Sixth investigation

[letsplayamod]

[The sun rises on another quiet day. Quiet because you no longer have any hallucinations toying with your mind. Those familiar faces have vanished to be replaced by those that are left with you. There's fewer of you, and there's once more an unshakable energy that things are soon about to go very wrong.

Will today be different? Time will tell.

It's up to you to greet the day and what it brings. Stay strong, keep your hope. Hope is what makes us strong. It is why we are here.

There is, at the absolute least, no bodies right outside your doorstep.]

Comments

[letsplayamod]

[In her sweater pockets are a repaired charm bracelet, a melted kitty hairpin and-

...That's all.]

[sweetsynergy]

...where's her phone-?

[Oh, actually fuck this.]

[This is somehow what gets her to look around nearby, at least, is it anywhere in sight?]

[Or does Quark also need his pockets checked?]

[letsplayamod]

[Aoi's phone is nowhere in sight but Quark does have a lot of pockets in that fancy jacket of his.]

[sweetsynergy]

Come on, come on-

[Okay, what fun little knives have been planted in Quark's hammerspace?]

[letsplayamod]

[Quark primarily used his inner pockets and there are several of them so it will take Vanity a few minutes to go through all his junk. Inside Quark's pockets she finds:

An envelope of tokens, the unfinished drafts of Alex's letters, Alex's letter addressed to Quark, a few bar rags, two tiny figurines with distinctive spots around their temples and the sides of their faces, Ferdinand’s letter addressed to Quark (though the envelope is opened, it seems the letter was never removed) with some of Quark’s blood seeped into it.]

[sweetsynergy]

Dammit.

[Blood on the envelope and letter, but not on the jacket? ...The jacket where this particular pocket was, we see that stab wound evidence down with Riful.]

[letsplayamod]

[Ferd's letter was tucked away in a side pocket, specifically the side Quark is laying on. It looks like it may have seeped in due to gravity.

And for his jacket, the back of it is soaked in yellow-gold blood.]

[sweetsynergy]

[Great, great, cool cool cool.]

[Is that all for the bodies themselves, or is there something weird about the pattern or amount of blood here?]

[letsplayamod]

[Small correction/clarification: The blood seeped into a letter because Quark is laying in a pool of his own blood so the jacket soaked up a bit of it and that got into the letter.

There are two things with the bodies not being covered in other threads that Vanity is more likely to passively notice versus the more obvious ones. Specifically, when she first approached, she may have noticed the bottom of Quark's left shoe soaked with his blood.

The second, when she was going through Aoi's pockets, is that her body was cold, especially compared to Quark's.]

[sweetsynergy]

[aaaaaaaaaaaaugh-]

[Okay, so. Her grasp of Ferengi physiology is pretty nonexistent, but she's pretty familiar with human corpses. Can she guesstimate how long Aoi's been gone?]

[letsplayamod]

[It's a bit hard to tell, even with Vanity's familiarity. But as different as Ferengi physiology might be, it seems they're still humanoid enough to go into rigor mortis and both of them seem to be at roughly the same stage.]

[sweetsynergy]

[Oh. Okay. She can maybe draw some really unfun conclusions from that, probably.]

[fukken' neat]

[Time to start looking for Aoi's phone nearby, then? And perhaps accidentally investigate other parts of the bar along the way.]

[letsplayamod]

[Vanity can look high and low, tear the bar apart if that's how she wants to cope thinks it's what needs to be done-

Aoi's phone is nowhere to be found.]

[sweetsynergy]

[ffffffffffffffffffff-]

[Okay, cool, anything out of place about the bar that might be found along the way on such a fruitless search?]

[letsplayamod]

[That's all she wrote, friend.]

[sweetsynergy]

[Thanks, she hates it.]

[Anything else to check, or is it time to sit with her feelings?]

[letsplayamod]

[Vanity is free to go feel her feelings.

Or more realistically go fight with Ranma until trial time.]