A Grimm Introduction
With my RPG treatise finally complete (or at least as complete as anything ever is, in my head…) it is time once more to return to the dark and twisted world of Edmund Moulde, and the second book of the Macabre Quadrilogy.
In many ways, this book was supposed to be the first book in Edmund’s story. I had imagined a very Rowlingesque (sans bigotry) opening of the odd little Moulde boy being tested after he used the chemicals from his sister’s makeup kit to revivify his dead pet rat. Then, off the odd little Moulde boy would go to learn about the mad sciences of penny-pulps and wrought-iron steampunk.
That changed pretty quickly as I developed the world around Edmund. Soon he was an orphan adopted by a spiteful dowager, and heir to one of the Nine Founding Families of the great industrial city of Brackenburg.
But Edmund was always going to go to school, and he was always going to learn something important about higher education — namely, its social function as distinct from its practical use.
Am I happy with the result? It’s a mixed bag. This is one of my under-drafted works, and is often the case, I feel like I tried to do too much. More than any other book, this one has changed both in form, skeleton, substance, and focus multiple times during its drafting. It is, all in all, I feel a somewhat inelegant result.
Nevertheless, there’s still quite a lot I enjoy, including Edmund’s poisoning, Professor Whiskfield’s opinions on Mad Science, and the Teapot Coterie’s ball. Perhaps I will come back someday to really polish the book into something I’m proud of. For the moment, I will swallow my pride and fear.
Let’s start with the back of the book:
“Nos Demonstrum Illis Omnes”
Carved into the gates that lead to the hollowed campus of Grimm’s School for the Intermittently Gifted, it is a motto as well as a promise; a promise that Edmund means to fulfill. After being accepted into the greatest school for academia in the world, he has the opportunity to learn all there is to know about exotic sciences and arcane literature. Then, he’ll show them all!
But first, he will have to deal with mad professors, selfish students, a shadowy raven stalking the graveyard, and a nobility too busy enjoying themselves to help. And when the actions of a mysterious murderer threaten the existence of Grimm’s, it will take all of Edmund’s guile and wits to save both the school, his family, his future, and his own neck.