Nightside 03 - Nightingales Lament

finally. "It's so not you."
    "This from a man who hasn't changed his look since the nineteenth century."
    Julien Advent smiled, and I smiled back. We might never be friends, or really approve of each other, but
    somehow we always got along okay. It probably helped that we had a lot of enemies in common.
    Julien Advent was the Victorian Adventurer, the greatest hero of his age. Valiant and daring, he’d fought all the evils of Queen Victoria's time and never once looked like losing. He was tall and lithely muscular, impossibly graceful in an utterly masculine way, with jet-black hair and eyes, and an unfashionably pale face. Handsome as any movie star, the effect was somewhat spoiled by his unwaveringly serious gaze and grim smile. Julien always looked like he didn't believe in frivolous things like fun or movie stars. He still wore the stark black-and-white formal dress of his time, the only splash of colour a purple cravat at his throat, held in place by a silver pin presented to him by Queen Victoria herself. And it had to be said, Julien looked a damn sight more elegant than the Jonah. Julien had style.
    There were any number of books and movies and even a television series about the great Victorian Adventurer, most of them conspiracy theories as to why he'd disappeared so suddenly, at the height of his fame, in 1888. And then he astonished everyone by reappearing out of a Timeslip into the Nightside in 1966. It turned out he'd been betrayed by the only woman he ever loved, who lured him into a trap set by his greatest enemies, the evil husband-and-wife team known as the Murder Masques. The three of them tricked him into a pre-prepared Timeslip, and the next thing he knew he'd been catapulted into the future.
    Being the great man that he was, Julien Advent soon found his feet again. He went to work as a journalist for the Night Times and made a great investigative reporter - partly because he wasn't afraid or impressed by anyone and partly because he had an even scarier reputation than the villains he pursued so relentlessly. Julien still fought evil and punished the guilty - he just did it in a new way. He was helped in adjusting to his new time by his newfound wealth. He'd left money in a secret bank account, when he disappeared from 1888, and the wonders of compound interest meant he'd never have to worry about money ever again. Eventually Julien became the editor, then the owner, of the Night Times, and that great crusading newspaper had become the official conscience of the Nightside and a pain in the arse to all those who liked things just fine the way they were.
    Still, everybody read the Night Times, if only to be sure they weren't in it.
    Julien Advent was in every way a self-made man. He hadn't started out as a hero and adventurer. He was just a minor research chemist, pottering away in a small laboratory on a modest stipend. But somehow he created a transformational potion like no other, a mysterious new compound that could unlock the secret extremes of the human mind. A potion that could make a man absolute good or utter evil. He could have become a monster, a creature that lived only to indulge itself with all manner of violence and vice, but being the good and moral man that he was, Julien Advent took the potion and became a hero. Tall and strong, fast-moving and quick-thinking, courageous and magnificent and unwaveringly gallant, he became the foremost adventurer of his time.
    A man so perfect, he'd be unbearable if he wasn't so charming. He had tried to recreate his formula over the years, but to no success. Some unknown ingredient escaped him, some unknown impurity in one of the original salts . . . and Julien Advent remained the only one of his kind.
    He never did discover what happened to the Murder Masques. That terrible husband-and-wife team, who ran all the organised crime in the Victorian Nightside, their faces hidden behind red leather masks, were long gone ... no more now than a footnote in history. Only really remembered at all as the main adversaries of the legendary Victorian Adventurer. Some said progress changed London and the Nightside so quickly that they couldn't keep up, or they were brought down by others of their vicious kind. And some said they just got old and tired and slow, and younger wolves dragged them down. Julien had tried to determine their fate, using all the considerable resources of the Night Times, but the Murder Masques were lost in the mists of history and