Esoteric:
The Prologue
He enters the swimming pool that in unwritten names, talks of a dead boy once named Carl Powers... He feels faded between lines of being over three hundred years old and thirteen again for the second time. His shoes echo from the walls, the ground.
(The line between being incredibly ancient and being who he currently is not a line, but a wet blur of ink on parchment.)
"My name's Jim Moriarty." A voice, made familiar by traces and ghosts calls out in the distance, taunting his victim in the distance. There's an old soldier ahead of him, an unbalanced genius, and a psychopath.
He is still the Queen's Watchdog, no matter what happens.
His orders are a fair bit more complicated this time and far more direct than they had been three hundred years ago, but time and technology did things to people, to places to render them completely unrecognizable.
"Hi."
He aims a DNA-activated handgun over the chest of the psychopath, aiming for the shoulder. The shadows hide him, and the target lights on the other two men's bodies are falsely lit.
By the time the Bruce-Partington plans drop into the water, the psychopath's chest is exploding with blood. A long time ago, he knows that he might have ordered his Butler to do the job for him. But part of what makes the blur of ink visible is his ruthless practicality. He has grown, in some ways.
The little black USB slowly drifted to the bottom of the pool, and with it, a few tendrils of blood leaked in, spreading like desolate, many-fingered hands to the gutter.
He tucks away his gun.
"James Moriarty, I shall be bringing you in." He says coldly, looking past the two other, shocked men in favor of the indignant figure that is Moriarty. Ironic, then that it should be that Carl Powers had died in the pool from the psychopath-And that the psychopath should be brought to his knees in the same spot.
(His duties to England's monarchy were never over, despite being delayed by death.)