The Unspeakable Story

**The Adventure of the Unspeakable Story** is a roleplay from *The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes* roleplay series, featuring the characters of Sherlock Holmes, John H. Watson, James Moriarty and introduced Watson's niece, Iris Watson.

## The Roleplay

### Part I:

A few years after the trial of Cosney Megundal, Dr. Watson arrived downstairs at 221B Baker Street to find Holmes scraping away loudly on the violin as Mrs. Hudson served up breakfast.

This was then followed by the arrival of Watson's 10 year-old niece, Iris, who had completed her education surprisingly quickly at boarding school and even became a qualified doctor in her own right. She even made a new form of cat-flap making machine, which allowed Harley, Valentine, Glupi, Hugo S. Catman, Wagahai and Larry to enter 221B to take over breakfast.

As it turned out, Holmes had collected his violin from Hatch's Pawnshop the day previous, but instead of grabbing his violin, accidentally ended up lifting a viola instead.

The gang decided to head down to Hatch's to try and resolve the situation.

#### Difficult Disc-ussions

At Hatch's pawn shop, they ended up bumping into Penny Pincher, who was being served by Hatch as she collected a coat, barely acknowledging Holmes and the two Watsons as she did so.

After Holmes collected his violin, a mysterious man calling himself Eggs Benedict entered, claiming that the coat that had been collected by Penny was actually his own property, and was able to name the correct passphrase ("**PROFESSOR**") that would be required to collect the coat and the music box disc that was inside its pocket.

Holmes immediately began joint reasoning, incorrectly claiming that instead of the man wanting to claim the coat and disc, he intended to get a job in the pawnshop to use Hatch's basement to dig underneath the road outside to the CatWest Bank on the opposite side of the road where the government was holding money to be used to fund the upcoming World's Fair.

As it turns out, Watson deduced, the man instead tried to claim ownership of the music box disc by reading the passphrase from Hatch's ledger on the desk by the till, and was likely using an alias, seeing as the initials on his cane were **R.M** and not **E.B**.

Infuriated, the man drew a pistol and decided that if Penny or Hatch weren't going to let him have the disc then he would take it by force. His robbery attempt, however, was interrupted by Tobias Gregson arriving in response to a call put out by Hatch in the means of a panic button underneath the desk. The man was immediately taken away for questioning.

That night, Iris invited Penny to Baker Street for a sleepover and celebratory dinner. After Holmes and Iris went to bed early, Penny told Watson of her deep distrust of other people, though Watson told her that people can sometimes be pleasantly surprising.

#### The Great Detective - shot!

That night, Holmes woke Watson up at around one o'clock in the morning, alerting him that Penny wasn't in her bed and that the lights were on in Hatch's pawnshop, meaning that it was highly likely that Hatch was being robbed.

The two of them quickly got dressed and headed down to Hatch's quickly, trying to catch the perpetrators in the act. But upon opening the door, however, shots were fired and the mysterious man and two unknown men managed to escape. Holmes fell on the ground, having been shot in his side.

At Holmes's instruction, Watson immediately went to check the back area of Hatch's shop, finding Hatch's dead body on the ground next to an unconscious Penny Pincher, and immediately called for the police.

### Part II: Watson's on the case!

At St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Dr. Joseph Bell explained to Watson that Holmes had been taken into surgery, and because they were going to apply an experimental form of anesthesia, he wouldn't be conscious for some time. However, he remained in a stable condition.

Dr. Bell also explained that Holmes had a music box disc, or at least a copy of one made out of chocolate, on his person at the time of the attack, and that it could be useful evidence to find out what happened during the robbery.

Watson returned home to break the news to Iris, who resolved to help her uncle on the investigation.

Hatch's Pawnshop was already being investigated by several constables along with Greg Lestrade, who was the assistant detective in-charge of the investigation. As such, he wasn't able to grant Watson official permission to investigate the crime scene, and he would instead need to obtain that from Gregson instead, who was currently attending a meeting with Minister Hart Vortex at the Ministry of Justice.

The resolve to investigate was strengthened after it was revealed that Penny had been arrested on the charge of having murdered Hatch.

#### The High-Powered Meeting

At the Ministry of Justice, Vortex and Gregson met along with Mycroft Holmes with regards to a secret investigation connected to Hatch's murder case, and were given a copy of Hatch's autopsy report by coroner Mike Stamford, who was just leaving at the time Watson entered.

It was explained that a number of telegram messages were leaked from the Ministry of Justice, and that Gregson was being tasked with preventing the messages from going public and to catch the perpetrator through any means necessary. However; the investigation to remain entirely secret under the Official Secrets Act, and should only be brought up if it was relevant to the murder investigation. Watson, needless to say, was granted permission to investigate, and could visit Penny in Newgate Gaol as and when he needed to.

#### Penny in a Pinch

At the scene of the crime, it was discovered that a struggle had indeed taken place and that the murderer may have been looking for something in particular, likely to be a music box that would be able to play the disc. Watson also made sure to confirm that a number of his manuscripts from *The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes* - especially The Unspeakable Story that Holmes wouldn't allow him to publish - were intact and hadn't been removed.

Using Holmes's experimental blood detection spray, they were able to figure out that two different people had been injured at the time of the robbery. One obviously being Holmes, and the other being an unknown third person.

At Newgate, Watson tried to interview Penny in-order to figure out what had happened, but she initially refused to tell, even as far as going to confess to the crime. Some persuasion from the two Dr. Watsons, however, made her reveal that Beppo DeDriver – the cab driver from the previous incident – had lodged Megundal's coat for him at the pawnshop after he had murdered Morta Milverton, and that he required Penny to both cooperate with him in court when the case was brought to trial and that she should withdraw the coat from the shop should anything happen to him (which it did), and that failure to comply would result in Megundal sending several thugs around to destroy the slums where she and other children lived.

#### Russian to Conclusions

With that information, Watson returned to the scene and continued his investigation, and met with a rather strange Russian man and a telegraph operator. When examining the scene of the crime, the Russian man explained that there were no bullet fragments lodged in the wall. Instead, they were likely to be bits of brass. He then asked Watson where he could find some fertilizer on the way to the crystal tower before leaving.

Tobias Gregson offered Watson the opportunity to interrogate two burglars, Nemmy and Tully Tinpillar, who had been arrested for attempting to flee the scene of the crime last night along with several thousand pounds' worth of stolen goods.

Watson attempted to interrogate the two, however, they proved to be rather uncooperative and unhelpful, with Gregson at one point shaking Nemmy quite vigorously in search of something. The two ended up proving to be useful, however, when they managed to give a description of a man who would be matched in-name by Ms. Morse as being Robert Milverton, a telegraph operator for the Ministry of Justice.

A warrant was issued for Milverton's arrest, and the man was brought in to be interrogated by Watson. The man initially proved to be uncooperative, but later admitted to robbing the pawnshop but refused to confess to the murder of Hatch Windibank and the attempted murder of Sherlock Holmes.

At that moment, Holmes appeared and admitted that he had outrun several doctors called Whittaker, Capaldi, Smith, Tennant and Eccleston in order to tell him that when he was shot, it instead knocked into his test tube pouch and triggered an explosive chemical reaction to go off, sending several bits of brass flying about the room which, in turn, hit Milverton who did have a shoulder wound.

This was before Holmes collapsed again and had to be brought back to hospital.

At several points during the interrogation, Gregson seemed to be giving information to Milverton, but refused to tell Watson why exactly he was whispering. Watson deduced that Gregson was helping Milverton in connection with cooperating in his own investigation, and that Milverton had indeed murdered Windibank, as he knew several pieces of information about the state of the crime scene that he shouldn't have otherwise known.

Milverton immediately broke down, breaking his cane in two and using the pieces to try and strangle Gregson.

#### What Really Happened:

Robert Milverton was approached by Cosney Megundal to try and obtain information about the government from leaking the contents of several telegram messages to him. In order to do so, Milverton asked his father, Morta, to encode the messages in morse code on two music box discs.

Fearing for his son's life, however, Morta decided to take matters into his own hands and give over the music box discs and the box itself to Megundal. Infuriated that Milverton wouldn't face him himself, Megundal stabbed Morta and left him to die in the omnibus carriage, and tried to manipulate the evidence during the trial to ensure a not guilty verdict.

Milverton, however, heard what Megundal had done, and decided to avenge his father's death by killing Megundal himself. He bribed several bailiffs at the Old Bailey and disguised himself as a bailiff who was going to help Megundal destroy more evidence. He then locked Megundal in the carriage before setting it on fire, destroying the carriage and killing Megundal at the same time.

Two years later, Milverton went to try and retrieve the two discs from Hatch's pawnshop, where upon he was stopped from doing so by Holmes and Watson. Milverton then decided that he would attempt to steal the discs and the box later that night in a robbery, with the help of his two childhood friends.

When trying to rob the place, Milverton accidentally shot and killed Hatch through the heart, the shock of doing so causing Penny Pincher to pass out. He then framed her for his murder by locking the two of them in the back room.

When Holmes and Watson arrived on the scene of the case yet again, Milverton went to shoot Holmes but instead hit his chemical pouch, triggering a chain reaction that would injure Holmes and cause send several pieces of shrapnel towards his shoulder, wounding him in the process.

Gregson would then cooperate with Milverton to try and get him found innocent by feeding him information about the scene of the crime, in return for returning the leaked information to him.

### Afterwards

Gregson and Milverton were taken away by "Inspector Glupison", and Penny was later released and discharged back to 221B Baker Street and Holmes was released from hospital, now having fully recovered. She gave a teary thank you to Holmes and Watson for helping her.

Mycroft Holmes then appeared to inform them that the investigation around the stolen telegrams had been completed, and that the music box discs and the box to play them in had been retrieved from Milverton's home, before he then played it for the group.

> **K. ASOUGI, T. GREGSON, A. SASHA, O. SACKER. ALL OF THE ABOVE.**
>
>

The true answer, however, to the meaning of the leaked telegram message would remain a mystery for quite some time to come.

Afterwards, Moriarty reflected on the case, and decided that it was time now to bring matters into his own hands.

## Notes, References and Running Gags:

* The Hugo Cameo - Hugo appears in the beginning of the roleplay, squeezing himself through the cat flap like all the other cats in the room. He later then appears on Baker Street reading the newspaper showing off the mysterious Russian man's true identity;
* The Red Headed League - This Sherlock Holmes story is referenced through Holmes's false deduction about Milverton's true motive for visiting the pawnshop;
* It is always 1895 - For the duration of the case, Holmes is staying in Room 1895 in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, which is also the hospital where Holmes and Watson first met;
* This is the first roleplay not to have featured a title character in the majority of the actual roleplay itself.