this was a self challenge: write something that takes place before electricity was invented (without looking up any details of that time)
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"Count Mariner, what are you doing here?" the lady of the house asked, clearly on one.
"Diamond, shush," the Count quieted his yapping Shiba Inu, "Mary Beth, I've tried being patient, but I know you. You've taken bigger risks before and you'll take bigger ones again, so it's time you gave me an answer."
"No."
"'No', as in that's your answer, or 'No' as in you won't give me an answer?" the Count countered.
"Enough, I've had it with your silly games of wit. My answer is no, as in I would never go all in on a business with you. Not after what you've put my father through. The anguish, the torment. You know you drove him to... you drove him..." Mary Beth trailed off.
"I what? Where did I drive him? The shop? The mall?"
Mary Beth's father was a financier, and a good one. Until the Count came into his life. The two built these great dreams (driven by the Count's propensity to the imagined) of what the world could be, and Mary Beth's father fell victim to their attempt at actualization. How could he have known that after throwing all of his money into the Count's plan to build a tunnel system between his home and the Mayor's house as a means of influencing local policy, the Count would sue him for intellectual property, causing Mary Beth's father to go bankrupt? He should have known, but how could he have? Now Mary Beth was forced to rely on her own husband's dwindling income to support her lifestyle (addiction to gambling).
"You drove him to drink," Mary Beth bit back, "and die. You drove him to drink and die."
Suddenly, the lord of the house appeared. It seems the two's tones weren't as hushed as they'd hoped. He was completely nude and all out of sorts.
"Wife? What are you doing up at this ungodly hour?" he asked Mary Beth.
"Charles, dear, you've lost yourself in the night. Retire to bed if you'd please," the lady of the house responded.
"Why? So you can proceed in your affair with this scoundrel?"
"Nothing of the sort is happening here," Mary Beth assured him.
"Enough. In these twelve years of matrimony, I've come to learn you raise your rightmost eyebrow up in the air when you lie, as I see you're doing now," Charles said, reflexively performing the gesture as he spoke. He was right that his wife had this tell, and that she had done it this very morning when she told him she would be delighted to have his parents visit for the winter months, however, she was not doing it now. He was looking at his own face in a mirror, unaware that his wife was off to his left, "Now, I want the truth and I want it from this man. Count Mariner: is my wife attempting to seduce you for reasons personal or professional?"
"About as much as you are, old man," the Count said with a chuckle, he always laughed at his own jokes.
Was this answer enough for the lord of the house? Likely not, as Charles was on a pill. It was a special regimen, straight from his doctor, to help cure his liver, which at this very moment was looking for the emergency exit. The side effects were simple in concept, though complex in their magnitude. Basically, they just made him act "nuts", for lack of a better term. The sciences were a very young field, and only those with Charles's status (high, though less so than the Count) could afford the risk of experimenting with them. Charles was convinced his wife was preparing to take off in the night with her own arch-rival to begin anew atop a top tropic (topical, he thought, given the discussions he and his wife had about someday visiting the Maldives once his condition was better managed).
And so the lord of the house pulled out his hunting whistle, blew it, and before anybody knew what was happening, the Count's dog Diamond prepared to maul all three humans in the room to death.
The dog was entranced as if acting on some primal instinct to kill. She went for the Count first, the saddest detail of all. Any shred of loyalty to her owner evaporated the instant she heard the whistle's tone. Mary Beth and Charles screamed, but that only encouraged the dog's work. Diamond was smart, she knew where the heart was, and she knew how hard she would have to bite.
Mary Beth tried to kick the dog, but Diamond was too fast, grabbing the lady of the house's foot in her mouth, and using the Count's corpse as leverage to throw Mary Beth face-first into the mirror hanging on the wall. Glass (mirrors are made of glass) shattered about, illuminating the room with an almost gay spirit. It was in these shards that one could see Charles's naked body, very poorly hidden behind a rail-thin lamp. He thought he was better concealed, but alas, his pill. Regardless of his prowess in the art of hiding from a dog who had just gotten the insatiable taste for human blood, Diamond could smell him, and made quick work of disassembling each appendage of his body.
