Sherlock Holmes, after a fashion

lienne

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The story is this.

First, you transplant Tony Stark from the Iron Man movie into the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You tweak the events of his life a little, and when the dust settles, he's twelve years old and bored and decides to clone himself. Since he's Tony Stark in the Buffyverse, it actually works. Since he's Tony Stark and twelve years old, he can't raise the clone himself and really doesn't want to. So he hands it off to Jarvis, his faithful AI.

Jarvis does his best. He manages to give the clone a sense of responsibility and an English accent, both taught by example although only the former was on purpose, which are the first obvious things that distinguish him from the original Tony.

Fast forward a few years. Tony is fourteen and a half. The clone, although technically only two, has caught up to him in physical and mental development thanks to magic accelerated clone growth (maybe literally magic; Buffyverse, after all). The clone really doesn't know what to do with himself, Jarvis is of limited help, nobody has even bothered to give him a name of his own... but he's as much of a genius as Tony is, and he's been blazing his way through a decent supply of books.

He names himself Sherlock Holmes, half as a joke, half as a way to get out from under his progenitor's shadow. And proceeds to learn everything he needs to in order to back that up, from deduction and observation through violin-playing to martial arts. By the time he's seventeen, he is living in his new identity as comfortably as can be expected, given the way it makes people think he is high up the slope between eccentric and insane. They're probably right, but he's not going to let that stop him.

Sherlock is a very complex person. Considering his circumstances, he is astonishingly stable. He prefers his own company to almost anyone else's, but he can fake extroversion very well when necessary. He can fake a lot of things very well when necessary; it comes with the territory.

In a lot of ways, some of them natural, some of them less so, he is very much like his namesake. He has minimal patience with mistakes, his own or anyone else's. He makes friends slowly if at all, but once he cares for someone, he cares absolutely. His sense of humour is whimsical, self-aware, and often dry; here he shows a little character of his own, because the Sherlock Holmes of Conan Doyle's novels never laughed as much as he does. He is ethical and honourable according to standards of his own which do not always necessarily accord with the law.

But there are also parts of him that owe very little to the character he assumes. He distrusts authority on principle and makes specific exceptions only grudgingly. He is impatient with the public school system, despite the fact that Doyle's Holmes was an avid student; he defends this to himself by complaining that the quality of education has decreased in the last century.

He thinks of himself as very mature for his age, which is only partly true. He is an excellent actor (one of the things he taught himself for the sake of his identity) and very intelligent, so it's easy for him to assume adult mannerisms and solve adult problems, but he's still a seventeen-year-old boy whose central role models are Tony Stark and, well, Sherlock Holmes—neither of whom is exactly a paragon of maturity. Compared to Tony, Sherlock is a wise old man. Compared to an actual adult, he's just an unusually perceptive, sensitive and well-spoken teenager.

Sherlock's Mental Realm is a combination of the lab where he was born and raised with his namesake's imagined home at 221B Baker Street. The central theme of the place is dichotomy, juxtaposition, and synthesis; his entire identity is an attempt to make the nineteenth century detective novels he has read work with the twentieth century sci-fi/fantasy he is living in, so of course his Mental Realm reflects that.

Figments of his imagination are an eclectic mix of objects significant to different aspects of his identity. Computer parts, violins, tobacco pipes, equipment related to chemistry or engineering, and magnifying glasses all feature heavily.

The setting overall is primarily indoors. Sherlock doesn't get out of the house much, so his mind is very much structured like one. At first it will seem very small, with only a few rooms, but there are doors hidden behind furniture that lead to attics or staircases or just to subtly different versions of rooms that already exist somewhere else. Tiny details are very important here. It's easy to get lost or feel like a door has led you right back into the room you just came out of, but there are always enough clues to tell similar-looking rooms apart from each other.

In the house where Sherlock grew up, there was an AI running all the computers and monitoring everything. When Sherlock appears in his own mind, he sometimes takes the place of that AI, able to see anything and speak anywhere but having no physical form. There are LCD screens set into the walls almost everywhere, usually in baroque Victorian frames. They might show other parts of the Mental Realm, or engineering schematics, or just screensavers. When Sherlock is the house AI, he can use these to show any of those things, but never to show an image of himself. When he visits his mind as a person, he has no more control over them than anybody else does.

The one exception to the indoor theme is the rooftops. These are accessible by climbing out attic windows or going through doors at the tops of staircases. There are three different roofs: one that belongs to 221B Baker Street in nineteenth-century London, one that belongs to Tony Stark's house in Sunnydale in the 1990s, and one that is a mixture of both. The first two each seem to show an appropriate view, but if you walk right up to the edge of the roof and look down, the ground flickers and you see what's really there: absolute void, going on forever. The third roof just shows you the void, with no illusions of ground or sky. None of the three roofs has a door leading to any of the others; to get from roof to roof, you have to go back inside. The third roof is the hardest to find.

I'll draw maps of the place if I need to, but there will be enough geographic impossibilities to make Escher cry. I'm currently writing a text adventure using I7 to work out the details of the setting, just in case.

He has had another bright idea. Sometimes it seems my entire life is created, constrained, and in every other way occupied by the consequences of Tony Stark's bright ideas. No—that was unfair. He has done his best by me, and the result, while not magnificent, is certainly better than the absolute neglect he receives from his own current legal guardian. This much can be said for Tony: when you outpace him in any field, he takes it as a challenge to do better, instead of any of a number of less mature reactions exhibited by Obadiah Stane.

Still, this business with Sunnydale High is yet another example of Tony going off half-cocked and leaving Jarvis and myself to deal with the ensuing messes. What could possibly have possessed him to consider for one moment immersing me in public education?

There is something very restful about dowsing for arrowheads. Faced with these simple mysteries and their accompanying simple exertions, Sherlock is almost able to forget the absence of his violin.

He follows the dowsing rod up a hill, over a small pile of rocks, and around a tree. At the precise instant when the whining of the device reaches its peak, he pulls, not with his hands but with his mind. Psychic powers are mainly a matter of concentrating the attention. It is, he thinks, nearly the easiest thing in the world. The arrowhead he retrieves from the ground is a fine specimen. Smiling to himself, he sets off after the next one.

So absorbed is he in his work that he fails to notice the bear until an invisible hand picks him up and shakes him like a rag doll. He yelps. A succession of evidence, previously ignored, assembles in his mind all at once: the sounds of ursine snorting, remembered warnings of psychokinetic wildlife, a curious stillness in the trees as though all the birds and squirrels had decided to vacation elsewhere. He rather wishes he could have put all that together half a minute ago.

The bear lets go, and he drops five feet or so to the ground. The impact is jarring, and he expects bruises, but at the moment he has other concerns. Snatching up the dowsing rod, he runs.

This time, he makes sure to pay attention. A slip like that is not just dangerous; it is out of character, and there are very few things Sherlock Holmes takes more seriously than staying in character.