I am disappoint

You know this fellow?

Of course you do. That's Le Stryge. The most famous "gargoyle" on Notre-Dame de Paris. He's even in my book case (my father bought this one in Paris when he was there):

And he's all over the game model of Notre-Dame that appears in Assassin's Creed: Unity.

I transferred the game to my new Steam install from the back-up folder. Clicked through a dozen screens, filled out the new password request for Ubisoft's I-don't-know-why-it-is-even-there "connect" service, and finally got the game running. Which opened several episodes back before I had free run of Paris, and the save game system is probably the most useless, ill-conceived, and impossible to navigate one blessing any game I know.

So nothing to it but play through several highly annoying stealth sections around the Palace of Versailles until I could finally get back to the Ile de la Cité and climb the cathedral again.

And there he is. Le Stryge. On every single corner of both bell towers. On the real Notre-Dame (well, up until the fire, and presumably being restored to their rightful places soon if not already) he is just one of a whole menagerie of grotesques. In our universe, he was placed there under the orders of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc -- in fact, he was the one to popularize chimères in ecclesiastic architecture -- and he in turn was inspired by Victor Hugo, and....do you get the sense that he shouldn't even be near Notre-Dame during the early days of the French Revolution?

Yes, the designers of the game knew that. There's a nifty nod, even; one of the saints surrounding the lower part of the spire (the predecessor of which was a tottering wooden thing that didn't last past 1792) is facing inwards. That would be Viollet-le-Duc himself, or at least his face on an Apostle.

At this point I was pleasantly surprised that the bells were actually coming from the bell towers, instead of issuing from some other location.

So it perhaps isn't, even after all that, the best reference. I've been looking at a lot of video because the stalwarts of Google Maps and web searches are only turning up post-fire images. And it is really, really hard to get anything that shows what the plausibly-navigable parts of the roof look like. I did get lucky enough to find a parkour video but since he was very much doing this illegally he had to take some quick shots then go home.

It is however the best thing I have to block out the scene. After all, many a stage director has made do with tape on the floor. I have a scheme that's just crazy enough to fit what I am trying to do with this book and the series; that due to poor aim with the grapple gun she ends up on one of the flying buttresses and has to crawl along the rain gutter. And then cap that off with walking along the peak of the lead roof from near the transept to where Le Stryge awaits.

Who was in the book already, at least in spirit; I asked a Fiverrrrrr artist for ideas and she really wanted to draw him...

(He is being used as the scene divider, the *** between scenes).