Chapter Text
The Peerless Playhouse in Grimshaw was not a stage for frightened amateurs.
Victoria had never properly been up there alongside her supposed friends and compatriots, at least not yet, which in her mind probably meant she was a frightened amateur.
She had tried; the results of many auditions rang clear in her memory. It wasn't that she was scared, realistically, she just wasn't very good or even very interested or passionate in the work she was trying to undertake. Instead, she tended to let time slip by while working on her genuine interests and talent: crafting alchemical potions of various natures in her basement laboratory at Craven Manor.
After so many failures to join her once-best-friend Constance Lovelace and potential-love-interest Cornelius Rathbone onstage, dedicating her time and attentions instead to magical science and the artsiness of crafting just the right potion from the ingredients she had was essentially a worthy alternative.
"Stageplays come and go," she had once told her assistant, Ingmar the Demigoblin, "but a formula well-made lasts forever. Always made in just the right way, and you can predict the results every time you make it."
"And what are the results?" Ingmar had said, inquiring as to which one she was making at that time.
She looked up from her vials and glassware. "Beauty, Ingmar. Of course, beauty, as always. For the beautification of the human spirit, and the purification and perfection of our flesh and blood."
Ingmar gazed on, and Victoria continued her work.
In the upstairs bedroom, Victoria's mother soiled her sheets.
It was Ingmar's duty to change them when Victoria was working, although Dolores Craven — last living matriarch of Victoria's dwindling family — much preferred Victoria, if for no other reason than incestuous familiarity with her own offspring, as opposed to the interspecies distance between human and goblin which she was unfortunate enough to share with one such as Ingmar Gorwin.
Victoria had come upon Ingmar sometime in the 70s, and he was one of her greatest successes. Although goblins tended to work better in hivemind-like groups similar to their cousin race, the kobolds, they — as Victoria discovered — functioned perfectly well as individuals if they were to receive the right amount of intellectual and genetic reprogramming.
To put it mildly, Victoria had been drugging him with potions ever since they met — various formulas intended to naturally increase his individual brain capacity and render him almost as conscious and free-willed of an individual as any human.
So it was that the Demigoblin had been born, and Victoria acquired herself a useful assistant in her affairs around the manor house which stood on its own, far into the Grim Grove and away from Grimshaw itself, on a plot of land known as Cravenholm.
Her mother, Dolores, hated the little rat. She always thought Ingmar had come between her and her daughter, that he'd damaged their relationship, that his presence was to be blamed for the increasing distance between herself and Victoria, rather than any of her own actions or even her present status and quality of life, which wasn't much.
She was bedridden, and had been for many years. The doctors at St Crucian's Hospital & Wellness Clinic in Grimshaw suspected it might be a form of advanced arthritis, acute auxosis, or chronic scoliosis, but whatever it was, it had rendered Dolores almost paralyzed and trapped in bed in her upstairs room at their ancestral plantation home.
(Well, it wasn't quite a plantation anymore, but in the height of its glory, Craven Manor had indeed been the center of Grimshaw's sugarcane and rice production, which had since been offloaded to other, smaller affairs in the swampy area around Grimshaw and the other settlements which had been established in the Grim Grove since its discovery and founding by the Crucian Order in the 1700s.)
In the cases of nights like this one, it was left to Ingmar, as we discussed — when not assisting Victoria, or cleaning up in the house, he'd be tending to Dolores's needs: feeding her, moving her around to help with bedsores, and cleaning up in the case of unfortunate accidents.
"You can send Victoria up, you know," Dolores said, as he slipped out the sheets and replaced them with new ones.
Ingmar paused, then smoothed out a few wrinkles. "What would be the point in that? Your daughter is busy."
"Ha, busy," Dolores scoffed. "Making formulas, I assume. As if the hospital would ever need them. She was supposed to be in charge of that place, supposed to rule that hospital. She'd have an entire staff to look after. Instead, she does what?"
Ingmar creased the corners of the sheets, her words bouncing off his ears; he'd heard this many times before, and it was certainly nothing new to him, now or then.
"She just works in that laboratory of hers," Dolores continued. "She doesn't even check in to see me anymore. It's all your fault, letting her slack on her responsibilities. I should never have let her bring you in here."
Ingmar stood back, Dolores all clean. "It's just something she's spending her time on. They won't take her at the Playhouse, she has little else to do these days."
"She has me," Dolores said, rasping out a pathetic cough. "And this house. The hospital, if she was smart. She's not getting any younger, and neither am I. What's she going to do with herself when I'm no longer here?"
Ingmar shrugged. "If that day ever comes, I suppose we'll have to figure it out then."
Dolores glared at him. "Yes, 'if'. If, if, if...if roses had noses and whiskers were liquor. I've thought about every one of those possibilities before. Don't fall into that trap, Ingwin."
He didn't correct her on the name; Victoria herself had initially called him by the name Ingwin, before he changed it to his current, fuller name.
"Bring me my tea," Dolores said.
"Of course, Madame Craven," Ingmar said, and headed to the kitchen to collect the tea set.