Detective Helsing down in the village

  Now I know what all the brouhaha a few nights ago was about. Helsing has been down in the village since last Tuesday. Doesn't he keep his schedule full enough going after Dracula? I can't imagine what he tells them down at Interpol: "No, see, Newton-Steyn is the original Dr. Frankenstein, the one who built the monsters 200 years ago... I don't know, he's obviously learned the trick to not dying, it seems. I don't think the whole monster idea was just to re-animate corpses, though he still seems to be up to that old stunt even now. Is anyone watching the morgues or cemeteries as I requested?"

  There he would be correct about the immortality thing, or I am projecting too much personal insight into my imagined scenario of Helsing trying to convince his superiors that I should be deeply investigated. They can watch all the morgues and cemeteries till they themselves become tenants. Neither Igor nor myself have traversed that hole, so to speak, since the early days. The chimera protein only needs a consistent course DNA strand from an original host, preferably one that is from an older person about to become deceased. There is less likelihood of a completed creature being mistaken for a youthful version of the host due to the passage of time and steadily diminishing numbers of the host's peers who could recall their youthful appearance. Changing fashion and hairstyle covers the rest of it. 

  Probably our luck we inadvertently retrieved a sample from some near-terminal aged relative of Helsing's and he ended up by sheer coincidence bumping into one of the active creatures and recognized some unusually distinct Helsing family characteristic; then found comparison to old family photos depicting deceased relatives of his as their younger selves. Probably I should do a little digging to confirm or disprove this hunch. I have left DNA retrieval up to Igor and the interns, but it would be ridiculous to try to saddle them with a whole bunch of extrapolated precautionary wherefores and whatifs. Their tasks are tough enough, lurking around nursing homes and the geriatric wards, sizing up candidates without drawing undue attention. Until I spelled it out more concisely to him, Igor used to show up with whole fingers or toes (if I was lucky). "I just need cells, a lock of hair will do the trick". That lesson sunk in that night, for I am sure that despite his being the only other beneficiary of the chimera protein enhancement,  Igor was never the keenest of sprinters. 
  Some way must be found to encourage Helsing to sprint his way back to darkest Transylvania and keep his honed pestering technique aimed solely at Dracula.

Helping the less fortunate

   My good friend Leo Tolstoy (author of 'War and Peace' and some other stuff) actually did walk among the slums of tsarist Russia giving away money. He came to rue his efforts, noting it a waste. "They blew it on booze or other frivolities" he griped, even after he tried to counsel them on what to do with it. Then they wanted more, from him. State welfare works to greater/lesser degrees, but an individual's benevolence is greeted in much the same manner as the overturning of an armored truck full of money. It only gets looted.

small failures

  I suffer somewhat upon the emotional scale anytime one of my re-animated corpses bites the dust. Or maybe I should say 're-bites' the dust, considering they were corpses before I re-animated them. 
  Mostly it's an ego thing. It's not like I see them as my children, it's more like the agonized puppeteer whose star marionette suffers string tangles or breakage in the middle of a performance.   

   However - the puppeteer doesn't have the problem of his puppets intentionally breaking loose for the purpose of running roughshod over first the audience and then by turn the countryside.

The village, Igor's ancestor and the sheep

 Igor worked for my grandfather, so we've known each other for my entire life. His "great great great" (as he tells it) grandfather was among the party that came from the Ruhr to this valley with one of my earlier ancestors. I point out to him that since the foundations of our castle's  original keep were built by that same group of settlers starting sometime in the 12th century, it had to be someone much earlier than his grandfather's grandfather or whoever.
  I do know that this ancestor of his was the character which inspired the naming of the post village as 'Heidlelwiche Constabulary'. The village's leather bound record books, which I moved (right before the first world war) from the back of the post office to a room down the hall from our lab, holds the names of everyone who was part of that group. Among them a notable character was Horstorach Igorenstein, who appointed himself as 'the constable' of the village. Local legend recalls stories of this person's services performed in the capacity of what authority his office entailed, as interpreted by him as exercises in the fullest expression of that authority. Had the villagers of that time not been imbued with a worthy sense of humor from the hardships of their journeys, then not for a lack of hardship's endurance of their self anointed constable's exercise of his office was that sensibility brought to a state of keenly tuned precision. Examples:
  - The sheep must be named, individually (by Horstorach).
  - All trade or commerce must be 'officiated' in the village square after lunch but before supper or sunset, 'whichever came first' (sic).
  - A chart must be ascribed that 'predicted' what days of the year sunset might come before supper so that certificates of trade (valued & sold by Horstorach) might be used to officiate each trade as recorded in the village records.
  These rules go on and on. I do have to consider had he not been so obsessive that the villagers might not have had any kind of written record, and so now thanks mostly to Horstorach we have all the books that I rescued from the rear of the post office so they might be safer from destruction in case the war came through here.
   What ended up being recorded were Horstorach's initial official decrees, but aside from a few entries attempting to fulfill their edicts, it seems as though some unrecorded compromise mollified any further application of authority to maintain as directed the carrying out of those decrees....in numerous circumstances. There is one page neatly full of single names that seem to comprise the size of the village's herd of sheep, for at the top of the page it merely says 'Sheep'. But  there are no later pages with names given to new lambs or further additions acquired through trade.
   "That's because they ate the lambs before he could name them." chimes Igor, reading over my shoulder. Annoyed, I point out to him that they obviously did not eat them all, for in the pasture around the village to this day graze the descendants of the herd his ancestor gave the names to. I know for certain that they are descendants because they all in one way or another carry various genetic markers that indicate they were the offspring of some of my earliest test subjects when I was a lad back in the late 18th century. I experimented on sheep before I realized I could get away with using humans. That sheep existed in the pastures around the village from the 12th century to the late 18th century must indicate that the villagers did not eat all the lambs, and from the late 18th century to now we know for certain they are from the same herd because of the six legs, double tails, disturbing parrot-like 'speech' instead of bleats, and (in some cases) three eyes. This must be the thousandth instance where I have attempted to get Igor to understand something using deduction through observation and applied logic. 
  "They stopped eating any of them once the extra parts started to appear." he remarks, assuring me in some small way that he is at least capable of retaining his own observations. If this is intended by him to be some kind of smart-guy comment at the expense of my early work, well, someone currently employed not as a half-nutty village constable but as a half-wit dimbulb hunchback smartguy oaf lab assistant / slave who might feel the discipline of the lash later. He is still reading over my shoulder, so I know he saw that thing about the lash. 
   Ah hell, I can hear moaning. Igor hears it too and he shuffles off in the direction of the holding pens. I should go have a look as well.

What's that sound?

   I think I hear something  that causes me to consider the villagers may be outside again with the torches and sharp farm implements. What is it this time, I wonder; another creature on it's way back here via homing beacon inadvertently killed someone? Or perhaps Igor got found out trying to pass his 'gold coins'. His lab-forged proofs are actually made from yellow-bronze brain insulation foil wrapped around a small chunk of lead then 'stamped' to coin size in the bone crusher. I wonder what gave it away, the portrait of my grandfather on one side, or the self portrait of Igor on the other. Both are extremely crude, stick-figure men type likenesses. The eyes are circles with a dot in the middle. I only know who they are intended to be because Igor showed me, seeking praise for his handiwork.
   I tried to explain to him he was more likely to get away with it if he used a portrait on one side only and a relief of our castle on the other, more in the fashion of real coins.

Igor (1 of many)

  Igor just dropped a whole box of new Petri dishes. I could tell that maybe half of them smashed to bits from the sound. It's not the first time this has happened.
He sees me eyeing the horsewhip on the wall, but no longer bothers with another episode of cringe-n-scrape begging for mercy, there is no profit in it.

Typical work related issue

   Unusual fluctuations within the brainstem lightpipe ganglion conduit on the latest creature. Basically a protein enhanced fiber optic bus, the ganglion conduit allows a steady current into the brainstem regardless of variables in the metabolic rate. Environmental influences can vary the metabolic rate, the creatures perform better with mammalian or 'warm blooded' metabolisms than a metabolism that mimics reptilian or a 'cold blooded' nature. Either design has it's pros and cons, it's just easier to deal with an agitated ape than an agitated dragon.

Global Warming

  It's caused by cow burps and farts.
  All we have to do is fit all global food chain livestock with oral and anal methane collectors. No more cow farts and burps released into the atmosphere = massively reduced threat of the threat.(?) Think of the jobs created building the collectors and hiring teams to fit them to all the cattle and periodically collecting the methane for burning in power plants.
  Then build a giant metal space sun screen to give Earth's magnetic field a breather on weekends.

Immortality and guardians of global economy

   Anyone paying the least bit of attention and employing even the loosest elements of deductive reasoning will conclude that the whole of my efforts back in the late 18th century were obviously a means of developing a path to immortality. I think Mary Shelley alluded to it somewhat, in that neatly composed biography. I intend to fill in select finer points, herein various media to follow.
   I suppose you can suppose that I succeeded in my bid, as you are reading current entries posted by me, and are sure to realize my nom-de-plume serves only to throw off only the basest of perceptions. There are things to tell, subjects to broach, concepts to dangle. For your edification, for my need to vent. First off, I am over 250 years old. The cells of my body are suspended in an artificial (not naturally occurring) chimera protein. It allows a rejuvenation of the chromosome telomerase cycle which balances on a fifteen link structure that never allows the enzyme to shorten. Only at the 'south end' will the end link shorten and drop off, and then the protein chimera structure builds a new link at the 'north end'. The north-south label is not figurative, the chain really does have a detectable alignment with the Earth's magnetic field. A simple diet sustains the mechanism and it works on a 16 to 22 month cycle. It was my third creature's creation that illuminated this principle.
   Sometimes I have some difficulty convincing myself that I haven't created some new kind of symbiotic cellular parasite, living one to each cell of my body. Cellular division is unusual: as each cell divides, one of the split new cells always dies. So it remains a one for one exchange of cell rather than expansion of the organism. (hint: this mechanism would be ideal for identifying cancerous elements before they grew to the point of becoming a threat). Hence my concern of the parasitic property, I may be sustaining an organism that is only able at division to transfer to one of the new cells. The other new cell dies immediately from the absence of the needed chimera. My metabolism is about one fifth of a normal adult, yet I never exhibit any symptoms that would be atypical of an average 42-45 year old Euro-caucasian male.
   Either no one else has discovered this, or it's well guarded. Too much too soon for the world; there is as of yet no means of assessing affects on global economy via a scaled delineation model that could be used to determine at what point a product that prolongs life indefinitely could be introduced without causing severe-to-catastrophic socio-economic disruption. A few storied analysts like to think there are such instruments and they themselves wield them with deft nimble acuity, but they are just shooting guns into a dark room and assuming the groan and plop of a body hitting the floor to be evidence that they hit their target and are therefore marksmen. They did hit a target but they are only lucky, always analyzing no further to determine the specifics of whether it's good or bad luck. If that is possible. No one is able (or more likely willing) to turn the lights on to see.
  Plus it would be difficult to give a Nobel prize to a person that nearly all of the world population considers to be a fictional being.

Helpful lab hints #1

   I admire and commend any experiment where working throughput requires at some point the application of an ignition source to flammable material.
   However, to avoid risk of bodily harm it is advisable to engage the services of undead minions. Have them do the 'hands-on' work while you watch safely from a distance. Should any mishaps occur you simply sew them back together. Better than them trying to sew you back together. They are more likely to consume your dismembered parts than provide ad-hoc surgery.
   Then Igor hit on the idea of recruiting interns from my alma maters.

Dr. Frankenstein, the fictional representation

  He's a lot smarter than I am, for a fictional being. This fictional being based on me (but named for my grandfather Victor) is always portrayed in video media as some kind of kook, the archetype 'mad scientist'. The Mary Shelley version is much closer to the operative reality in which I currently live and from where once whence I dwelt, as a humble Victorian era practitioner of the healing arts.
  In the movie version they make it seem like the first re-animated corpse just ran amok the countryside; flinging little girls into ponds, confounding blind old men, etc. In truth, he never left the castle on account of intense agoraphobia. He stayed in the dungeon, spent all his time befriending turtles and mice. Strange, yes?

Ongoing funding is no problem

  Nikola Tesla was an intern or lab assistant here right after he left university. Regarding certain contributions to efforts he may or may not have made, I didn't want to be forced to pay him. So I cheated Igor of his notional immortality by renaming the "Igor Coil" as (the) "Tesla Coil".
  But judging from the state of the world since the late 1800's I would say Nikola learned a great deal from my innovations. Everything except how to manage money, perhaps. You know the story of him tearing up his Westinghouse contract, the one that would have made him the world's first billionaire? It was all true, but he tore it up because it had a become a worthless document - after the transfer of it's principal value to my ownership. He signed it over to me in gratitude for merely naming that stupid sparking gizmo after him. That, and after a courier I sent 'reminded' Nikola just where he really got his ideas...
   Now I am worth...well, trillions. And that big electrical concern doesn't dare breathe a word to the public. How would it look for them if the world knew who really invented and holds active contract patents on nearly all AC power generation principles? Looks like I'll never run short of funds though...
   I tell people it's all just family money.
   Well, it is now!! ah-HA HA HA HA HA HA hee hee hee hee !!