#🖊️ investigative minds

[solitaireships]

Stealing off twitter but btw

[thegildedbee]

:: February 20 :: Selection for Week 8 of 2025 :: 🐝 "the adventure of black peter" (1904) from sherlock holmes: a year of quotes* 🖊️

Holmes was working somewhere under one of the numerous disguises and names with which he concealed his own formidable identity. He had at least five small refuges in different parts of London, in which he was able to change his personality.

O, the legendary disguises of the world's only consulting detective!!! As points of departure, they offer so much to tease out regarding cases of identity and personality! Especially because -- at least so I've heard -- no matter how hard you try, disguises are always self-portraits :-)

Although . . . I'm setting aside the disguises for now, because what I'm most curious about from the quote are the circumstances surrounding the "five small refuges": the existence of multiple pied-a-terre (feet on the ground) that Holmes has concocted throughout the city. It's not a common detective hack historically; the only one that pops into my head straight-away is the thrilling shared storage unit hideout of Benjamin Ferel's that we see in Series 2 of Lupin :-) I love the creative potential of the refuges for Holmes's sleuthing and for story-making about the crafty detective. [I think referring to these sites as "bolt-holes" is from BBC Sherlock, but I'm not well-versed enough in the original ACD lingo to know for sure.] (To digress slightly, the first quotation in the OED under "bolting-hole" is from 1851's Dialect & Folk-lore of Northamptonshire:

Bolt-hole, the hole from which the rabbit makes its escape; or, in the phraseology of the craft, ‘bolts’.

Which then makes the 19thc/21stc mash-up for the term in Sherlock a "bolting-into (?) :-)

221B may be home base for where Holmes' private life and consulting life intersect, but the criminals he pursues are spread throughout the city -- and, thus, with his refuges, so is Holmes, which I find an interesting dimension of all of this. With his contingency planning, the existence of the refuges also speaks to Holmes's being several steps ahead of his potential adversaries, an articulation of his investigative methods.

These private spots likely serve not only as dressing-rooms for disguised performances, but also as listening posts for intelligence gathering, giving a sense of Holmes as a rather dashing spy figure. They also are emblematic of Holmes's idiosyncratic Victorian presence, one that can easily cross boundaries, such as class. I think I like best picturing the refuges as places where Holmes places pieces on London's chess-board, or as extensions of the spaces in his mind palace :-) If I may be so bold, below, I've invented five secret Victorian/Edwardian hiding places for Holmes :-)

:: What better place to have a secret refuge than a grand hotel, especially one with a perpetually renewing international clientele, such as the Langham? After all, Holmes surely needed disguises that allowed him to mingle amongst the great and the good without recognition, so it could serve as an apt locale for stashing appropriate supplies. Perhaps he managed to clear up a sensitive criminal matter involving one of the guests, and subsequently the general manager (interestingly he was an American, and a former Union Army officer!), who then secured for him the use of an inconspicuous storage room in the basement for which only Holmes possessed the key. And if spending the night as a guest under an assumed name now and again was the occasional treat for closing a case, well why not? Of course, the Langham has some impressive Sherlockian bona fides. Arthur Conan Doyle often stayed there, and it's referenced in several stories (The Sign of the Four, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax). Most importantly, it was where Doyle was invited for dinner in 1889 by J.M. Stoddart, the American publisher of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine (Oscar Wilde was also invited, and persuaded by Stoddart to write what would become The Picture of Dorian Gray). Stoddart made it worth ACD's while to write a second Holmes novel. A second outing for Holmes wasn't necessarily in the cards -- A Study in Scarlet hadn't made much of an impression, and, in any case, Doyle placed much more stock in the historical fiction he wanted to write: the second Holmes novel that appeared through the intervention of the American publisher in 1890 was The Sign of the Four; the medieval epic that Doyle rated much more highly, The White Company, in 1891. (Once ACD began publishing the Holmes adventures as stand-alone stories, rather than in the form they came in as novels for the first two times -- the sky was then the limit for Holmes and Watson, much to Doyle's ambivalence).

:: Holmes would also need a bolt-hole in a working-class area, and perhaps a public house similar to the one pictured above might have had a friendly proprietor who would have allowed him a space in the store-room amidst the barrels of ale to stash some supplies and to bunk in a corner; or perhaps he was able to secure a room in a near-by run-down location. An example given in an article on dancing in Victorian London reports: "The Morning Post describes a blind fiddler working the taproom at the Salmon and Compasses in Brooke’s Market, Holborn, a miserably poor district. Money is collected, tables dragged to one side. Then, to quote a customer, ‘when the fiddler is paid he strikes up and we jump up and dances’." Can't you just picture Holmes in disguise as a blind fiddler in this scenario, having a grand time amidst the dancing pub-goers?

:: Another possible site for a good hideaway would be the Covent Garden area, bursting as it was with activity of all kinds, and attracting people from across different walks of life -- with the market trade (manual workers, porters, and vendors) and the wealthy taking their leisure at places such as the Royal Opera House, as well as there being a variety of shops and businesses in the neighborhood.

Tucked away off of Covent Garden is Cecil Court, populated by all kinds of commercial ventures that also had flats above the shops. Bookshops were popular, which would be properly Doylean (William and Gilbert Foyles opened their first West End bookstore in Cecil Court in 1904; it joined there the oldest esoteric bookshop in London “devoted to theosophy, philosophy, spiritualism and kindred subjects” -- making Cecil Court especially Doylean! Odds on that ACD made a purchase or two there:-) Or perhaps Holmes was befriended by one of the quirky second-hand booksellers in residence, all the better for discreet hiding away.

I'd also nominate Cecil Court for its connection to science, as indicated by the picture above from 1895 of one of the inhabitants: "A Practical Demonstration of the Latest Improvements in Photography. An Evening at the Camera Club." I think Holmes would enjoy the occasional night out at a scientific society that was also a club, especially one where he could chat about chemistry and new technologies (fodder, perhaps, for one of his noteworthy monographs?) The individual seen presenting the lecture is the President, William Abney, a distinguished photographic scientist (for example, in 1880 he discovered that hydroquinone reduces exposed silver halide crystals on photographic film into visible black silver.)

[I also couldn't resist Cecil Court because it was the first London address for Wolfgang Mozart and his family, when they came in 1764 for he and his sister to play for King George III and Queen Charlotte!]

:: If I'm going to be imagining goings-on in Victorian London, then Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' dinosaur sculptures are always going to figure in there somehow! (These were the first full-scale reproductions anywhere of the fragmentary remains of species discovered to that date.) So, hear me out: one of Holmes's hiding places is inside the belly of the largest Iguanodon! (Perhaps there are openings on the inside of one of the legs that allow one to climb up to where there's a trap door that can be pulled open :-) This is an idea inspired by the famous event in the top image, when a celebratory dinner was hosted at the completion of the models, with the guests set up to dine inside the beast on New Year's Eve in 1853. The sculptures were placed across a lake at the Crystal Palace Park, which is the site where the 1851 Great Exhibition moved to, after it closed; the dinosaurs appeared when it opened in 1854. I can even rustle up an ACD connection to partly justify my self-indulgence: the park is in south London, in Sydenham -- and when ACD moved to London in the 1890s he lived in South Norwood, which would have been about 3/4 of an hour's walk between the two locations. I like to think he went to visit!

:: My fifth candidate for a secret refuge is one that I recalled from a recent event from 2020: the discovery of a closed-up passage in the House of Commons (there was an itty-bitty keyhole in one of the wooden panels in a hallway that had gone unnoticed until just recently. When a key was fashioned and turned in the lock, a door opened and the hidden corridor appeared!) Inside are hinges for a door that would have been 11-feet high, opening into Westminster Hall -- the set-up looks to have been designed as a passage to usher in the invitees for the coronation banquet of Charles II (and dating revealed that the ceiling timbers in the passage were harvested in 1659); the passage was also used for visitors going to and fro until it was blocked up in the 19th century (and then promptly forgotten!).

So, in my mind's eye, I have an image of Holmes discovering the existence of the hidden passage in a study of old architectural documents of Parliament, and finding a snug little spot for himself in an alcove, concealed, right under the nose of Mycroft and the government without their knowledge :-)

*Levi Stahl and Stacey Shintani, eds., U of Chicago Pr, 2019

& bespoke notifications as requested :-) [thanks for reading!]: @totallysilvergirl and @winterdaphne2 and @keirgreeneyes and @calaisreno

[charaznablescanontoyota]

🖊️ drop your wisdoms

i might have talked about this aaages ago on here but if i ever write a third web serial that isn't antlers 2 electric boogaloo it'll be an urban fantasy noir detective story with my oc silvain as the protagonist

specifically the version of silvain i don't rp very often (but rotate in my mind a lot) who is a detective who gets magically handcuffed to the killer they're chasing because the two of them get on the wrong side of a witch. and they have to work together to solve a string of murderers done by a copycat of the killer silvain now can't get more than 30 feet away from

silv is very much a serious studious by-the-book type who takes their time investigating stuff and doesn't have a lot of friends due to being businesslike and socially awkward but they're fun to write :] one day ill show off more of them outside of like the 3 people i talk about them to

send me 🖊 + an oc (or just 🖊 for a random one) and i’ll talk about em

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[unit-antares]

🖊️, for the future of a muse of your choice!

// For what I have in mind for Antares's future, there's a few specific phases, namely:

One particular investigation mission going a way Rocket doesn't like

Unova League shenanigans

Antares returning to a place it used to know

Good ending? Bad ending? We'll see 👍💥

[andlatitude]

If you’re still doing the ask thing 🖊️ Cor or Ezra?

I AM still doing it, happily! Honestly it's really nice to get to talk about the OCs. I'll talk about Ezra and get @slamncram to talk about Cor. Sorry in advance because Ezra was the first OC I created for all this and I'm so insane about him. Ezra Devonshire is 29 years old, English, 6'1" tall. He looks dignified and put-together, and dresses well in high-quality clothing. However, Ezra is incredibly socially awkward, and tends to panic when pushed into social situations he's not comfortable in. He's also a bit of a snob, with a tendency to look down on people sometimes even if he doesn't realize he's doing it. In our canon, he starts off as a sort of administrative assistant to the Main Antagonist. Ezra idolizes this man, and has feelings for him, so he's been sort of blind to the shadier stuff Main Antagonist is getting up to. It turns out later that their backstory goes a lot deeper, and that Ezra used to work alongside him and has been forced to lose those memories, but we haven't completely delved into that yet. Ezra meets Byrne because the organization run by Main Antagonist fronts as doing independent investigations, and Byrne is looking for River, who went missing, and nobody but Byrne is looking for him. Because at heart Ezra is a good person, he can't turn Byrne down and agrees to (secretly) help him look for River (because Ezra isn't supposed to take on investigations but he can't say no). Throughout them working together, Ezra starts to clue in that he's working for the bad guy, and switches sides while still basically staying at his job, but more undercover to get more information. Main Antagonist is the one behind all the kidnappings and Ezra decides he wants to help take him down. This is all going on and in the meantime Byrne completely falls for Ezra and it takes Ezra way too long to realize that HE has fallen for BYRNE and it's soooo...!!! ALSO Ezra has a lot of power - the people being kidnapped are all being taken because of their telekinetic, mindreading etc abilities, and Ezra has a LOT of those. He could do full-on mind control if he wanted to, but he's been forced to forget he has these abilities to basically be a weapon in storage for the Big Bad, always at his disposal, so when Ezra uses his "talents" at first he doesn't realize he's doing it. ANYWAY *** Cor, according to @slamncram :

Corbin “Cor” Taylor is 29, from Yorkshire, and the tallest of our OCs at 6’3”. He’s an arsehole and proud of it, abrasive and aggressive but it’s mostly swagger, not a condition of his personality. He’s smart, but impulsive, a bit of an adrenaline junkie. Cor’s hair is naturally a dirty, sandy blonde, but he bleaches it. He has a lot of tattoos, almost all black and white floral, on his arms and chest, and down onto his hands and fingers. His only colour piece is the red rose on the left side of his neck. When he was younger Cor used to break into people’s homes, steal, and boost luxury cars and race them. He knew how to hotwire vehicles by the age of 12, and was running with gangs by the time he was 15. He’d get into fights and was just generally a nuisance, on a bad path that his sister, Emily, tried hard to keep him off. She didn’t manage, though, and he did end up getting caught and charged and spent a few years in prison. While he was in, he was found by our main antagonist who promised to give him a “purpose” and get him out. The reason for this is that Cor makes a good dog, does what he’s told… and is immune to the abilities of most of the people the antagonist has been kidnapping. Cor gets put in charge of Nico which is basically just a good time for him. He absolutely is more of a dick than Nico deserves but gradually he starts to get attached to his “charge”. He’s VERY protective of Nico despite being employed by the Big Bad. Eventually something happens that snaps Cor’s loyalty to the boss and he gives in to the fact that he cares about and wants to help Nico. Cor was ACTUALLY originally created for a band AU in which he’s a guitarist. In almost all iterations, he either was or is a barber as well, because it suits him and also he has few employment opportunities with jobstoppers. One last fun fact about Cor… he has both nipples pierced. Because why not? ***

[solitaireships]

Gonna carry Mark and Peter around on my purse now

[solitaireships]

How I encourage my friend

[solitaireships]

Untitled Investigative Minds Ficlet

Alright, final fic for the night, thank you all for dealing with the influx of pieces from me lol. Yes this is another very personal one bcs this is basically me living the fantasy of my f/os comforting me when I'm getting really bad period cramps bcs the ones that wake you up in the middle of the night truly are an evil creation

Also, the debut of me shipping with Strahm! This takes place in an AU separate from the usual Missing Piece canon, with this being a modern AU. I don’t have the full specifics of the AU, but Mark and Shepard are married in it and Strahm is Mark’s bf and Shepard’s qpp

Rating: Teen

Genre: Fluff

Words: 768 words

Divider by saradika

Content warning: periods + period cramps

The first night of Shepard’s period is always the worst. It’s not unusual for her to wake up in the middle of the night feeling like her insides are tearing themselves apart— something that happened tonight at 3 in the morning. The time she spent in the bathroom barely helped with the pain and nausea, and the Advil she took hasn’t kicked into effect as she made her way back into bed. 

Getting back into bed is harder than it used to be. Shepard shared a bed with just Mark for years, but now that she shares a bed with both her husband and his boyfriend, she has two people to navigate around to get to her spot in the middle of the bed. Mark is snoring, and she’s pretty sure that Peter’s asleep, but it’s hard to tell for sure. She knows Mark’s a deep sleeper, so she climbs over him, slotting in between him and Peter and hoping she didn’t bother either of them. 

She cuddles up to Mark’s side, hoping the painkiller she took will take effect so she doesn’t keep feeling like she’s about to throw up. Maybe then it’ll be easier for her to go back to sleep. 

Shepard lays in silence for a moment, trying not to get too caught up in her discomfort. She can’t help but let out a soft, pained noise that she tries to muffle against Mark’s shoulder. She must not have completely silenced the noise, though, because she feels a hand brush against her side and Peter shifts closer to her. 

“Are you alright?” he grumbles, his voice rough with sleep. 

“I’m fine. Sorry if I woke you up,” she says. 

“You were in the bathroom for a while,” he comments. “What’s wrong?”

Shepard feels a pang of guilt in her chest at that. She must have woken up him when she got out of bed originally. That had to have been thirty minutes or so ago now. She hopes he got at least a little sleep before she just woke him up again. 

And she hopes that explaining what’s wrong won’t be too awkward. She hates having to talk about this with people.

“Sorry. I… I’m on my period,” she says. 

“Cramps, then?” Peter asks. 

“And nausea.”

“I don’t think mine ever got to the point of waking me up in the middle of the night. At least not often.”

“You’re a lucky man,” Shepard says, as dry as she can. 

“Even luckier now that I don’t have them anymore,” Peter says.

“God, yeah.”

Peter cuddles closer to Shepard. She can feel his breath on the back of her neck with how her hair’s pulled back into a bun, and the warmth of it is pleasant. 

Just being with Peter is pleasant, though. Shepard hadn’t expected getting close to him like this. When Mark started flirting with him, she had figured what they had would stay between just the two of them, with Peter being able to fulfill Mark’s needs in ways that Shepard couldn’t. But things evolved between the two of them, going from coworkers-with-benefits to boyfriends, and as Peter got more involved in Mark's life, he also got more involved in Shepard’s. And, like she did with Mark, she ended up liking him a lot more than she expected. 

Shepard doesn’t love Peter in the same way, though. What she has with Mark is romantic. Her and Peter’s relationship is better described as queerplatonic. It’s still new, but it’s exciting. At least when she’s not regretting her entire life because of cramps. 

Relief floods over her though as Peter wraps his arms around her, sliding his hands under her shirt. They’re warm, and he rubs gentle circles into her stomach. The combined pressure of Peter against her back and Mark to her front is soothing too, allowing her tense muscles to relax. 

Shepard sighs. “Strahm.”

“Is that good for you?” he asks. 

“Great,” she says. 

“Then close your eyes and go to sleep. I’m not going to do this forever,” Peter says. His tone is snippy, but she knows he’s just putting on an act. 

Peter likes to go through life with a prickly outer shell, keeping anyone from getting too close. But Shepard knows him well enough to know he would keep doing this as long as he had to, even if he would complain about it. He’s nicer than even he likes to admit. 

“Thank you,” she says. “And good night.”

“Good night, Shepard,” Peter replies. He plants a quick kiss on the back of her neck. “Now go back to sleep.”

[solitaireships]

👑💕 for the s/i ask!

Answering for Shepard!

👑: What’s something about your self-insert that completely matches up with you irl?

One of them is an obvious thing, but I’m Shepherd and she’s Shepard lol. She also has glasses, and both of us love escape rooms! She also has my sense of justice and belief in rehabilitative justice

💞: What canon character has the most in common with your self-insert?

Peter tbh lol. tho with a pinch of Lindsey in there too. With Shepard and Peter tho, both of them are high stress autistic people who are ridiculously determined so they’re matching a little. And they’re qpps about it

[solitaireships]

Gonna talk about some mental health related stuff for my f/os since this month is also mental health awareness month!

Also, with all my self inserts basically being me, they pretty much have the same stuff as me going on. So all of them have autism and probably some kind of anxiety and maybe PMDD? idk, like me they have not gotten tested for any of that lol

Everything else going below the cut bcs this is long (tho the info I give gets shorter the further down you go)

Starting off with Bruce, the comic miniseries Batman: The Imposter said that he most likely has autism, possibly GAD, OCD, and PTSD, with the PTSD coming from watching his parents die. His obsessions are mainly focused around protecting Gotham, with the compulsion in response to that being to work as Batman

James also has autism and PTSD, with his PTSD having been from the mission he was serving on when the rest of his team died and the right half of his body was severely burned, then leading to him getting his prosthetics. He also has hallucinations from time to time, both visual and auditory, with this being a symptom of his PTSD

Chae-Yeong has PTSD, OCD, and autism. Her PTSD comes from witnessing her biological father get killed in front of her on her birthday. Her OCD obsessions and compulsions are similar to Bruce's, those hers are more broadly based around protecting people as much as possible, then being the Scarlet Shepherd as a compulsion in response to that

Mark is an alcoholic in recovery, with him having started drinking as a coping mechanism when he was dealing with the grief of his sister dying

Jayce has inattentive ADHD and some trauma following the events at the Shimmer Factory

Xianyun is autistic! Ae’s special interest is inventing stuff and she loves info dumping to me about aer creations :)

Luke is autistic and has some anxiety which usually leads to him getting irritable and generally speaking being pretty closed off

Alexander has PTSD and GAD, with his anxiety being exacerbated by the position he’s being put in by the Powers That Be

Boone has autism, PTSD, and is a recovering alcoholic. His wife’s death combined with everything at Bitter Springs led to him developing PTSD and have a depressive episode, which is also what led to him drinking

Miguel has autism and depression. In AUs where he ends up losing Gabriella, he also has PTSD from witnessing her death

Strahm is autistic and has checking and rumination based OCD. A big compulsive behavior he has is clicking his pen repeatedly

Yanfei has autism and combined type ADHD! I don't really have more to say here, I've already said a lot on this lol

[solitaireships]

I went through and revised my ship charts a while back! This is gonna be post 1 out of a couple lol

Helena art by me, Alex and Shepard were designed with this picrew!

[solitaireships]

Shepard and Peter are both autistic. Mark is not but also he does have autistic tendencies

[solitaireships]

At last I have wifi, so here’s some ship charts for Coffeeshipping and Investigative Minds! The special agent partners get to have their charts made together. I skipped the confession scale for Shepard and Strahm since they didn’t really have a confession

Josie was made with this picrew, Shepard made with this one

[solitaireships]

They both look so good here (ignore the context)

[solitaireships]

Ok. The qpp ship name here is Investigative Minds bcs Strahm’s in the FBI and Shepard is an escape room maker which requires investigative skills too. Also they’re only together in a modern au, which I’m still fleshing out