The walls writhed with memories.

The small laptop hummed softly on the desktop, plain and simple wood bought from some inelegantly built square-box-building store. He'd loved working with his hands, at least he thought he had, but the construction of the thing reminded Quartermain more of children's blocks than woodworking. How simple the people of the modern nights, he mused, looking at the bare apartment. It, like that too bright box building, was an offense to his eye. Blank wall space seemed to writhe and spiral from a want of anything to mar it, and the simple rooms - square boxes inside square boxes, seemed stifling.

How ignoble, he mused, leaning back in the chair as the bank account balance displayed on the screen. How ignoble, how foul, how unjust, to be reduced to this meager measure of existence as one cube inside cubes inside cubes. How did the kine of these nights survive inside their penitent cells among abbeys of mere adequacy? How did they not simply go stark raving mad from the sameness of it all; where was the art, where was the elegant lines of buildings?

Man, he mused, be they monster or mortal, was more than some honeybee to sit amid similar cells and singular structures. Man, and most definitely monster, was meant for more - for variety and elegance and the grand sweeping structures that only the truly timeless could plan, arrange, and build.

His eyes roamed over the cell, he found he could not think of it any other way, once again. He'd come to the States in order to join what had remained of the nobility in the mundane world; the wealthy. And for a time, he had - the social 'courts' of the kine had reminded him so much of the old world, despite being based on wealth instead of Breeding - and yet even that now had vanished in the fog of time and faded memory.

One hand stroked over the thick beard on his face as he felt something in his back stiffen. If a penitent's cell this must be, let it be the place from which he built; the place from which he was able to focus on what he must build anew. His 'retirement' to this abbey of sameness, one cell among many in the small hive that the kine called an "apartment building" might have been forced upon him by the vagaries of the Requiem, but if there was one thing Robert Quartermain knew, despite the fog of torpor within his mind, it was that he would build and build again.

But first, he would need help....