen is happy to find that his manual dexterity gets just a little bit better with practice and focus. He might have to have Thorn do the most delicate work though. It's amazing how good Thorn is at anything artistic. It reminds him of Einrich a little, and that hurts in a way he tries not to think about when he is alone late at night. His guest room at the Crumrin Mansion is very nice, even if he sometimes doesn't leave the lab until very late at night to get some sleep.

When they have made all the glass chemistry equipment he could possibly need and then probably a little more, Arlen starts to move on to the actual heart itself. Every single step is very important and it starts with the materials for the glass itself. This will not be ordinary glass. Like the material Arlen's hands and heart are made from it is a magical kind of living glass, capable of repairing itself from minor damage the same way a living body's cells regenerate. It takes a long time just to mix the minerals and magic together for the raw stuff before there is enough ready to melt into glass to be shaped. Thorn has a few days of almost nothing to do while Arlen almost lives at the lab absorbed in his work.
There are drawings and measurements and all kinds of details for every tiny piece of the heart. Arlen spends some time talking Aloysius into giving him lots of medical specifications and personal information before he even starts making diagrams, and even as good as Thorn is getting at working with glass they will have to remake many of the pieces over and over again before they are right for his exacting standards. There is also a big glass box, made very carefully and sterilized and carefully sealed. Each piece for the heart when it is finished and perfect in dimension has to be sterilized and cleaned, and piece by piece the heart is put together, suspended in the box, like it's some big rectangular robotic torso. Aloysius Crumrin's new heart is on display in the center of the lab as it grows from a few little tiny glass valves into a weird transparent organic work of art.

The room that Arlen has picked is a very big one at a quiet empty end of the Nexus labs. Steel beams show all around the walls and the high ceiling like the room never quite got finished to cover them up. In places there are vertical beams making posts to support the size of the room. When you come from a world where most of the buildings are falling apart this looks just like home. There are two furnaces for the glass, one is electric and smallish and the other is bigger, and old fashioned, with fire and a big bellows he needs Thorn to work. There are pipes and rods and stuff for making casts and some long tables to be cluttered up with all the stuff they'll be working on.
Long tables are actually most of the furniture. He needs space for alchemy equipment and books too and these need to be as far away from the furnaces as possible so there is no risk of things getting burned or knocked into. Making some new equipment will be a good way to teach Thorn how to shape glass, and you can never have too many alembics and retorts. There are also benches for sitting and they are heavy sturdy ones of metal and stone. Arlen does not want to have to watch out where he sits. There is only one bookshelf because the books will probably spend a lot of time open on the tables, and Arlen doesn't really have many. Most of them he wrote himself though. He takes notes and sketches from every book he finds that is helpful and compiles what he needs that way. He will not be teaching Thorn anything he does not think he needs to know though, and a lot of his writing has cryptic symbols and weird alphabets.
Arlen will have to make some purchasing trips to get gloves and aprons and goggles, raw glass materials, chemicals and minerals and magic ingredients, and safety equipment for putting out fires just in case.

((Images will be linked as I find them...))

Letter from Nuala

It probably has really taken Arlen this long to reply but he has been very busy.

( Letter from the lab )

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Nexus Labs

Arlen has found a suitable room in the labs and he has found a lot of equipment but what he needs isn't all in the room. Some of it is in pieces or needing repair or to be pulled out from under other things and it is all just too much. The room he has decided on is huge and it has the biggest stuff in it already. It looks like it's more of a metal forge then a laboratory but he will need the furnaces for glass. After making a partial list and giving that to Aloysius he tries to start on getting set up.

He has to be very very careful. His hands are stronger then they look but they're also vulnerable in ways flesh isn't. If a normal person slips and whacks their arm on any of this equipment, they'll be bruised. He could crack, and bleed, or worse.

After a couple of hours of moving everything he safely can he sits down and just gives up for a minute. He has wrapped rags around his arms and the glass of his hands is still a little scratched. He aches. Arlen can't remember his hands ever aching like this, usually they barely feel at all. It worries him.

There is so much work ahead, and he can't even set up what he needs to do it.

Current Mood: drained
Current Location: Nexus Labs

I don't know if anybody will actually have any questions but this seems to be on a lot of other people's journals so I will put it here. Arlen really doesn't lie much anyway but there are things he does not talk about very much.

I've given my characters a healthy dose of Veritaserum and now they have to tell the truth. What does this mean for you? Ask my characters questions about anything and everything and they will truthfully answer it. So, go ahead and ask what you want. He can't beat around the bush with half-truths.

Arlen does not know where to send his letter and has to ask around, at the Inn Nuala talked about and of the people there. Finally he has to give the letter to a strange thing that seems to understand English but won't speak it and he wasn't really ready to hand it over but it was a fast little creature and his hands are clumsy. He hopes the letter gets to her somehow.

( He doesn't know how to properly address her... )

Current Location: Crumrin Mansion

Tea with Miss Branigan

Tea and a job with the Crumrins

I grow weary of the search and I wonder what that means. I owe Einrich to keep up the search. I am incomplete without him. He must wherever he is be incomplete also. But-
but.
I returned to the Nexus today, to rest. To recover. I feel my mortality upon me sometimes. I will have a long time ahead still, but without some alteration I fear the time ahead may be less then the time behind and that is not a place in my life I wish to be. Must work to correct that. I don't know if I can, alone.
I asked a question that did not provide the answer I was looking for but it brought other things as worthy. I may have a job ahead, the commissioning of a heart. For ordinary blood, for an old man. If I get the job I will have to find a surgeon of skill enough to implement it. I think I have the desterity for the manufacture of the heart itself, and can find others to make whatever portions I cannot. A heart for ordinary blood can be lighter, gentler then mine. I would not cheat him out of a good heart but I hope to make him understand, when I meet him, that it will not be as heavy a piece of work as mine.
There was a lady, not human, of unusual blood and unusual tolerance. She was very nice to talk to. I hope to meet her again. If I am given the job I will be close to the Nexus for a while, so perhaps.
Also there was Miss Branigan. I am invited to tea tomorrow. Probably not like at Death's yellow house on the hill. Not at all. But we spoke of imbalances and the loss of my hands and my magic with them. And I wonder. But.
I am Einrich's greatest work of art, a being altered and a work in progress, always. I am not the man who entered into partnership with him as a young man. In seeking perfection an internal balance is achieved or at least sought after. Internal, not external. Perhaps we are held apart by greater forces. Perhaps our partnership has been somehow dissolved by the shifts within ourselves. If I find him again (If not when?) will we still balance?
Will he hurt me again?
I miss him. Why do i still miss him so?

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Nexus Inn

This was an app for somewhere I forget where, but has useful basic information other players might want to know about the character! ( Read more... )

((Unfinished RP with

tictoctictoc))

A young man sits in the Nexus with a bag full of packages. He looks worn out but content in the way that a holiday shopper is when they finish their purchasing.
Something runs into his leg. It is cold and hard and rounded. If he can see past his packages it is a teapot with a broken string tied to the handle.
Without thinking twice, he sets his things aside and picks it up, eyeing the string. "Who lost you, then?"
It squirms and warms up a little. A man with a briefcase spots them and heads towards them. "That is mine."
He almost drops it when it moves. "It's alive!" He looks startled.
"That depends on your definition." ( Read more... )

Arlen has been around the Nexus, he's just quiet and mostly takes notes. He's also found quiet corners somewhere to stay and work and he once got three teapots from Alec that were imbued with life force but now he only has one. Hmm.
The man in the suit sits in a corner with his briefcase and a notebook, and a teapot nervously fidgeting on the end of a string tied to the handle. The man is writing in a notebook and studying people over his glasses. His hair is long and pulled back, and his skin is a golden tint that matches it, but there's still something about him that's reminiscent of Schreber. The man doesn't have any visible scars though, and he wears gloves.
The bench he's sitting on is long and a convenient resting spot for anyone who might wander over here.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Nexus corner

Light in the morning I notice is different from any other kind of light. If light can be said to have qualities beyond the visual and a sensation of heat -and we should not deny the input of other senses- morning light has a deceptively airy texture while a more forceful nature. It is as though this is the more pure and elemental version of the thing. Morning light pushes its way where other light does not reach. It seems probable that it expends more energy to do this because its heat is not as great as at other times.

The place I have come to has a different kind of light from anywhere I have been yet. The space is wide and feels it should echo but there are no boundaries for echoes to bounce from. The light is very white and sterile, sourceless. It can be said to come from above but this is only discernable by the shadows cast. The light varies in dimness or brightness in some areas without apparent cause. The constant white of the place is raw when my eyes are used to red and orange. I would guess whatever the source this light is in some way artificial. The whiteness makes colors stand out more brightly than I am used to. This is a very colorful place.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: a Nexus?

Profile

Arlen Arkenstone

Helpful information

Page Summary

Maisondeportes
For Grimholdkeeper
(no subject)
Tea for Sarah
Under Construction
The Glassworks Lab
(no subject)
Moving in
OOC meme!
Letter to Nuala
Lots of tea
Written in the evening
Helpful information
(no subject)
For Sarah
Observations - Light

March 2012

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Style Credit

Style: Alive for Dusty Foot by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 10th, 2025 01:30 am

Grand Pursuit

A Quest Neverending

Recent Entries

Maisondeportes

For Grimholdkeeper

(no subject)

Tea for Sarah

Under Construction

The Glassworks Lab

(no subject)

Moving in

OOC meme!

Letter to Nuala

Lots of tea

Written in the evening

Helpful information

(no subject)

For Sarah

Observations - Light

Profile

Page Summary

Most Popular Tags

March 2012

Syndicate

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags